Blaine Harden

Photos and article by APF Fellow Blaine Harden   LEWISTON, Idaho — We sailed west at sunset on water the color of dark chocolate. The sun disappeared slowly into the downstream distance, notching itself between knobby, bald hills and burning out in a long tomato-red smear. The river smelled of the farms it irrigates and erodes, a swampy perfume of mud and fertilizer, algae and a hint of dead fish. A barge in the Snake River, near Lewiston, Idaho. Down in the galley, groggy from afternoon naps, a fat tugboat skipper and a muscular deckhand were playing a quick hand of blackjack, yawning, smoking, drinking coffee, scratching themselves in manly places, and preparing for a six-hour shift of squiring twelve-thousand tons of peas, lentils, wheat, computer games, wood chips, and polyurethane-coated milk cartons out of the hinterlands of the West and off to the consuming capitalists of the Pacific Rim. On the splendid September evening that we lumbered out into the middle of the Snake River, the principal tributary of the Columbia, the tugboat Outlaw

Arno Harden sneaked aboard a boxcar in Great Falls, Montana, in the late summer of 1932. He was twenty-one, fresh out of work, alone, and heading West. Everything he owned he carried with him. He had a bedroll and a pillowcase half-stuffed with clothes and one pair of shoes, the work boots on his feet. He wore a plaid wool mackinaw and a black cap with flannel earflaps. Two months of bucking hay for a Great Falls farmer who let him sleep in the granary had earned him $80. The money was in his pocket, along with a sandwich he bought in a rail-yard cafe. My father also carried a letter — from his father. Elvin Eldorado Harden, the author’s great-grandfather. The letter told him not to come home. It said there was nothing at the family farm in northeast Montana to come home for. His mother had died in the spring, of liver cancer at the age of forty. Drought had ruined the three-hundred and sixty-acre farm that his father leased from a New