In My Time - Dick Cheney [16]
The first time was in Cheyenne, and I managed to brush it off. But the second time, in the summer of 1963 in Rock Springs, was a different matter. Many of my friends had just graduated from Yale. Lynne, after spending a semester in Europe, had graduated summa cum laude from Colorado College. And I was sleeping off a hangover in the Rock Springs jail.
It had taken a lot to drive the message home, but I realized the morning I woke up in that jail that if I didn’t fundamentally change my ways, I was going to come to a bad end. As soon as I was released, I drove home to Casper. I remember spending the better part of a day on Casper Mountain, up near the top where you can see all the way to the Bighorns. It was a good place to get perspective on life and to figure out what I was going to have to do to get off the self-destructive path I was on. I talked to Lynne and my folks, and although they would have been fully justified if they’d stopped speaking to me then and there, they seemed to believe that even after all the false starts, this time I really meant it about turning my life around.
I went back to Rock Springs, to the apartment I was sharing with Tom Ready, a journeyman lineman and crew foreman, who had been drinking with me the night I was arrested. The job we were on—building a 115,000-volt line from Rock Springs to the new Flaming Gorge Dam, on the Green River—was the third we’d worked together. Tom was an interesting guy, good enough on a horse to rodeo on the weekends. I considered him a friend but told him he would have to get a new roommate. I was moving out and camping at the job site. When he asked me why, I told him I’d decided to clean up my act and go back to school in the fall. “I’m going to make something of myself,” I said. “Who in the hell do you think you are?” he responded. “You’re no better than the rest of us.” It was the last time we spoke.
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I MOVED OUT TO the job, where my crewmate Bob Lieberance and I had the assignment of going ahead of the other crews, drilling and dynamiting holes for the wooden structures they would follow along and build. Bob had a fascinating and complicated history. The way he told it, after he’d gotten in a scrape in Tennessee in the late 1930s, he had moved to Canada, and when the war started in Europe, he’d joined the Royal Air Force and flown missions against Hitler. After Pearl Harbor he’d transferred to the U.S. Eighth Air Force and been badly wounded on one of his missions. By the time I got to know him, he was something of a loner. For most of the year he worked as a “powder monkey,” dealing with all the explosives on a site, but in the winter he would leave and hole up in the mountains.
Bob lived out at the job site, sleeping in a camper on his four-by-four truck and stowing his gear in a big wall tent he used for cooking. He considered a stray dog he’d picked up as his best friend, and he didn’t have many others, but he and I got along. After I spent a night in my sleeping bag in the open, he told me I could set up a cot in his cook tent.
Except for once-a-week trips to town to buy groceries, shower, and hit the laundromat, I spent the rest of the summer out on the job and far from the bars. Bob and I would work hard all day and share the cooking at night. After dinner I began reading Churchill’s six-volume history of World War II by the light of a Coleman lantern.
In the fall, I moved to Laramie and enrolled at the University of Wyoming. UW is a school with many virtues, not least of which in my day was that, regardless of my previous academic record, they had to accept me because I had graduated from a Wyoming high school. The tuition was $96 a semester, and I moved into a $45-a-month,