"Wildness meant, to me, getting out of town and into the country. Even our small town -- really, in 1948 still a frontier town in many respects -- tasted to me like a pabulum. It stood for social order, good manners, the chimed schedules of school and church. It was a world meant for storekeepers, teachers, ministers, for the rule-makers, the order-givers, the law-enforcers. And in my case, my parents were not only figurative agents of the law, my father was the law."
"With my friends or on my own, I spent as many of the day's hours as I could outdoors, usually out at my grandfather's ranch or along the banks of the Knife River. (How it got its name I've never known; it's hard to imagine a duller body of water -- in dry summers it could barely keep its green course flowing and sandbars poked up the length of it; it froze every year by Thanksgiving.)
I did what boys usually did and exulted in the doing: I rode horseback (I had my own horse at the ranch, an unnaturally shaggy little sorrel named Nutty); I swam; I fished; I hunted (I still have, deep in a closet somewhere, my first guns from those years -- a single-shot bolt action Winchester .22 and a single-shot Montgomery Ward .410 shotgun); my friends and I killed more beer cans, soda bottles, road signs, and telephone pole insulators than the rabbits, squirrels, grouse, or pheasants we said we were hunting; I explored; I scavenged (at various times I brought home a snakeskin, part of a cow's jaw bone, an owl's coughball, a porcupine quill, the broken strip of tree bark with part of a squirrel's tail embedded in it, a perfectly shaped cottonwood leaf the size of a man's hand, and a myriad of river rocks chosen for their beauty or odd shape)."
- Larry Watson, Montana, 1948
