Читать книгу Tamed By a Bear - Priscilla Stuckey - Страница 8

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Back home in Boulder, I repacked myself into layers of long johns and turtlenecks and braced for March snows. Nestled against the eastern face of the Rockies, Boulder gets its biggest dumps of snow in March and April, which lends some credence to the saying that snow in Boulder never lasts. If a blizzard arrives in December—but it usually doesn’t—the snow will indeed stick to sidewalks and driveways, slicking them with black ice for the rest of the winter. I’ve taken more than one tumble on that invisible glaze. But if snow arrives in March and April—and it often does, a foot-deep layer of wet heavy white accumulating in an afternoon or a night—the warming sun of spring will melt it to nothing in a day or so. Native plants along the Front Range have evolved great tricks for outwitting the spring blizzards. My favorite, the pasqueflower, grows a layer of furry hairs on the outside of its stem and three huge lavender petals to keep the snow a millimeter or two away from delicate flesh.

But after six years in Boulder, I wasn’t yet native, and I dreaded the spring snows.

Plus there were those sliding book stats. Say what people would about book tours, they did keep the Amazon numbers in a more rarefied range. Every book trip, every public talk bumped the sales number up, where it would hover for a few days as if trying to make up its mind. Such a fragile thing, that graph of rising numbers, shooting upward like a fledging bird on delicate wings, suddenly freed to the sky, fluttering, joyous! My heart would stop. Maybe this time momentum would catch the bird and hold it aloft. But so far it hadn’t happened. The line would turn downward again, and with it my heart.

I knew full well that watching numbers was futile. Knowing it only made the gnawing inside grow sharper, more determined.

And what about the next stage of my life? I’d had the feeling that this book would lead somewhere new—exactly where, I had no idea, but it would likely be a place to settle in and make a contribution. My friend had been right; I was expecting something more to open up. And I was eager for that next assignment. In each new city I checked out nature centers and environmental departments in universities and amount of winter sunshine. Tim was self-employed too, so we could move wherever we wanted. We could turn on a dime.

But the days, and then weeks and months, were creeping by with no appealing prospects on the horizon. One tenure-track position in religious studies opened up in a city known for its sunshine. The job description sounded as if it had been written for me, which is saying something, considering my specialty in the field is rather new and vanishingly small. I thought about it; I gave a lecture at that university. But did I really want academic work anyway—another decade or two of begging students to focus their research questions and reformat their reference lists? In the end I didn’t even apply.

I kept thinking about the book readings—how an audience might begin as disparate, mildly curious individuals but almost always ended as something else, something more like a community. How, as listeners opened to a story, their eyes wide as children’s, a silence would steal across the room and settle quietly like a blanket around their shoulders. How my own heart softened and opened each time I watched it happen. How each reading, each talk, reminded me that all of us—animals, trees, rocks, galaxies—are in it together on this journey. Each reading took me to that still and loving center where we’re all connected and we’re all whole. I wanted more of that.

So I kept on setting dates for book events, sending out bios and photos for publicity, making travel plans, and calling faraway friends. And kept on being dogged by the sinking realization that not only did we not have the money to support this habit—and it was using a frightful amount of energy, both mine and the Earth’s—but also that in the long run it would never, ever be worth it.