"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning"

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.”

                        F. Scott Fitzgerald,  The Crack-Up

This is something I wrote in a journal I was keeping regularly for four or five years, during the time  that I was home with babies and we were doing our back-to-the-land act on an old Finnish homestead about nine miles east of Mendocino, California.

The evening that inspired these reflections was a great, boozy, and, as I look back on it, rather innocuous New Year’s Eve .  I say “innocuous” although I remember that it was the early 1980’s, a time when my husband was doing a remodel for the counterculture Zelda and F. Scott of the town and coke seemed cool.  The carpenters’ after work gatherings were often more than Miller Time.  As I look back on it, I survived the recreational drug era fairly unscathed.  I had two young children.  I have always fallen back on my own  reliables:  coffee, alcohol, anger and remorse.

This particular evening culminated in my walking home.  Not knowing where the car was; not realizing my husband had gathered the kids and gone home, assuming I would crash on the couch of our friends  in town;  somehow knowing I was too drunk to drive the seven miles of narrow paved road and two miles of dirt lane, even if I did find the car,  I decided to walk.

I arrived at our  white farmhouse in the clearing sometime after daylight, exhausted but sober.  A few months later I wrote this in my journal:

“The memory of walking home New Year’s Eve is starting to fade and it’s a shame.  It felt good to walk it off:  the cigarettes, the coke, the champagne, the last whiskey and soda or was it a half empty Heinekens I  left  on the Seagull bar; the half drunk remarks blurted at people I hardly knew; the completely drunken conversations I carried on with strangers.

I walked off all the restraints of the previous year.   All that fixing of food:  the breakfasts, the lunches, the lunches for school, the dinners for the kids, the second dinner for the tired husband.  Chewing my own way through the day, ruminating on past loves, silently chewing out my husband, nursing grudges, licking wounds, feeling the tension in my jaws.

I walked off the hectic traffic pattern that a year traces on a mother’s brain:  the trips up and down stairs, the dumping of garbage, the trips in the car to the laundromat, the health food store, the grocery store, and the kids saying at every stop, “Can I get out?  Can I get out?”

I walked through the tangle of my relationships with friends; the lifelines that started to kink, to confuse me about where the beginning was and the end, and why I  held on tightly, knowing my friends were my family.

I walked through the late afternoon dreariness that stopped my breath like a yawn and made me  hate myself for standing in the hallway talking on the phone, my two-year-old pulling at my leg while  I threaten her with a raised hand and squinty look as I tell someone, someone I don’t even like very much, how bored I am  and how mean my old man is, and then doubly hating myself for saying "my old man."

I walked long enough and late enough—no coat and high heels, five in the morning, no moon, mist heavy enough to call "rain." especially in the narrow parts where it felt more like a trail than a county road—that I walked out of the stupor and into an alertness that made me aware, not of danger, although a scream for help would have gone unheard, but of separation.  I stopped dead in my tracks and called my daughter’s name, and I was shocked to be so far from home.”

I've Had Better Days

  “I’ve  Had Better Days”

I wish I knew Harry Reid.  There’s a story I’d like to tell him.  It’s about Senator Dean Rhoads and his wife, Sharon.  He knows Dean, who has been in the Nevada State Senate since 1985 and is as firm a Republican as Harry Reid is a Democrat.  You might imagine that each of them stays on his side of a barbed wire fence.  That’s not true.

Just a couple of weeks ago I ran into Dean Rhoads at the Tuscarora post office.  Although there are only eleven fulltime residents in town, if you can call it that, (there are no services),  the post office serves one of the biggest, best, and most authentic ranching communities in the West.  The Independence Valley begins about fifty  miles north of Elko and claims the hay meadows,  private holdings and public  grazing lands  that extend to the Idaho border.

 Two miles south of  Tuscarora is the Rhoads’ ranch, where Dean’s wife Sharon was born and raised.  I’ve heard it said that Dean Rhoads is the only member of the Nevada State Legislature who makes his sole living ranching.  You know, a working  ranch, not some boutique outfit.

When Dean came into the post office, Julie Parks, the current postmistress, and I were talking about Harry Reid’s re-election prospects in 2010.  I had just read an article in the Wall Street Journal claiming Senator Reid  may be in for a tough race.  “What do you think, Dean?” Julie said as she handed him a rolled up bundle of mail.

Before he could answer, I blurted, “It seems to me that Harry Reid forgets he’s from Nevada.”  

 “That’s not true,” Dean said.  “We’ve worked together  over the years on many ranching and mining issues.  He’s a good man.”  He said goodbye to Julie, nodded to me, and climbed stiffly into his dust-covered truck.  I got the message.  He wasn’t going to let me bad-mouth Harry Reid regardless of the barbed wire fence that separates them politically.

Well, I’ll tell you the story about Sharon and Dean.  Maybe you know Harry Reid. I think it would do him some good to hear it.

This happened a few years back.  After unpacking the car and getting settled in for the summer  in Tuscarora, I went to the post office to see my high school friend, Sharon Packer Rhoads, who was postmistress and well as  running the ranch by herself on the alternate years that the Nevada legislature was in session and most of the year Dean was in Carson City, the state capitol.

As always, I started the conversation by saying , “What’s new around Tuscarora?” 

She said, “Not much.”  Then, as an afterthought, she said, “Well, last August Dean was thrown from a horse and broke his leg pretty bad.”  She handed me the contents of my box: a stack of sale advertisements, a special hunting supplement of the Elko Daily Free Press, and a wad of papers addressed to Boxholder.   “He was out in the sagebrush nine hours before we found him.” She could tell by the look on my face that she better  tell me the story. 

She said they were gathering steers on the Wilson allotment. By midday, she and the two cowboys had brought in the strays and figured Dean would be coming along any time.

          “We didn’t know he was in trouble because his horse didn’t come back to the ranch.”  She               p        paused,  ”You know, like they do in the movies. It    just  stood by the horse trailer, up in    the          o         foothills, waiting for   a ride. “

What had happened, she said, was that Dean’s horse stumbled and pitched him into a scree slope.  His leg got wedged between two rocks, and, as the horse scrambled to get upright, it came down on Dean’s leg and broke it in two places.  This happened about nine or ten in the morning.

It wasn’t until late afternoon that somebody stopped by the ranch and said, “There’s a horse about eight miles back just standing by a trailer.”

Sharon said,   “We knew we better go look for him. I don’t know if you know that country or not.  The Wilson allotment is a stretch of land about twenty by twenty-five square miles.  We finally found him,” she said, “but it was very rocky and slow going.”

They got him back to the ranch and she headed for town in a big old  Suburban owned by a young couple living on the ranch, thinking her husband would be   more comfortable “because we could lay him out flat in the back.”

All the time Sharon was talking in a matter-of-fact way, she was occupied at the big work table where she sorts mail.  At this point she did pause, look at me, and said, “And then I got a flat tire.

         I’ve changed plenty of flat tires in plenty of vehicles, “ Sharon continued, “but I could not get that               hood open to get the jack.  I tried and tried and finally said to myself, ‘I’m just going to have to  r        drive it to Lone Mountain on the rim.’  Finally, about a mile and a half this side of Lone Mountain    s         some bow hunters came along, stopped, and changed the tire for me.”

I breathed a sigh.  She had gone the  twenty-seven  miles from the ranch to Lone Mountain.   She only had another twenty-five to the Elko General Hospital.  Imagining  poor Dean in the back of this big old ranch vehicle, I listened for the conclusion. 

Sharon continued:  “We get to the Emergency Room at Elko General and there aren’t any bone doctors.  They tell me that Dr. Wright is on maternity leave and that the other doctor won’t be in until Monday. We just ended up flying him down to Reno.  There were some more complications,” she said, clearly uninterested in turning this into anybody’s episode of General Hospital, western-style. “He has three pins in his leg, but he’s doin’ pretty good now. ”  That was the end of the story.  Sharon gave me a smile that said, “Gotta get back to work.”

          I went back  to the post office the next day, which was Saturday, to say hello to Julie Parks, who was, at that time, the part time postmistress,.  Julie was sorting mail, folding the canvas mailbags that go to  the fourteen mailboxes   of the ranches on this  particular rural route.  After we exchanged greetings I told her about hearing Sharon’s story the day before..  I shook  my head in wonder and admiration at their  toughness—no complaining, no dramatics

 Julie nodded.  “That happened on a weekday.  I think it was a Thursday.  Anyway, about 6:30 the next morning Sharon called me from Reno.  She wanted to know if I would work for her.”

“Hi Julie,” she said.  “How are you doin’?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “ How are you doing?”

“Well,” Sharon said, “I've had better days.”

I thought of Sharon's story after my conversation with Dean Rhoads and as I watched the way he grabbed the steering wheel of his pickup to hoist himself stiff-legged into his truck.

It seems to me it's a mess back in Washington right now.  Although we hear talk from Washington about"working across the aisle,"  when  compromise happens,  it's often portrayed as a defeat or a defection.


I think Harry Reid probably is proud to be a Nevadan.  When I read his official biography on the Congressional website, I was reminded of how much he has in common with Nevadans like Dean and Sharon.   I like to think that he would understand the essence of Sharon's story:  in the hard scrabble, high desert ranch life of northeastern Nevada, you toughen up; you don't complain, and true grit is not a cliche, it's a character trait you develop to survive.  You speak well of your neighbors and you are proud of what you have in common, not what separates you.

Smitty, Who Died in His Car Somewhere in Arizona

Smitty, Who Died in His Car Somewhere in Arizona

In Tuscarora, everyone has stories about characters who lived there. In Tuscarora everyone is a character. One evening last summer my friend James told me this story about a man who lived in the small stone building visible from the road as you drive into Tuscarora.

“Smitty was filthy and he was huge. He weighed at least three hundred pounds. He wasn’t educated, but sayings about life poured from him. He was one of the wisest men I have ever known,” said James.

“The stone house had no plumbing, no electricity. He used an old gas stove for cooking. The shelves on one wall of the room were filled with Duncan Hines cake mixes, at least fifty of them. Clint, who had the mail route, brought him jugs of red wine and cake mixes. Smitty baked them in 9 x 11 aluminum pans. When I went over there, even in the mornings, he offered me wine and cake.”

James smiled, unable to resist the effect of his story. Then he leaned forward. “You have to understand. He was remarkable. He was never mean-spirited. He was tolerant, accepting. I loved talking with him.”

I wanted to ask, “What were Smitty’s words of wisdom? What did he say?” However, I could tell by the way James shifted in his chair that all was not going to go well for Smitty. He couldn’t sit forever in that stone house drinking jug wine, eating cake, and saying wise things.

James continued. “One day he said he was going back East to visit his mother who was seriously ill. He did it. He got on a plane and flew back East.”

“Do you think he took a bath first?” I asked. “You know, got cleaned up?”

James thought a moment. “I doubt it,” he said.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He returned, but he wasn’t well. He was having a difficult time getting through the winters. So he took his two dogs and left, drove to Arizona, where he lived out of his car. He died in his car somewhere in Arizona.”

In the Business Office Chatting about Dying

In the Business Office Chatting about Dying

When I went into the business office to get the phone number of a potential part time instructor, I took time to visit with Betty. She handles our faculty insurance claims, among other things. She said, “I talked with Tom today. Actually, he called me twice. His voice was very weak. But he sounded sharp as a tack. He was worried about a medical bill that the insurance company hadn’t paid.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Still taking care of business.”

“I know,” Betty said. “Anyway, I called Managing Underwriters and said, ‘Look, this guy is on his deathbed. Just pay the bill.’ Well, evidently they called him, and then he called me back to tell me it was straightened out.”

I don’t know what people are supposed to be doing with their dying breaths—contemplating mortality, reviewing their lives like Marley confronting the ghosts of Christmases past, or taking care of business, like Tom, my dear friend and colleague in the English Department.

I didn’t say any of that to Betty. What I said was, “Did you know Bill ?” Betty had finished making a copy of the applicant’s file, and we just stood leaning against the duplicating machine talking in lowered voices. It was a quiet morning. She had time to visit and so did I.

She knew exactly who I was talking about. “Yes, but not well ,” she said.

“I didn’t think I saw you at the funeral.”

“How was it?”

I could tell by her tone that she had heard about it and was interested in my version.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t mean to be disrespectful...” I had already commented to my husband that when you go to somebody’s funeral you shouldn’t rate it like a movie. It’s not entertainment. “…and I think that they must have planned it together, down to every last detail. I suppose that’s one of the only advantages of dying a long slow death.” I’m pretty sure Betty could see right through my pseudo piety, especially when I said, “including the widow wearing red.”

“No!” she whispered.

“That’s what I mean about getting to plan your own funeral. Those two definitely had their own sense of style. I’ll bet that Bill said to her, ‘Now I don’t want to see you in black.’ It was a handsome coat, red wool felt with fringe on the bottom. She wore a black hat and black boots. I’ll have to say that I was a little worried about the brakes on the wagon. You know that cemetery in Willits is on a hillside. She was sitting up with the driver, holding a single white rose and she had her little black dog in her lap. Two brown mules pulled the wagon. Bill was laid out in a simple pine box. Anyway, when the driver helped her out of the wagon and before the pall bearers lifted the casket from the wagon bed, I just hoped there were good brakes and that nothing spooked those mules.” Betty didn’t say anything but she was clearly enjoying visualizing the details.

I changed the subject—sort of—by saying, “And then there’s poor Yvonne. Betty nodded in reference to the college librarian who, like Tom, is suffering the final stages of cancer. The past few weeks she has still been coming to work, pale skin and bones and quiet dignity. “Do you know what Tonia did?” I said, raising my voice a little. “ She announced to everybody that she had a get well card for Yvonne and to be sure to stop by her office to sign it. A get well card, “ I said. “Can you believe it?”

“Well Tonia doesn’t have a clue," Betty said as she handed me the copies I was waiting for, "and that’s all I have to say about that.”

The conversations around the duplicating machines, in the hallways, over coffee, they are often about death these days. That’s just the way it is.