I’ve reached the age when I have to bite back a tendency to talk to my daughter like Yosemite Sam: “What in tarnation do you mean there’s nothing on TV? Why back in my day we were thrilled to get two channels and Dad had to wade through a snowdrift to move the antenna when we wanted to change from one to the other.” That’s the honest truth. Our aluminum aerial at the back of the house was wired to the top of a tall, spindly lodgepole pine, the kind used for teepee sticks.

We were satisfied when we could make out a vaguely human shape emerging from the “snow” on the black-and-white 15-inch screen mounted in a washing machine-sized plywood cabinet – like Samara the ghost girl clawing her way through the hissing static in the Ring movies.

Living on the boondocks of the reservation, gravel for the driveway was often more than we could afford. Half the year, frozen tire ruts fish-tailed up the hill to the county road. My older brother Greg and I tromped along the edge of a stubbly cheatgrass pasture to the school bus stop, climbing crude wooden steps over the barbed-wire fence in our path, dirty old black rubber overshoes lined with plastic bread sacks. Thanks to poor TV reception, we had no idea how appallingly uncool we were. I don’t know what my excuse is today…

I can now see how the Indian grade school we attended made a pretty decent effort to give us some fun and interesting experiences, though it didn’t seem so at the time. We were bombarded by the deliciously scary and loud Beast from 20,000 Leagues.Being near Yellowstone, thermal springs were something of an under-appreciated hometown resource, and we made an obligatory weekly trip to the Chief Washakie Plunge to splash around in its 98-degree pool. Shy as a coyote, I mostly was mortified at having to strip naked around strangers in the changing room.

In third grade, the age my sweetie-pie Elizabeth is now, I had never been to see a movie. As a special year-end treat in May 1966, just as reckless wildflowers were beginning to hazard their first blossoms on the sagebrush-studded hills, our whole school was herded into the auditorium, we younger kids excited as spring lambs and just as ignorant.

Whoever was in charge of selecting what we would watch earned a place in heaven that day, in my book anyway, though I have a hunch our parents might have demurred. With all the earnest and thoroughly forgettable options available – anything starring Pat Boone springs to mind – we were instead bombarded by the deliciously scary and loud Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the 1953 schlock-classic in which a fearsome dinosaur freed from an Arctic grave by an atom bomb test rampages through New York City. I don’t know what was more shocking: The beast or Manhattan skyscrapers!

Days tumble through a life like grains of sugar poured from a bag. Looking back, we retain a general sense for whether they were sweet or sour, but as they recede ever deeper into the past it becomes hard to say exactly what happened on any particular one. I sure can’t recall much about third grade, but my memories of the “Beast” are still sharp. It feels as if I could go out to Mill Creek and still catch a glimpse of myself, all ears and scabbed knees.

Within a couple years, we moved into town where the Grand Theater beckoned with cavernous dark space, new movies every week and opportunities for childish high jinx. The Plains Indians have a concept called counting coup, symbolic acts of derring-do that become trophies in the tale of a person’s life. It was in the Grand where I counted a mighty one. My relatively sophisticated best friend was always pulling pranks into which I naively stumbled like a sacrificial fatted calf, but during one matinee I carefully peeled the bottom out of a paper Coke cup, held it over his lap and asked for some of his. The rest is history.

A dozen years ago, my wife and I watched Maverick at the Grand. I was shocked to find myself in such a small place, when it is so large in my mind and affections.

– M.S.W.

Matt Winters is editor of the Chinook Observer