My father’s family is of Norwegian descent, out of northern Wisconsin. Grandpa fought in Korea, worked for Boeing in Seattle, and followed work to Chicago. My Father grew up in the suburbs in the late sixties, roaming the neighborhood with his four siblings as children did in those days. He loved small wild things; snakes, frogs and chipmunks. In high school he was on the gymnastics team. The old photos show him on the rings; a smiling, acned teenager with sculpted biceps and a heavy mane of long, brown hair. Quiet, unknowable, conflicted. A championship athlete and a hippie. A foot in both worlds, at home in neither. He drove a Willys Jeep, and broke Grandpa’s heart by refusing to consider college. 

“You want to be a grunt the rest of your life?!” growled Grandpa, and from what I know of Engbretson fathers and sons, my Father wouldn’t have replied.

An old farrier gave him a job shoeing draft horses, and by his 19^th summer he was on the road with O’s Gold Seed Company’s forty horse hitch as an outrider.

The O’s Gold caravan put down in Eli J. C. Yoder’s lower pasture and when the forty Belgians were put up, the help, as young drifting men will, sought and found Eli’s five pretty daughters. Eli was a Sugarcreek, Ohio Amish farmer who raised and hustled Belgians. He loved the sounds and sights of horse sales with an excitement that muted the more subtle callings of fatherhood, and his daughters went into the nights with the O’s Gold men. My mother was beautiful and red-haired, and when the forty horses left Sugarcreek, my father came back for her. 

Dad became Christian, Amish and married. In what order this occurred I cannot accurately say. My parents are reticent about these years. There was a motorcycle, romance, some fast living. There’s a distant glint in my Mother’s eye in the rare moments when she speaks of their young love.

I was their second child, born in 1982, odd and solitary. I lived in the shadows, on the edges. My hair was big and shaggy. My shoes were, as I remember, stiff leather husks with up-turned toes and slick soles. I fed and watered with the miscreants and the marginalized. I stuttered, I gnawed my fingernails, I wet my bed. 

But I was a happy child, loved by my parents who both gave better than they’d been given. We subsisted on $.59 hotdogs and applesauce, but I had a dog, time to roam for miles, and I could always find the books. 

By the time I was twelve, my father, who was more Amish than the Amish, as someone once put it, could no longer imagine a future in Holmes County, Ohio that accommodated his vision of a plain life. He moved us to Michigan, onto 80 acres of swamp and sandy hayfield with a collapsed barn and an old farmhouse with milk snakes in the dark places. The 12-year-olds that came from behind the derelict buggies were a different lot than the Holmes County boys. These were my kind.

The cedar swamps and second growth hemlock/birch/maple woods became my home. I was free, easy and happy alone in the woods. Hours and hours and days, all through my teenage years. My friends and I birded, camped, played volleyball and hockey, and were taught by our bishop Omer P. Miller. Omer P. was a small man with a great mat of a Blackbeard beard and a voice that reduced my peers and I to quivering, compliant subjects on our benches. When I followed him to pre-baptismal instruction class he laid out humanity’s need for salvation, and how transgression requires blood. He fixed me with his gaze and told me there’s no blood in nature, no salvific power to be found in the woods. I said nothing. After church I returned to the trees. And the books. Aldo Leopold, Sig Olson, David Kline–these writers and thinkers shaped my ecological morality.

When I was 21, I left Michigan for the Mission valley in western Montana, to teach at the New Order Amish school. My assimilation was instantaneous. The people, place and culture were my inevitable destiny. In the Mission mountains and the Bob Marshall wilderness I spent the summers of my early twenties, those years when our minds began to gel and solidify and our self-awareness begins to reveal the first traces of accuracy. 

I married Amy. Three words, and a life of love and meaning. We have intergrown to where I can no longer tell which is me or her. Her heart is lovely, her mind is bright. I like her. She likes me.

We live in Grangeville, ID, on 10 acres in a little valley above the South Fork of the Clearwater river. I build fences for work. Amy has borne me four beautiful children, Asher, Claire, Willow and Jesse.

I believe, but faith is hard won for me. I wander the borderlands, the half-wild where the light and shadow plays. The life and love of Jesus ring true and call me, but doubt too, is always there. Some days Christianity feels like a wilderness of mirrors and my faith a house of cards and I must retrace my steps to where the seeking Son of God calls me to Him again. I can only hope when Jesus told us those who have been most forgiven will love most there’s a parallel version of this for those of us like me. Those who have doubted believe best.

I am a lover of ideas, and writing is a medium I find myself happy in. Some write freely, for the sheer pleasure of playing with words. I am more a builder, a builder with sweat on his furrowed brow laboring at the far side of his skill set. Oscar Wilde is quoted to have said he spent all forenoon putting in a comma and all afternoon taking it back out. That’s how I write. Put down a few words. Take them back out. I cannot so much as type properly. What literary skills I have do not feel honestly come by. Real writers spend years finding and developing their voice through a disciplined and rigorous progression of education and word counts like the sands of the sea. I graduated at age 13 from eighth grade in a crudely gutted modular home with a cotton curtain on a wire down the center. A hand pump provided water and the outhouses were out back. We bent over our books under teachers exiled there, who taught for the same reasons young men hired on with Custer and the Seventh: free room and board, new country, girl and church troubles. Stepping to Good English, in which Pathway Publishers combined seventh and eighth grade, is the extent of my literary education. 

In those formative days of youth, I took my place in the pragmatic, labor-centric Amish economy, but by night, when the sun set, I would read, into those magical hours of early morning. The rhythm of good words, the syntax of a beautiful phrase, the illuminating, whole-hearted experience of living others’ lives in other worlds took me up, and in the darkness the meanings and images carried me both deep inside and above my world. Cormac McCarthy, Wallace Stegner, Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Scott Turow, Kent Haruff, Larry Brown, Pearl Buck, Charles Frazier, Peter Mathieson. These authors have their pen prints on my soul. 

My writing ethos is simple, the golden pen rule: to write for others as they have written for me. Here is where I try.