When I was a kid, I’d see my dad walk out of the house, headed for his pickup, and I’d ask him where he was going. He’d say, “Crazy. Want to go?” I always wanted to go, but to him that was a figure of speech, or a way to be humorous. I never got to go crazy with him.

Before long, I had my own family, and one day, when my oldest daughter was four of five, she asked me where I was going, and I said, “Crazy. You want to go?”

“Yep,” she said.

We lived in Montana at the time, in the mountains, so she tagged along as I went outside and changed the oil in my pickup and mended some fence. When I finished, I headed inside, and she stopped me and said, “Dad, I thought we were going crazy.”

“Honey, that’s just an expression.”

She started to cry and said, “Dad, I want to go crazy.”

I thought: well, you told her you were going somewhere, but you never left the house. To her, crazy is a place. She feels like you did when you were a kid and got left at home. I loaded her inside the pickup and we drove around. So happened that I had a bag of Smarties in the truck. I love them. I gave her some. She stood on the seat next to me and ate her candy—yes, this was back when a kid could do that in the mountains, even ride in back.

“Is this going crazy?” she asked.

“This is going crazy,” I said.

She nodded and smiled and held out her hand for another little roll of candies. I drove aimlessly for 20 minutes or so, then returned home. She ran into the house and told her mom that she got to go crazy. She was happy.

We went crazy a lot in the coming years. The next two kids as well. Whether driving or walking or horseback riding or camping or sledding in the snow, and we always had Smarties to hold us over while we were gone.

Sooner than I dreamed, this young lady was out of high school graduated and in the Marine Corps, then married to a Marine and had two little girls of her own. When they got out of the Corps, she and her husband bought a house nearby.

One thing she and I really looked forward to was hunting season. We go horseback. I took her the first year she was old enough to hunt, just before my wife and I made some family decisions that took us all overseas. Anyway, we couldn’t wait to go again now that they lived closer.

Opening morning dawned cold and windy. Horses were fed and saddled. We checked our gear, placed our rifles in their scabbards and mounted. I had a packhorse in tow and led the way out of camp, into a large meadow. Wind makes horses flighty, and they hadn’t been ridden for a spell, so they were fresh, ready to go. My packhorse is a saddle horse too so he was unaccustomed to following and being a knucklehead, trotting along beside me. We finally lined out and my daughter rode up next to me. I looked at her. She looked at me, grinned, and handed me a Smartie.