August 13, 2006
Life and Times of
a Roustabout
The Boy Who Invented Skiing (St Martins, $24.95) is a collection of short vignettes that resemble the tall tales usually told between happy hour and last call, if not on a mental health professional's couch. Swain Wolfe's loose-knit informality, however, is this book's greatest asset, as it matches his itinerant life, from a childhood running wild in rural Colorado to jobs in a slaughter house, a 3,200-foot-deep mine and at the head of a firefighting crew.
As a child, Wolfe suffered abuse from both parents, who eventually split up. He moved around quite a bit, living for a while in a log cabin and for some time in a tent shared with the friendly horses his mother rented out to tourists. "My favorite horse was Joe," he recalls. "He liked to hang his head over the gate at night and put his muzzle next to my cheek. Sometimes I would wake up to his warm breath on my face. If I lay still and pretended I was asleep, he would snort. I could never fool Joe."
Real tragedy pervades this memoir, including his sister's murder by a serial killer, but it's frequently balanced with resigned humor.
The misadventures Wolfe so vividly describes have clearly made him wiser and prone to philosophizing. Among his clever and hard-won insights he reminds us that the "last generation whose parents had unrestricted whipping rights was the one that challenged the Vietnam War." And "There's a limit to dirty, after which dirt won't stick to you." Wolfe is a gifted storyteller whose natural curiosity and fascination with the world around him come through on every page, and they're entirely contagious.