Serendipity

During the spring '08 semester, I'm on sabbatical, spending the first half here in Sioux Falls and then traveling back to Kansas from late March through at least the end of May. My family and I will be staying at my dad's ranch, where I'll be working with my dad and diving into a writing project centered around my rural childhood, my distance from my family's ranching background, the influences that remain, etc., etc. When describing the project, I find myself citing the two muses of Wendell Berry and Hank Williams, Jr. An odd pairing, I realize, but hopefully that oddness promises some interesting terrain to cover.

Having gotten most of the academic paperwork off of my desk during the month of January, I finally started in on some of the reading planned in connection with the sabbatical. This evening, I was reading a profile of Hank Williams, Jr., in Peter Guralnick's Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians. Since my familiarity with Hank junior's music centers almost exclusively around my high school days and drinking ill-advised quantities of beer in the parking lots of the Chatauqua County Fair & Rodeo, I never felt compelled to dive into Hank junior's biography. Clearly, I knew who his father was, but that was about it.

Evidently, in August of 1975, as I was getting ready to turn 8, Hank junior was mountain climbing in Montana with a friend. He fell 490 feet and nearly died. The serendipity: His friend's name was Bill Dyer, which also happens to be my dad's name.