AUGUST 8, 2023 – The trip had had its origins in February 1995. Gaga had died the previous November, and Mother and Uncle Bruce decided against having a funeral. We all knew that Uncle Bruce “didn’t do” funerals, and somewhat out of character with her Christian impulses, Mother herself saw no need for a funeral but instead proposed a memorial service—back in Minnesota, of all places, which to her dying day several months past the 100 mark, Gaga still considered to be the wilderness. The service was designed to be for our family—Mother, Dad, my sisters and me and our families—to share recollections about our inimitable Gaga. Uncle Bruce told Mother he didn’t want to attend, and I guess I understood, since if a guy “didn’t do funerals,” how could you expect him to “do memorial services”?
To inventory my memories of Gaga, I searched through the many bags of my correspondence that were stored in a trunk up in the attic of Mom and Dad’s house in Anoka. I pored over letters from Gaga and the handful from Grandpa and read through correspondence from Uncle Bruce. As I sat alone, surrounded by those letters from Rutherford, I felt deep sympathy for my uncle, however odd he had become—or perhaps always had been. There was nothing of his oddness that was bad per se it seemed, and for the past 15 years, he had sacrificed so much of his life in order that Gaga and Grandpa could live out their lives in dignity, in relative comfort, and in their very own home. Mother had reminded us constantly of that sacrifice, and we never questioned it. From a sense of guilt, it seemed, Mother readily acquiesced when Gaga asked “if it would be okay” to compensate Uncle Bruce by giving him 100% of the interest in the family’s legacy property in Lyme, Connecticut (along with his half of everything else to be inherited)[1].
I thought of the Christmas season just past—the first one of his life that Uncle Bruce had spent alone, the first Christmas for which there had been no one to appreciate Uncle Bruce’s cheerful, however odd, approach to decorating the house: hanging Christmas lights around the downstairs of the house, setting up the artificial Christmas tree on a chintzy, rotating, musical stand, and adding a haphazard collection of cheap, plastic snowmen, reindeer, and other K-Mart products to the growing clutter of 42 Lincoln. It was all rather endearing, really, done to add cheer to Gaga’s housebound life. How very sad and lonely Uncle Bruce must have felt during the Christmas just past.
Upon discovering the letter from Uncle Bruce in which he had enclosed the Hogback Ski Area brochure and his invitation to ski with him during Christmas vacation in 1967, I felt inspired to return his generosity with a measure of my own. I thought how wonderful it would be to send him an invitation to ski with me at Big Mountain in Montana—a real ski mountain in the real mountains, the Rocky Mountains. He would fly out to Minnesota, and then we’d take Amtrak to Whitefish, in the northwest corner of the Big Sky State. Uncle Bruce loved train travel as much as I did, and I knew he’d be thrilled to take the route from St. Paul to the heart of the northern Rockies. We would take with us my son Cory, all of eight years old—three generations of skiers—and share an interest that no other members of the family could fully appreciate (though Cory’s younger brother, Byron, showed promise). We’d revel in the renewal of Uncle Bruce’s lifetime passion, which he had put aside selflessly so that Gaga and Grandpa could live out their lives in their home instead of a home. I figured it was the least that any of us could do to express our love and appreciation for what he had done.
Later that day, I wrote him a letter. A few days later, he called. “Hello?” I answered.
As always, he skipped his name and any kind of greeting and with a voice seemingly boosted by an air compressor went straight to a question. “Will someone who skied in Vermont all his life need a passport to ski in Montana?” he asked, then laughed.
“No,” I played along. “I think you’ve earned honorary status.”
“I would love to ski with you,” he said using a calmer, serious tone.
The trip was a huge success. Uncle Bruce was as avuncular with Cory as our beloved uncle had been to my sisters and me 30 years before. He skied with confidence and his solid proficiency[2]. The three of us enjoyed every hour of the expedition.
The next season, I renewed the invitation to Uncle Bruce. He accepted enthusiastically. We talked logistics, and soon Uncle Bruce asked if Cliff could go along too. It didn’t matter to me. If Uncle Bruce wanted to bring Mr. Rock Star, I decided that would be fine, though I wasn’t sure about the dangling skull earring. “Yeah, sure,” I said, “if he wants to, I don’t know why not. Can he ski?”
“We went skiing at Great Gorge [in New Jersey] a couple of times last year,” said Uncle Bruce. “He hasn’t skied a lot but Cliff is a tremendous athlete—used to play hockey and was quite good, I’m told.” Given Cliff’s build, hockey was plausible—at least with Cliff as a defenseman. At Bowdoin, I had known several excellent hockey players from New Jersey, but off the ice none of them wore a Mick Jagger shirt—or a dangling skull earring.
“I’ve looked into flight schedules for the day before we leave, and we can catch a 1:00 flight that puts us into Minneapolis at just after 2:30 your time. Will that work?”
* * *
Three weeks later, I pulled up to the curb by the baggage claim area of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. There they stood, an odd pair quite out of their element: Uncle Bruce in his signature trench coat, pork pie hat, half glasses, K-Mart “dress” shirt, and clip-on tie, and towering next to him, Cliff in a big black and white ski parka, with a gray headband over his ears—decidedly unstylish for a New Jersey rock star—and a long, black and white scarf wrapped tightly around his neck.
If Uncle Bruce didn’t look bound for the slopes, neither did Cliff—though with some straining and double-looks, I noticed that the dangling skull had stayed back in New Jersey. Uncle Bruce reminded me of Peter Sellers, and Cliff looked like a provincial New Jerseyite, who had taken all too seriously, legends of Minnesota winters. His style was more suitable for the annual Winter Carnival ice-fishing contest out on nearby White Bear Lake than it was for a ski trip to a Rocky Mountain ski resort. If these two characters had “New Jersey” written all over them here in Minnesota, how would they appear on the slopes of Big Mountain in far-off Montana? (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Years after Gaga died and UB was in one of his periodic hyper-contrarian moods, my sisters and I questioned this decision. UB threatened to “donate” the property to the Town of Lyme. We worried more that he’d “gift” it to Alex, the Serbian émigré-gold-bricker, whom the reader will meet in a subsequent chapter.
