Rad Dad and the Family Tree was made during a month’s long residency at The University of Montana, where I returned to my alma mater to continue my examination of personal narrative and the subjective nature of memory. Through the lens of magical realism and child-like wonder I directed my focus on my one Rad Dad as my original art mentor. This immersive, multi-disciplinary exhibition included large-scale photographs, sculptural objects, sound, writing, as well as a collection of carvings my dad made during a brief, but prolific period in the early 1980s. I believe witnessing this burst of creativity instilled value in art-making as well as the audacious belief that, instead of an astronaut, I could be an artist.
Lured to Missoula in 1962 by a friend who had found success in the flooring trade and a promise to hire him as his helper, my dad spent over 50 years dedicated to the craft of laying carpet. He was part of the unintentional movement that helped preserve all those beautiful hardwood floors we now admire by covering them in colorful shag, deep plush and woven-patterned carpets. He installed the carpet multiple times over in the local schools, hospitals, hotels, the Southgate Mall, and Federal Buildings. Our house was a patchwork mosaic of disparate remnants he had gleaned from commercial jobs and wealthy people’s homes. For most of my life, I thought wall-to-wall carpet meant literally having carpet on your walls. Yes, our walls were carpeted too. My dad mentored several of his own brothers and sons and by now the concentric ripple of my dad’s carpet-laying oeuvre seems endless.
As my dad’s cognition declines, one memory motif that continues to surface is carpet. There are days where all he can think about is getting back on “the job,” trying to figure out where his tools and truck are and having to be reassured that the 5-gallon buckets of glue have been brought into the garage to prevent them from freezing. He was a devout worker, fully committed to the trade even though toxic materials often made him sick. He took pride in the fruits of his labor.
Shag-a-Delic
This is photograph is from an old album I recently rediscovered while visiting my dad’s house. It’s so much more than a snapshot captured during a family camping trip. It’s a real-life 1977 moment forever frozen in time. My mom sits cracking eggs, a flower, no doubt a gift from one of her children, decorates her hair. I would be born later that year. Did she know yet, I wonder? My older sister Nikki, then just a baby herself, stretches out her expressive fingers. She would start piano lessons at seven and go on to play professionally, her hands still her most defining characteristic. My brothers Jerry and Jesse are immersed by something they’ve captured in the creek nearby while my sisters Julie and Shelly take notice. Perhaps a bucket of minnows, maybe a pair of salamanders? My brother Nate, in the little brown jacket, seems to be the only one who fully acknowledges that a picture is being taken. He looks up to smile at the camera. Who was he smiling at? In the backdrop we see the legendary Suburban. This beast of an automobile transported our family of 12 as it endured multiple trips to Minnesota, at times hauled a barnyard full of 4-H animals to the county fair, chugged into the mountains to harvest mushrooms, huckleberries, deer sheds, and wood for my dad’s carvings, and, most infamously, nearly killed half my family during what has been coined The Carbon Monoxide Incident.
The Suburban
It’s the summer of 1982 and my family, in its entirety, goes to the movies for the one and only time, to see E.T. Not only am I oblivious to the cultural significance of Spielberg’s smash hit, after all, I’m only 4 years old, but it’s my first time at the movies and like the tales of early cinema viewers who fled theaters thinking the train was destined to hit them, I am terrified! I am so utterly horrified in the presence of a wrinkly, sickly creature with skin reminiscent of my dad’s homemade sausage projected monumentally on the screen that I bawl hot snotty tears in my mom’s bosom to the film’s end.
Later that summer, my dad would receive a gift from his brother, a memento from that night in the form of a carving inspired by the now legendary extraterrestrial. My dad spent that summer teaching his younger brother Louie how to carve on cottonwood bark, a relatively new hobby that he had himself taken up. Every night even before the dinner remnants of a table-for-twelve were cleared, my dad would transition the table into his art studio. He’d line up his sharp knives and start whittling away on a hunk of dead wood. In the midst of this whirlwind of barefoot kids, dogs looking for table scraps, and flying wood chips, he’d discover and uncover “Wind Man,” “Knott Head,” and a beautifully crafted little alien friend that fits perfectly in the palm of your hand.
The Grand(father) Table
In the late 1970s, my dad, now midlife and a father of ten, and apparently yearning for a creative outlet, announced that he wanted to take a carving class at the university. The experience would spur a brief but prolific artistic period where my dad feverishly carved on the dead bark of cottonwood trees. The subject matter was clearly influenced by the mythology of the wild, primitive West, still omnipresent today (rugged individualism, harnessing the land, and “cowboy & Indian” tropes), but his relationship to the wood itself was the most inspired part of the process.
On Sundays after church, my dad would pack our family of 12 into the old brown Suburban and venture up into the mountains in search of dead old cottonwood trees. Driving slowly over bumpy roads, boys in the middle, girls in the back, he searched for trees. Once he found one, armed with a crowbar and hammer, he’d pry off the bark like an orange peel. These towering trees were lone wolves that had survived frontier expansion. Back home with his day’s bounty, using orange bailing twine, he’d methodically wrap the pieces of bark around the trunk of the old evergreen that canopied our house, patch-working a second layer from other trees’ dead skin. What resulted was an unintentional roadside attraction, an experimental piece of earth art, which compelled everyone who ever dropped us off or picked us up to inquire about it. And it made sounds—a haunting symphony of humming moans that we’d hear from our beds when the wind blew at night.
Perhaps those noises we heard were the souls within the dead bark calling to be discovered, and like Michelangelo’s angel in the marble, asking to be set free. I only recently learned that the reason he hung the wood on our tree was so he could walk around it, mirroring the experience of solitude and discovery within the natural world, and poising himself to “see” his subjects.
