Some 45 years have come and gone and I am still here. I never wanted to leave this place. Children in my day and age- didn't have much say in matters like that. My mother and father did not run a democracy. In the summer of 1969, while descending down the western slope of the Continental Divide, I got my first glimpse of Butte, Montana. I was 8 years old. It was love at first sight. That's why I am here and that's why I keep coming back. I can't really describe the immense feeling of hope we had as a family that summer. The excitement was tangible- like great things were about to happen. This feeling I think, is reserved for the young and adventurous. It is something that has only made brief appearances in my life and now at age 54, most of my adventures and opportunities are behind me. I don't think I'll ever feel the same excitement that I felt in the summer of '69. We moved into a place near the top of Caledonia Street, just west of Excelsior...

The police have never been popular and from the looks of things, it is certainly not getting any better. As a young man, I had a couple of run ins with the police. Those incidents went about the way I expected. What I never expected nor experienced was a sense of hatred for the police who were simply doing their jobs. I never received a ticket that I didn't deserve. I was once detained and fingerprinted but I never held the police responsible for that grand theft or the humiliation of leaving high school in handcuffs. There is a great deal of inherent power in knowing that not only are you innocent of a crime- but that you actually know who was responsible for the act. I chose not to tell the police who did it- I might have been a little more cooperative had they acted a little more decently. Oddly, I think those cops thought I was guilty up until they found out that I had an iron clad alibi. I threw freight all night long on a grocery store freight crew the night of that theft. ...