Our father hadn’t been deployed to Korea, but been assigned to desk jobs at home, in the supply and requisition forces. He’d been allowed to stay in because he’d won combat ribbons, but hadn’t advanced beyond captain. And at a certain point—which happened when we were in Great Falls and he was thirty-seven—he decided the Air Force was no longer offering him much of a future and, having put in twenty years, he ought to take his pension and muster out. He felt our mother’s lack of social interests and her unwillingness to invite anyone from the base to our house for dinner may have held him back—and possibly he was right. In truth, I think if there’d been someone she admired, she might’ve liked it. But she never thought there would be. “It’s just cows and wheat out here,” she said. “There’s no real organized society.” In any case, I think our father was tired of the Air Force and liked Great Falls as a place where he thought he could get ahead—even without a social life. He said he hoped to join the Masons.

It was by then the spring of 1960. My sister, Berner, and I were fifteen. We were enrolled in the Lewis (for Meriwether Lewis) Junior High, which was near enough to the Missouri River that from the tall school windows I could see the shining river surface and the ducks and birds congregated there and could glimpse the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul depot, where passenger trains no longer stopped, and up to the Municipal Airport on Gore Hill, where there were two flights a day, and down the river to the smelter stack and the oil refinery above the falls the city took its name from. I could even, on clear days, see the hazy snowy peaks of the eastern front, sixty miles away, running south toward Idaho and north up to Canada. My sister and I had no idea about “the west,” except what we saw on TV, or even for that matter about America itself, which we took for granted as the best place to be. Our real life was the family, and we were part of its loose baggage. And because of our mother’s growing alienation, her reclusiveness, her feeling of superiority, and her desire that Berner and I not assimilate into the “market-town mentality,” which she believed stifled life in Great Falls, we didn’t have a life like most children, which might’ve involved friends to visit, a paper route, Scouts and dances. If we fit in, our mother felt, it would only increase the chance we’d end up right where we were. It was also true that if your father was at the base—no matter where you lived—you always had few friends and rarely met your neighbors. We did everything at the base—visited the doctor, the dentist, got haircuts, shopped for groceries. People knew that. They knew you wouldn’t be where you were for long, so why bother taking the trouble to know you. The base carried a stigma, as if things that went on there were what proper people didn’t need to know about or be associated with—plus, my mother being Jewish and having an immigrant look, and being in some ways bohemian. It was something we all talked about, as if protecting America from its enemies wasn’t decent.

Still, at least in the beginning, I liked Great Falls. It was called “The Electric City” because the falls produced power. It seemed rough-edged and upright and remote—yet still was a part of the limitless country we’d already lived in. I didn’t much like it that the streets only had numbers for names—which was confusing and, my mother said, meant it was a town laid out by pinchpenny bankers. And, of course, the winters were frozen and tireless, and the wind hurtled down out of the north like a freight train, and the loss of light would’ve made anybody demoralized, even the most optimistic souls.

In truth, though, Berner and I never thought of ourselves as being from anywhere in particular. Each time our family moved to a new place—any of the far-flung locales—and settled ourselves into a rented house, and our father put on his pressed blue uniform and drove off to work at some air base, and my mother commenced a new teaching position, Berner and I would try to think that this was where we’d say we were from if anyone asked. We practiced saying the words to each other on our way to whatever our new school was each time. “Hello.