memoir | Books and my backpack

A few days ago, I completed my long-awaited pilgrimage to Coalwood, home to a fantastic coming-of-age adventure.

My drive through the West Virginia mountains on twisty, narrow roads was a journey I craved after reading Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam, whose father was the town’s coal mine superintendent. I passed dilapidated towns left behind by a dying coal industry.

A lump formed in my throat when I first saw the Coalwood sign and later, his former house. I am no Homer Hickam, but I shared some of his family struggles from my own childhood. Like Homer, somehow I persevered. I admire his accomplishments beyond measure.

During the late 1950s, Homer Hickam and five buddies joined the space race by firing 35 homemade rockets in a West Virginia field. They formed the Big Creek Missile Agency and defied Homer’s dad and many naysayers with their incredible victories, which ultimately won ribbons at the National Science Fair.

They all won college scholarships, which saved them from lives in the coal mine. And Homer, who wrote his memoir nearly 40 years later, realized his dream of becoming a NASA engineer.

When I stood next to the Space Shuttle marker, I imagined the scene at the field when Homer, then 17, fired off his most successful launch as a crowd of townspeople cheered. He turned around and saw a person he would never have expected to see: his father.

Jake Gyllenhaal, then 17, played Homer in the hit movie October Sky. Now in his 80s, Homer Hickam is working on what he calls an “equal” film.

Two earlier posts briefly introduce all four books Homer Hickam wrote about his remarkable life. Second post. First post. Many thanks to Sue, who captured our journey in pictures.

It was “like peeling an onion.”

Gary Paulsen used those words to describe how he felt while writing his memoir, Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood.

Author of more than 200 books, mostly aimed at children aged 10 and up, Paulsen wrote the gut-wrenching childhood story that was published shortly before he died of cardiac arrest in October 2021.

Gone.

To live, in 1944, at just five years old, with relatives on their Minnesota farm to escape his alcoholic mother who had made him sing in Chicago bars.

Gone.

At age seven, to the Philippines, where he witnessed grisly living conditions and killings that would haunt any adult, while living with his parents. Both of them alcoholics. His father served there during World War II.

Gone.

Would describe a teenager who looked for ways to escape his life with his parents back in the USA. Gone to the woods, where he learned to hunt and trap his own food. Gone to the library, where he learned to love books thanks to a librarian whom he at first suspected might be like other kids and adults in his life: Up to no good. But that librarian came to know him without many words passing between them. Her gift of a spiral notebook and a yellow Number Two pencil changed his life.

In his memoir, Paulsen talks about himself in the third person. Is it to keep emotional distance from himself (“I”) and ”the boy,” which he uses throughout the book?

Gone.

But a voice I still hear. His most famous work, Hatchet, about Brian, a youth who survives by himself in the Alaskan wilderness after a plane crash, was one of my favorites to read aloud in class to my sixth-graders and to my sons as they sat next to me on the couch where we shared other Paulsen books. The book moved me, enthralled me. Newbery Medal judges chose it as a most cherished book, one of three Newbery honors he won.

As an adult, Paulsen lived a life filled with his awe for nature. He sailed, hiked, explored, even entered the Iditarod three times, completing it once.

Through his characters and stories, Paulsen taught millions of kids (and more than a few adults) life lessons. In Hatchet, Brian remembers that the tears he shed during the hard times he endured had taught him “the most important rule for survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn’t work.”

Not gone.

Gary Paulsen’s characters, lessons, and the growing 35 million copies of his beloved books will be around for a long, long time.