For Kenny

A life well lived

Father’s Day weekend was a rough one this year. I found out Saturday that my stepfather Kenny had passed away, seven months into a fight with stage four brain cancer.

On Father’s Day, my son Colby and I drove into the Sierras and hiked into his favorite camping and fishing spots. Some of them you can’t even reach by car anymore. We told stories, listened to the music he loved, and took it all in. It was a beautiful, sad bittersweet day. I took a few photos along the way. This is that story.

How he found us

I met Kenny when I was ten. My grandfather Vern had died the year before. Vern was a pseudo father to me. I spent most of my free time as a kid at my grandparents house on Grove Street in Rocklin, while my mom worked and finished her master’s degree at Sac State. When Vern was gone, there was a hole where he’d been.

The world has a way of sending people right when you need them. Kenny showed up not long after, met my mother and things moved fast. Within the year we’d left Rocklin for Placerville to move in with him. I started sixth grade at Herbert C. Green, a brand new school. That move ended up giving me the friends who are still in my core circle today, at 54.

Who he was

Kenny was a master mechanic. A true do-it-yourselfer, the kind of guy who’d pull something apart with no idea what was inside it and figure it out anyway. He loved drag racing, motorcycles, camping, fishing, boating, and a tight group of friends he kept his whole life. Free time, to Kenny, meant being outside with people he loved.

Everything I know about being handy, about having the nerve to open something up and work on it even when I’ve never seen the inside of it before, I got from him. I wouldn’t be the man I am without the childhood he gave me.

The music

Kenny was a serious music fan, and classic rock came into my life through him. I was introduced to “The Classics” the summer I was twelve. Kenny had assembled what felt like the ultimate hi-fi system, a Technics turntable at the center, flanked by carefully chosen components, paired with a set of blue vintage Stanton Dynaphase Forty over-ear headphones from Japan. They felt like serious equipment.

I spent entire evenings lying on the floor, lost inside those headphones, listening to The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon on original vinyl, over and over. The sound didn’t just play. It surrounded you.

Part of my job every summer was making cassette mix-downs for the car and for our camping trips. I’d sit beside the turntable, watching the needle lower, trying to get the levels right on Memorex High Bias II 90s. Those tapes became the soundtrack of long drives and open sky next to the waters edge.

That thread runs straight through to who I became. The reason I play guitar and build tube amplifiers traces back to him and those records.

The years that followed

Time with him got harder to come by once I was married, self-employed and building a life of my own in my thirties and forties. But I held onto the Fridays. In the fall I’d take the day off and we’d go fishing at Ice House Lake. Later, when Colby was old enough, the three of us would camp at Loon Lake and boat back into the parts almost nobody bothers to reach. Those were some of the best days I’ve had.

He is going to be missed badly. There hasn’t been a day since he told us about the diagnosis that I haven’t thought about him and what he was up against.

The hike back

So on Father’s Day we went looking for him in the places he loved most. Some of the roads in are gone now, grown over or washed out, so we hiked the last stretch. We told the old stories. We played his music and swam in Loon Lake. We stood in the shores where he taught me to fish and just took it all in.

I was lucky. I got shown this country early, by someone who loved it enough to keep coming back his whole life. I still am.

He will be sorely missed, and anyone who knew him was better for it.

Our job now is to keep those memories alive and carry them forward.

Kenny is survived by his daughter Shauna, her husband Leonard, his girlfriend Helen, and his granddaughter Olivia. I would be remiss not to mention the incredible job Shauna did navigating the system to get him the amazing care and treatment he needed over those last seven months.