We Are Always Getting Ready to Go Somewhere

 In April 2012, I went on my first trip abroad.  Having turned seventy, I was in no mood to delay anything. My sixtyish sister was returning to Bristol with her English beau; our mother had given us  money to visit Wales, the land of her ancestors; my passport was up-to-date. I said to myself, just go.

The most pleasurable part of getting ready for the trip was shopping for travel clothes. I wanted everything new and perfect.  I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to look:  in the airport, on the plane, in London, hiking with my sister in Wales.  I bought a fuchsia raincoat, purple hiking boots.  At the time, I thought this rosy persona would blend with Englishwomen my age.  There’s a picture my sister took of me in Paddington station.  I looked ridiculous.  I should have gone with a Miss Marple style—tweeds and stout walking shoes.

That imaginary role-playing was fun and frivolous.  Actually, I took comfortable clothes in dark colors, only wore the purple boots while we were hiking, and they were soon covered with mud.  The cheery raincoat was easy for my sister to spot, a good thing when we were walking among the Easter holiday crowds in London.

The other part of getting ready was as if I were preparing to die.  I had to confront the urge to write letters with instructions on the envelopes:  open upon my demise.  What would I say in those heart-felt, hand-written letters to my husband, to my grown kids, to my unborn grandchildren, and all future generations? I gave it up, admitting that it would be things like, “A stitch in time saves nine” or “remember to floss.”

 I don’t think experienced travelers  go through this agonizing, “I may die en route or when I get there” feeling every time they go on a trip.  Furthermore, they know how to pack.

Well, I went on the trip, had a great time, sang “Streets of Laredo” with a group of Welsh folksingers in a pub in Knighton, came home to find my family alive and glad to see me.

 I have always loved this quote from a Grace Paley short story, “All it takes is an interest in life, good, bad, or peculiar.”  Turns out, an interest in life is my best accessory.

Solitary Play

 In the early 1950’s we spent five summers on a sheep outfit my father managed near the Flattops, a unique mountain range in northern Colorado.  A memory from that first summer has  stayed with me for more than half a century.  Not traumatic, just odd.  I still don’t know what to make of it.

I was seven and my sister was an infant.  The ranch foreman and his wife had two teenagers.  I had no one to play with except the ranch dog, a border collie called Shep, who slept in the barn.

I remember the elaborate game I played with Shep.  The activity began in the barn.  I would open the heavy wooden lid to the oat bin and, with a coffee can, catch one of the surprised mice scurrying across the bed of oats, diving for the dark corners.  Shep would follow me  into the corral, where I crouched on the ground, let the mouse loose, called “Siccum, Shep,”  and watched the dog chase the mouse and kill it.  “Drop it, Shep,” I would command and then tell the dog to go back to the barn.   His part in the game was over.

The next site was a sandy inlet in the creek between the barn and the house.  I remember the child-sized beach, the clean sand, and how beautiful ordinary rocks looked beneath the water.
I gently dumped  the dead mouse onto the sand and used the coffee can to dig a grave.  With a stick, I nudged the furry corpse into the hole, covered the hole with the pile of cold sand, and tamped it down with both hands.   With pieces of tall grass and dry twigs, I made a cross to mark the mouse grave.  The game was over.

I don’t remember thinking one way or another about the dog chasing the mouse and killing it.  Dogs liked chasing and killing.  No one on the ranch liked mice.

Although I am not ashamed of the experience, I feel a shadow of guilt that I should remember it with such pleasure. That afternoon—one or many, I can’t remember—seems a summation of  the sensory pleasures of ranch life:  the darkness of a barn in daylight; the scent of oats, hay, leather, horse manure; the companionship of a dog; and the sound of water in a year-round creek, something westerners treasure even more than the scent of sage after rain.

 I remember the pleasure of solitary play, of being lost in the story I was telling myself about the life and death of a field mouse.    I do wonder what my childhood game says about me, if anything.  My husband tells me I am making too much of it.  Of course, he is one of Shakespeare’s “wanton boys” whose  summer days were filled with hunting and killing small things.

Sometimes I think I should have been in the house, playing with dolls, making up stories about a mommy and daddy and a baby in a crib, rather than hanging out in the barn catching mice for the dog to kill.

Love and Coyote Bait

     We get to a certain age and realize we are the old-timers.  Some of our stories seem like chronicles from another century.  They are.  My friend JoAnn Messerly Osorio recently sent me the following e-mail about an incident when she was a child living in a sod and rock cabin in a remote valley in northeastern Nevada.  Her father was running mustangs and supplementing their income by killing coyotes and collecting the bounty:

          “About the coyote poison remember they used to put a bounty on each coyote pelt, dressed out                or not.  I have pictures with dead coyotes covering a horse from neck to tail.  They mixed lard with arsenic and snake oil.  Then they rolled it into little balls then rolled the little balls in sugar.  The snake oil would attract the coyote; the sugar would make it tasty.  Then they would put it out on the range and come back the next day to pick up the dead coyotes.  I will never forget when I was about 3 or 4 years old, I found the sack in back of the car, and was licking the sugar off of the coyote poison ...he'll, what did I know.  I came into house with sugar all over my lips, and my Dad asked me where I got it.  I showed him the sack...you talk about one terrified cowboy...he talked to me very softly and walked me around very softly talking to me. Nice and easy ...which he never did before.  He never left my side. For hours, just walking and talking very gently.  My mom was terrified but did not panic,

.          Finally they decided that I had not eaten the little balls of coyote poison.

          But only licked the sugar off!!!”

     There are a lot of ways to think about her story, which took place in the mid-1940’s, not the 1840’s. While my friend was living a rugged version of Little House on the Prairie, the most powerful poison the world has known was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  DDT had become available as an agricultural insecticide, and we, on the ranches, considered it a godsend for keeping down the flies.

  

     It was a time in the West when we needed to push back nature, in some areas to keep rattlers out of our houses and yards; in nearly all places to keep coyotes from killing our calves or lambs.  The herds of wild horses were culled to keep a delicate balance in the management of open range.

    This is my friend’s vivid and loving memory of a father who was a rough and careless parent, and a sanguine account of a harsh time in her life.  We get to a certain age and we are inclined to sugar-coat bitter realities of the past.  It’s neither right nor wrong.  It is what we do.

     Here's what others do to us:  pass judgement.

I, Too, Have a Hemingway Story

I, Too, Have a Hemingway Story

     In 1956, my friend Karen Toothman and I met Ernest Hemingway at the bar of the Stockmen’s Hotel in Elko, Nevada. My friend's father managed the casino-hotel.   Hemingway was on his way to his home in Ketchem, Idaho.

     High school freshmen, Karen and I were doing homework in her basement when the phone rang.  Her mother called down the stairs, “Karen, your father says Ernest Hemingway is at the bar.  If you girls want to meet him, come down right away.”

     Out of breath from running, we paused at the hotel entrance, reminding each other about the great  article we would write for the Sagebrush Saga, our high school newspaper.

     I don’t remember what Karen asked him, but I still wince at my question.  I looked  at him and said, “Mr. Hemingway, which do you write first, the story or the title?”

     Hemingway  paused and said, “Well, sometimes write the story first, and sometimes I write the title first.”

     We walked back to Karen’s house and were talking with her mother when Mr. Toothman came home, which was unusual.  It was also unusual when Karen’s reserved, Germanic father put his arm around his beautiful, petite Spanish wife, Esther, and said, ”He said she reminds him of Ava.”

     Forty years later at our class reunion, I saw Karen again.

     Obviously, we  had aged.  I heard that at one point she had a drinking problem, but  was in recovery.  I  had not written the Great American anything.

     As we reminisced, I said, ”Karen, do you remember that your father was told by America’s greatest living author that you looked like one of the ten most beautiful women in the world—Ava Gardner?

     “No” she said.  “I just remember that you asked Ernest  Hemingway some really intelligent question about writing.”

Don't Be a Stranger

  

Don’t Be a Stranger

I have been thinking about Nevada women in the Forties and Fifties who lived in godforsaken places:  remote ranches, mining claims, highway maintenance stations at least fifty miles from bread and milk.  They had telephones and electricity, but that was it.  Many don’t think they have stories, but they do.

Last summer I went with my friend to visit a woman who lived most of her married life in out-of-the-way places.  Now in her eighties, she and her husband    retired on a little spread along the south fork of the Humboldt River, about an hour and a half drive from Elko.  My friend had been raised in this house and on this ranch and invited me to come along for the ride.  Before we got out of the car, my friend said, “She has cancer.” 

The thin woman moved and talked with effort.  No action seemed easy, not even leaning forward letting herself receive a hug from my friend.    “I need to get something in my stomach,” she said as her husky, fortyish daughter handed her a small dish of bread pudding.  As we chatted she took one or two teaspoons of food from the blue and white china bowl.

Somehow, we got on stories about trusting strangers; how, in the old days, people were more helpful.  “Last spring we were on our way to Oregon,” she said, “and had car trouble about sixty miles this side of Denio.  No one would stop.  People always used to stop.”  My friend and I nodded, sitting across from her on a brown naugahyde couch that matched her armchair.

“Well, Mom, somebody musta stopped or you’d still be there, right?”

“Don’t get smart with me, missy,” the woman said, making the effort to smile at her daughter.  “Of course someone stopped.  A rancher pulling an empty horse trailer.  He took us to Denio, at least forty miles out of his way.  That’s how it used to be.”  She handed the nearly filled bowl to her daughter, pleading, “ Don’t scold me.”

She leaned her head back into the worn chair and told us this anecdote.  “I was alone in the house.  My granddaughter was in the bathtub.  These two deer hunters came to the door, saying  their truck was stuck in a creek some miles back.  They’d spend the night in the truck, had been walking all morning.”  

“I asked them, ‘Do you want me to fix you some breakfast?’ Well, I fixed them some breakfast and told them the men were gone for the day.  There was nobody around. “ 

My friend and I glanced at each other.  We knew the Nevada-Idaho border country she referred to.  We understood how alone she and the child were. 

“After I fed them breakfast I said, ‘I guess you could take that truck over there and try to get yourselves out.  The keys are in it.’” 

“One of the men said to me, ‘Don’t you want our driver’s licenses or something?’”  

“No.” I said.  She looked at her daughter, as if she were the one who would understand the   intuition and experience that had taught her how to live in the middle of nowhere, how to recognize dangerous men.  “I couldn’t see any point,” she said.

“Well, they took the truck and went and got their truck out of the creek, came back, and went on their way.  It turned out that one of them was with the sheriffs department in Reno.  He showed me his badge.  He said,’ You know, ma’am, you really shouldn’t have done that.’”

We laughed.  She smiled and we thanked her for the nice visit.   At the door, I glanced back and noticed she was lighting a cigarette. I heard her say to her daughter, “Don’t scold me.”