Dusty was a hermit who lived in a tiny, rustic shack in the woods less than a mile northeast of us. He also had goats, including a scary-looking billy goat.
We knew of Dusty from the time we first moved to our North Boyer farm in 1950.
I still can dredge up snippets of when we were all fixtures in the North Boyer neighborhood.
During our kid era we would often see Dusty headed for town on his bike. He might be thought of as the Boo Radley (To Kill a Mockingbird) of North Boyer cuz for us kids, he was kinda spooky.
He was a skinny, quiet older man with a small white beard which, in my youthful eye, appeared to grow from his Adams apple.
He minded his own business, but the neighbors kept track of him.
The Bests down the road would have him over for dinner and to watch wrestling matches on their black and white TV.
I often wondered what Dusty thought as he sat there during those sessions because Mr. and Mrs. Best would often get pretty wildly demonstrative about their wrestling.
During one period, Dusty also came to our farm and picked up sticks in fields Harold had cleared, often toiling for 12 hours at a time.
My dad would have to tell him to go home or he might be still in the field working the next day.
My mother often took a cookie plate or a meal to him at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
One year a neighbor contacted my dad and said that Dusty needed to see a doctor. So, my dad and Dr. Marienau went to see Dusty. His foot was the problem; I think his toes froze and had become infected.
They had to be removed, and Dusty happened to be a patient in Bonner General Hospital at the same time our son Willie was born in 1977.
Eventually some other neighbors who kept track of Dusty bought his place and built their home there. Dusty continued to live in his cabin.
One year while he was still occupying the acreage (now a "Big Toy" condo complex) by himself when my folks had gone off to Montana for a few days. I was at our North Boyer farm watching my younger siblings when a car came into the driveway.
Two women got out and came to the back porch, asking about Earl Dustin (that was his name as we knew him).
The women said they were both nurses who had brought a picnic lunch to share with Dusty. One had recently learned from her grandmother on her death bed that Dusty was her father.
Details are sketchy in my mind but the story was that Dusty (actually Earl Dursten) was a teacher whose wife had died in a car accident when he was driving. He supposedly suffered a brain injury in the accident and was not himself.
So he was confined to a home for mental patients in Warm Springs, Montana. Dusty eventually walked away, changed his last name slightly and found his way to North Idaho.
I told the two ladies how to find him. Then, they went on their way and, from what we learned later, had a nice picnic with our neighborhood hermit.
Dusty actually had two kids who had grown up with the grandmother. The daughter was a nurse while the son was a contractor in the Tacoma area.
After that picnic, Dusty's life changed dramatically, so much so that he actually boarded a plane in Spokane and flew to the Washington coast to see his family.
He has been long gone---at least a couple of decades, but his memory was revived yesterday as I watched the movie "Train Dreams."
I saw some parallels to Dusty as the movie told the story of Robert Granier, a railroad worker and logger who lost his wife and daughter when their cabin on the Moyie River burned to the ground during a forest fire.
At the time, Robert was working in the woods away from home. Upon his return when the fire was still raging, he spent much of his time over the years yearning for and actually dreaming about the return of his family.
It was never to be, though, so Robert lived pretty much as a hermit in his rebuilt cabin, with neighbors keeping track of him for the rest of his life.
Like Dusty, though, he did return to society with train trips to Spokane and even an airplane flight.
The movie Train Dreams is now on Netflix as well as in some theaters.
Bill, who had just come from working in the woods, and I never once left our living room perches while watching the entire movie yesterday.
The beautifully produced drama based on a novella by the same name offered me a taste of nostalgia regarding our own family story of a grandmother working as a one-room school house teacher in the same area where author Denis Johnson's main character lived at a similar time in the early 20th Century.
Also, toward the end, thoughts of our neighborhood hermit and his sad and poignant story were resurrected with Robert Granier's departure from his cabin in the woods to board a train and visit the big city of Spokane.
It's a wonderful movie, and I can see why it has achieved critical acclaim.
from Rotten Tomatoes:
Train Dreams is 2025's prettiest film by far, but it's also a devastatingly beautiful exploration of the human condition.
🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃
Movie critic Roger Ebert provides a much better, in-depth assessment than I ever could.
His thoughts not only reinforce my own but also give me much food for further thought and maybe even another viewing of the movie.
Because of specific mentions of place names we all know, I think viewers in this area would be very thrilled if Train Dreams wins an Academy Award.
Above: that's raspberry apple pulp and below the final product, a zingy, flavorful rasberry-apple jelly.
It seems to be setting up, so I might have produced a winner yesterday.
Above: if you look closely, you can see smoke in the chimney.
Bill built our first fire in the wood stove Friday night, and the house has been toasty ever since.
A fire in the wood stove and cooking up jelly in the kitchen go hand in hand in my mind.
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