Because I had done a good job at Andersonville, I got hired to work on a salvage job at the Old Capitol, OPS, for the Bureau of Historic Sites and Properties.

Brenda had been working at the Bureau of Historic Sites and Properties, OPS, as a clerk/typist, teaching herself zooarcheology after she finished her clerk/typist duties for the day.

Owen and Balder were in nursery school, although Owen would soon start kindergarten, and become a latch-key child, walking to school and back and letting himself in, fixing himself a snack, and playing with the neighborhood children, after school.

Now Brenda went to the National Park Service, on a 180-day appointment, as a zooarcheologist.

We had switched employers.

Around the time my dig at the Old Capitol ended, Brenda would go into the field, surveying Big Cypress Swamp, backpacking bone samples out, in a knapsack.

When the New Capitol was built, behind the old one, the Old Capitol made the new one look like a high-rise parking garage.

Some pork-chop legislators wanted to tear the old one down.

Historic preservationists wanted to save it, and renovate the buildings.

A compromise was reached.

Two-thirds of it would be torn down and one-third saved.

This was called restoring it to a previous "baseline configuration."

The baseline configuration was dirt.

When federal funds were used for construction-or demolition-a certain amount was set aside for archeology.

That's the money we got. A pork-barrel project.

We got salvage money to sink potholes in the courtyard until the money was gone, and call it scientific research.

I wrote, "War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Demolition is preservation."

I said that to get a salvage grant you had to be willing to call demolition preservation, and to call salvage archeology scientific research.

I started calling myself the salvage archeologist of the Mall Builder culture.

Because I wouldn't call demolition preservation I would not be hired permanent by the Bureau of Historic Properties. I had an attitude. They didn't like the cut of my jib. I was not a team player.

I also called myself a demolition laborer, because as an archeological field worker, OPS, I made less money than a green helper on a construction crew throwing scrap into a front-end loader to put in a dump truck and haul away.

A common laborer made more than an archeologist with a college degree and several years experience doing field work.

I also saw parallels between the Bureau of Historic Sites and Properties and the Division of Cultural Affairs. The Bureau of Grants Services.

Just as I saw that--or felt that, in my paranoia--you had to call salvage archeology scientific research to get hired permanent as an archeologist, you had to call WPA art art, to win a grant.

I said they supported WPA art, not art.

That all the grant money went to defanged artists, artists who had caponized themselves, to get a grant, and if you wouldn't, your work was called inferior. Your work was rejected on grounds of quality. Merit.

You didn't measure up.

Later, I was to make fun of the Division of Cultural Affairs, and the WPA art they supported, in my newspaper columns.

One weekend we went on a camping trip to Cape San Blas with a couple I dug with who had a canoe, a pickup truck, and an extra tent.

Owen and Balder caught fish we made a bouillabaisse out of.

Later, we bought tents and sleeping bags and a propane stove and started camping with Owen and Balder, killing, cooking, and eating our food, taking nature trails, hiking and swimming, fishing and body-surfing in the great outdoors.

We bought a secondhand yellow fiberglass canoe. For $75.

You didn't need a lot of money to camp out.

This became a major family activity on long weekends. Owen and Balder remember it fondly, and do it with their families, now.

Instead of watching television or going to tourist traps like Disney World.

They may go to Disney World and watch television too. But not exclusively. Not instead of enjoying the great outdoors, living the strenuous life.

Throwing fill dirt out of a test pit was strenuous, but it ended, like my writer-in-residence job, and I was out of work again.

I was at the house.

Then Brenda went into the Big Cypress and I was really at the house. With Owen and Balder.

Just the three of us. No mom.

Mom was off fighting snakes and alligators. In her Vietnam jungle boots.

Your mother wears GI boots.