Our Boo Radley

Yesterday while reading Kenney Leen's Sunday email thoughts to his family and friends, I couldn't help but think of our neighbor, Dusty. Kenney works in construction. Most recently, he moved from Connecticut to Seattle where he's working on a project downtown. His family lives in Sandpoint, and he grew up in the same neighborhood where we spent our early childhood.

Kenney's weekly stream of consciousness accounts of childhood/adolescent adventures with his brothers are rich in visual imagery. He tells of times before television sets entertained all the kids, times when kids created their own entertainment. In yesterday's missive, he mentions one of the "spooks" in a back alley where he spent his childhood.

That's what got me thinking about Dusty, who lived in a tiny shack on 40 acres just down the road from us. . He had goats and even kinda looked like his goats----skinny frame, a white beard extending down his front from his Adams Apple. He kept to himself, but whenever he did venture out, it was always on his bike. I can still remember moments when we'd be playing in the front yard and suddenly see that solitary, almost haunting figure quietly pedaling down the road after dusk.

Dusty worked for the neighbors, including my dad. He picked up sticks in one of our newly-plowed fields. He'd show up before the sun, and after it set, my dad would have to go down and tell him to go home. Otherwise, he probably would have kept working the night through. In those times, the wages were a dollar a day. He made do on that and money from pop and beer bottles collected along the roadsides.

When the Best's, who owned a dairy down the road, got a television set, Dusty loved sitting in their living room watching. The Bests loved their TV wrestling matches, and it must have been a bit scary for old Dusty because Clarence and his wife would get into some brawls of their own while fake wrestlers were throwing each other around on the television mat. It was not uncommon for shoes to fly around the Best house, whether there was company or not.

Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, Mother would fix up a plate of turkey and the trimmings along with a big supply of cookies or pie for Dusty. Harold would always accompany her on the delivery. I remember every time they'd come back, they'd try to describe the progress of the squalor within that tiny cabin where the little ol' man lived. Harold kept track of him, and one time took him to the doctor because he was complaining that his toes hurt. Turns out they were frostbitten and had to be amputated.

One day, two ladies came to our house. They had driven to Sandpoint from Tacoma; both were nurses. They wondered if I knew where an Earl Duston lived. So, I told 'em. Then, came the most incredible story. One of them was Dusty's daughter. She told me he also had a son who was a Tacoma building contractor and a graduate of the University of Chicago.

Dusty had always been a little off mentally, at least during the time we knew him. Before he came to Sandpoint, however, he'd been an educated mining engineer. Apparently, he'd suffered head injury in a car accident where his wife had died. The injury led to his being locked up in a Montana mental institution, from which he escaped, found his way to North Idaho, changed his name from Durston to Duston and lived the life of a hermit from that day forth.

Well, Dusty's life began to change the day his daughter arrived. She'd learned about him from her grandmother who'd kept his existence a secret until just before she died. After the daughter tracked him down, Dusty slowly re-entered society, even though he preferred to remain in his cabin for some time after his daughter's appearance. He even flew on a jet and got to know both his son and daughter. Eventually, he moved in with another local family and continued to hear from his own family on a regular basis.

He died several years ago, but memories of his hermetic existence left an everlasting impression in my mind. With Dusty, we definitely experienced our own North Boyer Boo Radley.