Author Archives: deansgreatwahoo

Unknown's avatar

About deansgreatwahoo

After graduating in 1964 I headed to Hollywood to be a movie star, only to drop into the '60s. Lucky me! After hitch hiking around the country from '69 to '72, I graduated from Boise State University and settled into waiting tables for a living and pursuing other interests—teaching stained glass at BSU, writing for Boise Weekly and Idaho Magazine, publishing some Idaho and Biblical history, acting in a few local shows, and traveling at the drop of a map. For two years I produced a half-hour public access TV show available at www.greatwahoo.com. In 2011 I was featured in Scott Pasfield's book Gay In America. Through it all I've come up with some stories and am using this blog as an excuse to get them written down.

Dean’s Train

6 Replies

When I was a kid my Dad bought me an electric train set. It was a Lionel with a small oval track. I was one frustrated boy, finding out that every time I put the train on high it would fall off the track as soon as it hit the curve!

What good is a train that won’t go FAST ? !

It didn’t take much thinking to realize I needed big curves. For forty years, through my teens and twenties and thirties, I dreamt of building a train that would run through my entire house.

One day I went to a local dance club and they had Christmas Tree lights floating through the stage. Knowing tree lights sag, not float, I went to inspect. Wire is what suspended those lights. Two days later I had figured out how to use two pieces of wire, one above the other for dynamic tension, to hold my train in the air.

The next day I was knocking holes in my walls. Six weeks later my train was making a complete loop. And, yes, I can crank that sucker up!

Train w card INT

Here’s a video I shot with my phone. Sorry for the lack of production quality. Seems as amazing as phone photos are the video has a smidgen of trouble keeping up with focus and light conditions —

Playing Rapture

1 Reply

Every spring I get to play Rapture.

When I got my house it included a small field of poppies mixed with an assortment of other plants. Included in the plants was grass which, every spring, I grab close to the ground and individually show my special attention to by flying it up into the sky.

Left behind are those poppies and other unfortunates — cursed to remain suffering in the filthy, muddy ground. Cursed to suffer the winds, usually too hot or too cold. Cursed to endure the sun beating onto them. Cursed to face the constant incarnation of death that is Winter, of resurrection that is Spring, of growth that is Summer, and of rotting that is Autumn. Cursed to endure all those Pagan gods.

Raptured into the sky, the fortunate grasses enter a peace that passeth all understanding and join a god that stays the same for ever and ever.

Frost Valley #10: Raining Dam Spikes

3 Replies

Well, folks, I missed having Hurricane Gerda blow me off Cape Cod, but I sure did not escape the rain.

As the caretaker’s helper on a private estate in the Catskill Mountains in the summer of 1964, I was staying in the loft of a combination barn and garage, right under the wooden shingles of a roof with no insulation or finished ceiling. The shingles spent the night dancing under the consistent pelting of pouring rain. The babbling brook of Clear Creek became a roar.

The next day Stan and I got in the Scout and headed out to see what rambunctious Clear Creek had been up to. We only had to go about 500 yards.

The structure had not been much more than a wide sluice box, more of a pass-through spillway than a structure of any height — just enough of a weir to divert some of the creek’s water under the road and through several small ponds meandering through the estate’s main compound of buildings. Even so, the dam had been substantially made, with heavy beams framing it and thick timbers for the creek to run over. The morning after Hurricane Gerda, it was largely a jumble of boards strewn down the stream.

Within the week Stan and I and a craftsman Stan knew were fixing what could be fixed, securing the beams that needed secured, and laying salvaged and new timbers across the raceway. Sturdy spikes, some eight to ten inches long, had been purchased to secure it all together. Stan and his craftsman were glad to have a hired hand to sledge the big nails through the boards.

When I was fourteen my Dad quit letting me drive nails in the cabin he was building because every nail I started was bent by half way in. To this day, be it a three-penny or a brad, if it is in my hand and I have a hammer, it is going to end up bent.

Yet, with these sturdy spikes and being all of twenty-four, I thought I had finally found nails substantial enough to withstand my influence.

Nope! After five or six spikes were beyond recognition, Stan mentioned those things cost 80 cents each. After a dozen he started commenting how far it was to the hardware store to get more. By the fifteenth, Stan and the handyman had taken over and I was left trying to look helpful.