Our Perfect Wild: Ray & Barbara Bane's Journeys and the Fate of Far North
280
Our Perfect Wild: Ray & Barbara Bane's Journeys and the Fate of Far North
280Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781602232785 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alaska Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2016 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Our Perfect Wild
Ray and Barbara Bane's Journeys and the Fate of the Far North
By Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan, Ray Bane
UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan and Ray BaneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60223-278-5
CHAPTER 1
"when are we going?"
Barbara Bane walked toward the tiny apartment in Huntington, West Virginia. She was tired after a day of teaching, but couldn't wait to tell Ray about the day's antics of her students. It was 1960, and she was just growing accustomed to being called Mrs. Bane. As a new bride and teacher, there was much to share at the end of each day. Ray was training to become a teacher too, with just a few months left of college to finish his degree.
When she walked in the door, she knew something was up. Their one-room apartment held only a twin-size bed and small table for eating. The kitchen was no bigger than a closet. Smaller yet was the bathroom. They could hear the murmur of other couples through the paper-thin walls of the married student housing.
Small as it was, they cherished their space precisely because it was theirs alone. Just starting a life together, they could not have been more enthusiastic about the prospects that lay ahead. Barbara had known Ray now since junior high school and as she walked in the door of the apartment, Ray had that look, an expression of earnest excitement. He sat on the bed and gazed at her with his intent blue eyes. He didn't say a word. Pinned on the wall was a giant map of Alaska.
She knew this was not one of Ray's college homework assignments. And she knew the heart of her husband. He was nothing if not adventuresome; that was partly why she had married the man. Their plans for Cleveland were a lovely thought for the future, but she saw, pinned to the wall, a detour in the making. She felt a shivery little thrill. Matrimony was going to be a bigger adventure than she'd anticipated.
Ray and Barbara were an unlikely couple from the start.
Barbara Ann Cox, born May 20, 1937, in Wheeling, West Virginia, was the only child of a gentle man and his stern wife. Barbara's father, Arch Cox, had quit school in the third grade to go to work and help support the family. Later, he made a living driving a truck delivering coal. Barbara's mother, Zana, had immigrated as a child from Czechoslovakia. Zana was fiercely religious and devoted to her daughter. Barbara inherited the easy-going personality of her father and found friendship in her father's company as she grew up. From her mother she inherited a great capacity for commitment, which she applied in all that she set out to do over the years.
Barbara was only five years old when a woman at church offered to give away a piano. With surprising determination little Barbara said she wanted it. So her father loaded it up in the coal truck and brought it home. That began her love affair with music. She immediately began taking lessons and soon became a skilled pianist. Her days were spent immersed in church, school, and music. She excelled at school.
Ray on the other hand, lived a Huck Finn kind of childhood where he was often left to fend for himself. Born July 14, 1936, in Wellsburg, West Virginia, he was the third surviving child to Bill Bane and Ester Zornes.
Ray's father was a short, fireplug of a man and impressively strong. Bill Bane had been born and raised on a hilltop farm in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. For a brief time in his early years, he was a prize fighter and fought under the name of "Battling Bill Bane." Handsome, with a zest for life, he was known as a "rounder."
"When they heard his jalopy coming, fathers 'rounded' up their daughters," Ray explained. Ray's father loved people, enjoyed joking, and people were drawn to him, including the ladies. Bill fathered one son outside Ray's immediate family.
"He was very good to me but strict. My dad was brought up with 'spare the rod, spoil the child' and he did not spare the rod. But when I got it, I knew I deserved it and the best thing to do was mend my ways," Ray remembered. Ray loved his father's cheerful good humor.
Ray's mother, on the other hand, seemed bowed by the difficulties of her life. Ester Zorne's parents had divorced when she was an infant. Her mother remarried and had a second child. Ester's early life was trying and she married Bill in her early teens. Among her four children, she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. Their second daughter was severely burned in a house fire. Caring for their disabled daughter consumed Ray's parents, which left Ray and his brother Pete mostly on their own. When Ray was in junior high, his mother lost part of her right hand while operating a press on a factory assembly line. She could no longer operate machinery, so she was given a broom and cleaned the factory floors until she was able to collect Social Security.
By the time Ray was in the fourth grade, he spent his summers camping alone along a bass stream, and working odd jobs for owners of fishing camps. He lived in a pup tent in the woods along the river. This became a haven of quiet predictability, where the rhythms of the river shaped his days. If he needed something, he rode his bike five miles to the country store at Elm Grove. He enjoyed reading books about the Western frontier, and summers became the time to forge his own adventures. While he was still in grade school, he was given a 20-gauge shotgun and a .22 rifle, which meant he could hunt small game and "live off the land" just like the early pioneers. His father occasionally joined him on the weekends and they camped together.
"My father loved to fish and hunt from the time I remember, I followed him around like a puppy. He taught me that we hunted and fished for food for the table, not for the fun of killing. That was significant. I stood in line for day-old bread at the local bakery. That was for poor people and we qualified," Ray said. "My father made me aware that animals have feelings, and that they were to be treated respectfully. You hunt to feed your family."
Summers on the bass stream were happy days when notions about wilderness began to take root in Ray's consciousness. He saw how nature provided sustenance. And while he could not yet put it to words exactly, he also felt a sense of possibility and connectedness, and a freedom that he found nowhere else. To him, the natural world was a place of solace and a welcome reprieve from the tumult of his home life.
He hated returning to school in the fall. The family always seemed to be on the move, following better jobs or less expensive rentals. Their unsettled lifestyle took its toll. Ray and his brother, Pete, missed many days of school during the transitions from one neighborhood to the next. Both of them were held back in their classes. Pete gave up and quit school by the time he was sixteen.
In 1949, Ray's family landed in Warwood, a working class suburb of Wheeling, West Virginia, the suburb where Barbara and her family lived. Ray was thirteen and Barbara was twelve when they met in junior high school. Although they attended the same school, they moved in distinctly different social circles.
Ray failed the seventh grade — the second time he'd been held back for a year. He and his buddy, Donny Club, worked at a job collecting money from pinball and other gambling machines. Their work took them to some seamy neighborhoods including the red-light district. Ray learned early on that getting by on the streets meant being tougher or faster than the next guy. Fighting and drinking were commonplace. After all, Ray was the son of "Battling Bill Bane." By the age of fifteen, he was known as "Boozer Bane" by his friends.
Barbara sailed through her classes with top grades, played piano at church, and enjoyed the attention of many young beaus.
Ray's wayward ways came to a head in the tenth grade when a police officer showed up at the school principal's office. A gang fight was rumored to take place on the coming weekend and Ray had been implicated. For once, in this particular case, he was innocent. Regardless, the principal, Mr. Phipps had finally reached his limit with the young delinquent.
"Bane, you're finished here," Phipps said. "You're never going to make anything of yourself. Do you realize what your IQ is? You should be one of the highest academic achievers here. You're lazy. Why don't you just quit?"
This caught Ray up short.
"No, sir," he said. He had friends who had quit and others who had spent time in jail or were working at dead-end jobs.
It was a defining moment in the principal's office, one in which he decided that he wanted more out of life. No one in his family had finished high school.
"I wanted to be the first," he remembered.
Ray managed to convince Mr. Phipps that he was not involved in the upcoming fight. The principal reluctantly agreed to give him another chance. That one chance was all Ray needed. He earnestly began focusing on earning his high school diploma.
Barbara had noticed how young men in certain circles often seemed to disappear into the same patterns and problems they learned and lived as youngsters. Everyone knew these hoodlums often came to no good end. But Ray seemed different. Ever since junior high school, he'd had a streak of independence — even fierceness — and it appeared that once he set his mind to something, his resolve was unwavering. Although he was a year older — she had passed him a grade level in junior high — Barbara noted that Ray was funny, kind, and smarter than people knew.
It was a warm spring evening in 1956, when the song of the phoebe and meadowlark had returned. Virginia bluebells had just begun to bloom and a young Elvis was crooning his way to the top of the charts with songs like "Love Me Tender." That night, Barbara and Ray arrived separately at the Saturday dance, with other friends. Ray couldn't help noticing Barbara's quick smile. Barbara was a popular girl with any choice of suitors. He doubted that this smart young woman would give him the time of day. She was a freshman in college while he, at age nineteen, was still working to finish his senior year of high school. He gathered his courage anyway and — amazingly — she agreed to a dance.
At the end of the evening, Barbara allowed Ray to take her home. Their attraction was immediate. Ray enjoyed her sparkling sense of humor. Barbara was captivated by his sense of adventure. Ray ventured a kiss and they agreed to see each other again.
The only one more surprised than Barbara's friends — or astonished than her mother — at Barbara's interest in the once wayward Bane, was Ray himself. The first time Ray and Barbara arrived as a couple at a high school football game, a number of people in the bleachers stood up to stare in disbelief.
While Ray finished high school, Barbara lived at home and attended the local college. Ray planned to continue his education beyond high school, an endeavor no one in his family could fathom.
"What for?" they asked. Wasn't it time to buckle down and get to work in the factories or coal mines like everyone else they knew?
During his senior year, an acquaintance from the old red-light district sought him out at one of the high school football games, showed him a revolver, and asked if he wanted to help with a "job." Ray emphatically declined. His old pal, Donny, would eventually serve time for murder. Ray wanted to leave that world behind. He enrolled in Marshall College 200 miles away to put distance between himself and his ruffian past.
The one connection he nurtured was his blossoming relationship with Barbara. She gave him one more reason to succeed.
"I wanted to be worthy of her," Ray said. And at age 79, he said, "I still do."
College opened up the world to him. He had to work hard to compensate for all he'd missed academically over the years. But the biggest challenge was paying for school. That summer he labored in the same foundry where his father worked. The blistering heat created by the foundry furnaces, the pound of pneumatic hammers, and noxious fumes were a preview to hell. Ray watched as day-after-day, men who had worked there for twenty years shoveled sand into molds from the same pile that had been there the day before. The spit in his mouth turned black from inhaling the suspended dust. The job erased any doubts he may have had about going to college.
At school he took work wherever he could, cleaning rooms, washing dishes, and digging ditches. He joined Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, in part because they offered work to pay for his room and board. The fraternity encouraged involvement in student government and civic service so he ran for a seat in the student senate. He won and near the end of his junior year was elected student body vice president. All of this was new and invigorating. The world was so much bigger than the coal mines, foundries, and factories of northern West Virginia.
Much to the dismay of Barbara's mother, Barbara and Ray were engaged in 1958 and married in 1960. More than fifty years later, with laughing eyes and a serene smile Barbara would say, "I was after his body. Simple as that."
Through their four-year courtship, they had lots of time to think and talk about how they would order their lives. After they graduated, they planned to move to Cleveland, Ohio. Barbara had relatives there. They would get teaching jobs, buy a home in the suburbs, and eventually have children. Theirs was the classic American dream of the 1950s.
Then, a few weeks before their wedding, Ray and Barbara went to see a movie called "White Wilderness," a documentary about the Arctic. Settling into their theater seats, the big screen in front of them was suddenly filled by an expansive landscape unlike any they had ever seen. Caribou migrated in massive herds across a land unbroken by human constructs. Bears and wolves roamed free. White mountain sheep climbed nimbly over breath-taking terrain. Rivers shimmered bank to bank with migrating salmon. It reminded Ray of the frontier he had read about as a child, when buffalo lay claim to the plains of the American West. It fueled every dream Ray had ever harbored as a boy when he'd fished and camped along that pretty bass stream.
Barbara and Ray talked about what an adventure it would be to visit Alaska someday. Meanwhile they settled into Huntington, West Virginia, where Ray continued his final year at Marshall College and Barbara taught at a rural elementary school.
Barbara loved married life, loved being called "Mrs. Bane." She had a gift for connecting with people. She found ways to draw others into conversation, always reflecting back to people their unique value and place in the world.
"Tell me about yourself," she would ask, and then settled in to listen with genuine interest. She had an uncanny memory for the details of other people's stories and decades later she could recall the names of people she had met only in casual conversation. She enjoyed teaching in the rural setting and her gift for music brought people together for song and fellowship.
Ray could not get the images of the Arctic out of his mind. They haunted his dreams. They pestered his daytime thoughts. He just couldn't get over those vast tracts of wilderness, free of human alterations. No highways, bridges, or dams. No power lines or radio towers. Nothing but untouched landscape, from one horizon to the other.
Just for kicks, he decided to inquire about possible teaching positions in Alaska. Having just gained statehood in 1959, surely some resources were going toward education. Ray learned that Alaska had a shortage of qualified teachers, especially in rural areas. Getting a job would not be a problem.
When Barbara walked into their small apartment that afternoon, she saw the large map of Alaska hanging on the wall. She looked at the map and then at Ray.
"When are we going?" she asked. It would be a question she would ask many times in the years to come.
Ray and Barbara made a pact that day. They would find teaching jobs in Alaska and spend one year before returning and settling down in Cleveland. One year in Alaska would give them the honeymoon of a lifetime and a year of adventure to remember it by.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Our Perfect Wild by Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan, Ray Bane. Copyright © 2016 Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan and Ray Bane. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS.
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