Future Farmer?

Could this have been 
Beginner Child later in life
had we stayed in Kamas?

During my beginner marriage, I lived in Park City, Utah.  When I was given the terrific news that I was pregnant, I told the beginner husband that living the ski bum life with roommates wasn’t going to work anymore.  So, I “forced” him to buy a house.  The nearest house we could afford was out in Kamas, Utah, about 25 minutes east of Park City, and a few miles north of Samak, which is Kamas spelled backwards.  This will give you insight into what that part of Utah was like.  

Surrounded by open fields at the end of a dirt road, it was the ideal place to grow up.  Or it could have been. Unfortunately, our only neighbors were the biggest thieves in the county, a story for another time.

Our tiny house was in the valley between the Wasatch Range and the Uinta Mountains- a beautiful rural area.  My Beginner Child had the run of the area as long as I could see him from the kitchen and living room windows.  As a preschooler, he spent his summer days in swim trunks and moonboots - the smushy kind for snow - popular in the 80’s.  Usually naked from the waist up, he would climb the haystacks in the cow field 200 yards away.  Beginner Child would take the dogs, cats and goats (yes, I had goats) for walks, climb under the pasture gates, and splash in the dirt watering troughs.  Idyllic, if you didn’t think of what was in that water, or that he could have fallen off the haystacks and been trampled by cows.  I remember being more bothered by the amount of muddy water he would bring in the house trapped inside his moonboots, then any danger he might have been in.  I was a beginner mother, and, regrettably, not an overprotective one.

When Beginner Child was in preschool, and about four months from starting Kindergarten, I began to inquire about the local school in Kamas.  In confidence, I was told that many kindergarteners through second graders could not write their names yet.  Most of the kids had not really traveled outside of the county.  And with Salt Lake City about 45 minutes away, it apparently was the “big trip” few had ever made.  Hmm, this local school did not look promising.  I did ponder enrolling him in school in Park City, but traveling early mornings in winter on those roads, in generally unplowed conditions, felt a bit treacherous.  Yes, I did have some sense of what might be unhealthy to his well-being.

The clincher was the afternoon I picked Beginner Child up from preschool and he told me that his teacher asked his class what they wanted to be when they grew up.  Normal question.  Most preschool boys will tell you they want to be firemen, policemen, baseball players, daddies, etc.  Well, at least that was what I remember growing up in California.

Well, in Kamas they grow them a bit differently.  Beginner Child relayed to me that a few classmates wanted to be ranchers like their dads- this made sense, and one wanted to be a park ranger (how did I miss meeting these parents?).   So, what did Beginner Child say when I asked him what he said at school?  “When aah grow up, aah wanna baaaale haaaay!”  He said it in a slow, drawn out, Utah drawl.  Yes, Utahans do have their own “southern drawl”.  Okay, I knew he liked tractors; I knew he liked to play on the haystacks; I knew he liked to be outside.  But baling hay as his life’s work?  I was thinking a bit higher in my aspirations for Beginner Child.  For the first time I felt he was in real danger.  Was it his acquired drawl or the content of his answer? It didn't really matter, I was truly frightened that if he stayed in Kamas he was destined to be a “can’t write his name by second grade” adult.  

We packed up and moved back to California before his first week of Kindergarten.