A family tradition of storytelling
Maite Uranga
Life in Africa
Some of the first memories I have are of camping with my family. We had a sheepherder's tent exactly like the one that my grandfather used when he tended his sheep every summer. It was huge. The canvas walls and ceiling protected us from every possible element that Idaho's mountains threw at us. My younger brother and I thought it was heaven. It had a wood stove that we used to heat the tent and also to cook pancakes. There was a place for our sleeping bags and there was a place for our table and chairs.
I remember cold mornings when I would refuse to even poke my head out of my sleeping bag until my dad had started the wood stove and there was a cup of hot chocolate on the table for me. On days when the rain came we played endless hours of Old Maid and Go Fish. On extremely hot days we would sit in the shade and drink lemonade. Amongst all of these memories the bedtime stories my dad told stand out. They were always about his misadventures in the mountains.
For some reason he only told us bedtime stories when we were camping, or perhaps that is the only time I remember them. There were stories from the times when he worked with my grandfather and uncles in the sheep camps, others from when he was a smoke jumper and still others after he and my mom were married but before they had kids. The stories seemed almost mythical as I drifted between dreams and reality.
Soon weekend soccer games and various summer camps ended the summer camping trips. The sheepherder's tent went into long-term storage, and my brother and I became too old for bedtime stories. The stories moved into the mélange of reality and childhood imagination that is childhood memory. I remembered bits and pieces.
Funny things always happened. Sometimes, with his dad, they would loose a sheep and have to wander endlessly and when they returned to camp the sheep would be there. While smoke jumping, he would land in a tree. Backpacking with my mom and cousins, one of my cousins would get her fishing line stuck in the middle of a river. They were always stories without endings because I fell asleep.
I had not thought of those stories for a long time. About a year ago my dad sent me some stories he had written. He had just read a book about Idaho and finished a semester's worth of my columns. Apparently he was not impressed by either and decided it must not be that difficult to write down the stories he had told for years. The stories he sent me filled in the endings that I never heard with a humor I was too young to understand. The strangest part about it was that as I read his stories, I saw my writing style in his and also the way we look at the world and people in that world.
Yesterday I received an e-mail from my brother. It was not really an e-mail but a short story about his life in Spain. Again the memories of the sheepherder's tent and bedtime stories rushed back. As I read my brother's e-mail I saw the storyteller I knew as a child but this time it was in my brother. It was a somewhat surreal and a magical moment back in time. The tone of sarcasm and humor mirrored my dad's stories. After I read the e-mail and returned to my house I felt lucky to be allowed into the stories of my dad and brother.
The irony is that if we were all living in the same city or on the same continent, this exchange of bedtime stories would never happen. The last 20 months in Africa have caused moments of loneliness and distance from my family and friends at home. Other times in moments like this I feel like I have a closer relationship with people at home while I am here than when I can talk to them everyday. I am the person in Africa who they will not see for another year, so I become their de facto journal.
I am on the downhill slide of my Peace Corps service, so in my free time I often think about what I am going to do when I get home. One thing I hope is that I still have the time to listen to people's stories. Maybe dust off the sheepherder's tent and go camping to reminisce and tell the stories that I have not heard since elementary school and tell the stories that I have personally acquired since then.
Maite Uranga graduated from Notre Dame in 2000 as an anthropology and government major. She is currently a Peace Corps volunteer in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Monday, January 27, 2003
