Читать книгу Tantra Goddess - Caroline Muir - Страница 9
ОглавлениеChapter Two
On My Way
It was dusk when I pulled into the driveway of Johnny’s chalet high in the mountains west of Denver, among boulders and wildflowers. Butterflies fluttered in my belly as I saw my brother and his wife moving about through the living room window: I was really here.
Johnny and Cherrie welcomed me warmly and made me feel at home right away, leading me into the nursery, where I would sleep in a single bed near my six-month-old godson and nephew Josh’s crib. He had grown so much since my visit just after he was born in February. We peered into the crib together, whispering so as not to wake the littlest angel of the family. “I’m so glad you’re here,” Cherrie said, squeezing my hand.
Johnny owned a gallery, The Hands of Man, in the nearby town of Evergreen, showcasing the work of local artists in ceramics, silver, and stone. Artists were a big part of this community, along with hippies, cowboys, young families, and old timers who liked to live the simpler life in the Colorado Rockies. I expected to fit right in.
During the day I helped Cherrie at home while Johnny ran the gallery. In a few months, I would work in the gallery two days a week making silver jewelry at the workbench Johnny also used and waiting on the occasional tourist or customer who came to shop. It smelled woodsy and earthy in there, with the cedar shelves and burning piñon pine in the pot-bellied stove. At night, Johnny cooked our hometown favorites—fried chicken and mashed potatoes, hamburgers or steak on the barbecue. We stayed up late getting high on homegrown and laughing until our sides split, listening to the Moody Blues. As teenagers and through our twenties we had lived in our own little worlds, and it felt good to share some old favorites as we made new memories. Cherrie and baby Josh cuddled close to the tremendous love between brother and sister. On weekends, Johnny and I hiked in the mountains and he listened to my musings, never trying to fix anything, just listening or offering to help in any way. I loved him for his unconditional acceptance of me as I tried to make sense of this freedom I had chosen.
With Johnny’s help, before long I found a one-room log cabin to rent on Turkey Creek Road in Conifer, fifteen minutes from his house. I didn’t have much with me, but Johnny and Cherrie scrounged up a futon from their old apartment in Denver, pulled some cookware out of storage, and unpacked some chipped pottery that hadn’t sold in the gallery. I sewed gingham curtains for my country cabin and wove soft cowhide into pillows for the funky old couch. I had a great time perusing yard sales for treasures, and embroidering or sewing what needed my touch. Winter would be cold, and I had a cord of wood delivered for my big moss rock fireplace. When that was stacked neatly outside and covered with a tarp, I stood back and surveyed it all. Living like this for the winter would feed my pioneering soul.
As soon as I was settled in, I took a job waitressing at the Little Bear, a tavern in Evergreen popular with the cowboys and hippies, who somehow got along harmoniously. I spoke by phone every few weeks with Eddie, who was creating his new life five hours away in Aspen, until he told me (on my thirtieth birthday) that it wasn’t time for him to be in a relationship. This was my first big rejection in my single life, but I got over it pretty quickly. Eddie and sailing to Spain had been a bridge. I was ready to fall in love with my life now, and I had the cutest little log cabin this side of the Mississippi.
I had almost forgotten what autumn turning to winter can do to your spirit when you stand under the big night sky and breathe in the scent of pine and wood fires in the crisp Colorado air. These were the mountains of my childhood, the getaway I had loved as a child, sitting beside clear, rushing streams while my father or Nank fished and I counted leaves sailing by on their way to somewhere. From this good place, New York seemed never to have existed.
It was in my blood, this thirst for adventure. I come from a long line of pioneers. My great-grandparents left Scotland in the 1890s with their three boys—one of them my grandfather Nank—to travel west by covered wagon in search of everything America might be. They settled near Ames, Iowa. Fifty years later, as soon as World War II ended, my parents settled on the Missouri side of State Line, with their baby girl, Carolyn, as my birth name was spelled. Three years later their second child, Johnny, was born, completing the picture: a handsome Irishman for a dad with piercing blue eyes and black wavy hair, a beautiful young mother with almond-shaped eyes and a radiant smile, two cars parked in the driveway, a manicured lawn out front, weekends golfing and sunning at the country club. Acres and acres of cornfields surrounded our house and I romped there with my brother and our dog, running down the rows and dropping into their shade to watch clouds pass by. Sometimes I played in our yard, swinging on a tree swing or climbing the apple tree for the view of “forever”—anywhere else, the horizon line, and all its possibilities. From the outside, everything at home looked great, but I knew better. My father had a hot temper, and he and my mom fought so loud sometimes I dreamed of leaving home and taking Johnny with me. One night, I decided it was time to take action. While our parents raged in their bedroom down the hall, I scooped up Johnny in my arms and held him tight. “Let’s call the police.” He looked at me with wet eyes as I dialed “O” on our telephone.
“Now, little girl,” the woman at the other end of the line said to me, “you can’t be bothering us with family squabbles.”
I hung up. Squabbles? “Okay, Johnny. That’s it. Tomorrow we’ll run away to Nank and Nanny’s.” I was sure I could remember the way to our grandparents’ house.
That night I made piles of “supplies”—dresses, clean underwear, clothes for Johnny, my new pink Easter hat—and we went to sleep in our beds. When we woke up, the house was still quiet. I emptied a box of Cheerios into a paper bag while Johnny pulled the Radio Flyer wagon around the front. “Get in,” I said, and Johnny obeyed, legs tucked under as I surrounded him with our supplies. We walked for blocks, stopping at a church to use the bathroom. The wagon flipped once on a turn, muddying the folded clothes, but I piled them back in. I felt heroic. I was Johnny’s angel! I was saving our lives!
Our grandparents’ housekeeper, Minnie, answered the door when we finally reached our destination. “Well, look who’s here!” she cried, looking us over. “Oh dear. Your grandparents is out. When they gets back they’ll see as to what to do.” She ushered us inside and gave us cookies and milk.
Our parents picked us up that night. They scolded us in front of our grandparents and warned me never to do that again. They were especially angry that I’d called the police. (The police had phoned them and tattled on me. And I’d thought they were supposed to protect me!) It would be years before I would leave my family again for a chance at something better.
When I was twelve, my family splintered and would never pick up the pieces. My mother had a nervous breakdown and overnight was living in a hospital for the mentally ill. The asylum was in Kansas City, a drive from our home in Prairie Village, one of the many suburban communities that had sprouted up on the prairies after the war. She stayed for a few months in an old brick building with bars on the windows, where they sedated her and gave her shock therapy to try and cure her. Both Johnny and I missed her terribly. When she did come home, she slept most of the day and night, but besides that, she didn’t seem too different. Then one day not too long after, they packed her up again and sent her even farther away, to Menninger’s Clinic for the Mentally Ill, in Topeka.
To take care of things at home while Dad was away all day at his dry cleaning plant in Kansas City, he hired a housekeeper. I didn’t care—I was out most of the time, losing myself in my social life. I lived for dances, parties, and spending nights as often as I could with my best girlfriends, Gerri and Nash.
When my mother was finally released from Menninger’s, she tried to step back into her role as wife and mother, but she couldn’t. She had been diagnosed as manic depressive and schizophrenic, Dad said, and her doctor and her father, Grandpa Nank, had advised him to file for divorce and take full custody of the kids. Before I knew what was happening, Mom was back at Menninger’s, Dad had sold our house (goodbye, beloved apple tree!), and Johnny and I moved in with Nank and Nanny, leaving Dad free to live closer to work in Kansas City. He would see us on weekends.
I loved my grandparents, especially Nank. When we were younger our parents would send us to their house for weekends, and on hot summer nights I’d share Nank’s bed by the window. He slept upstairs and Nanny had her own rooms downstairs. I’d fall asleep beside him listening to the songs of the crickets after watching him snore softly beside me for a time. I loved his funny old face and wisps of gray hair pulled out as if they were trying to look sleek and long. On walks along Brush Creek he told me stories about growing up on a farm in Iowa. I was his “little daisy,” and I loved watching his eyes go soft when he called me that. He was my first big taste of real love, always assuring me with his gentle warmth, “Little daisy of mine, you can never make me mad enough to not love you.” Oh, there were times I tried to prove him wrong, but nothing I did ever shook him.
Not long after Johnny and I moved in with Nank and Nanny, Nanny went into the hospital and never came home again. Gin bottles were found hidden all over the house, which explained Nanny’s “funny moods.” Mom escaped from Menninger’s a few days after the funeral and hitchhiked the 250 miles home to Prairie Village. Nank didn’t have the heart to send her back, and he moved her into the room Nanny had recently vacated.
All of us somehow managed our various assignments for survival. There we were, the four of us, a splintered family living in separate rooms in a big house no one could really call home. Nank stayed in his wing, Mom, Johnny, and I used the other three rooms, and no one saw each other much. Mom slept a lot, and when she was awake she roamed the house in her nightgown, mumbling words no one could understand. Twice that year, Johnny found Mom bleeding in bed after attempts to slash her wrists.
For years I had worshipped my mother. For Johnny she was a skirt to hide behind when Dad raged at her, at me, at the world. For me, she was comfort when Dad lost his temper over a simple thing like reaching into the cookie jar after dinner. “Fatso!” he would yell, whacking me across the head with the back of his hand and sending me to my room to sob my heart out. Mom would come in after a while with a plate of those cookies and a glass of cold milk. Dad took his temper out on Johnny now and then, but I was older, and sassier, and a girl, and he had a thing for girls. Once, reeking of Scotch, he took a hairbrush to my legs and buttocks, slapping me over and over until my tender skin was bloody. I wailed inside each time the bristles hit, but I never made a sound. My mother stayed out of it, never shouted at him to stop and leave me alone, and I didn’t really care. I assumed I must have been bad to deserve this, and no one needed to see it.
Before she got sick, Mom kept house, threw parties, and volunteered as a Cub Scout mom and Girl Scout mom. She met Dad at the country club on weekends and visited with girlfriends while I swam or practiced with the water ballet team. We went to church with Nank and Nanny, and now and then with Dad, too, and I sang in the choir, tears running down my cheeks sometimes from the beauty of the songs as the organ music lifted up my spirit to meet God.
Since she’d been in the hospital, I didn’t know how to talk to Mom. Johnny was the good boy, keeping an eye on her when he came home from school, while I did everything I could to stay away. Nash and Gerri were the world to me. We threw water balloons at passing cars, drove too fast in the family car I “stole” when Nank was sleeping, spray-painted the word “F U C K” on the elegant statuary around town, and prized our star piece of contraband, a sign that read “DO NOT STEAL THIS SIGN.” My diet consisted of jumbo packs of Hydrox cookies dipped in milk, Campbell’s Tomato Soup, and Hormel chili supplemented by trips to Winstead’s Drive-In for double cheeseburgers in Gerri’s ’57 Chevy. I had a charge account with the local cab company and the local drug store and soda fountain, and everything was “neat” and “swell.” My older friends had driver’s licenses, and the 3.2 beer sold in Kansas flowed freely at the basement den parties where “Kernie and the gang” hung out. Nash and I were wannabe beatniks, and we read Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin while soul-searching our way through ninth and tenth grades. Nash asked questions about morality, politics, and philosophy, opening my mind to questioning authority and to expanded ways of thinking. She planned to quit high school early and travel the world. I wanted to do it, too.
But my family had other ideas for me. The summer before my junior year my dad remarried and decided his kids needed more supervision. He would send me to a boarding school he’d heard about in Fort Lauderdale, and Johnny would go to a military academy.
I was outraged. Leave my friends? Johnny? The love between us surpasses all understanding; we were everything to one another.
Boarding school. I felt ostracized, barred from my past. Miss Harrington, the dorm mother, a stern spinster who lived in an apartment at the entrance to the one-story house where twenty other girls shared rooms, was now my authority figure. I instantly hated her. It was the job of teenage girls to give the dorm mother a hard time, and I was good at my job. But I was determined to make this boarding school thing work.
A friendly person by nature, I jumped in to my new life with abandon. I listened to the chatty girls, gathering data. Just where would I fit in? My roommate, Adrianne, was okay, blonde and tall and about as lost as I was, having just arrived from Michigan. Adrianne and I staked out our personal territory, hung our old school banners over our beds, and began the process of adjusting to an environment that was hardly terrible, given that the Fort Lauderdale beaches were our backyard on the weekends. We wore Bermuda shorts to classes, walking in our saddle shoes the short distance to the local soda shop, school dining room, and classrooms. The air was humid and heavy, and it made my curly hair frizz, but Adrienne helped me style it into something cute. I tried to make friends with the day students who lived off campus with their parents, hoping I would be invited for overnights on the weekends, but it didn’t happen often.
Before the first semester ended, I began to notice some good things about being new. I had a clean slate here at Pine Crest Prep. No one had parents who didn’t think I was a good influence on their daughter (no supervision at home, you know!). No one knew my mother’s story. I had friends, I dated boys, and I joined the cheerleading team. For my sixteenth birthday, Nank gave me a Chevy Impala convertible, which kicked off as much fun as I knew how to have and still make it to graduation. I flirted relentlessly with the tall basketball players and had a crush on most of the cute guys on the football team, but for the most part, I found boys disappointing. I loved making out with them and vying for their attention, but I was terrified of their penises and had no interest in sex. I vowed to remain a virgin until I married.
By Christmas, Dad was getting another divorce and moving to Fort Lauderdale to live with his new girlfriend, Marty—his ex-wife’s friend—two miles from me. Her two daughters were day students at my school, which is how Dad had heard of Pine Crest Prep in the first place. I thought it was strange he didn’t ask me to come and live with them, but he didn’t, and I decided it was best this way. I had more freedom. Before I knew it, Dad and Marty were off to Las Vegas to get married, and suddenly I had inherited two stepsisters. (“I’m a cocksman,” Dad had once boasted. “The women love me.” “What’s a cocksman?” I had asked.) News came from home that Nank had remarried, too, a blue-haired woman named Elizabeth who I was sure was after his money, and he moved Mom into an apartment near his house. Gerri and Nash visited from Kansas that Christmas, bringing me a taste of home, until Gerri surprised me speechless by falling in love with my roommate and running away with her not too long after that. I had never even heard of a lesbian, and here my best friend turned out to be one! Was everybody nuts or what?
Senior year was a new story. Johnny hated military school and Dad let him join me at Pine Crest. I had been voted captain of the Panther-ettes, my cheerleading team, and my popularity would help Johnny be accepted. We would tolerate the occasional weekend visits to Dad’s new life and be pleasant enough to his stepdaughters when we ran into them at school.
Football fans came to our school games, and two of them were Jill and Frank, a couple of the friendliest people I had ever met. Jill and Frank never missed a game, and they were interested in me—a girl whose father lived nearby and kept her at boarding school. They invited me home for Italian dinners, laughed at the way I pronounced “Parm-ee-ze-an,” and begged me to come live with them. They would have taken Johnny, too, a fact we both loved, but Dad would never have allowed that. He showed his true colors when he asked, “Who are these guineas you two are friends with?” (I later learned that “guinea” was derogatory slang for Italians, and I seethed inside that I had a dad who was so lame.)
Sometime around my birthday, Jill told me about her brother, Arnie. He was in the service and he would be staying with them for a couple of weeks over Christmas. “You have to meet him,” Jill told me. “He’s going to love you as much as we do.”
And they were right. Arnie loved me right away, and I was intrigued by him. Arnie was older than the other boys I knew—twenty-three! Almost a real man. I loved talking with him. I thought he was the most intelligent, gentle, and sophisticated person I’d ever met. And he never lost his cool, even with my dad. When Dad said, “I would never let my daughter get serious about a skinny wop from New York,” Arnie just gave Dad a respectful smile and said, “Jack, your daughter is in good hands with this skinny New York wop,” and he swept me out the door, my hand in his.
Life at Jill and Frank’s house was warm and full of family love and laughter. I spent more time there when Arnie was in town, visiting with his family, eating as a group around a big table, laughing, cuddling, and talking late into the night. Before he went back to the army base in South Carolina we went on a few dates, dressing up and going to see Ella Fitzgerald at a Miami hotel, a gift from cousin Joe. Our next date took us to a Miami nightclub to hear Lenny Bruce, the raunchiest comedian of the day. I blushed through the show, which amused Arnie. No matter how I tried to hide it, I was a Kansas girl at heart.
When Arnie left, I missed him badly. We lived for the letters we wrote to one another and for the occasional long-distance phone call. Over spring break, Arnie proposed. I said yes in a heartbeat. I was wanted! I was adored! For the rest of the school year I proudly sported my diamond engagement ring, to the envy of the other girls.
After my high-school graduation, Johnny and I moved into our mother’s apartment back in Kansas. As soon as I could, I would leave there forever. She was zoned out, smoked a lot, and didn’t do much to help me get ready for my wedding, although she did perk up to go with me to buy our dresses (mine was ice blue with a long train and lots of pearls and lace, hers was a mocha cream silk and lace). Arnie’s mother filled my hope chest with embroidered aprons, linen tablecloths and napkins, and monogrammed towels from Portugal, and Nank planned to walk me down the aisle. Dad wasn’t invited to the wedding, a revolutionary act for me. But how could I invite him? When I told him Arnie and I were engaged, he said, “You’ll never get into a country club married to that wop.”
Arnie’s family became mine as soon as we married, and when we visited them every year in Florida, I would take off alone to visit my father. I wanted to believe I had a connection to my family, too, even if it meant putting up with my dad showing me off at his country club and sitting through his third and fourth martini while he and Marty argued over the smallest things, and he criticized everything and everyone in sight. I didn’t like his macho style or how I felt with him or his comments about me—he liked to say, “You’re just a girl, you’ll never amount to anything,” as his eyes lowered to stare at my breasts—but I was determined to keep up the illusion as long as I could.
Now Arnie, Robin, and I were family, and that was not an illusion. But I was leaving them. I wasn’t going to get my father on the phone and tell him what I was doing. He would claim to have been right all along, and he wouldn’t have been right about anything. I didn’t want his or anyone else’s comments to mar the fragile foundation of my choice. My stability was essential as I pioneered the new landscape of my life.
Winter came hard and cold in the Rockies, but I loved the snow and the adventure of driving through it to work at the Little Bear. Live music rocked the tavern nights and weekends, and tips were good. For added income I pulled out my jewelry-making tools, bought some more silver and supplies, and started up a business I called Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining. Back in New York, jewelry-making had been a good time-filler. Now it would be part of my livelihood. A cook at the Little Bear built me a workbench using wood from old, abandoned sheds in fields nearby. That bench was the focal point of my living room, next to the big rock fireplace where fires roared all winter as I created hundreds of hollow silver beads for necklaces out of sterling, then set uneven rounds of turquoise stones for the pendants, belt buckles, and earrings. I fit right in with the locals and became one of Johnny’s favorite artists at his gallery.
Every mountain girl needs a dog, and it was time for me to get mine. I chose the pick of the litter, a Golden Retriever puppy I named Jeremiah Johnson, and we became inseparable right away. Any loneliness that crept in vanished when Jeremiah and I stepped outside under that starry sky. Some afternoons before work I’d jump into the Jeep with Jeremiah and drop by Johnny’s for a visit. He and Cherrie were supportive of me and my choices, and they never wavered in their love for Arnie and Robin. These were unusual times.
And every Sunday, I called “home.” Arnie and I talked long and deeply, like the friends we had always been. “Robin misses you a lot, Kernie, and I miss you, too, my blue-eyed Kansas girl,” he would say. “But I get that you have to do this.” I felt incredibly fortunate to have a husband so supportive of me. But eventually it was time to make agreements over visiting rights and put the divorce papers through with lawyers we hired. Our uncontested divorce would be finalized in about a year.
One bitter cold January day, two tall cowboys walked through the swinging saloon doors at the Little Bear. “Who is that?” I asked another waitress, as the doors swung shut behind them and the men looked around for a seat.
“Rick and Victor,” she said. “They come in from time to time.”
I hung back to get a good look. The men wore Stetsons perfectly perched on their heads, topping weathered faces. They looked like real cowboys to me.
I maneuvered my way into getting their table, introduced myself, and asked for their orders. Rick’s emerald eyes sparkled when he looked at me, and chatting with them was easy. I accepted Victor’s invitation to join them for a drink at the end of my shift.
Before we finished our second pitcher these cowboys invited me to join them on a road trip to Aspen the next day. They sold Western-style belt buckles for a living, twenty dollars apiece, and the bars in Aspen in January were good business. I was in. I traded shifts with another waitress before I left the tavern to go pack. The next morning I was back in Evergreen to meet up with my new companions.
I climbed into the front seat of Victor’s pickup, settling in between two men who smelled like hangovers needing a shower. I was quite the contrast in my sunshine-yellow down vest, clean Levi’s, and flannel shirt, my braids tied with yellow velvet ribbons. It would be a grand adventure.
Rick and Victor were friendly cowboys, good men with big hearts, but when it came to money, these two really lived on the edge. As we drove out of town in Victor’s camper pickup I realized that my new friends not only had a nearly empty gas tank, but they had no gas money. Victor said, “We’re pretty embarrassed, ma’am, but we wonder if it might be possible to borrow twenty dollars from you to git us to Aspen. We’ll pay you back, no problem.”
“It’s true, Miss Kernie. We are terribly sorry, but we’re not gonna make it too far on no gasoline,” Rick said. I pulled out a twenty and we were on our way.
About an hour down the road, another twenty bought more Coors, and the men entertained me without pause for the six hours over the Continental Divide and into the quaint ski village of Aspen. All day I wondered which one I would sleep with, Rick or Victor. Rick was the cuter of the two, and he was charming in that effortless way of mountain men. I thought it would probably be Rick.
It’s freezing in late January at 8,000 feet, and the long, winding road into Aspen was terrifying and exciting with two singing cowboys in an old pickup with questionable brakes and no heater. What joy it was to see the glow of lights through a window at the Hotel Jerome and a big parking place for our rig at the side entrance.
The moment we entered, the real fun began. Out of the men’s sacks came the leather rolls filled with brass belt buckles stamped with bucking broncos, horseshoes, pine trees, and “COORS.” In no time, these guys had sold enough belt buckles to the men at the bar to pay for the evening. I was ready for a hot buttered rum. After my drink I took a walk while they worked a few more bars, and we met up again in an hour for some elk and venison with “taters” and beer. They handed me a couple of bills to repay me for the help getting there and stashed rolls of bills in their wallets. It had been a good night. After dinner they taught me to play pool. We played darts, partied some more around town, and they sold more belt buckles. Around 3:00 a.m. it was time to find the old pickup and get some sleep.
It was clear by now that I would be sleeping with Rick. We climbed under his down sleeping bag, and by morning, I was his gal.
For a week we traveled the Colorado interstates and highways, getting to know each other in ways that only come with the intimacy of traveling. Rick opened up, telling stories of growing up on a ranch in southern Colorado. He and his father had hunted in high country, and he’d hauled elk and venison out of the hunting camp and back to the butcher in Durango. He’d been in Vietnam, was wounded at nineteen, and sent home with a Purple Heart. His stories tore my heart open. Since he’d been back home, he and Victor had traveled together, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, selling belt buckles, making some kind of living. I vowed then to love Rick into wellness, to do my part for the war effort and help him heal his wounds.
In this land of cowboys, Rick was the sweetest man around. When he wasn’t selling belt buckles with Victor in bars from one end of the state to the other, he spent nights with me. He rode in rodeos, carried a can of Skoal chewing tobacco in his right hip pocket, lined up three pairs of cowboy boots in my closet below his western shirts with their various horse and horseshoe designs, and wore fitted boot-cut Levis. Sometimes he’d fill the freezer with elk and venison steaks from his hunting trips in the high country with his dad, then cook up meat-and-potato dinners that tasted like sweet home on the range. And sex was great with this cowboy. He knew about pleasuring me in some of my favorite ways before riding his cowgirl into the open country of abandoned passion. He was quiet much of the time, but he was easy to be with, so I didn’t care.
That summer we took a month-long mule pack trip into the mountains together. I quit my job at the tavern in late spring, gave up my cabin, and Rick and I moved in with his folks on their ranch near Durango to get ready for our trip. It would be the next big adventure in the life of this young pioneer.
Rick’s folks were old-fashioned farmers, the kind who don’t say much and get a lot done. They went to bed at 8:30 so they could rise before dawn to start the routine all over again. Fried eggs, bacon, and potatoes were eaten before sunrise, and then Rick fell into step with his dad, who was happy to have his strong young son around to help with chores. We baled hay and rode and worked with the horses that would come with us on the trip. I learned to knit scarves with Rick’s mom in front of the daytime soaps, and every day I sketched the shapes of clouds, studied their forms, and worked in my jewelry studio, which we set up in the junk shed near the hay barn. The old pot-bellied stove in there kept me cozy and warm while I worked. But sales were slow at best in that area, and we had to make do with what we had, which wasn’t much in terms of money but was a lot in quality of life. We filled our gas tank from the supply on the ranch, ate elk and venison with those yummy fried “taters” Rick’s mom cooked each night, scraped up enough cash to take in a drive-in movie, eat popcorn, and have hot sex in the privacy of our pickup in the parking lot. At night, while lightning storms lit up the western sky, we made love quietly in Rick’s childhood bedroom in this farmhouse on the mesa while his folks slept only feet away in the next room. Sometimes, for more privacy, we spent the night on haystacks in the barn with our little family of dogs—Rick’s two Australian Shepherds and Jeremiah Johnson. It was peaceful out in this simple farmhouse under a big Colorado sky with my man, my dog, and my chance to experience more of life.
In early July we packed huge leather saddlebags with cans of beans, tuna, milk, Spam, and other basic survival food, dog food, cartons of Marlboros and cans of Skoal, and a supply of marijuana buds. Fishing lures, lines, and poles went in, too, along with rain gear and changes of denim and flannel. We would follow an old Spanish trail along the Continental Divide at an average altitude of 12,000 feet and stay out for about a month. It was wilderness wilder than any I’d ever known, but Rick knew the area like some kids know their backyards. I trusted my guide completely.
Rain came the week we headed out, unseasonable rain, strange in July. But it didn’t stop us. Rain or shine, we were going.
Those first days with the well-grazed mules were tough on Rick, who had the responsibility of tying the gear onto the animals every morning and re-tying it throughout the day when it slipped out of balance. The dogs chased rabbits as we rode trails so steep I was sure one of our round-bellied mules would slip and roll down the mountain with our gear tied to her back. But we all were making it just fine. Rick led the animals, and I pulled up the rear.
Lightning storms were frightening events. You could feel them coming—your hair would stand up on your arms. When a lightning storm approached, you had to tie up the horses and mules and take cover crouched against an embankment and away from tall trees. Rick said more people died in those mountains being struck by lightning than are killed driving the highways.
Rick taught me all about mountain life as we camped by crystal clear mountain lakes, catching trout and frying them up within minutes out of the icy water. The flesh was succulent and the pinkest I’d ever seen. Even the boxed mashed potato flakes tasted like pure heaven when they were drenched in butter, and the instant biscuits from a mix melted in our mouths in seconds flat. We watched herds of elk cross the green velvet meadows, humbled by their majesty and their number. Wildflowers peeked out of the undergrowth in the pine forests, and every night we warmed our fingers and toes in front of a roaring campfire. Many times I was sure we were lost, but Rick always found the disappearing trail and led us through the wilderness until we finally dropped low enough in altitude to follow the railroad tracks into the old mining town of Silverton.
In Silverton, a nineteenth-century mining town, I felt on top of the world. Tourists seeing us ride into town might have taken us for real prospectors as we rode in pulling our mule train, dusty and covered with the proof of having lived in the wilderness for thirty days. We tied up our horses and mules to the wooden rails lining the unpaved road and walked into town with our dogs. Rick had an old girlfriend in Silverton, and we visited her and rested for a few days, until Rick’s dad could come to collect us with his horse trailer. We loaded the horses and mules into his trailer and climbed into the pickup, eager for our familiar roof and real bed.
Back at Rick’s family ranch, it was time to consider our next move. I had no plans besides creating more jewelry to sell at local craft fairs and galleries for food and gas money. Rick had an idea: let’s take the top off your jeep and drive to New York to see your daughter, then see what’s around the bend. What a grand idea! Four days later, windblown and sunburned, we pulled into the driveway of the older house further in the country where Arnie had moved with Robin after selling our New Rochelle house. My old life was completely gone except for the people who inhabited it and some familiar furniture.
Robin squealed when she saw us pull up in the jeep, three dogs barking in the rear, and she ran into my open arms. Arnie welcomed us warmly, giving Rick a warm handshake. When we had a few private moments, Arnie admitted to me that Robin often woke during the night crying for her mother. It broke my heart to hear it, but I didn’t know what to say. I knew Arnie had climbed his own mountains: packing up a life that had split wide open, selling the house, finding a simple place in the country to live. He was writing and working freelance so he could be home with our daughter and serve as both mother and father to her. I ached hearing all of this, yet I praised him, as did Rick, for the good man he so obviously was. We regaled him with stories of our high-country adventures, and somehow his heart opened to Rick, who from then on he called “brother.” I swore to him and to all who would listen that our friendship would remain with us for life.
Robin was another story. Right away, Robin and Rick were inseparable. With me, though, Robin was cautious. She hung back. In later years I would learn that the scarlet letter had left its mark, as it had on me, although I wasn’t willing to admit it.
All the way home to Colorado, I blamed myself for failing as a wife and mother. I hadn’t kept up my part of the commitment. It was a hard reality to take. Another reality I couldn’t avoid was that I had to find work. Victor asked us to go with him to his uncle’s uranium mines in Gateway. “You oughta join me up there for a while. He needs a few hands,” he told Rick.
We were clearly “on the run,” though from what I’m not sure. All I knew was that adventure and travelin’ that lonesome highway were leading us where we needed to go and feeding this pioneer girl’s spirit. As long as we had a destination, we were happy. I sold my Jeep for a pickup, waved goodbye to Rick’s folks, packed up what I’d take with me, and we were on our way to the Colorado-Utah border and the little town of Gateway, population 52.
Fish for dinner caught fresh from the Dolores River and wild asparagus picked on the riverbanks was appealing for a while, but after eight months, living in a plain two-bedroom farmhouse with Victor and his girlfriend got old. And mining was taking its toll on Rick. Hard physical labor in a mineshaft a mile down into the earth for minimal pay was anything but a cowboy’s dream. It was time for something new.
For years Rick had thought about becoming a farrier, making a living shoeing horses and being free to go where he wanted. It was a perfect job for a cowboy, and it sounded like a fine idea to me. Rick found a farrier school in El Paso, had a friend there we could stay with, and we moved again, squeaking by on savings until he got his license and could get some paid work. When farrier school ended we were just about flat broke, my divorce was finalized, and the settlement check on its way would buy us a ticket out of there. We begged the managers of a bank in south Texas to cash my out-of-state check, then drove the dying pickup to a used car lot and bought a shiny new truck complete with a camper trailer. California would be the next stop, and this camper would be our traveling home.
Arnie lived in Woodland Hills outside Los Angeles now, in a spacious suburban house, and Robin was much happier there. There were other kids in the neighborhood, and the swimming pool entertained her day in and out. We visited them on our way north, promising to come back to visit often. We wanted someplace rugged and green, a place with a lot of horse ranches and great big skies.
The Northern California coast along Highway One is famous for its expanses of rolling hills dotted with grazing cows, stunning rocky shores, and empty beaches. Dairy farms and ranches, private estates, and rural dream houses fill the area, and we chose this area for our destination, parking the trailer in a campground near Point Reyes State Park, about thirty miles north of San Francisco. There was lot of money in Marin County, and we expected a thriving business. The campground had good showers, laundry facilities, and corrals for the horses we would bring out soon from Colorado. The sleepy little town of Point Reyes Station, with its bookstores, galleries, and bakery where the locals hung out was just minutes away, and it offered some balance to the life of solitude I led. Mostly I sought the peace of the windswept beaches and hiking trails through the sloping hills and redwood forests and along the serene waterways of Tomales Bay. We had enough money to feed the horses and dogs and enough for our ground chuck and potatoes stew, and somehow we always scraped together enough change for gas, Skoal and Marlboros, and homegrown, which was pretty cheap back then.
Rick would need a horseshoeing rig to get started; our fifteen-foot “home” hauled from El Paso just wasn’t going to do it. He found a used produce trailer, hung a sign on the side—“Garvan’s Horseshoeing Service”—and he was ready for business. I set up my jewelry-making tools and sat down with a lot of new ideas. I would sell what I made at local craft fairs, and there seemed to be a lot of them in the Bay Area.
Rick’s country ways were adorable to me. He was polite, gentle, helpful, kind, and always ready to lend a helping hand to anyone who asked. We made love every morning or night, after his efforts to earn his living. We didn’t talk much, it just wasn’t Rick’s style, and for a while I didn’t mind, but after a time I began to miss having friends to talk with. I found classes in Hatha yoga in town and stayed up late reading books about metaphysics and past-life regression. Rick wasn’t interested in any of it, and I had to keep my thoughts to myself. I’d always known our styles were different, but they were beginning to scrape against each other a bit—the sweet, simple cowboy and this Kansas girl turned New York wife, turned suburban mom, turned jeweler and mountain woman, turned California soul searcher. Our quarters started feeling cramped, and sometimes I’d lose my patience. Climbing over Rick in the middle of the night to get to our tiny toilet, I once stepped into a smelly tobacco can that had been ripening for months. “Can’t you keep your goddamn spittoon outside?” I’d cried, pounding on him, and he wrestled me down and tickled me until I collapsed in laughter and love.
A year into life on the California coast, we decided it was time for a change. Jet Spencer, a friend of Rick’s from Durango, lived in Ojai, an hour north of Los Angeles. Jet was an artist with a crowded art studio, but he had floor space for a couple of friends until we found our own next home, and our dogs wouldn’t be a problem. Work seemed promising in Ojai. The inland winters would be shorter, which could mean more work for Rick, and Arnie and Robin would be much closer. Rick drove the horses in the horse trailer all the way back to Durango to his folks’ ranch, and I packed everything up and got ready for the move.
I hadn’t been in touch much with Grandpa Nank since I’d left Arnie and headed west; in fact, I had been silent for several years. How could I explain to him what I was doing? Johnny told me Nank was living in a nursing home in Kansas and not doing too well. He was ninety-two. As soon as Rick got back from Colorado and we were settled into our room in Ojai, I used the last of our savings to fly to Kansas City for a long-overdue visit to my beloved Nank before it was too late.
As the cab from the airport in Kansas City turned up the drive to my roadside motel, I felt my stomach tighten as I tried to rehearse what I would tell Nank I was doing. I had to have a better story for him than the truth. How would this self-made man, this farmer’s son who graduated college and became a veterinarian in 1908, feel about his “daisy” sleeping on a mattress on the floor in her boyfriend’s friend’s back room, living off meager earnings from her jewelry sold at craft fairs and his paltry earnings shoeing horses? Nank had bought me a beautiful four-bedroom home in New Rochelle and set me up for the good life with my husband so we could adopt our first child before I turned thirty. What in the world could I say?
But as soon as I got to the nursing home, I knew there was no need to worry. While I was so busy living my life, Nank had grown old and senile. I had expected to sit with him and hold his hand, to kiss his face and tell him I loved him, to thank him for loving me more than anyone in my young life.
He didn’t recognize me.
“Nank, it’s me!” I cried, sitting in the chair they’d put beside him for our visit. “It’s Carolyn … your little daisy. Don’t you remember me?” He looked ancient and lost.
“You don’t recognize anyone, do you, Dr. Graham,” the nurse said, straightening his collar and stepping back to look at us both. She saw this all the time, didn’t she? I noticed a small card extending from the end of a plastic stick at the center of a wilting bouquet of spring flowers. I tugged it free and read, “Love from Mary”—my mother. She knew her dad was here. Did she care? Did she visit him? I had no idea what anything meant to her anymore. I had tried to reach my mother over the past few years and she had never answered or returned my calls. I just wanted was to make sure she was all right in her little apartment alone. I looked at the second bouquet, the fresh one. The card tucked into that bouquet read, “I love you, Elizabeth.”
“His wife comes here every week,” the nurse told me. I gave her a weak smile. Maybe I should call Elizabeth. Or maybe there was no one to call.
Guilt nearly sickened me as I held Nank’s gnarled hand and asked him to forgive me, certain that any moment he would break into a smile and we would talk, like old times. I reminded him of how Johnny and I used to salt his coffee at breakfast when we stayed there, biting our tongues to keep from laughing. “Mmmmm, delicious,” he’d always say. He taught us to play gin rummy and canasta and let us win and collect our candies and shiny quarters. I told him all about that, too.
He fell asleep while I talked, mouth open, drool snaking its way down his roadmap face.
After that first visit to Nank I nearly ran the mile back to my motel room to get my bearings. My grief seemed boundless. I cried and cried, and then I rallied and put myself back together. This was why I’d come, wasn’t it? To see Nank. I splashed cold water on my face, brushed my hair into place, and headed back out.
For the next three days I was at that nursing home, getting to know the people who made up Nank’s new family, all of them overflowing with warmth and good will. When it was time to say goodbye, my chest felt horribly tight as I kissed his craggy face. I sobbed all the way back to the motel, walking the shoulder of the highway as cars sped past. I had felt like this my first night at boarding school, but that was a different kind of loneliness. There was no end in sight with this one. I crawled into the flimsy bed and prayed for sleep.
In the morning I flew back to California and Rick picked me up at the airport in LA. We barely spoke all the way back to Jet’s house an hour north. I hated to think of what was ahead of me. The jewelry business just wasn’t cutting it, and Rick had smashed his thumb horseshoeing and couldn’t work until it was healed. There would be applications to fill out for a waitressing job at Carrow’s and other coffee shops in town. Raines, the local department store, wasn’t hiring.
A week later, I came home tired and discouraged after a day of filling out job applications. “Your brother called,” Jet said. “He said he’s been trying to reach you. You better call him right away.”
Johnny? Was everything all right? I grabbed my purse and headed out to find a payphone for some privacy.
“Are you sitting down?” Johnny’s voice on the other end of the phone line sounded strangely comforting.
“I’m in a phone booth, I can’t sit down. Are you all right?”
“Nank died. I got the news yesterday and flew to Kansas City last night. The service was this morning. I haven’t been able to reach you.”
“Oh, my God!” The tears came fast.
I told Johnny I felt I had helped Nank die. I had whispered to him that he could head for the light, that I was okay, Johnny was okay, he was okay. Johnny waited a few minutes while I cried. “I need to tell you something else,” he said. “I met with a bank trustee and the attorney handling Nank’s affairs.”
I clutched the telephone cord to my chest and tried harder to listen.
“We both inherited a sizable trust fund.”
“Sizable?”
“Enough to support us for the rest of our lives if we live modestly,” he said.
I gasped. “I applied at Carrow’s yesterday! The waitresses have to wear short skirts and knee-high black boots. I don’t have to work there! Thank you, Nank.”
After we hung up I sat down on the grass outside the phone booth for a long time. Nank was still watching over me, my guardian angel. (“You can always count on me, my little daisy. I will never let you down.”) He had given me many gifts, taught me to value integrity and kindness, showed me love. And now he had left me set for life. Because of his gift I would be able to choose work that had real meaning to me.
I had once believed with all my heart that I would be a good mother. But I knew now that day-to-day parenting was not a bigger life purpose for me, and I was in the process of trying to forgive myself for not showing up for my daughter the way she needed. Could my disappointment in myself as a mother propel me toward a greater good, something beyond adventure and wandering? What was I here to offer that is greater than being a good mother? I wanted to give back to life as much or more than I felt I had received.
That day, sitting by the phone booth, I had no idea of the role destiny would play or had already played in my choices. All I knew was that opportunity lay at my feet and I was ready to start walking.
