HOME FIRES

Essays on roots, restlessness and renewal

A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

by

Bobbi Marie Maiers

May 2013 Thesis written by Bobbi Marie Maiers B.A., University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, 2004 M.F.A., Kent State University, 2013

Approved by

David Giffels, Advisor

Robert W. Trogdon, Chair, Department of English

Raymond A. Craig, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements...... iv

Prologue: Left to Burn...... 1

Maple Hill Farm...... 5

Leaving: Wildwood...... 22

Arrival: Top of the Mountain...... 28

Summer of Solitude...... 32

Arrival: Waldo Canyon Hike...... 43

Edge of the West...... 46

This Place is Yours...... 78

Ladder to the Moon, Part 1...... 99

Leaving: Pikes Peak Morning...... 108

Arrival: Bed on the Beltway...... 112

Big City, Small World...... 116

Leaving: Match Day...... 131

Arrival: Rootless...... 135

Dr. and Mrs. Dungeon Master’s Dinner for Dorks...... 140

Ladder to the Moon, Part 2...... 154

Leaving: Little Tree...... 164

Epilogue: Home Fires...... 169 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my writing mentor, D’Arcy Fallon: for being the first person to tell me I was a writer, encouraging me in the pursuit of both a journalism career and an MFA, reading so much of my work and, always, listening.

To my parents: for teaching me the value of roots, instilling in me a love of the outdoors and a respect for rural places, letting me go when I needed to go, and fielding my endless questions about our life on the farm.

To my fellow writers Katie Trook, Amy Creelman-Purcell, Maria Varonis, LeeAnn Marhevsky, Chris Drabick, Jack Boyle, and Stephanie Kist: for providing thoughtful and intelligent feedback, much-needed workshop humor, and friendship.

To my thesis director David Giffels: for saying yes, investing valuable time, teaching me to kill darlings and capitalize on nonfiction gold, and for knowing too much about me and liking me anyway.

Last, and best: to my husband, Jarrad, for generously giving me the time, support and encouragement I needed to produce this collection, along with a great love story to tell and a beautiful setting for it. Mere words can do justice to neither, nor can they suffice in relaying the depth of my love for you and the life we share. Here’s to all the stories awaiting us.

iv Everyone carries in them an image of an ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary...A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country. There is no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.” -- Edward Abbey

I have left everywhere that I have ever been. -- Ani DiFranco

The fire which enlightens is the same fire which consumes. -- Henri Frederic Amiel

v Prologue: Left to Burn

June 2009

The house is ready.

It stands alone and empty on the green, sunbathed lawn. A few days ago, men came and ripped away the dirty white slate siding, and said so many bats flew out as they worked. Now the house stands naked, a large, solemn tarpaper square before a dense grove of oak and ash trees. Some of the paper pieces flap and flutter like burned bits do as a campfire dies. Or they hang, haphazard, exposing scars of weathered wood beneath.

The clothesline my mother used when I was young still stands, forlorn. The front porch screen door is open, swaying in a lazy breeze.

It is eight a.m. on a clear Saturday morning in May. This is the Midwest, rural

Minnesota, where many farm houses stand miles from neighbors. To reach this one, you drive eight miles south from the town of Starbuck, population 1,200. You hang a left on

Highway Sixteen and drive past the Ferraro place and the Thompson dairy farm. After the large pond and the Opdahl family’s pasture, you turn south on a gravel road, push up the hills and past the fields, toward the trees.

The sound of diesel engines drifts through those trees this morning, growing steadily as the vehicles climb the first big hill. Dust billows. A team of three, they emerge through

1 2

the stand of trees and into the yard--a ladder truck with STARBUCK FIRE DEPT. #2 on its doors, and two lumbering pump trucks, one red, one silver.

They station themselves on the circular gravel driveway in between the horse stable and the old white garage. Firemen spill out and begin their work, setting up a giant yellow plastic holding tank and filling it with water. They run thick gray hoses across the yard, calling to each other in excited voices. Many of them are familiar faces, people in town my family has known a long time.

Over the years we have made a habit of burning down structures on the farm to replace them. More than a decade ago we burned the chicken house and corn crib with the falling-in roof. The sagging granary was next. The old red barn with the milking area in the basement and the hay mow upstairs was the largest fire--it was torched and then buried to erect a new pole shed. Now, the house.

Before they begin, the firemen break every window: the huge sixteen-pane windows in the living and dining rooms, the small leaking windows above the breakfast nook, and the wide window above the kitchen sink we called the Hollering Window, where my mother yelled outside to my father as he worked, to let him know he had a phone call.

The men tromp upstairs, the steep uncarpeted steps creaking beneath their heavy frames weighted down with oxygen tanks, axes and thick suits. They break every whistling old bedroom window that should have been replaced decades ago. Glass shatters and old wood groans, splinters. Air comes in. 3

Once finished, the men roll a wheelbarrow of bright yellow straw bales to the farmhouse front door and lug them down the staircase to the musty basement, where we spent hours stacking logs in the wood room and where my mother hid the blue doll house

I discovered on a Christmas morning treasure hunt in 1989. Where the dark monstrosity of the wood stove lurked, the old freezer with the creaky lid, the root cellar where we stored canned peaches and tomatoes from our garden.

The firemen light the bales on fire. They climb back up the stairs, go outside. Wait, and watch.

Smoke appears first. It grows thick and oily, billowing black as fire spreads around the basement. Through the broken windows on the lowest level, the first real licks of red and orange flame show themselves. The wooden benches from the breakfast nook have been left behind, unwanted, near where the wood stove used to sit. They burn, and the shelves in the root cellar burn, and bits of wood littering the wood room floor burn. The

fire moves up the stairs to the main level.

The house is utterly dry. A tinderbox of wood, plaster, some carpet. In minutes, ugly black smoke plumes rise into the clear May sky. They can be seen for miles--from the

Thompson farm down on the highway, the Olsen place several miles east of there, even from town. Campers and hikers in Glacial Lake State Park adjacent to the farm will see the sky turning colors and feel fear or worry. No one will know that it is not an emergency but a deliberate choice made because a house has been deemed too far gone.

A carefully monitored, managed catastrophe. 4

Minute by minute the fire eats, grows and climbs up walls, burning hotter and hotter.

It reaches sixteen hundred degrees at its roaring center. It takes everything--the creaking screen door and worn carpet, the painted kitchen cupboards. Flames dart through the main level, snaking upward to decorate the wide arch between the living room and dining room. They find added fuel in narrow closets--magazines, letters, cards, old clothing, decades-old bank records. So many unwanted things, left to burn because no one knew what else to do with them. Because flames consume, erase. They leave a blank slate.

The fire sweeps up the wooden staircase, consuming the rail and eating up stale bedroom carpets, slowing slightly when it reaches the moldy upstairs walls where rain came in. Flames crawl up into the attic. They spark and shoot once there is nowhere else to climb. The tar paper covering the outside of the house curls and shrivels, fluttering down onto the grass like dead, blackened skin.

Slowly, through the billowing smoke and angry flame, a skeleton house is revealed.

Walls gone, ceilings crumbling. Bare boards remain, blackened and gray with hot ash.

These bones crumble, and what had been the second floor of the house crashes down into the hot red rubble on the ground floor. Sparks and splinters fly, and a great cloud of ash and smoke rises. The tall stone chimney is left standing naked, sooty and bare against the blue sky. When the firemen spray it with a hose, it too surrenders.

For eighty years the farmhouse stood, rooted like an old pine tree. It had been my family’s place for two decades. I grew up there, grew restless there, and at seventeen, went out searching for other things. In the twelve years I’d been away, I thought I’d 5

become good at being gone and had stopped believing it was home. I held on to that idea right up to the day it was lit afire. Until the moment when its last walls crumbled and fell.

Until it all burned down to nothing--just a charred black pit in a field of summer green, with no evidence remaining of the tall, white house that once stood there. Maple Hill Farm

My sister Toni and I each sat on an armrest of my father’s recliner, looking at the pages as he read.

“Here is Max, leaving chipmunk guts on the doorstep,” he said. We chuckled at the illustrations of Max and the other farm cats misbehaving. “And this is Gooseberry, who is beautiful but not very smart,” Dad continued, and we erupted in giggles. “Here is a picture of her using the cat pan.”

My mother sat on the couch nearby, working on a needlepoint project, smiling and shaking her head. It was six thirty, after dinner. Outside the farm house’s living room windows, the January night was cold pitch black.

“Here are the horses Ibn Rafferty and Chaos, breaking through the pasture fence and running away,” Dad continued, looking at our mother. “Doesn’t that one sound familiar?”

Toni and I cast a glance at Mom, awaiting her response. I was five, and my sister was nine, and we’d been riding horses ever since we learned to walk. Dad always called them hay burners and ranted about how much money they cost.

“Yeah, just as familiar as your cows breaking through the fence,” Mom answered, carefully threading a new needle. “Or Candy treeing a coon and barking half the night.”

6 7

Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm was the one book my father would read to us as many times as we asked. It was published in 1974, written by a couple named

Alice and Martin Provesen, who in fact did live on Maple Hill Farm. Theirs was located in upstate New York, thousands of miles from our own farmhouse outside Starbuck,

Minnesota.

My father, work-weary and serious, rarely laughed. But reading that story aloud to us, he’d collapse in giggles, his whole broad chest shaking. I can’t recall any other story he read to us, and he was usually far too busy working to spend time lounging in his recliner. But those winter nights, when the cold was crippling, we hunkered down inside, grateful for the old wood stove kicking out steady warmth.

Hardcover, until the binding weakened with so many readings that the cover fell off, the Maple Hill Farm story was a simple tale about farm life and the work rural living required. But it was no Charlotte’s Web, with pleasant animals who lived in harmony and talked secretly while their human stewards slept.

Maple Hill Farm was a train wreck.

Cattle didn’t graze peacefully in verdant meadows. Unruly packs of them leaned on and broke fences, reaching for grass. They got loose, trampling crops and shitting in the vegetable garden. They refused to be herded back into their pen. The horses ran away when the farm children attempted to catch them and ride them. The dogs chased the horses and got kicked in the face. The cats scratched people, had litters of kittens in inconvenient places, and left guts on the farmhouse front doorstep. A goose named Evil 8

Murdoch chased people, while a sheep named Whiney ate poison weeds and got sick.

There were invading raccoons and skunks, bees and beetles, toads and turtles, and a resident possum. Squirrels stored things in the attic. Field mice raided the pantry. Rabbits munched in the garden.

The part of the story that always made my father laugh hardest was a section titled

These dogs aren’t around anymore. “Canny chased cars and was run over,” he would read to us, giggling. “Biscuit bit people, so now she lives in a kennel somewhere. Argos killed sheep, and another dog, Sweeney, peed on the beds and bit children. They had to be put away.” Even as little girls, Toni and I knew what “put away” meant. It was what happened to Dad’s hunting dogs who weren’t good at hunting.

We laughed because the book was honest. Farms were inconvenient, messy, and so much work. They tied you down. Things were always dirty. Some animals might have been pets, but others were tools--and they rarely did as they were told. Weather bowed to neither requests nor prayer. Barns were smelly, and houses suffered neglect. The stories of Maple Hill Farm shared the unvarnished truth we all learned too well: rural life was beautiful, but hard.

* * *

It was like discovering a great secret. Miles from town, there was no way of knowing what lay at the end of that two-mile gravel road that turned south off Highway 9

16. There were large fields on either side, corn to the east, wheat to the west. As you climbed the three large hills, you could catch glimpses of state park land ahead, dense with trees. At the bottom of the last hill there was a rickety metal mailbox leaning in tall yellow prairie grass. The road cut east, into a grove of trees so thick it was impossible to see what lay beyond. As you approached, bits of white began materializing through green tree leaves. Slowly, a great square house floated into vision--a somber, colossal ghost hidden behind that secure wall of ash, oak and elm.

My father first saw it, in 1977. “Me and Dicky Feigum got permission to hunt down there, hunting coon,” he said. He had no idea that a decade later, he would move his family in to that large, silent house. The owner was an older man named Orlean

Kleven who sometimes had morning coffee with my dad in town at Nodland’s café. He’d moved from the farm into town years ago, leaving it empty.

In the mid 80s land values crashed, and we needed a place to live because my parents were losing the first farm they bought, unable to make the high payments. My mother sometimes took my sister and I to look at places for rent. They always seemed small, expensive, and too close to town. While I was too young to notice then, it was a deeply distressing time for my parents. They felt like failures, trying to raise stock cattle and run my father’s bait business, but losing everything they had in the process. My mother had just started working at the post office as a rural mail carrier, but it was only part-time. We had no medical insurance, money, or backup plan. 10

One day Mom took a drive on her own to the Kleven farm. “I’d heard there was an empty place back at the end of that road, and when we had to move, I thought I’d just go see what it looked like,” she said. “And it was the neatest place. Total privacy. Very secluded, abundant with wildlife. That’s what I liked about it. I’d always wanted one of those big old square houses.” This is what she loved--the idea of the place, its history and worn out charm. So much mystery, so full of potential. Before everything ended the way it did, before we could know what would come a decade or two down the road, there was only possibility--the idea of what the place could be, and what we all could become there.

It would be easy, I think now, to love a place like that.

In a town like Starbuck deals happened over handshakes and cups of coffee rather than with realtors, stacks of paper and signatures. Dad made a phone call, and Orlean said of course we could live there. The rent was $150 a month.

It had sat empty for years. The house was woefully neglected, everything covered in a layer of dust and grime. The dull red paint on the window trim was peeling, the white siding was cracked, chipped and decorated with mold, and the ancient wood roof was home to soft clumps of green moss. The closets smelled stale and musty. The bathroom had only a rust-stained cast iron tub surrounded by pink plastic tiles that broke off easily.

Worn orange and brown shag carpet flowed through the living room, dining room and den. In the spring, the basement flooded. In the winter, freezing air seeped through every old window. 11

In addition to the farmhouse there was a great red barn, silo, corn crib, machine shed, chicken coop and garage. A bubbling crick wound its way south through the pastures, toward the edge of the cornfields. Several stately, fluttering cottonwood trees divided the pasture from the Glacial Lake State Park land just beyond the property. The lowest level of the barn housed rusty old milking stations, and the upstairs was filled with decaying straw.

All of it was empty, quiet. So many years had passed with no family to inhabit the farm. We would be the ones to revive it.

* * *

“Get your duds on, girls,” my father said, finding us in the living room, in front of the television. It was what he always said--his shorthand way of saying “Get ready to go work.” It could mean herding the cows from one pasture to the other, picking rock in one of the large fields south of the barn, weeding the garden, or, that day, helping haul and stack a load of wood.

“Do we have to?” Toni asked. It was November, the Minnesota air bitter cold.

With lakes frozen over, requiring Dad to saw through the ice to trap bait, we figured he would be gone longer. We were watching television instead of doing our chores. 12

“It’s not too bad out. One load. Come on Tootsie Roll,” he said, patting the armrest of the recliner in which I was lounging. “House don’t heat itself.”

Our father was impervious to outside temperatures. He wore long underwear,

Hanes one-pocket T-shirts, flannel button-downs and leather boots, and he never considered forgoing work because of single digits on the thermometer. He claimed we never got sick because we didn’t heat the upper level of the farmhouse, where we all slept. Winter mornings, I would leap from beneath my several flannel quilts, grab clothes

I’d set out the night before, and run shivering downstairs to get dressed by the heat vent in the dining room.

One load of wood meant a full truck bed, and that took a few hours. The old wood stove in the farmhouse basement gulped and incinerated logs quickly, so many of our fall and winter Saturdays were spent in the woods. The first vehicle I ever drove was the sagging Chevy wood hauling truck at age twelve. Dad cut and split, and Toni and I hauled logs into the truck bed. We’d return home, toes and noses frozen, to toss them into the basement wood room, and then head downstairs to stack them neatly. There was no backup heating system in the house then. It was wood or nothing.

Dad was forever returning home with a project on his mind, and he would corral one or both of his daughters to help. Even when I was very little, I’d go help before I learned how hard helping was. 13

“Come on Toots, you’re lagging,” he’d say, striding ahead of me through an open field in late autumn. I would be struggling to keep up, my pink cotton pants muddy to the ankles.

“It’s so heavy, Dad,” I would whine. In my two small hands, I clutched the still- warm neck of a pheasant--a bright rooster Dad had just shot. I was half carrying it, half dragging it along, my arms like noodles.

“You’re fine,” he said. This is the same thing he would say when we were fishing on Lake Emily and I was trying to reel in a Northern that was fighting too much for my spindly arms to handle. You’re fine. Sometimes he’d gently place his thumb on the rod to give me a little assistance.

No help this time. “It’s kicking me still!” I yelled, horrified the bird was moving when it was supposed to be dead. One of Dad’s hunting dogs bounded far ahead of us, on the trail of another bird. I had no idea how I’d carry two.

We ate them, of course--the birds, our cattle, the deer my father hunted in the fall.

There was never any question about an animal’s purpose. We had a pet or two--an inside cat named Buffy, and another named Beaner who loved playing and fighting with my sister and me until she got outside one day and became lunch for coyotes. And we had horses we considered pets, to my father’s displeasure. But for the most part, animals did a job. The dogs were for hunting, and if they didn’t hunt, they were shot. And the cattle we had were for breeding, selling, or eating. 14

When we first got stock cows, there was a little inky black calf my sister and I loved, whom we named Buttercup. “Your father came home with her from the sale barn because he thought she was little and cute,” my mom told me. “He thought you girls could help raise her and then the money from her would go into an account for you.”

Toni and I would climb into her small white calf hutch to feed her bottles and hug her squirmy body. “She’s a stock cow girls,” my dad told us, “and when she gets big she gets sent away for meat.”

The following fall, we were eating steak at the dinner table one evening. My sister suddenly dropped her fork on her plate, and stared wide-eyed at her meat.

“Is this Buttercup?” she asked.

A pause.

“Yes it is,” Mom said. “Isn’t she tasty?”

Toni and I stared at our plates.

“Well Bobbi,” Toni said, turning to me, “at least she’ll always be with us in our stomachs.”

* * *

Rural life, ten miles from a tiny town and three hours from the Twin Cities, was difficult. Inconvenient. Isolated. But not without its rewards.

Our two-mile gravel driveway was sometimes barricaded by snow in the winter. One year, when I was thirteen, we went without power and heat for four days during a record 15

blizzard. But the view of the stars on those bitter winter nights, with no streetlights or stoplights interjecting false glow, was spectacular. When I got old enough to drive and had a job working late shifts at the local convenience store, I’d still stand out in the yard when I returned home at 1 a.m., watching the stars on my weary feet. If the moon was bright enough, I could turn off my headlights at the beginning of our driveway and let moon glow alone guide me home.

The horses broke through our fences occasionally, prompting a call from our neighbors down on the highway, saying “Just saw those Arabs you ride run past my place.” We’d have to drive down with saddles and bridles, catch them, and ride them home. But from our back pasture, we could ride into the Glacial Lake State Park on trails my sister and I memorized. When she was twelve and I was eight, we would saddle our horses on Saturdays when both our parents worked and disappear into the park for long rides. We would streak through the trees, letting her Arabian gelding, Star, and my chestnut pony, Peanut, carry us along as we laughed and bounced around in the saddles until our sides ached from the jostling.

In the sweltering humidity of Minnesota summer, chores like picking rock and weeding the garden were miserable. But the taste of fresh sweet corn and green beans in late summer was impossible to match.

And the farmhouse was neglected. But it held all kinds of secrets: the storage cellar and hidden stairway in the basement; a small door in the upstairs hallway with the ladder that led to the attic. And though the house was outdated, it was always well-kept. 16

Saturdays after she’d finished her mail route, my mother would come home and clean, bustling about the house in her Fleet Farm blue jeans and second-hand blouses from the

Prairie Five dime shop, listening to John Denver and Roseanne Cash on her old record player from high school. Still, when I hear “Take me home, country roads,” I think of her, sweeping the kitchen floor, scrubbing the tub, and folding loads of laundry before evening chores.

We had hard well water that stank and stained the bathtub with rust, and a house that seemed to fall in on itself more and more as the years passed. But the birch trees in the yard whispered us to sleep, and the stands of sumac turned a bold, beautiful red each fall.

Cleaning barn was stinky, sweaty work. But swinging through the haymow on an old, spiny rope swing was like gliding through a large, silent cathedral, fragrant alfalfa dust dancing on sun rays shining through holes in the roof.

* * *

The winter Clyde fell through the ice, I was fourteen.

We’d had him for several years--Clyde the Jumping Mule, trained to leap fences in pursuit of dogs, who were in pursuit of raccoons, who were running for their lives from

Dad’s baying hounds. Sometimes he went out on foot with the dogs, but on Clyde, Dad could keep up easier. And the small, bay mule made it easier for Dad to trespass on others’ property in the dark of night, too. Fence dividing different parcels of land? Just 17

jump it, and continue on your way. While most of the time Dad knew the neighbors whose land on which he trespassed, in general he treated land boundaries much like he did the Department of Natural Resources. Rules were meant to be disregarded, and he’d shoot and trap what he wanted, when he wanted to, thank you very much. Clyde was a

fine partner for Dad because he too disregarded rules. If he could leap over every other fence, why not jump our pasture fence and go where he pleased? We had a hard time keeping him where he belonged.

One snowy March afternoon, my mother came in from throwing our horses a few bales of hay and, still dressed in barn clothes, stalked into the kitchen to grab the telephone.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“That damn mule’s in the pond,” my mother said, using the phone book to look up the number to the town café, where she suspected Dad would be.

“What? Pond’s frozen over,” I said. The body of water in our back pasture was small but deep. We fenced it off in the winter so the horses and Clyde couldn’t go near it.

“He fell through, that idiot,” my mother said, dialing. “Jumped over the fence, walked out on that ice and fell in. You can see his two little hooves and his ears and nose, but he’s sliding. He struggling, and he’s not going last much longer.” Just last summer, when Mom had attempted to give Clyde a regular hoof cleaning, he’d unceremoniously kicked her in the face. With her eye purple and swelling, she said she’d had it, and wanted to dump the mule off at the nearest sale barn. Clearly she’d forgotten that. She 18

was that way with the animals--asking Dad not to shoot the dogs that wouldn’t hunt, but to let her find homes for them. Caring for the countless, unexpected litters of puppies and kittens. Mixing up milk replacer and bottle feeding the inevitable stray or rejected calves.

Taking dogs to the vet when Dad insisted they were fine, that coon bites and dislocated joints were no big deal. She was caregiver to and defender of us all, the soft heart to balance my father’s cold view of an animal’s purpose.

A half hour later, they’re in the back pasture, trying to find a solution: my father, his hunting pal Mike, and my mother.

We’d dropped vehicles through the ice before, not terribly uncommon in a state where the main winter activity is ice fishing. People get a little too eager, drive out, and crash through too-thin ice. But how do you haul a 600-pound mule out of an icy pond? It seemed pointless, given he’d likely drown or die from hypothermia anyway. It hadn’t even reached above zero that day.

After brief, ineffective experiments with a halter and lead line, my father stepping out on the precarious ice to fashion a makeshift lasso, there was little hope.

“I got a tow chain in my truck,” Mike said.

“Rip him out of there like you’re towing a car?” my mother said. “You’ll break his poor neck.”

“Don’t see much other option,” Mike answered.

“‘Spose that’s the only thing left to try,” Dad said. 19

One long, heavy chain, and one hefty, risky truck pull later, Mike’s hulking four- wheel-drive truck digging into deep snow drifts, and Clyde rocketed out from the pond.

He flew, they say--soared out of the icy water like a giant flying trout. Amazingly he stood up, neck intact. And then he ran like hell, braying all the way, back toward the barn.

He jumped into the paddock and bolted into the warmth of the barn.

For a long time after, Clyde just sat in the pasture, the way mules do with the small hooves of their back legs stretched before them, their front legs extended forward, a great, furry triangle. He seemed no longer interested in jumping fences.

* * *

Near the end of the Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm, there is a two-page illustration of a quiet, snowy field in autumn. There is an owl and a fox, a pair of deer.

Geese and ravens fly overhead.

“Here, in this quiet corner, the best wildflowers grow, and owls call from treetops,” my father would read. “Here, fox are safe from hunters. The mother deer has her fawn, and the migrating geese come to rest. This is where a beloved hound, named

John, is buried.”

We buried our share of animals--those that became pets over time, who lasted long enough and worked hard enough to earn a place in our hearts. The autumn I turned sixteen, my father’s old hunting dog was dying. She lay on a worn horse blanket in the 20

hallway. In the living room, my father mourned from his recliner. He sat up late at night to feed the wood stove so it didn’t sputter out by morning. And to be with her awhile.

We had her since she was a squirming, pitch black pup. Born in a sagging granary on a bed of yellow straw, her mother was a Walker Coonhound named Jill, white with black and brown spots and soft, flopping ears. Her father was a black Lab. Dad said I could name one of the puppies, the one he’d decided to keep. Because I was six, I decided Candy was an excellent name.

My father trained her well. He had known since she was a pup that she was a good one, he said. He loved Jill, and the best part of her, the fierce, energetic, tough part, lived in Candy.

She grew up to be lanky and lean. She was a runner, a fighter. At dusk on autumn and winter evenings they would go out chasing raccoons. Sometimes they would depart together, just Dad and Candy, he running on foot to follow her when she hit a raccoon’s trail. Other nights he’d ride Clyde, who made it much easier to keep up. So many other dogs we’d been through--the Canadian Currs and German Pointers, the lazy Chesapeake and the yellow Lab who barked too much. All of them were like tools he tried out and discarded when they didn’t do their jobs. He hadn’t loved any of them.

That autumn, Candy was ten years old. Skinny and scarred, her liver was shutting down, and it was killing her. As she was dying, my father wanted to talk about her. It seemed he needed to do so while she was alive, so that it was not just him reminiscing alone, after. 21

“Isn’t it terrible to see your friend die like that?” he asked me, his voice full of disbelief and anger, and, strangely, sadness. I had never seen my father cry. But as he looked at her then, curled in a small, tidy ring on her blanket, tail covering her nose, there were tears in his eyes.

“One night she fell through a slough and almost drowned before I got there,” he told me. “I walked out on that ice and almost fell in myself, trying to get her. We both almost froze. Must have been well below zero out.”

“What’d you do?” I asked quietly.

“Took her up on the mule with me, and wrapped her up in my coat next to me so I could keep her warm. We rode all the way home like that.”

He sat silent a while.

“Lots of winter coats that dog gave you girls,” he said, looking out the window.

“Many years putting Christmas presents under the tree.”

“But I thought you just did it for fun,” I said.

“Well sure we had fun,” he answered. “But the bait business went way down in the winter, and those coon pelts were worth a lot of money then. Enough to get us through to spring.”

On the last night, the old dog stood. She wobbled from the hallway to the living room on weak, shaky legs. Her muzzle was completely snow white, and every rib showed through her faded coat. In the living room, she placed her head gently in my father’s lap and looked up at him. He knew then. 22

They stayed there a long time. Then he fed the wood stove enough to keep the house warm until morning, and told her goodnight.

* * *

I grew up there. And as time passed, I grew away from that life. Horses and weekend trail rides were replaced by a car, a part-time job, an electric guitar and weekly lessons.

The old country tunes my mother raised me on became pop music, followed by Kurt

Cobain and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Once I hit fifteen, sixteen, I found the farm terribly isolating, and the small town nearby mundane. I went with friends to visit

Minneapolis and was awed by the traffic, the energy, the sheer amount of things happening all around me.

The idea of leaving seemed so easy. Necessary. I wanted to be in a place that felt alive and different. I desired new geography--not cornfields and cows grazing, not rolling hills and deciduous trees. I wanted something else, far away. A cityscape, or perhaps mountains, tall and daunting. A big body of water. A place where I could marvel at something. I’d only ever called the farm home, and I’d never traveled anywhere further than South Dakota. I didn’t know how to choose where to go, and didn’t even know why--I couldn’t name the yearning feeling I had. I only knew I felt stuck, bored, disenchanted with rural life. I only knew I wanted to leave. Leaving: Wildwood

April 1999

Eggs and toast for a dollar, the chalkboard sign behind his head advertises. The man across from me has kind gray eyes and is the thing that doesn’t belong here in the local café, wearing neat, dark jeans and a fuzzy sweater, his fingernails so clean, amid crowds of farming men who wear dirty coveralls, who spit and might not take the time to kick the shit off their boots before coming in.

He is a pastor, I’m surprised to learn. Reverend Neil from Morris, a town twenty miles west of Starbuck. He does not look like a reverend--too young, no palsied quiver in his hands, no white collar. Though it’s a Tuesday, not Sunday, and this is a business deal.

She’s a vintage Fender Wildwood II, one of the oddest guitars Fender ever designed but unfortunately for me not one that rose to any value. Discontinued in 1971.

The body was made from Beech trees injected with colored dye before being cut and fashioned into veneer, resulting in earthy green streaks through the rich honey yellow, a surprise you find mostly on the back. Bright as a turtle’s shell. The guitar has an electric neck and a Stratocaster headstock, with a large metal resonator bar running from the neck block through the entire body to support the heavy neck’s weight on the lighter, acoustic frame.

23 24

We chat a bit first about the chilly weather and about our families, because that’s what you do at the town café. Our waitress brings mugs and pours coffee, and Neil asks if live nearby, if I have always lived in Starbuck.

“Yep--south out of town about ten miles, on a farm by the state park,” I answer.

“Your neighbors out that way, the Barsness family, they’re members of my church,” he says. I know this; I grew up with their kids. And in a town of 1,200 people, everyone is a neighbor. At this moment, in fact, I can name every patron at the coffee shop.

“Yeah, my Dad used to farm with Daryl,” I say, and, wanting to move on to the business at hand, “so, you think you’re interested in the Wildwood then?” I lay the case down, unlatch the clips, and lift the guitar out to hand to him. He inspects.

“Well, it sure is beautiful, isn’t it?” Neil says, turning it over and caressing the green streaks in the wood.

“She is,” I say. It’s true. The prettiest thing I’ve ever owned.

“I did some Internet research, and for this model, it seems that about $375 is the acceptable price,” he says. “Would that be okay for you, Bobbi?”

I’d wanted four hundred. I need travel money.

I want to tell him all the reasons the guitar is worth more. It’s the one I bought from my old teacher, Graham, who taught me to love Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young. Who was the kind of player I dreamed of being, with hands tough yet delicate and careful, so skilled and beautiful I wanted to photograph them. Artist hands. It’s the guitar I carried 25

with me when I moved to the arts high school in Minneapolis the previous year, the one I played alone in my room before I found enough courage to make friends. It’s a guitar that’s good for playing alone, I want to say. And the sound--the sound alone is worth thousands.

But he’s been the only one to respond to my for sale ad. So I calculate in my head: that three hundred and seventy five is my one-way plane ticket to Seattle (one twenty and change) and the new backpack I’ve chosen (red, North Face, two hundred plus tax), plus a bit extra for the gas money fund--from Seattle north for three long days, probably three tanks a day? And next week I’m on the road with the photographer I work for, setting up and assisting during shoots, taking down and lugging equipment. That five hundred (cash, under the table) will be new tent money, food money, and a bit for getting settled before I get an actual paycheck. My friend and travel buddy Mary and I have lined up jobs with a company that manages a hotel and restaurant, a souvenir shop and an art boutique. I’ll be a prep cook, and we’ll both work in one of the tourist shops. The man on the phone said many of the summer employees work two jobs. Work hard, play hard, har har har.

“That’d be fine,” I say. Neil smiles.

We have our coffee to finish, so we talk a bit about music, what we play and what musicians we like. It’s funny to me, a pastor who likes rock and roll. I’ve known only one: Pastor Karl with the beard, who played his acoustic guitar during Sunday service, singing “This is the Day the Lord Has Made” in the key of G as we Sunday School kids sang along. 26

Neil asks where I’m headed, and it still feels so odd to say, “Alaska. I am going to live in Alaska in a tent.”

He is full of more questions. Why so far north, so early? Won’t it be awful cold?

Just what do your parents think about this plan? Why the need to leave Minnesota?

I can’t answer the last one, not for a stranger. I haven’t even sorted it out myself yet. I am from a place where people stay put, yet I know I need to go. I have been ready for too long without knowing how to leave. And I know that some other Minnesota town or city, some other Midwest state, will not be far enough. I’m going to Skagway because

Alaska seems far away enough--the big and wild unknown. I want mountains.

“It’s just time,” I say.

“Hmm,” he responds. “So Bobbi, where are you at with the Lord?”

“Nowhere really.” I’d stopped attended services just after I was confirmed at age

fifteen.

“Well, I’d like to invite you to church.”

I realize then what he must see: a nineteen-year-old girl still a little awkward and strange, with odd hair. Someone who wants to get out bad enough she’ll give up a guitar she loves. Someone who seems a little sad. Lost, he must think.

I’m uncomfortable. But I know it’s okay that he asked, because it’s his job. I suppose pastors don’t stop being pastors just because they’re not in church, wearing their collars.

“Thank you, that’s so kind,” I answer. “But I’m leaving in a few weeks.” 27

“A few weeks is still enough time to come visit,” he says, an eyebrow raised.

“No thank you,” I say. “Maybe Jesus and I will cross paths somewhere along the

Alaska-Canadian Highway.”

Pastor Neil chuckles, and hands me a check. Arrival: Top of the Mountain

Skagway, Alaska

On my way On my way I would like to reach out my hand I may see you, I may tell you to run You know what they say about the young

“It’s going to suck camping in all this snow,” I call over the Rusted Root song blaring from Mary’s car speakers. The urgent, chanting rhythm provides the perfect soundtrack to our arrival in Skagway--hopeful, curious and impatient after three days on the road through British Columbia and the Yukon Territory. Now we are winding down, down, down. The road down to Skagway is a long, snowy spiral. Mary keeps both hands on the wheel, the silver Subaru hugging the highway’s curves.

“Did you know it’d be like this?” I ask her, gazing out at the high white drifts on either side of the road. “I wonder if we’ll be warm enough.”

Mary smiles. “It won’t be like this at the bottom,” she says. “We’re at the top of the mountain. We’ve got a long way down yet. Haven’t you ever been in the mountains?”

28 29

Well pick me up with golden hands I may see you, I may tell you to run You know what they say about the young

“Nope. Never,” I say. I don’t understand the geography of the passes. I know nothing of Glacier or Denali, of sea level living versus mountain glaciers and snowpack. I know rural Minnesota’s rolling hills, but nothing of the place we are to call home for the summer.

“Well, at the bottom it will be warmer and not so snowy,” she says. “At least I hope so.”

“Right on,” I say. We’re all smiles as we fly down the pass, me pounding drum and bass beats on the dashboard along with the music.

At the bottom there is less now, but is not warm. All is gray.

Gray, sleepy little town. Dark gray sky. Cold gray water at the end of the pier. And so empty--a few lonely cars are parked on Main Street, but we see no pedestrians.

We drive five or six blocks down the main drag, passing brightly painted storefronts, and find our way to the Golden North Hotel. It’s easy to pick out, with a tall yellow dome and spire. This is our new place of employment. According to our job contracts, we begin in two days.

A ruddy, goateed face greets us from behind the bar. The bartender looks down on

Mary and me, because he probably looks down on everyone. Six-six? Six-seven?

“Hey, welcome. Get you ladies something to drink?” 30

“Water would be great for now,” I say, and Mary agrees. Surely our giant barkeep is wondering what our story is. We’ve been four days without showers, and we look it.

I’m wearing saggy red pajama pants and a tattered gray sweater, my messy pixie haircut sticking out in spikes. Mary’s long yellow strands are greasy, cascading to the middle of her back, and her gray hoodie is stained with pasta sauce from dinner two nights ago.

The bartender turns to grab two water goblets with furry paws. Ice goes plunk, the beverage gun with all the buttons swooshes and our glasses fill.

“Buffalo?” I say stupidly, reading his gold and black name tag as he slides the waters toward us.

“Yes, it’s my real name, not a nickname. Would you like anything to eat?”

“We’re starving,” Mary says. She’s never one to turn down food.

“We’re here to check in with Jeff,” I say.

“Which one? There’s brew master Jeff and boss man Jeff,” Buffalo answers, handing us menus. On the cover the microbrew selections are listed: Try Mary’s Pale Ale, named after the Golden North Hotel’s resident ghost!

“Boss man, I assume,” I say. “The one we talked to on the phone who gave us jobs.”

“Oh, you’re new staff, huh? Welcome. Front of the house?”

“Um, kitchen. Prep cook,” I answer, feeling uncool. I’ll be the girl who makes tartar sauce, slices tomatoes and draws chocolate designs on dessert plates. I will smell like deep-fried halibut. 31

“Right. Well, might be fun,” Buffalo says, his tone doubtful.

I look around. Aside from a woman at the small front desk area adjacent to the large mahogany bar, the place is empty.

“Where is everyone?” I ask. I look at Mary, who’s too engrossed in her menu to notice that we’ve moved to a ghost town.

“This is everyone,” Buffalo says. “It’s really early in the season still. Too cold.

There are some professional snowboarders hanging out in the hotel this week, Tom Burt and his crew, but they’re out heli-skiing every day. So, you need to check in then?”

“Here? No.”

“But you lined up lodging as part of your contract, right? Employee housing isn’t open yet, so the few of us here are staying in the hotel, since it’s empty,” Buffalo tells us.

“Mary the ghost’s room is spoken for.”

“We’re camping,” I say. “A campground south of town.”

“You have a camper? Drive up in a motorhome or something?”

“Tents. We each have one.”

“Tenting. Now. In April, in Alaska.”

“Yep.”

Buffalo reaches for our drained water glasses and takes a long look out the large front window. The mist that was falling when Mary and I walked in has turned to steady rain.

“Hope you brought extra blankets,” he says. Summer of Solitude

I found the Gibson when I was seventeen. It was twenty-six, a castaway hidden in the back room of a Minneapolis music shop.

It was a dreary April weekend, and I was browsing the Uptown Minneapolis

Music-Go-Round, wandering rows of cheap acoustic Fenders, tacky Ibanez and Squire electrics, Epiphones. I’d gone in to consider trading my turquoise Fender Jagstang, because my Kurt Cobain phase was long over. Early in my year at art school, I had traded

Nirvana and Pearl Jam for Ani DiFranco. I needed acoustic, not electric--fingerpicking and actual melodies, not power chords and shouting.

I wandered into the back store room, a graveyard of guitar cases. A single camel- colored case propped up against the wall caught my eye, sticking out in the sea of dull black. Inside, nested in pink fuzz, was an old Gibson Blue Ridge acoustic. The back and sides were a deep, woodsy brown, its rosewood neck and bridge chocolate-colored and faded. The top was a glossy cedar, amazingly unscarred. Honey-colored and alive.

The sound of the old wood was rich and throaty, unlike any tone I could cull from other guitars I owned. On the Gibson, songs I’d been playing for months sounded different, like they’d been opened up wide.

One strum, and I knew it should be mine.

32 33

Years later, I would carry the Gibson into a different music shop in a different city.

The luthier would tell me it really wasn’t worth fixing. The neck needed to be re-set, the headstock was cracked, and the bridge was rising off the body. Inside, many braces needed repair. It would take weeks, and a thousand dollars, and though it was a Gibson, the Blue Ridge had never risen to any great value as it aged. I took it from him, replaced it in its pink fuzz-lined case and walked out the door, tears welling.

I did not have the money. But more than that, I did not have a way of explaining to the man that the Gibson had invisible worth, the kind you feel and hear.

It was the first guitar I played in front of an audience, the guitar on which I wrote my own songs. It was the guitar my friend Eli used to play me to sleep at night while we wasted days away as college dropouts in Minneapolis. It was the one I played for friends’ weddings. Unlike the red Stratocaster, the custom Telecaster, the Wildwood, or the

Ovation, the Gibson was the one I never left behind, traded or sold. I carried with me as I moved to six different states over the course of sixteen years.

And at the time I was furthest away from everything familiar, it was my comfortable companion. For one meandering summer along the misty southeast coast of

Alaska, when I owned nothing and cared to own nothing, the guitar was the one possession I kept. I played it at campfires, by the ocean, and high in the mountains overlooking deep blue canals. 34

When I had only a tent in the trees, underneath what seemed an endless canopy of rain, the Gibson was my one familiar thing. Warm and compact, it was home in my hands.

* * *

It was April 1999, almost a year since Mary and I graduated from high school. In that time I’d dropped out of college, and she hadn’t managed to start. We decided to flee things--our cities, Portland and Minneapolis; our somewhat disappointing post-college lives as servers in coffee shops; and any pressure about what we might do next. We were leaving because we could. I wanted to be far away, out on the edge of something. I believed the Alaska-Canadian highway would take me there.

We had no gas can. No cell phones. I wasn’t even sure we had a spare tire. We had no idea how rough and isolated some parts of the ALCAN would be, nor any clue whether we would have the right clothes or supplies once we arrived. Now, fourteen years later, I am a meticulous list-maker and astute planner, ready for every trip, no matter how brief. But at nineteen, I figured a backpack with some warm clothes and a bit of cash would be enough, and I’d find the right tent to buy somewhere alone the way. I left the route planning up to Mary, who bought our much-relied-on copy of the Alaska

Milepost guide. 35

At the Canadian border, when the patrol officer inquired about our purposes,

Mary blurted, “We’re moving to Alaska for the summer!” We were promptly exited from the Subaru. When a tall, thick woman in a security uniform came out of the office snapping on blue latex gloves, I began gnawing my nails. But she only took everything out of the car, disassembled our packs, carefully took apart our tampons, and then left us with a scattered mess to stuff back in the car before continuing on our way.

Outside Prince George, I received a speeding ticket for driving 130 kilometers in a 110-Km zone. That night, further north, we rented a flat patch of grass and a picnic table from a woman who said she sure wasn’t expecting anyone for another month or so given how cold it was going to be. On day three, in the middle of nowhere in northern

British Columbia, we drove slowly on badly rutted gravel roads and found only static on every radio channel. Just when our gas gauge hit the red, we found a lone pump located in a residential yard. A furry man with a dark, dense beard and mustache, who perhaps had been alone in the woods a bit too long, approached the car. He invited us to visit a nearby hot spring, promising he’d show us his leopard-print speedo swimsuit.

On the last night of our drive, at another cold, empty campsite, the vastness of

Canada seemed overwhelming. I considered all the things we did not know, did not have.

I wondered why we had chosen Alaska at all. I dug the Gibson out from beneath the pile of clothing and gear in the backseat of Mary’s car. Sitting on a picnic table at dusk, I played chords, over and over again, until my fingers grew numb. 36

* * *

Skagway didn’t look like I imagined, because I didn’t know how to imagine any mountain place, having never ventured further west than South Dakota.

The town had been a nothing place until the cruise ship industry came in. Just mist and mountains, divided by a long, cold canal out to the ocean. But cruise ships were the reason Mary and I were there. The town grew up around the industry, and its simple, pristine peace was slowly swallowed by guide and tour companies, restaurants, shops and hotels. They lined Skagway’s single main street, advertising fresh halibut, fly-fishing expeditions and flight tours, and selling every type of tourist kitsch.

Beyond Main Street, though, the bright false storefronts and window displays disappeared. The real Skagway consisted of modest, faded houses on dirt roads. There were trails into the mountains leading to secret lakes and lookouts, and, in the summer, a campground full of vagabonds who served tourists during their shifts at souvenir shops, restaurants and tour companies. Seasonal, poorly-paid squatters from all over the nation.

Us.

The campsite I shared with Mary was small and semi-hidden in the pines. I pilfered a splintery wooden pallet from behind the Golden North Hotel, Restaurant and

Brewery, and a bowed piece of plywood from the hardware store dump (their motto: “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it”). Atop this platform sat my Kelty two-person backpacking tent, purchased from a small outdoor shop in White Horse, Yukon Territory, 37

because my first cheap tent caved in from the heavy rain after two weeks. The new Kelty had a wonderful, impenetrable rain fly.

Inside, I had a gray foam sleeping pad, a North Face women’s sleeping bag, and some borrowed blankets from other campers because I nearly froze the first few nights. In a plastic crate I kept a headlamp and some books (The World According to Garp,

Slaughterhouse Five, Geek Love) and one small candle. And this was home.

* * *

The bathroom was the warmest, driest place.

Not many campers were present in April. Skagway was wrapped in a shroud of gray and dampness. My tent sweated cold on the inside, a soggy canvas for finger designs

I made from my sleeping bag. My white rain fly grayed with each day. Midnight downpours turned into light morning sprinkles, pittering against pine trees, pattering against our kitchen tarp. I curled up, hooded in my purple and green mummy bag, my feet blocks of ice, as drops drummed in steady rhythm on the picnic table in the center of our camp. The soundtrack to southeast Alaska in spring.

The damp turned everything into a wilted, sleeper version of itself. Tarps and rain

flies sagged, and the pine needle floor grew mushy. It lingered, so dense I thought I could reach out and mold it into discernible shapes with my hands. 38

The cold woke me early, before sunrise. Those mornings, when I was too chilled to go hiking and I didn’t need to report to work in the kitchen until 3 p.m., I retreated to the one dry place. I crawled out of my cocoon, pulled on muddy shoes outside my tent. I retrieved the Gibson from the Subaru’s backseat, where it lived because everywhere else was too wet, and walked to the bathroom. Everything was quiet at camp, except for the sound of rain. No one woke so early.

When I opened the door, the heat hit me in a comforting chlorine wave. There were three white sinks and four or five gray metal stalls, a tiled floor with a drain in the center. Small skylights at the top of the walls near the roof let in dim light.

I sat on the floor, because there was no other place to sit. I woke up with the music, playing chords quietly while my numb feet and slow fingers returned to life. The few women who came in did not mind--the campground was a small place and we were all familiar with each other, sharing the same space. When Mary woke she would come sit with me, sleepy-eyed, listening as I played. It was not a bad way to begin the day.

* * *

Some weekends were for disappearing, to places like Sturgills Overlook.

I had occasional time off from my job in the Golden North kitchen. When there were fewer cruise ships coming to town, fewer waves of tourists getting off boats, I took the chance to get out into real Alaska. At camp I packed up the things I’d need--tent and 39

sleeping bag, a bit of food, and full water bottles both side pockets of my backpack. It was late June, and the sun came and stayed a while. I was unaccustomed to wearing T- shirts and being warm, having spent nearly two months with a runny nose and constant chill.

I bungeed the Gibson onto my backpack, with the neck sticking out from the top like a skyscraper spire. As I walked from camp and passed through town I encountered

Mary on her way home from work.

“You should see the smile on your face,” she said.

“Going to be a great weekend,” I said. “I’ll see you Monday.”

The climb to Lower Dewey Lake was muddy. Up, and up, and up, and I was sweating with the weight of my pack. The trail became rockier and narrow, my Teva sandals slipping. Once the sun came I only wore sandals, no sturdy hiking boots to protect my ankles or support my arches. Sometimes I thought about going barefoot.

Halfway up the climb to Lower Dewey, I sat to rest on a wide rock. The Gibson thrummed out a broken chord behind me. I’d forgotten it was there and knocked the neck on a tree limb, scraping the bottom of the body on the rock itself. Its first Alaska scars.

After reaching Dewey I hiked all afternoon through the pines. I reached Sturgills overlook just after 5 p.m. and set up camp. There was a point at which several boulders’ edges created a colossal chair, and at its end there was an immense drop off overlooking the Lynn Canal, the long passageway from Skagway to the Pacific. I perched on the edge 40

of the boulders and played music alone until darkness fell, relishing the quiet, the lack of camp noise and voices. The silence was perfect, and it was a clear night with no rain.

In that moment I loved being alone. I had felt lonely in Alaska, especially the first month when the sun didn’t shine and I knew only Mary, who was far better than me at making fast friends with the other seasonal campers. But at the forest’s edge, with only my tent and guitar, the water and stars, I felt content in my solitude. Down below a wide, white cruise ship sailed out to meet the ocean. From where I sat, high above the canal, it was a silent, glittering gem making its way to the sea.

* * *

Sometimes I drove Mary’s car to the pier and played music at night. The campground could be loud and rambunctious on the weekends, and I was tired of noise. It was good to play in the quiet dark; once the cruise ships sailed out, the pier was deserted, and I sat and played in what I supposed was a ferry waiting station, sort of like a bus stop.

Or I sat outside by the rocks, if it was warm, so I could hear the seals splash. It was late

August by then, and evenings were growing cool.

A few days earlier, I’d driven into the Yukon with poor directions for two hours to

find a tattoo artist a friend had told me about. He was covered in camouflage that had been inked permanently on his skin. I supposed there was little else to do during endless, isolated Alaska winters. I wanted him to tattoo an image around my ankle bone and 41

extending upward, a design I’d seen in a book I was reading about Pure Land Buddhism.

It said that pure lands offered respite, that they were places where both gods and men dwelled, covered in fruit and flowers and wish-granting trees that hosted rare birds.

Entering it, the book said, was equal to attaining enlightenment.

Something about it made sense to me then.

I wanted the right scar to remember Alaska, since my time in Skagway was winding down. A scar like those the Gibson sustained--so many nicks, scratches and dings from all the time spent strapped on my back and carried through the trees. It had changed immensely since we’d arrived four months earlier, its headstock cracked, the veneer chipped and faded. But what looked like damage, I knew, was simply evidence of adventure.

* * *

September, and the rain was returning.

For a week before I got on the ferry and sailed south, I built campfires. I was determined, painstakingly coaxing weak sparks into full, warm flame, even in the mist.

Just a few pieces of dry wood would do. I simply wanted the warmth. The hot yellow and orange center of our camp staved off the familiar, returning chill. Sometimes work friends or camp friends came, a friendly ring of glowing faces, filling the damp, smoky night with music and low laughter. 42

My last night in Skagway, I didn’t sleep. I broke down my tent and stuffed every damp thing I owned back into my red pack. And then I sat alone, watching flame turn to embers and die out. When it was time to head to town for the 6 a.m. ferry, I placed the

Gibson in its fuzz-lined case, which was held together mostly by duct tape. Later that morning, riding toward Juneau for five hours in a gray, sleepy haze, I would take the guitar out just to smell the rich campfire smoke and pine needle scent of Alaska. It seemed embedded permanently in the wood. Years later I swear it remains, a bare hint of my summer of solitude lingering in the Gibson’s weathered frame. Arrival: Waldo Canyon Hike

Colorado Springs

Up, up and around. Highway 24 climbs up the mountain pass, winding from the foothills of Colorado Springs toward Woodland Park at 8,465 feet. I drive slower than usual and steer carefully. Alaska taught me how to drive in the mountains.

This morning is my inaugural hike--a solo celebration of sorts. The best way I can think of to kick off being a Colorado resident is to explore the mountain trails.

I have been in town one day. In a week I begin classes at the University of Colorado.

This was the official reason for my move--school. I’ve been attending community college classes in the evenings in Minneapolis for the past year, working as a temp in offices around the city. A year of treading water, post-Alaska, to save some money.

The real reason I’ve moved is what lies before me: winding mountain passes, gnarled pine trees, rocky trails and sputtering streams. I wanted mountains like Alaska, but sun too--unfurled blue sky and a wide horizon. Trails that will lead me to the tops of peaks.

Waldo Canyon seems a good place to begin. The trail, just outside the city of

Colorado Springs, is a seven-mile loop with 2,000 feet of elevation gain. It’s a mild hike to a seasoned local. But I still have Minnesota lungs and sea level stamina. I’m breathing hard and sweating just climbing up the rutty wooden steps to the trailhead itself.

43 44

At nine a.m. the sun is hot and beating. I wear shorts, a thin sleeveless shirt, a baseball cap. I carry 32 ounces of water on my back. The heat is a drastic change from

Minnesota’s humidity. There everything sticks, the air so heavy you can see it.

Here in the foothills of the Rockies under a relentless sun, everything yearns for water. The dry heat sucks all moisture from me, leaving me drained and shaky. Skin burns quickly. After just fifteen minutes of hiking, my pale arms are turning pink. I pause, reach for the tube of sunblock in my backpack, and slather on another layer.

The intense sun is just one of many ways life seems harsher here. Colorado is bigger, wilder, than the Midwest lands I know. In Minnesota there were occasional tornado threats and some harsh winters. The landscape was one of rolling hills, deciduous trees, so may bodies of blue. Here in Colorado, mountain peaks are treacherous with snow and the possibility of avalanches half the year, and then wildfire season rolls around, everyone praying for rain to moisten the land before lightning or human carelessness causes flames.

Fire can grow from a single acre to a raging inferno in a shockingly brief amount of time.

Water is precious. Rivers gush in spring with mountain snowmelt but trickle throughout the summer.

I hike alone, quietly. The thin air makes my lungs work overtime, and I’m in awe and a little jealous of the trail runners who whiz by me as I plod slowly up the steeper parts of the trail. I wind slowly from sun-exposed scree trails to a shady canyon. Immense rock spires climb out of the ground up toward the cloudless sky. 45

Colorado is like nowhere else. Alaska’s mountains were wet and green, with fast- growing moss and a cold damp that climbed inside your skin. Even the north shore of

Lake Superior in Minnesota, though pine-treed and craggy, was mild compared to what surrounds me now, in my new home.

Home, yes--for the next three years. My college years. I’m twenty-one, finally ready to be a full-time student. When I’d returned to Minnesota from my rootless Alaskan summer, it was for a transition: to work and save. Colorado was my goal.

More twists and turns to the trail, and suddenly a view opens up before me. It is Pikes

Peak, the great mountain that overshadows the entire city of Colorado Springs. At 14,110 feet, its long gaze seems to reach me wherever I go. I find this comforting.

Alone on the trail with my thoughts, my head completely clear, I pick up speed. My breath shortens, the trail widens, and the broad view of the Peak floats before me.

Everything seems full of possibility. I feel ready to remake life once again, excited to explore my new city and the entire Rocky Mountain range awaiting beyond it. I know that in time, these trails will be like home to me. There is so much delightful unknown, and so many parts of the mountain to discover. Edge of the West

Craig, Colorado

Part I: Scared Sheep

“This is....” I said slowly. A shit hole, I thought. It didn’t even look like Colorado.

After three years of college, this, here, was my best option?

My words hung in the still air as we continued driving west. Frank, my boyfriend, looked out the window. “Well, maybe this is just the outskirts,” he said. “It could be cool.”

“True. Let’s wait and see until we get through town.”

I gripped the wheel tightly and drove on, hoping to come upon some local shops or hangouts, an interesting downtown neighborhood, a park. Something.

Four stoplights later we’d passed three bars, a small grocery store, a Subway, the square brick county courthouse and The Golden Cavvy Lounge and Restaurant. There was a gas station and a K Mart, some small houses with faded paint. A large mobile home park. And then we reached the hotel, nothing but flat highway and prairie grass stretching beyond it.

“I think that was town,” I said.

46 47

“I think you’re right,” Frank said. “I kind of like it.” He talked like it didn’t matter at all. And maybe it didn’t to him--he wouldn’t be the one living here.

“Why? What’s to like? I do not want to stay overnight, even if they did pay for a room,” I said. “I’d rather drive back tonight.”

“When’s the interview?”

“Half hour,” I said. “I need to find someplace to change.” The long drive from

Colorado Springs would have wrinkled my dress pants.

We stopped at the Subway, where I found the restroom and quickly pulled on pantyhose, tan slacks, a black sweater I deemed business-like, and black heels. I tied my hair in a low ponytail and wound it around into a bun. I emerged from the bathroom feeling proper and interview-ready.

“I’ll call you to come pick me up when we’re through,” I said to Frank, who’d bailed on work for the day so he could ride to Craig with me. I’d wanted the company-- four and a half hours was too long to fret. And he would need to get a feel for what the commute would be like, for when he’d come to visit me on weekends. That’s what we were doing, I thought. Trying on the idea of this. At least I was.

“Maybe I’ll go hang out at the Golden Cavvy,” he said, smiling. Raised in the

Sacramento suburbs, Frank found places like this intriguing. He loved the idea of large swaths of undeveloped country, “living off the land,” wrangling ranch animals in billowing dust. He was a city boy stuck in a tech support job, answering phones and solving computer snafus while wishing for dirty hands, compost piles and organic crops. 48

The closest he’d gotten, in the two years we’d been together, was putting a white five- gallon pail on his porch and declaring it a compost bin. He’d placed chicken waste in it and maggots grew.

I, having grown up in rural Minnesota, had no romantic ideas about living off any kind of land. I knew what it was to be surrounded by not much at all.

We made our way to the office address the editor, Mike Hagan, had given me on the phone. Five-One-Nine Yampa Avenue, “right in downtown,” he said. Downtown looked to be about two blocks long. There were a few Fords and Chevys lining the street.

An antique store. Mather’s Bar. We parked just down from the Golden Cavvy near a T- shirt and souvenir shop.

“What the hell does that say?” Frank asked, pointing at one of the shirts on display in the store window.

“Craig, America: Where Men are Men and Sheep are Scared,” I read. The cartoon imagine on the shirt depicted a man, who was missing several teeth and wearing overalls, displaying a wide, ravenous grin as he chased a distressed sheep over a rolling green hill.

The man’s face was full of delight, his arms outstretched and greedy. Get ready for Sheep

Wagon Days! proclaimed a nearby hand-written sign.

“Exactly what goes on during Sheep Wagon Days, do you suppose?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Frank replied. 49

An hour earlier, at the top of Rabbit Ears Pass in my small red Chevy, I’d felt elated. The sunny, snowy mountaintop offered a gorgeous view of glittering blue

Steamboat Lake. As we cruised down through pines sagging under fresh, heavy snow, the highway narrowed and morphed into Steamboat Springs’ bustling main thoroughfare.

This was a pristine Colorado ski haven, not as prissy as Aspen or crowded as Vail. The storefronts along the downtown strip were freshly painted in bright colors--the two-story aqua bookstore with white and purple accents, the peachy salmon hue of a local Italian restaurant, a red rustic wood-oven pizza place. On the side streets were small, charming

Victorians painted blue and yellow with white porch swings and nicely kept yards. Mount

Werner, Sunshine Peak, Storm Peak and Pioneer Ridge rose up all around. And in the summer it would all be verdant and green, with blooming alpine wildflowers. There would be fabulous hiking and mountain biking.

I could live fifty miles from this, I thought.

Elation swiftly faded as we passed through the outskirts of Steamboat and continued northwest. The fifty miles between Steamboat and Craig could have just as well been five hundred. The land flattened out and browned, those verdant alpine meadows dulling into high plains, rolling yellow grasses and scrubby ranch land. Lone, leaning trailer houses stood in open fields, surrounded by rusted barbed-wire fence and various parts of cars, trucks and farm equipment.

Craig, it appeared after a pass through town, was Steamboat’s ugly, toothless sister. Where my narrow vision of Colorado ended and the real west began--rugged rather 50

than quaint, purposeful and blue-collar to Steamboat’s cutesy charm. Steamboat said,

“Greetings! Park your sport utility vehicle over there, pull off your ski boots and rest awhile in the chalet, won’t you? Care for a local microbrew?” while Craig hollered,

“Howdy! Sit a spell at the Cavvy. Grilled elk steak tonight, and two-for-one Bud Lights.

Come and git it.”

I had done some research. I knew it was a hard-working ranch town where people raised cattle and sheep and worked in coal mines, likely disinterested and too busy for those pristine white slops fifty miles down the road. I realized I wouldn’t be finding any ski-in, ski-out condos for the wealthy. I knew it was largely conservative, that their schools didn’t perform particularly well, and that the only tourism draw was for hunters.

Elk hunting season was all that kept Craig afloat.

Still, I hadn’t fathomed it would be like it was. It was the edge of the West, where

Colorado’s mountains turned into the endless emptiness of Wyoming. So sparse that most people passing through would likely pause just long enough to fill up their gas tank and move on.

I knew it was wrong to judge a place so harshly, so quickly. I knew I was thinking like a spoiled snob. And I also knew Craig was the only place in Colorado with an entry- level news reporter position available.

* * * 51

“Good lede on this story about the Beatles,” Mike Hagan told me, looking at my clips.

He and I were sitting in a busy Italian sandwich shop and pizza place called

Carelli’s, located on the block of downtown directly south of the newspaper office. The restaurant smelled like roasted garlic and marinara, and footage of snowboarders and mountain bikers played on the televisions while rough and shouty rock crackled out from tinny speakers. Bike and snowboard brand stickers decorated every walls. It seemed like the kind of place you’d take a job applicant who was twenty-four years old and from a city ten times the size of Craig. Smart move, Mike Hagan.

“Thanks,” I said. “That one was fun because I spent the afternoon at the city park, asking high school kids what they knew about them.”

Lie. It wasn’t fun. The kids had been so daunting, clustered in lazy packs around park benches on their lunch hour. “Go see what kids today think about the Beatles,” my editor Warren said, “and write about the 40th anniversary of them appearing on the Ed

Sullivan show.” Ed who? I wondered. I sat watching the students for a long time before getting up the nerve to approach a group. Like I myself was in high school once again.

“Love this kid--‘I don’t know where they were from. England?’--and look at this one, who only wants to talk about Insane Clown Posse,” Mike Hagan said, chuckling.

“It made for a fun feature piece,” I said. I smiled and kept chomping away at my giant chef’s salad. It was a nervous tic, shoveling food down my throat. I was glad I didn’t get the chicken parmesan sandwich. Mike Hagan did, and it was messy, with sauce 52

dripping and cheese stretching. Its messiness fit the rest of him--out-of-control curly brown head, sloppy jeans hanging on a lanky frame, ruddy red complexion, flannel shirt, worn sneakers. He’d been fifteen minutes late to our interview. Perhaps every day was casual Friday in Craig.

But Mike Hagan was nice. Instead of grilling me about my theories about reporting (I didn’t have any), we just had a conversation. We talked about hiking. When he told me about what it would mean to launch the Moffat County Morning News from the ground up, I felt sort of excited. And he was open too about the fact that he’d just been fired from his editor position at the Aspen Times. He did his best to make Craig sound appealing (it’s affordable, and Steamboat’s close, and there’s a great opportunity to do good journalism here, oh, and the people are really nice) but when you’ve just been booted out of a great job in the most beautiful part of the state and forced to relocate to a place where methamphetamine manufacturing was the fastest-growing industry, it shows on your face. I felt bad for him. But by the time our lunch interview was over, I also felt like he’d be a pretty good boss.

And lucky I did, because Mike Hagan was the only editor who’d answered one of the thirty or forty job applications I’d been sending out in the past four or five months. It was April of 2004, a month away from my graduation from the University of Colorado.

I’d decided I would be a reporter. Sort of. I’d decided I’d try, because that’s what I had been doing for a while, part-time and with some amount of enthusiasm. My favorite writing professor, D’Arcy, used to be a writer and columnist for the Colorado Springs 53

Gazette, the city’s big daily newspaper. She introduced me to some people there: short, smug Warren Epstein, the entertainment editor, and classy, curly-haired Barbara, with her

Mississippi drawl and elegant hands, who edited the features section. Both kindly threw small freelance pieces my way. Hermit crabs were the subject of my first real story, certainly not hard news fit for A-1, but I was happy with the feature section. After that, a choir concert preview for the entertainment section. Then, a ballet review and the Beatles piece, and a few others. They paid me $50 an article. I picked up some other local freelance work too in my senior year of college, writing business and book reviews for a giveaway monthly called Springs Magazine.

“It’s kind of a crappy publication, isn’t it?” I asked D’Arcy.

“It’s a fish wrapper. Not as good as the Gazette, definitely not winning any

Pulitzers,” she answered. “But the important thing now is that you get some clips.”

So I devoted all my energy to trying on a career in journalism. It felt big and important, and it made me nervous. I loved words and language and telling real-life stories, being rooted to facts and challenged by finding the most interesting ways to relay them. The questionable parts were the things I had to do to obtain the stories (talk to people, especially approach complete strangers) and the disappointing financial prospects. But for a part-time gig, it was working out okay.

By the time spring came, I had seven or eight solid clips to send away with my applications and my carefully written, humorous-but-still-professional cover letters. 54

Though I didn’t want to leave Colorado, I applied to jobs in Oregon and Idaho, New

Mexico and anywhere else in the West.

Nothing. For weeks and weeks, nothing.

I started to fret. Why had I worked so hard to put myself through college? I had spent long hours as a banquet server for Garden of the Gods Country Club, wearing an idiotic white dinner jacket and burgundy tie for countless fourteen-hour shifts, setting up and serving for and breaking down $100,000 wedding celebrations, doling out $10-a- slice cake to drunken crowds at midnight. I’d painted houses, did sweaty landscaping work in the summer, worked in Home Depot’s garden department, did data entry, answered phones as a work-study student. All these things to buy a bachelor’s degree, and I feared it was for nothing.

My excitement surged when I found out the Gazette would have an entertainment writer position opening up, but my heart sunk when Warren Epstein told me frankly on the phone “I’m looking for five years of experience, Bobbi.” I was good enough for semi- regular freelance work, but not good enough to hire. I visited journalism job websites daily. I hoped the phone would ring, and it didn’t. I bit my nails and fretted to Frank, who offered vague assurance that everything would work out fine.

Two days after I met Mike Hagan, he called to offer me the job in Craig.

* * * 55

“Fenster Macher?” Hagan said. “That can’t be fucking right.”

He and the publisher, Mitch, had been laying out the Graduating Seniors Special

Section all morning, alphabetizing and matching up senior photos. It was Volume 1, Issue

1 of the Moffat County Morning News, and more than double what would be our usual 24 to 28 pages. We wanted to make a big splash. Parents love to see their kids’ photos in the paper, so we decided to include every single graduating Moffat County High School student.

“I’m pretty sure I organized them all by first and last name,” Mitch said, walking over to examine the list.

“Right. So this girl’s first name is Fenster?” Hagan said, gesturing at the screen.

“No, no, likely not. Interesting name it would be though, don’t you think?” Mitch said. I loved him already. He was cool calm to Hagan’s erratic stress, always willing to explain and answer questions in his friendly Arkansas drawl. Didn’t seem at all phased that we were terribly behind in getting the paper together.

“Maybe she’s GER-mohn,” Will bellowed with a terrible faux accent, twisting around in his chair instead of editing the photos on his computer screen. He was my fellow reporter, fresh out of college like me, from Flagstaff. Hagan had told me during my interview he had his eye on a kid from the University of Arizona who “couldn’t write for shit but was a hell of a photog,” and he thought we’d balance each other out. Thus far

Will Fletcher, despite his nice reporter’s name and stunning photographs, seemed like a 56

tan, muscled frat boy with ADD, who didn’t seem nearly as stressed as I thought he should be. He and Hagan made frequent evening trips to Mathers Bar down the street.

Our ad sales manager’s brother owned it. I think they drank cheap.

Hagan shuffled papers at his messy desk and pulled out a spreadsheet.

“Fenstermacher is her last name. Katie fucking Fenstermacher,” he moaned, rubbing his red forehead and staring at the computer screen. “Goddammit, we’re going to have to shuffle around the whole spread.” Mitch chuckled.

It was deadline day, and we were all gathered up in our mezzanine office, with two narrow windows and a sea of questionable-smelling brown carpet. We had all been awake far too long; aside from graduation weekend, there was a local charity fundraiser, a 5K run/walk and street festival happening outside our front door, and the opening of the

Moffat County Fair. We still had several more stories to pull together. The photos I’d taken of the graduation ceremony were too dark, and many of them were posed because I knew nothing about photojournalism. I was working on a story to accompany the graduation piece while Will wandered about the town festival, eating kettle corn and shooting impressive photos. We hadn’t even begun to test our fresh Quark skills out by laying out actual pages. Deadline was midnight.

I’d lived in Craig for two weeks. My small apartment with the seventies linoleum stank of cigarette smoke, even after I spent a day washing all the walls and floors with bleach water. My first day of work I’d contacted the sheriff, Buddy Grinstead, who invited me to come in to his office and say hello. When I arrived, he had gathered the 57

entire Sheriff’s Posse around the large conference table to welcome me to town right proper by suggesting I get tased. The new guy from The Craig Daily Press, our competition, had agreed, they said, and he’d taken it like a man. They liked him a lot.

I declined.

I hadn’t eaten much. I hardly slept, waking up in the middle of the night to worry about where I’d find stories and how I would continue to do so every day, every day.

Each morning on my way to work, I felt like vomiting.

Because a feeling was setting in. The few weeks leading up to the start of my new job were a blur of celebration and stress. I’d been too busy to think about what was before me. I’d graduated, participating in the formal ceremony in my black gown while fretting at the thought of my newly divorced parents having to interact. There was a backyard party with friends, professors, champagne, cake, and my weeping mother, who retreated to the living room while my father and his new girlfriend--surprise!--sat outside and socialized. The following morning I’d said goodbye to Frank and drove to Craig feeling exhausted and numb, not knowing when I’d have the time to head back to the

Springs or when he planned on coming to visit or if I cared. I cried for the first two hours of the drive.

Finally, alone for the first time in a long while, home from work late in the evenings in my near-empty apartment, clarity came in waves:

I had only taken one introductory journalism course in college.

My school didn’t even offer a journalism major. 58

I had a bachelor’s in geography. (Good christ, what the hell’s that good for? my father had said. I’d replied weakly, “I want to be...an environmental writer”).

I’d never read In Cold Blood. Weren’t journalists supposed to read that?

I didn’t know anything about journalistic ethics or the Sunshine Laws, had only read through the AP Stylebook once.

And the way things were shaping up, I’d be working sixty or more hours a week.

I’d only be paid for forty of them--and at eleven bucks an hour, with student loans to repay, there was no extra gas money to drive down to Colorado Springs, let alone for weekends at a quaint Steamboat ski chalet with friends.

But there was something far worse. Something that should have occurred to me that day in Acacia Park when I talked to students about the Beatles. Something I felt every time I approached a stranger to ask a question. My desire for a byline and need for a definite path after college had pushed down and hidden this feeling, sequestered it somewhere deep enough that I could say yes, go through with this whole mess.

Beginning in Craig, it had been rising up daily as a knot in my chest and a lump in my throat, turning into nausea and ear-ringing until I had to sit down and remember to breathe.

I was an utter, sweating, fearful, shaky-handed introvert. I was alone and tired and broke, yes...but worse, I was deeply afraid.

Of my own job. 59

I felt terribly alone in figuring out how to fix it. My parents were no fit support system at the time. Neither was my newly-divorced sister. Frank couldn’t really be counted on; though he was six years older than me and long out of college, he was mired in his own career disappointments and being a self-titled “tech weenie.” And my college friends were far away and bad at calling. They were all together, busy being young professionals in the city. I was the one who left.

I was alone, scared, and felt I was no one’s priority. It seemed too much at once-- too many problems rising up all together in one great, crippling wave. I feared too the undetermined length of time I’d be spending in Craig. I knew college would be three years, just like I knew art school would only be one and Alaska would be six months.

And I had always found a rhythm in such situations, knowing that I would soon be moving forward. Don’t get too comfortable, I always told myself. I never did. I kept moving.

Not so in Craig. There was no determined end-point. I had no money and nowhere to go. No other options. Only work.

I should be getting comfortable here, I thought--but I didn’t want to, couldn’t imagine doing so in such an empty, empty place. This was Craig, America, surrounded by not much. Steamboat might say “Oh, why not just quit that job and move here, share a condo with some ski bums and work at the resort? Hang on to college life a little longer.

It’s okay.” But Craig, which in my head sounded a lot like my dad sternly telling me it was time to go chop wood on a Saturday morning, said “put your duds on and git to it. 60

Quit bein’ snobby and spoiled. No one wants to hear your whining. May well be there’s not much here. But there ain’t no room for scared sheep.”

Part II: Dig in

“You can do this,” I said to myself quietly as I pulled into the gravel parking lot.

“You will do this because there’s a big hole in tomorrow’s paper, and this is your story.”

Reminding myself that I had no choice helped sometimes. No option but to be here at the shooting range on a chilly Saturday morning, ready to approach a pack of thirty burly men wielding rifles.

The previous night I’d made a desperate call to D’Arcy asking for her help. I needed a boost of confidence.

“God, Bobbi, I know it’s hard out there in cow town,” she said. “Trust me, I struggled too. My first job was writing Aunt Clarissa Cooks columns for a tiny paper in

Eureka, California. Masquerading as an old lady who knew what she was doing in the kitchen--no glamour there. You’re paying dues.”

“I know. I know it can’t be perfect, it’s just...how do I make it better?” I asked in tears. “I’m trying to find stories and get ideas, stop being scared and stop missing the

Springs and--”

“Remember where you’re from,” she said. “Starbuck, Minnesota, population no one, home of the world’s largest Norwegian potato thing.” 61

“Lefse,” I clarified with a sniff.

“Exactly,” she replied. “Is that so different than Craig, home of the annual Sheep

Wagon Days? You can do Craig. Because you know small-town America. Just--meet ‘em where they’re at. Get out there. Dig in. It will get better.”

“I hope so. Thanks--it helps just to talk to you.”

“Sure. And I can’t make any promises, but I’ll make a call or two to the Gaz, see if there might be any openings soon back in the Springs for you. I think you’re going to become a fine journalist, you’re just lonely out there in ranch town.”

“I don’t even want to think about a job move yet,” I said.

“Yeah, but you will eventually,” D’Arcy answered.

I got out of my car with notebook and pen in hand, camera bag over my shoulder.

Groups of men were gathered beneath an open shelter in clusters, wearing coveralls and fur caps, heavy boots and blaze orange. Beyond them was a large collection of bullet- riddled targets. It’s just like back home, I told myself. Craig is basically Starbuck with coal miners and elk. You know these guys--they’re like Dad and Dad’s friends.

“‘Morning,” I said to the first one who turned toward me, frost in his beard.

“Getting some target practice in?” He seemed surprised, clearly not expecting me.

“Well, never too cold for some shooting,” he said with a smile. “Got my son here, we’re gettin’ him familiar. You...need something?”

“I’m Bobbi, from the Morning News,” I answered, extending my hand, which he grasped tightly with a large, chapped paw. 62

“Oh hey, I seen you wrote that story last week about Twentymile Coal,” he said.

“I work there.”

“Well, glad to hear it’s not closing after all, right?”

“Yeah, I sure was looking forward to that severance check though,” he said, chuckling and slapping my shoulder. “So who you need?”

“I talked with Jim yesterday about coming out to talk with you guys for an article

I’m working on, on gun safety.” Elk hunting season was in full swing, and a hunter had been clipped by a stray bullet a few days prior.

“Huh. Well I’m Don, and Jim’s there,” he said, pointing across the shelter to a tall gentleman in coveralls. “But first things first, now. You shoot?” He crossed his arms over his chest, gave me a once-over, then raised an eyebrow.

“Uh--no. My dad’s a hunter and a trapper, but I never learned,” I answered.

“Kinda trapping?”

“Muskrat and mink. And coyote hunting. Deer sometimes.”

“Where at?”

“Minnesota. Little town called Starbuck.”

“Huh. And he never showed you how to handle a gun?”

“I guess I never asked him to,” I said.

“Well, hell. Good thing you got plenty of teachers here today, then,” he declared.

“Today?”

“Sure today. Why not?” 63

“I--I don’t have a gun, or ear things, or--”

Don cawed and slapped my shoulder again. “Look around,” he said.

He had a point. There before me had to be one of the largest collections of

Remingtons in the western U.S. Dig in, I heard D’Arcy saying. Go do stuff.

“Well--lead the way,” I said.

An hour or two later, after a brief safety lesson and a lot of tattered target sheets,

Don and the rest of the Moffat County Sportsman’s Club and I were becoming good pals.

I was fairly certain I’d crossed a journalism line, and I did not care. As I fired my rifle at the targets, every cheer and call of “Git ‘er done, girl!” chipped away some pent-up anxiety. It felt so good to be welcomed into a group--any group. For the first time since

I’d moved to Craig, I was having fun.

And wouldn’t you know, I was actually a pretty decent shot.

* * *

After that morning with the gun club, things began to change. I knew I had to find a way to take hold of myself. I was tired of being shy, scared, stressed--and it seemed that the only thing I could control and focus on was Craig. Work. I would try to be a good reporter, become a real journalist. I would tackle my loneliness and fear, rather than be crippled by it. 64

When the Moffat County Sheriff’s department went on a whitewater raft rescue safety training trip, I went too--four days with a pack of fifteen strangers on the river, including running a terrifying stretch of rapids called Hell’s Half Mile. It was my introduction to Colorado whitewater, to paddling hard and breathing deep and digging into crushing waves. It was my first time at a riverside camp, the comforting crackle of the fire and rushing water lulling me to sleep. I spent half the trip deeply afraid, both because of the rapids and because I had to approach different teams each day and ask them if I could ride with them. But no team ever said no, and they were happy to answer questions. After, I was exhausted and triumphant. And from that point forward, Sheriff

Buddy and Deputy Tim never ignored my phone calls.

When the police were doing ice rescue training, I got suited up in the heavy rubber coveralls and tromped out onto the icy lake until I fell in, floating there and awaiting “rescue.” I got involved in the county’s Extension Office, covering their healthy lunch program initiative. When the director, Elisa, invited me to go cross-country skiing with her, we spent dusky winter evenings cruising around the Moffat County golf course on groomed trails.

I visited local ranches to write about hail damage and destroyed crops. I dropped in at the new Boys and Girls Club in town and got to know their new director. I wrote about the hospital board’s controversial construction projects and profiled the team of nurses who gathered to establish a nursing education program at the local community college. I wrote about meth labs, about nineteen-year-olds going to jail for cooking and 65

dealing. I wrote features about a local Russian ballerina and the elderly couple who dressed as Santa and Mrs. Claus for Christmas.

I bonded with my co-workers, too. I learned from Mitch and Hagan, had girls’ night out with the ad sales staff. I came to know Will not as a spoiled frat boy but as an irreverent smart ass who would inevitably make me laugh. Most Monday mornings we’d go to Serendipity Coffee House across the street from the news office. We would complain about our pitiful paychecks, that our relationships were going to hell because of the distance. He’d make jokes about Craig’s serious meth problem, about Hagan being a not-so-functioning alcoholic, about the fact that he and I were the only two people in town our age without children.

I was learning to be unafraid of my new life. The more I reached out, the more I came to know the people of Craig. As I worked to craft myself from a shaking introvert into someone who could be an extrovert when necessary, I began to see the people, and the community, quite differently. The distance between me and everything familiar didn’t matter as much.

When the heavy snow came, I woke early on Sundays and drove from Craig through Steamboat Springs, up to the top of Rabbit Ears Pass. I pulled on my snowshoes and would spend a good part of the day out in the trees. Away from the computer screen, from work projects, from town. Up high, where I could reach a craggy lookout and view frozen Steamoat Lake below. Snowshoeing was peace--just me, knotty pine trees, and a thick white blanket of quiet. There I still felt I was in Colorado, with the mountains, thin 66

cold air, and a place from which I could see a great distance. Maybe gain some perspective.

But still, home alone most evenings, I felt isolated. Craig could be a lonely place no matter how much I wrote or what acquaintances I made. It was at that point, during the long dark of winter, that a couple in town invited me to be a part of their family.

* * *

“Why don’t you come for dinner?” Shannan had said as we were copy-editing the paper one evening. She was a freelancer and wrote the “Looking Back” Craig history columns for each Sunday issue. She’d lived in Moffat County for thirty-five years, and she knew nearly everyone and everything about the town’s history. She’d seen mayors and commissioners come and go, and could remember Craig long before it had any of the features I’d come to appreciate: the K-Mart, the City Market grocer, the small fitness center.

“I’d like that,” I said. “Can I bring anything?”

“Your laundry,” she said, smiling.

“Oh, no, I don’t want to--”

“It’s no problem. I’ve seen you at that dirty laundromat on Sundays. No need for that. Bring it on over.” 67

Shannan lived at the edge of town with her husband, Ed, and six dogs. In addition to writing, she trained professional service dogs and had a host of border collies, including Jake, the oldest, who could do all kinds of household chores. She had the right kind of patience for that kind of training--when she talked to the dogs as she would to a human, they listened and obeyed.

During that cold winter, Ed and Shannan’s home was a warm, cozy respite. I began joining them for dinner at least two nights a week. Shannan would prepare hearty meals--lasagna and salad with garlic bread, spicy beef chili--and I’d help clean up. If it was a weekend we’d watch a movie, Ed in his recliner, Shannan in hers, and me on the couch with a dog or two. Shannan and I shared a love of writing and reading, and I appreciated having long conversations with Ed about politics, and about what the coal mining and gas industries were doing to the West. I would do my laundry there weekly and would treat Shannan to lunch in exchange, or bring over some groceries for dinner.

They were not well off--Ed’s work at the coal mine was coming to a close as he approached retirement, and their home was a modest double-wide. But it was clean and welcoming, full of spicy cinnamon smells and wriggling, happy animals. I came to feel more comfortable there than I did in my own apartment. They were people much like those I’d grown up with in Starbuck--hard workers in pursuit of the simple pleasures a rural life can offer. 68

“We’d like you to have Christmas with us,” Shannan said one afternoon. It was a

Saturday, and we were baking shortbread as it dumped snow outside. “Will you be staying in town?”

They hadn’t met Frank, because he hadn’t been to visit in many weeks. And I hadn’t decided what I’d do for the holiday yet. I didn’t have enough time to go to

Minnesota to see my family, though I knew I could join Frank’s parents and sister if I wanted.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I only have a few days off, and I worry about driving over

Rabbit Ears pass.” My small, light Chevy Cavalier was useless in snow. I held onto it only because it was paid for.

“Well, know that you’re welcome here.”

“Will Micah be coming? Or Ben?” Micah was Shannan’s son and Ben was Ed’s, both from their previous marriages. Micah worked laying pipeline in Wyoming and had a longtime problem with heroin. After years of rescuing him and bailing him out of jail,

Shannan made the wrenching choice to stop helping him. Now they didn’t hear from him regularly. Ben was a student at the University of Colorado and spent most holidays with his mother.

“No,” she said quietly, leaning to take the shortbread out of the oven. “It will just be us.”

“You didn’t hear from Desiree?”

“Not since October,” Shannan said. 69

Desiree was the daughter Shannan didn’t often talk about. She’d given her up for adoption in the late 70s. Twenty-five years later, Desi had contacted Shannan and brought her husband and son to Craig so they could meet in person. But she was very close with her adoptive mother and didn’t want to establish regular communication with her birth mother. It pained Shannan greatly, dug up a time from the past I knew was difficult for her.

It seemed both Shannan and Ed felt distant and cut loose from their family. They knew nearly everyone in Craig, of course, after living there for more than thirty years.

But in their late fifties, I think they longed for stronger connections with their children.

I understood. I knew what it was to feel distant.

“Well, I think it’d be nice to be here with you,” I said.

“We’d love it,” she said. “You know we think of you like a daughter. And

Christmas means rack of lamb,” Shannan said, smiling.

“Sold,” I said.

Part III: If you want it

Spring came. Sun peeked through clouds and melted snow. Craig came alive a little at a time. I’d been in the community eleven months and felt I knew what it was to be a small-town journalist. When I went for walks, I saw people I knew. When I had questions about the school board, what I saw on the police blotter, what happened at the 70

county commissioner meeting, I knew who to call. Picking up my pen and pad and camera and heading out the door no longer made me feel sick and scared. I came to prefer being out of the office, talking with people, and to do my writing from home or from the coffee shop. I was still broke, and still tired--but I felt I was living an entirely different life than the one I’d faced fresh out of college. So little time had passed, yet so much change had occurred, it could just as well have been years.

In January, Frank and I had broken up. It had gone badly--there was an ugly confrontation that ended with me stuffing a suitcase full of all the things I’d accumulated at his house over the past two and a half years, and leaving at 1 a.m. to drive back to

Craig. I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself--because the thought of being single in Craig was worse than investing halfheartedly in a dying relationship from a distance--but we should have parted much earlier. I was angry at him for never being sure of what he wanted in his own life, and angry at myself for taking so long to realize he never would.

One Monday morning in late March, just after my twenty-fifth birthday, a call came from Colorado Springs. I was at home, preparing to go into the newsroom a bit late since it wasn’t a deadline day. I recognized the area code but not the number.

“Hello?”

“Bobbi Sankey?”

“Yes,” I responded.

“Jay Beeton at the Gazette.”

“Hello,” I said, unable to disguise surprise in my voice. “I--how can I help you?” 71

“I’m calling because D’Arcy Fallon sent me a note about you, and said you might be looking for a reporting position,” Jay said.

So she had. Months back, when I’d been so miserable, I’d asked for help. D’Arcy had said she’d make a call or two. I’d forgotten.

“I--well, I was. Are you hiring?” The Gazette was never hiring, it seemed--or they wanted five years of experience, as Warren the entertainment editor had told me months ago. But Jay was the editor of the community news section, a weekly 32-page insert called The Slice that went out on Thursdays.

“I am. One of our reporters is transitioning to a copy editing position for the main news desk, so I have an education reporting position available. I know it was a while back that she passed along your information, but D’Arcy spoke highly of you. I know you did some work for Warren and Barbara too, and I thought I’d see if you’d like to come talk.”

“When would you like to meet?” I asked.

“A week from today, if you’re able,” Jay said. “You could come to the newsroom and meet the other Slice staff members, and you and I could talk a bit.”

“That would work well,” I said. Monday were good, quiet--I could write all my articles by Friday afternoon, ask Will to cover Saturday, take Monday off. Drive down and stay with friends.

“Great. Let’s say 10 a.m. at the newsroom. Come in to the front desk, and they’ll buzz me so I can let you upstairs,” Jay said. “Bring your clips.” 72

“I will. Thanks so much Jay--glad you called.”

“Yep. See you soon.” Click.

I hung up the phone, my heart pounding.

I would go and see, I told myself. It was probably a long shot. Maybe it wouldn’t be worth it. But I would try on the idea of it, just like I had with Craig.

That following week was a whirlwind--I drove down to Colorado Springs, met editor Jay Beeton and the other writers for The Slice, and spent two hours in the newsroom talking. A day later, he called to say “It’s yours if you want it.”

I said I’d need time to think--and on the four and a half hour drive back to Craig on roads that had become so familiar, that is all I did. Weighed options.

In the past eleven months, I’d labored to become a part of Craig. I worked to tell good stories, to report the news, but also to make it home. It was exhausting, yet while I drove back that day, up and over Rabbit Ears Pass, through Steamboat on onward west, I felt the greatest sense of accomplishment I’d ever experienced. I was no longer afraid of my own job, no longer terrified to be alone, out at the edge of the west. I’d made a few friends. I had made my own life.

I was also broke. And in addition to the Gazette being a big career jump, it would mean a $10,000 per year raise. A raise that significant meant things like plenty of grocery money, making regular payments on my student loans, perhaps a slightly better apartment. This was a chance to go from a thrice-weekly, 5,000-circulation paper to a 73

daily, 100,000+ circulation paper. Jay Beeton said in a year, I’d likely have a chance to move to the city news desk, be a part of the real metro staff.

If Craig had taught me to embrace being a journalist, to discard fear and muster the guts to do my job, this was its final lesson: when opportunity comes, you take it.

Shoot the gun. Paddle the rapid. Say yes instead of no. Dig in.

It was terrible, sitting across from Hagan with unprofessional tears in my eyes, feeling disloyal and selfish as I told him I was leaving. Telling Shannan and Ed at dinner one evening was even more difficult. Elisa, my cross-country ski buddy, was happy for me, being able to return to the city she knew I missed. My pals at the Sheriff’s office, my gun club guys, my good contacts in the community who, in a short while, had gone from business contacts to friendly acquaintances or more, wished me well. When I told Will, his litany of cursing made me laugh, and I was forced to agree to a final night of drinking at Mather’s with he and Hagan as a going-away party.

* * *

I carried the last small box of books down my apartment steps. In the kitchen

Shannan swept, silent.

In my car were the same things I’d moved to Craig with me not quite a year ago: my Gibson guitar in its sticker-covered case. Two duffels of clothing. A box of kitchen utensils and cookware. A laptop, a few boxes of books. There was just enough room in 74

the trunk and backseat for all of it. In the front passenger seat my calico kitten, Anabel, mewed from inside her blue travel crate. I’d let her out once we were on the road. After several months of regular trips down to Colorado Springs, beginning when she was a tiny kitten barely old enough to leave her mother, she had become a very good passenger. She would curl up on my lap and sleep, while I fed different CDs into the player and sang to help pass the miles: fifty miles to Steamboat Springs, up and over Rabbit Ears Pass that would still be drenched in heavy, wet snow, then the long stretch to Kremmling and

Silverthorne. I’d stop for gas there, maybe a soda or a bit of candy, before jumping on

1-70 East, which would take me back to the Front Range. To Denver, then south to the

Springs. It had become my most familiar drive.

A few days earlier, my good-bye column ran in the last issue of the Moffat County

Morning News that I’d ever be a part of. It was a thank-you--to Hagan and Will, to Ed and Shannan, to the Craig community. Inwardly, it was more--an apology to the town I’d judged, snuffed at. A recognition that I’d been humbled in countless ways. Craig hadn’t

fit my ideal vision of Colorado. It was a place I never wanted to belong. Yet it had been gracious enough to embrace me anyway.

I closed the trunk and walked back upstairs. So many months I’d spent living over that garage painted seafoam green, with the small windows that look out over the vacant lot next door. When I moved in, I painted the sickly yellow walls a warm taupe, scrubbed the hardwood floors clean, and got a new comforter for my bed. I hung golden Christmas lights around the living room, because their comforting glow made things less lonely. 75

Shannan helped me take them all down. She showed up that day without my asking, carrying a bucket of cleaning supplies, a broom and a mop. In a way I’d hoped she would come; leaving was lonely, and I welcomed a friend to help me escape the insides of my own head, the voice that kept asking if I was sure I’d made the right choice.

Yet I hoped she wouldn’t come, too. Of all the goodbyes I said that last week, hers I dreaded most.

I walked into the cramped kitchen with the low, slanted ceiling, and saw she’d

finished with the floors. The bedroom was done too. The closet doors were open, a few stray hangers dangling from otherwise empty bars. I’d sold or donated my furniture. In

Colorado Springs a shoebox apartment near downtown awaited, empty. For a while it will just be Anabel, an air mattress, and me. Starting fresh, with a completely blank slate, seemed best.

“It looks so good, certainly cleaner than when I moved in,” I said to Shannan, who was dumping her bucket of mop water down the sink.

“Doesn’t take too long to cover this place.” she answered. “Pretty tiny.”

“Still, I appreciate you being here,” I said. “I--this day isn’t good. It’s better that you’re here.”

“Well, it’s no good for me either, kiddo,” she said.

I took her broom and dustpan, she carried the mop and bucket, and we walked down the steps together. At the bottom, I slowly placed the key on the last step and then 76

shut the door, locking it inside. My landlords were out of town and asked that I clean the place and leave the key.

I turned toward Shannan. Knowing I was not usually the one to hug first, she reached for me. Her hugs were rare, whole and deep. Though she was shorter than me and I had to stoop just a bit, when Shannan embraced me, I felt comforted and at peace, just as I did in her home. She smelled like Ivory soap and Jergens hand lotion. She held me tight, but not so tight I was uncomfortable. She had a mother’s steady embrace.

“I’m going to pray for you now, okay,” she said quietly. It wasn’t a question. Just a notification.

“Okay,” I whispered, knowing that it was something she needed to do. Shannan’s

God was a private one, and while I’d always figured she was a fairly staunch Christian, she had never pushed me to talk about her faith or my lack of it.

I listened as she asked God to keep me safe, to give me courage in my new job, to be with me as I adjusted to a new life. She thanked him for bringing me to her, and said I was like the daughter she gave up so many years ago. I shuddered into her warm shoulder and sobbed.

When her prayer ended and she released me, there were so many things I should have said: that no one had ever done that for me before, prayed for me that way. That it was a gift she’d somehow known I needed. That I wished her daughter Desiree would call, and I wished there were something I could do. That I would visit.

But after a long period of silence, all I could say was “thank you.” 77

“You’re welcome. Be safe, daughter.”

“I will.”

I got in my car, closed the door, and let Anabel out of her crate. I thought about placing a CD in the player. Instead, as I pulled away from the garage and from Shannan’s white, waving fingers, I just took in the silence. I listened to the sound of wheels on blacktop picking up speed, heading toward the mountain pass. This Place is Yours

Colorado Springs

“Pleasure to meet you in person,” she says, extending her hand and smiling.

“Nicole Happel. Thanks for meeting me here.” She’s petite and tan, dressed smartly, with a warm handshake. The For Sale sign in the front yard has her face on it.

“Thank you,” I say. “I’m excited to see the inside.”

“Have you driven by?”

“Yes, since it’s not far from my work,” I answer, waving my hand back toward downtown.

“Oh, the Gazette, right? This would be a convenient spot for you,” she says. We walk across the small, clipped lawn and up the cement steps. She jiggles open the gray lockbox hanging from the front door, and we go inside.

“It’s been on the market a while, I think because there’s the apartment complex next door,” Nicole says, opening up a window shade and letting light spill into the kitchen. I haven’t thought of that. What else haven’t I thought of? What are you supposed to think about, looking through other people’s houses?

The place is in downtown Colorado Springs, just off busy Platte Avenue. I’ve

78 79

lived here a total of four years now, and I know well enough which neighborhoods to avoid. This home sits a few blocks from the cutoff line. On the website, the kitchen appeared nicely remodeled. In person, the cabinets seem bockety and cheap, the tile floor crooked. I walk slowly to the living room, a tiny area with two narrow windows, full of too-big furniture. At the back of the house I peer in two bedrooms and the bathroom between them. It’s cramped, the walls cluttered with art, sconces, and plaques with inspirational quotes on them.

I return to the living room and stand, silent. What I am doing? Now, in the middle of the room, I can’t recall why I thought this was a great idea. It’s a whim, really. The house is close to work. I drive by frequently. I kept seeing the For Sale sign, day after day. Maybe I’ve started to imagine a little. It would be nice to paint walls whatever colors you like, right?

But there is more than that. I think I’ve begun needing something that I can’t quite define. I am restless, again--but it feels different this time. Is a place of my own the answer? The idea feels strange. Scary. Would it be a comforting thing, being permanently tied here? Or a burden?

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to tell Nicole what I’m thinking or feign interest, even when I know after two minutes it’s not the right spot. It’s certainly not. I can always tell. I’ve lived in so many places, hunted for so many. It’s easy to look at other people’s houses and say yes, or no. 80

“It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” I say. “I mean, I don’t need tons of space, don’t want it really. I guess it just feels cramped with all this stuff in it.”

Nicole bends to pick up a wet towel off the bathroom floor. “They’re not doing a great job of keeping it ready for showings,” she said.

“Yeah, maybe it’s just the amount of clutter, I don’t know,” I say. I appreciate her honesty. I’m sure she wants to sell the place--yet she’s not blathering on about its good qualities or telling me why it’s a great price and I should really consider it, so close to downtown. She’s just listening and nodding.

“This is the first place I’ve looked at, so I plan on looking a lot more before making any decisions,” I tell her as we step out to the front stoop.

“Absolutely,” she says. “If you’re just starting the process, it takes a while to get a sense of what’s on the market in your price range.”

My price range is slim. I’m single, a reporter at the local newspaper. I don’t have impressive paychecks. And I’m not willing to live in the neighborhoods I so often visit on work nights to cover robberies, shootings, the occasional fatal. Those parameters are very limiting.

“I’d be happy to talk with you further, if you think you’re ready,” Nicole tells me as we head out the front door.

Am I? I don’t know. But what does it cost just to look?

“Thank you,” I say to Nicole. “I think I’d like that.” 81

* * *

This my parents taught me: work and time make a place yours.

I lived in one place for seventeen years. It was an old white farmhouse in the trees, at the end of a long, empty gravel road. From watching my mother and father find it and settle us there, I learned that you have to earn a place. Earn it with work, love it over time, and only then can you call it your own.

When I became old enough to consider the option, I decided I did not want what they’d chosen. Not the country, not the trees, not the endless cornfields and cows grazing.

I wanted to move out, on, away. At seventeen I decided that art school in Minneapolis was my ticket to be free. I applied, auditioned, was accepted, and drove away to spend my senior year of high school in college-like dorms with a pack of kids I didn’t know.

It was terrifying.

And, I knew, necessary.

The people who stayed where I grew up never, ever left. I had to know what else there was. Leaving for Minneapolis was the first small step, and I think I knew even then that there would be countless other moves. That it was best to embrace leaving rather than fear it.

And so many times after that, I packed my car and left one place for another, to try on other homes. 82

In Alaska, I lived in a two-person Kelty backpacking tent that kept out the rain but not the damp. In Minneapolis, a run-down south side house on Longfellow Avenue with three guys who worked as puppeteers and used our home as a design and construction space. Then, a beautiful house in Northeast (Nord’east, if you’re from the Twin Cities) painted country blue with bright white trim. It was the opposite of the puppet house-- clean, quiet and not filled with artists’ chaos. Five spacious bedrooms. Its hardwood

floors gleamed, and I filled my lovely, sunny room with lush green plants and bright yellow bedding. After a roommate fallout regarding just how clean the hardwood floors were required to be at all times, I found the perfect home: South Minneapolis, Pillsbury

Avenue. My bedroom was a converted sunroom, windows on three sides looking out to a shady back yard. My roommates--Walden, a sport canoe paddler and construction manager, and Jess, an office assistant and jazz fanatic--were welcoming and laid-back.

There were no disputes about the house being too messy or to clean; we were a happy, platonic family of three. I cooked simple meals for myself in our remodeled kitchen, fell asleep with all the windows open most summer evenings, and drank gin with Walden on weekends in Uptown.

Each of those places suited me, at different points in my life.

In Alaska I was happily lost. I spent my days hiking, playing guitar by the water, and reading late into the evenings, cocooned in a fluffy sleeping bag in my small tent. I was a happy college dropout, having stepped entirely away from real life. 83

Several months later, in the Longfellow house, I was trying to find footing in a city I thought I loved. I’d just returned from Alaska. Broke, I struggled to adjust to the urban chaos, and worried about paying rent and buying food on my temp office worker salary. I was lonely.

In the beautiful country blue house, I’d transitioned from being a temp worker to a full-time business professional. I had goals, a plan. I could drink. I had a real job, a better wardrobe. I started dating. I saw myself as a metropolitan woman.

I believed in moving and change, and in the potential of what I could become in each new place. I was, it seemed, addicted to moving.

The day I looked at that Colorado Springs house with the For Sale sign in the front yard, I I had moved twenty-one times in eight years. No matter where I was, I couldn’t help but imagine myself elsewhere. I liked my life a bit unreliable. I believed things could, if I chose, be undone. On some level, everything was temporary.

Since the farmhouse where I grew up, I hadn’t lived in any one place long enough to love it and claim it. I think I wanted to feel that again. I was beginning to realize that

Colorado had called to me not as just another place to try on and explore for a brief time.

It called me to settle. To earn a place there, and stay long enough to finally again feel the comfort and familiarity that only time can afford.

* * * 84

Nicole and I are out on our first full day of house hunting.

“This is...” I say as we walk through the first house on her list. I’m trying to find the right word. I realize I can’t have a pristine, remodeled home. That I’m a starter-home candidate, and major concessions have to be made. But does it have to smell like pee?

“Crooked,” I say finally, standing in the kitchen, noticing the leaning floors. It is a significant pitch.

Nicole has pulled from the MLS the few homes that are in my price range, within the zip codes I listed. I want to be close to work, in the central part of the city.

This particular house is next to the freeway, a low hum constant as drivers rush south less than half a block from the front door. It’s west of Uintah street, west of

Colorado College, toward Old Colorado City. It’s dark, because of the freeway wall directly east. It has a dirt front yard and a sagging porch with peeling paint. My realtor is silent as we walk through the house, letting me settle on my own first impressions.

“I wonder if I’d feel safe walking around here at night,” I say to her as she examines the kitchen windows and looks out onto the brown back lawn.

“I would not,” she tells me, shaking her head. She walks to the living room and presses on soft floorboards, looks up at the ceiling. “I don’t see you here,” she says.

“I don’t see me here, either.”

“On to the next, then.”

“Yeah, the one south of downtown, right?” 85

“Yes. The neighborhood is better than this one. But not as good as the first place where we met.”

Driving out, we pass a house with boarded windows I’d failed to notice as we arrived. “Meth lab?” I ask Nicole as I point, smiling.

She shrugs. “Who knows. Probably. Sorry--but I thought we’d start with the most affordable options first, so you can get an idea of what we have to work with.”

My mind actually eases. Perhaps all this is is an exercise to determine for certain that I am in fact not ready to purchase a home. Not just because of my limited income, but because of the way my chest tightens when I take slow steps through something that could be mine.

But this could be exactly what I need, I tell myself. You’re just scared. And something else in me inevitably would answer, but something like this ties you somewhere forever.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Or rather, I wanted too many different things:

I wanted another big move, to find a quiet studio somewhere on the west coast where water wasn’t so precious and I could once again breathe cool Pacific air. In

Colorado, I sometimes yearned for water. You can’t grow up in Minnesota and not desire lakes, streams, in more abundance than mountain trickles in the summertime.

I wanted to stay, too. See what I could become as a journalist. Cling to the new, delicate roots I’d just begun to establish. For once, hold tight to friends and familiarity. 86

I wanted to go do something--go backpacking, go on a road trip through the red rock spires of the southwest. Go see Thailand. Go to the grocery store and get a pint of chocolate Haagen Dazs to eat in the bathtub because ice cream and a hot bath never failed to provide clarity.

I was simply filled with want. I wanted to start over, or I wanted to hang on. I wanted to take off. I wanted to settle. I wanted everything I owned to once again fit in a backpack, or I wanted to buy a sofa, a queen-sized bed. I was enthralled with the idea of uprooting but exhausted by it, too. Yet to consider myself settled somewhere felt like such a significant risk. A diversion from the person I’d always imagined myself to be.

Did I know how to stand still, stay put? Did I have more need to uproot and start over remaining in me?

And was Colorado enough to quiet it?

* * *

Four years before I began house hunting, I was oblivious to what longer-term

Colorado Springs residents saw.

As a newcomer to the mountains in 2001, I was elated to wake up in the shadow of Pikes Peak, rising fourteen thousand feet into the sky, part of the solid granite spire of the Rockies that cut Colorado in half--flat eastern plains, mountainous west. I was delighted by the sun that shone every day, and the clear, thin air that left me feeling 87

woozy and gasping after my morning runs, until I acclimated to the elevation. In between my new full-time college schedule, I was motivated to explore it all--every part of the town and every trail that wound its way upward into mountain territory. I discovered St.

Mary’s Falls and the shady paths around Glen Eyrie Mansion, built by Colorado Springs founder General William Jackson Palmer. I sweated up Section 16 trails lined with red rocks and dry, rustling gambel oak. I climbed up Barr Trail that eventually led you to the misty top of Pikes Peak, the same place from which Katherine Lee Bates conjured images of purple mountains and penned “America the Beautiful.”

I visited downtown brewpubs and did homework at West Side coffeehouses, stationed amid tiny dwellings built in the late 1800s, when Colorado City was the capitol of the state. All the people who had proclaimed “Pikes Peak or Bust” during the gold rush had settled there, disappointed, when the rush died out in ‘61.

And I looked at the land, so much flowing endlessly out from the foothills once claimed by the Ute Indians. So unlike Minnesota, so unlike Alaska. Just space, wide and open, and an endless blue dome overhead.

Other things about Colorado Springs I learned only with time.

It was home to five military bases--a gigantic L of armed forces territory cradling the city, running north to south along the Front Range and to the far eastern reaches of

Colorado Springs. First Fort Carson, 137,000 acres of Army lands established immediately following World War II. Then Norad in 1958, a command center for military mysteries buried deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, the myriad silver antennas blinking 88

from the mountaintop the only sign that something manmade existed there, hidden inside miles of granite. Then Peterson Air Force Base to the east, Schriever Air Force Base ten miles further out onto the plains, and at the very north of the city, the United States Air

Force Academy, home to a rotating crew of America’s aspiring young military officers.

So many transient citizens. Around Carson and Pete there sprung up an abundance of dry cleaners and sports bars and strip clubs. After 2001, when soldiers were being shipped off regularly from Carson to Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and returning home vacant and anxious and quick to anger, armed robberies and domestic abuse blossomed in the south parts of the city.

In the north, a different kind of change took place beginning in 1977, when James

Dobson and Focus on the Family made Colorado Springs the headquarters from which they preached about conservative christianity. Six years later, a blonde pastor named Ted

Haggard with a wide, white smile gathered twenty-two people in the basement of his home and called it the beginning of New Life Church. A decade later, it was a 14,000- member mostly white, conservative congregation, housed in a massive sanctuary that was part of New Life’s prayer “campus,” which claimed hundreds of acres directly north of the city. From the brightly lit center stage, microphoned and with his clean-cut image and white smile broadcast on big-screen televisions and his devoted wife and five children in the front row, Pastor Ted preached about good christian family values to his trusting, upper middle class flock. In 2005, Time magazine named him one of the top twenty-five most influential evangelicals in America. 89

All that changed in 2006, when he was caught snorting methamphetamine off a male prostitute’s chest in Denver. Yet Colorado Springs’ image inevitably includes being a beacon to religious and political conservatives.

Some people said you could feel it--the pulse of evangelical christianity and military conservatism flowing through the city like electrical current. As a newcomer I didn’t notice, and when it became apparent, I did not care. Why did any of that matter, with such a magnificent backdrop?

* * *

Nicole and I peek our heads into the house on the far South side of town.

“No,” I say immediately. It smells like cigarette smoke. There are large holes in the living room walls. Through the doorway I see a stove standing alone in an otherwise naked room I assume is meant to be the kitchen.

“No,” Nicole agrees.

I wish I were handy, good with construction. I wish I knew something about remodeling. I wish I had a bigger savings fund.

We return to the car and drive to the next house. It’s south of town, a bit too close to a neighborhood I’ve often visited for work. 90

“This one isn’t so bad,” I say. The carpet is clean, and the kitchen, with a little paint and some new tile to replace the old, cracked linoleum, would be instantly improved. The bedrooms are tiny, but for only me, they would be fine.

“No. It’s do-able, and in your price range,” Nicole answers.

“Close to work,” I offered.

“Can you see yourself here?”

I looked out the living room windows and saw the neighbors’ houses. The view out the bedroom was of the apartment complex nearby.

“I don’t know if I can,” I answered.

I consider all the other places I’ve lived, loved, and ultimately left. None were luxury dwellings. The farmhouse, in fact, was the most modest place I’d ever lived. It was run-down and rust-stained, in need of remodeling my parents couldn’t afford. I knew, from watching them, that having a place is all sorts of work. Work to earn it, keep it, and love it despite its imperfections. Loving the farmhouse was difficult, especially when the snow barricaded the long driveway and the basement flooded in the spring. But we endured it--chopping wood for the old wood stove in the basement, listening to bats in the walls, worrying about the roof leaking or caving in in during bad thunderstorms. After renting for two years, my parents bought the place. I think my mother was relieved. She always says she knew right away that it was supposed to be ours, the first time she walked in. Even with the musty old carpet and the rotting roof. It was a feeling she had. 91

“It just--I dunno. It’s fine,” I continue. “I know it’s fine. It feels not like me, though. I just--I don’t love it. I think I need to, to buy. I need to feel right when I walk in.”

“That’s a good thing to know,” Nicole said. “Let’s be done for today, and do more looking next weekend.”

“Okay,” I say. I am disheartened. And relieved.

* * *

A few nights later, instead of listening to the police scanner at work, I’m trolling the web for houses for sale in Colorado Springs, zip codes 80909 or 80907 or 80903, two bedrooms minimum, $140,000 or less. The options remain slim in that price limit.

After a half hour of disappointing photos, I get a little reckless. I up the price bracket to $145,000. I click a half dozen times. Then I dial Nicole’s cell, speaking quietly.

“I found one I really want to go look at,” I say. “I just sent you the link.”

“Okay, hang on, let me pull it up,” she replies.

A little phone silence.

“Hmm,” Nicole says.

I wait.

“This one actually looks... really fantastic,” she says slowly.

“I know. I know! Did you see the kitchen?” 92

“I did. Great sunlight. It’s a few thousand over budget, Bobbi--”

“Iknowbutjustafew,” I say immediately. “I think it’s worth looking at.”

“I think it’s worth looking at too,” Nicole says, encouragement in her tone. “It’s only been on the market eight days. I’ll set up the appointment for early Saturday afternoon.”

“Thanks. See you then.”

That Friday night, I’m working the closing shift at Montague’s coffee house. It’s a little English tea room and restaurant on south Tejon street, just as downtown Colorado

Springs stretched into the southwest, toward the ultra-fancy Broadmoor Hotel. My friend

Jen, a good college pal who worked as a crew leader for a trail-building nonprofit group during the week, supplemented her income by working a few shifts a week at

Montague’s. Several months earlier, I’d mentioned I needed to start saving some money, and she told me I should stop in and meet the owner, pick up a few shifts a week. At the time, it wasn’t for a house payment. It was for a newer car, and a trip to a place I hadn’t yet decided.

“How much you got saved up now?” Jen asks me from the dish room, as she hoses down the industrial-sized soup pots. Mist from the hose sprays her dark curls. I take the clean pot from her and place it in the high storage rack above the prep counter.

“About three thousand,” I answer. “Helps to be paid under the table here.” Jeff, the owner, keeps most employees off the books and pays cash, and the tips are good. 93

“Bet you’re tired,” she says, scraping congealed pumpkin tomato soup from a stack of crusted bowls. It’s the house speciality. It starts with sautéing chopped vegetables in a full pound of butter. No wonder people like it.

“Yeah. I could do with a night off,” I say, beginning to break down the sandwich prep line. I’m in the newsroom forty hours a week and at Montague’s about twenty-five. I haven’t had a day off in months.

But the money has slowly been accruing. Not an impressive amount, but more than I’ve ever had in the bank before.

“You looked at any more places?” she asks, smiling.

“Just looking at one more this weekend,” I say. “Nothing else has come up. I probably won’t find anything, you know?”

“Mmm hmmm,” she says, smiling.

* * *

Nicole works with the lock box while I wait.

I survey the outside from the front stoop -- stucco painted a rosy tan with dark green trim. New fence. Woody lilacs bushes with tiny buds. Quiet street, no neighbors with decrepit vehicles on blocks in their front yards. More, perhaps, than a first-time homebuyer on a strict budget could hope for in this city.

She swings the door open slowly. We step inside. 94

I walk from the sunny, open living area into the kitchen. Sliding glass doors out onto a patio. Tile backsplash. Hanging pot rack in the corner. Gas stove. New cupboards.

Big, deep farmhouse sink.

Across the hall, a tiny bathroom barely large enough for one person to stand in. A closet with a washer and dryer. Nothing special.

I return to the living area. Exposed brick along the breakfast bar. Large windows.

So much sun. The seller has left little notes around the house, written in a round, bouncy hand: All appliances stay! Hardwood floors just refinished! New water heater!

I walk toward the bedrooms. They are small, carpeted, each with one large window facing west.

When I walk into the main bedroom, Pikes Peak greets me. Over the fence, through the leafy trees, I see it. White-topped, waiting for me to notice.

The house isn’t extravagant. It has only basic amenities. There is no garage. The driveway is rock, not pavement or cement. It is a basic stucco bungalow. Simple, clean and sunny. Yet I know, right now, seconds after walking in the front door, that it is right.

Standing here with the mountain before me, I feel certain.

I turn to Nicole.

“I want this one,” I said.

* * * 95

There was a time when I needed nothing more than to leave, to disappear from one place and reinvent myself in another. A time when I only needed a backpack, and when uncertainty surrounded me yet I still slept soundly at night.

Now, the opposite rang true. I wanted something definite, something as rooted as the massive mountain out that bedroom window. And it was okay, I realized, to want that.

I was no longer the careless eighteen-year-old who dropped out of college. I wasn’t the 19-year-old tent-dweller in Alaska, or the 20-year-old in Minneapolis.

I was twenty-five. Not so far away from those more restless years, but more capable. I’d learned how to be okay alone, in my unreliable life.

My chosen career path was eternally unreliable, both the state of the journalism business and my current beat, my daily work life. One week the paper may be laying off several friends deemed disposable. The next week, they’d be talking pay cuts. Daily, my job could mean anything. There was no regular schedule. Early on I appreciated this. I liked not knowing if I’d be running out the door with the police scanner to a fire or a car crash, or if I’d be sitting quietly in the office, working on a long-term project and listening to mundane scanner chatter.

But it grew tiresome. I began to feel tied to the scanner, having to carry it with me no matter where I was. I dreaded the dead soldier notifications from Fort Carson army base, knowing I’d have to call up a wife or mother or husband and ask them questions that made them cry, or yell. I couldn’t control much about my work environment. The new wore off quickly. 96

The community I’d built in college and through my career was disintegrating.

Friends were moving away for graduate school, different jobs, or to teach English in foreign countries. People I was once close with became long-distance acquaintances. I ended a long-term relationship with a man I thought at one point I might marry. A time zone away, my parents and sister were distant, each recovering in their own ways from divorce.

The house would mean, I thought, that I would finally be able to discard the deep- seated fear that I’d left my one true home and could not return, the worry that I’d wandered so long I’d never truly feel at home anywhere. I would make it happen, I decided. Amid all the uncertainty, I would have one certain thing--a place of my own, where I could stand still.

* * *

“It’s been wonderful to work with you Ms. Sankey,” the loan officer says on closing day. “Always a pleasure to work with such young buyers. Twenty-five--well aren’t you ambitious.” I nod and smile as I sign, sign, sign. My hand goes numb and my signature progresses from my familiar, legible script to a quick scrawl. There are a thousand documents to sign, saying I owe this, have received such-and-such, that realtors will receive so many dollars and the seller, Melissa, will pay certain fees. She and I met 97

for coffee a few weeks earlier ,and she showed me her house scrapbook, all the remodeling she’d done on her own. I admire her.

“Well, we’re all done here,” the closing agent finally declares, organizing her stacks of paper.

Nicole turns to me and smiles. “Congratulations, Bobbi,” she says, reaching to hug me. “You’re a homeowner.”

It feels surreal.

I want the keys. I want to go there by myself to sit and let it sink in. There in the title company’s conference room, I ignore completely the small, internal voice that rises.

But you always leave. What makes you think this is different? It’s part of your nature.

You’ve just added another damn level of difficulty to your life.

Yes, it’s part of my nature, I tell myself as I drive away from the office and toward the house. But so is seeking the right place. That, at my core, is why I’ve moved so much.

No place has been exactly right.

This one is.

I place the key quietly in to the front door lock and step into the open living area.

Sunlight floods the room, spilling out in warm squares on the hardwood floor. I open the four large windows and let in the brisk February breeze.

There, in the middle of all that new emptiness, I take a deep breath. “This place is yours,” I tell myself. 98

And I will make it mine, on my own. I’ll paint walls and fill the house with meaningful things--good art, good books. I will enjoy meals on the patio and eat ice cream in the bathtub at 2 a.m. if I feel like it. I will embrace my life here and will not think that a year from now I might have to move. Here I will choose to be rooted, like an old pine tree, and will begin anew. And in doing so, I will cleanse my own yearning, wandering spirit. I will change jobs, change other things, as I need. But this place will remain. Work has made this place mine. Time will make it home. Each day I will wake to my view of the Peak. Ladder to the Moon, Part 1

June 2007

We begin in Colorado. Just Jarrad and me.

The foothills of the Rockies are flush with fluttering green aspens and leggy pines. As we drive south, clouds stretch across the sky like long ivory tabletops. Slowly, the lush hills grow spotty and sparse and the color palette simpler--sapphire sky, sienna earth, tiny yellow flowers dotting the roadside like confetti. We pass over the Conejos River and head up La Manga Pass. On the other side, red desert takes hold. Peaks turn evil-looking, hot rock crumbling and jagged, and distant tendrils of smoke rise from a new fire to the south. It is wildfire season once again in the west.

We enter New Mexico. As the miles tick by, we listen to acoustic songs that fade into one another. Out on the desert now and feeling lost, Josh Ritter sings, and we roll the windows down to let in the inevitable dust. We pass a natural amphitheater hundreds of feet high, carved out of solid ancient rock, so deep it swallows all sound and tosses back wild echoes.

And then tall, gray Mount Pedernal appears, standing watch over the entire valley.

Beyond its flat top, the turquoise Abiquiu reservoir glitters amid the baked brown earth.

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And I know we are close. We have entered the tip of the Colorado Plateau, 130,000 square miles of craggy badlands that blanket the Four Corners region of the United

States. It is red rock country, peppered with domes and spires, slot canyons and cliffs. It encompasses the Grand Canyon, Zion, Arches National Monument where Edward Abbey lived in a silver trailer and ranted at tourists, Mesa Verde with its ancient Anasazi ruins.

And this place, the gateway to the northern New Mexico part of the plateau, with

Pedernal its single grand marker. The Navajo say their spirit Changing Woman, who personifies earth, the turn of the seasons and the universe’s natural order, was born on mountain’s narrow chimney top.

We round a slow turn and wind down into the Piedra Lumbre--the Valley of Shining

Stone, named for the surrounding cliffs stacked in layers of yellow, red, white. Each marks a distinct era of geological history, and the oldest reaches back 200 million years.

Cliffs of heaven, they have been called.

I’ve read these things, and heard stories about a mysterious old ranch at the end of a long gravel road in the desert. But I’ve not visited until now. I’m wandering around northern New Mexico with a man I haven’t seen in two years, whom I used to love, who says it’s a place I must see. We turn slowly from blacktop to gravel and head toward the secret place called Ghost Ranch.

* * * 101

“We should stop, I want a picture,” I say as we rumble up the washboard gravel road.

A gigantic stacked cloud looms over the highest part of the mesa directly before us.

“That’s where we’re going to be hiking later--Kitchen Mesa,” Jarrad tells me as he pulls the car over to the beaten yellow grass alongside the gravel road. “I can’t wait for you to see the top.”

“How long will it take us to get up there?”

“Oh, couple hours.”

I take photos from several angles, the towering gray and white cloud looming over the high rock walls. When the sun peeks through, the cliffs do seem to shine.

We park in the gravel lot and visit the main ranch house. It is modest, with a small office, a cozy gift shop, a meeting place for tours and a brief display about the painter

Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived at Ghost Ranch in the 30s and 40s and eventually made it her permanent home. She claimed the badlands of New Mexico, painting the low red hills, shimmering canyon spires and the clean white bones she found scattered among the hills.

We fill up our water bottles and walk out past the chapel and pool and dining hall, beyond Ghost Ranch proper. There is a labyrinth of small white stones glittering in the red dirt, outlining the careful path one should walk while meditating. We pass a swaybacked gray burro in a large weedy pen, its small muzzle resting on a the top portion of a splintered fence. Then, a weathered sign reading “Kitchen Mesa” points us to the right, and we turn onto a trail through dusty creosote. 102

An hour later, the trail up the mesa is disappearing before us, consumed by hot red rocks.

“It’s getting steep,” I say, stopping to wipe my brow beneath my orange baseball cap and take a gulp of water. Mid-morning, and the sun is high and unrelenting. The clouds have all drifted off, the sky a fierce blue.

“It will be worth it when we get to the top,” Jarrad says, the back of his red T-shirt darkening with sweat the more we climb. “Hey, see that flag on the side of the rock there?”

He points to a faded green swipe painted on a large boulder a few hundred feet away.

“Yeah, easier to do those instead of cairns I suppose,” I huff. I’m used to Colorado’s high-alpine trails, with small stacks of rock easily visible from thin, grassy places above treeline to mark the trail. It is different in the southwest, where you have rocks for trail and more rocks to guide your way.

“I painted them when I was a kid, and those green cans hanging in the branches, too,” he says. “We came out and flagged this trail for a service project one year with the church youth group.” He points to other markers and painted cans speared by tree limbs along the faint trail, switchbacking up and up.

“It’s neat they’re still here,” I say. “Your church projects were way cooler than ours.”

Jarrad was raised Unitarian, with water ceremonies, coming-of-age days and sweat lodge visits alongside Buddhists and Catholics, Atheists and Humanists and Jews, men wearing 103

dresses or ladies holding hands. My own Lutheran upbringing meant ages-old hymns and the same empty creeds uttered every Sunday, and potlucks in the church basement.

“I’d always wanted to show this to you,” Jarrad says. “I’m glad you’re here, that you wanted to come. I didn’t know if you would.”

Jarrad and I met in Colorado during college. A few years later we dated briefly, spending a long, lazy summer hiking around Colorado and reading to each other in my tiny bedroom. I was a reporter for the local newspaper, and he’d just received his acceptance letter from Georgetown University School of Medicine, after being an Air

Force medic for ten years.

When he moved east, our easy, comfortable times together ended. I only visited once,

finding Washington D.C. sweltering and chaotic. And medicine was a jealous mistress,

Jarrad told me, even without two time zones dividing us. He was drowning in schoolwork just a few months into his first year. That October, he said he couldn’t be with me anymore.

Two years later, I emailed him out of the blue--not with hope of reuniting, but simply out of friendship. We began talking again. He suggested we meet for dinner while he was visiting Colorado on his two-week summer break. No, I said, we should do an overnight camping trip. He said a road trip would be even better--four or five days completely away. After two long years of solid studying in a city he didn’t enjoy, Jarrad said he could use a trip to the desert. To Ghost Ranch, where he’d spent time every summer as a kid. 104

I agreed because I loved its name and because I had once loved him, deeply, and couldn’t make myself say no.

So we took up our old, familiar habit of loading our backpacks, rolling the car windows down, and driving backroads of the west with the music on and sun baking our arms. We stayed overnight in Santa Fe, where we browsed art galleries and ate enchiladas on a patio that glowed under the sway of hanging colored lanterns. The following morning we woke early and drove, the streetlights and touristy shops of the city quickly gave way to empty, open scrub land.

We continue climbing and reach a narrow passageway through large boulders on the side of the mountain.

“This is the one hard part, and we’re almost to the top,” Jarrad says, taking a gulp of water. Sweat runs down his brow. “We just have to climb a bit to get through this section, and then the trail flattens out.”

“I don’t know how I’ll get up there,” I say, eyeing the huge boulder and the narrow cavern of rocks beyond it.

“I’ll go first. I’ll steady my legs and then help you up.”

I go slow, worrying about broken ankles or cracked skulls, knowing we are miles from help. We make our way up the crevasse one foothold at a time. Jarrad points out hand grips and steady places, and I follow. 105

Beyond it we make a sharp turn and tackle one more short, steep climb. The red rocks even out and fade in color, stretching wide and flat. The top of the mesa is peppered with fallen remnants of juniper and cedar trees, gray and weathered by decades of harsh sun.

The ground beneath our feet is crumbling gypsum, clean and white as flower petals. We walk up one last short hill and finally, sun-baked and sweaty, we reach the mesa’s edge.

Pedernal is almost misty in the distance, and acres of scrub brush pan out before it. We stand there together.

“You can see Chimney Rock way over there,” Jarrad points out. “We can climb that at night, if the moon is bright.”

“It’s so amazing. And so quiet,” I say. It is a kind of silence I’ve never experienced.

There is no traffic noise or city hum in the distance. Just wide-open quiet, with silent ravens drifting high in the impossibly blue sky.

We sit for a long time, watching. We breathe in the stillness with the full, hot sun on our shoulders. I feel for the first time in long years that I am in a place where I can marvel at something.

“So,” Jarrad says, and then pauses a long time. “Are we...together?

His voice comes out tangled with hope and confusion, breaking the deep silence. It is a question I knew was coming.

“I...don’t know,” I say.

He turns to me, his face serious. 106

“I know it would be hard for you. I know what I’m asking. But I promise, I will never let you go again.”

I keep my gaze on Pedernal’s distant outline, and then watch the tiny black shape of a raven circle above me. A thousand questions fill my mind. There are so many possibilities and problems that being together would create.

Here is Jarrad, with me again like no time has passed. Who entered the classroom in

Air Force fatigues the night we met, five years previous, and sat next to me. Who wrote me letters from a war zone. Who spent a summer living out of a backpack stashed in a corner of my tiny apartment, hiking and traveling with me, reading me short stories in bed. Who left, quitting on me and everything else in his life in order to survive school.

Who then brought me here to show me the desert, his most-loved place, as a kind of apology.

And here am I, finally settled in a place. I’ve claimed Colorado Springs and made a home. I love my life, and have been able to ignore the occasional restless feelings that rise, telling me to move, leave, begin again somewhere new.

I don’t know what I need or want. I wonder if this, us, is the right thing. How is it that being with him now can feel as though we’ve been together so long?

It could seem impossible--the timing, the distance dividing us, my Colorado roots, and the medical pursuits that claim so much of his life.

Or it could seem simple. A single choice--yes, or no. All else could fall into place, if we try. 107

But the fact remains: I can have Colorado and the mountains, or I can have him. Not both. Leaving: Pikes Peak morning

November 2007

I wake before sunrise, after a mostly sleepless night.

In the middle of my bare bedroom, I roll up the green Thermarest pad I use for backpacking and fold my sleeping bag. Since the moving sale, I’ve been camping in my own house, a squatter in unfamiliar territory. It is empty of all the things that had made it mine.

I walk out to the bare living room. Across the street, just over the roof of my neighbor’s house, a faint orange glow simmers.

In the bathroom I wash my face and dress in jeans and a comfortable long-sleeved

fleece. I pack my pajamas and a few remaining toiletries in my small green backpack. I pull on my weathered cowboy boots, with the honey-colored old leather and worn down heels. I carry everything I have left in the house to the front door.

Outside, the sky has turned midnight blue and velvet indigo, the dark receding as the orange glow in the east intensifies.

At the door, my guitar case waits. It is camel-colored, covered with hundreds of stickers--bands, brew pub logos, bumper stickers. The ones that say Alaska Airlines

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FRAGILE are faded now, bleached by years of Colorado summer sun. Duct tape still holds parts of the case together. I grab the handle and open the front door.

Brisk November air hits my face in a swift gale, and I feel instantly awake. I smell dried brown leaves, and the frosty twinge to the morning tells me autumn is nearly over.

It has snowed in the mountains already, but not the foothills. The final bit of the season lingers, waiting to see me off.

In my yard, a FOR SALE sign is staked. Stiff grass crunches as I walk to my white Subaru wagon and open the back passenger door. Most of my things I packed last night. I secure the Gibson behind a box of cookware and kitchen utensils and a duffel bag of clothing and shoes. Behind the passenger seat I stuff my sleeping bag and pad.

In the small cargo area there are books, some blankets, and a box of my old sketchbooks and journals. They span the last ten years: books full of high school poems and song lyrics and pictures of my old band. An Alaska journal with tattered, water- stained edges. And the Colorado journals--in drawings, scribbled words, song lyrics and lines of poetry, they document those first early months of exploring, my college years, my isolated time in Craig, and my rediscovery of Colorado Springs. They document hiking trails, friends, jobs, and some men. All searches, it seems to me now--for the right path, the right place, the right person.

A few short months ago, it became clear that I cannot have all those things at the same time. Today, I make a tradeoff. 110

My warm breath puffs white as I walk around the car, check tires, make sure everything in the backseat is secure. To the east, the orange glow is boiling up and over rooftops like a looming wildfire. A brilliant fuchsia burns below it. Why now, on my last morning in this city, do I notice how glorious the sunrises are from my own living room windows?

I head back inside and grab my small backpack, lying on the breakfast bar between the dining area and kitchen. I sling the pack over my shoulder, flip the kitchen light switch off, and walk to the door. On the hardwood floor, my boots softly echo. I turn and face the room, knowing I’ve made all the preparations but running through them one more time: deep clean of the entire place, done. Furnace off. All windows locked.

Patio doors locked. Shed locked. Realtor will turn off water soon. Neighbor Stan has my number if problems arise. There is nothing else to do.

I step outside, locking the front door behind me. I walk to my car, get in, push in the clutch and brake, and start the engine. The gas tank is full. Next to me, my iPod contains road trip playlists that friends gave me at my going-away gathering a few nights ago.

Before I make my way out to the highway, I stop in the Safeway parking lot at

Circle Drive. I walk in and purchase a large black tea from Starbucks, the only place open this early. I add milk and head back outside.

In the empty parking lot, I sit on the hood of my car. And for a long time, I simply watch the light. The sunrise breaks wide open, illuminating the entire sky and spilling a 111

pink-orange blanket over the foothills. High cirrus clouds over Pikes Peak are indigo, then violet, then turn to orange as the light stretches all the way up the mountains.

I wonder, in this moment, how I ever thought leaving would be the right thing. I have never felt like I belong more in a place. Here, exposed under this vast sky, I feel that

I belong. What could be home now, after this? What do I know, if not Colorado?

I know this: no sunrises can be viewed from a 400-square foot basement studio apartment in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. The Russian Embassy is in the way, with its bland yellow cement walls. A sky like the glorious one before me is unfathomable in a part of the country where stores and bus stops and streetlights decorate every corner.

But I said yes that day on top of the mesa, knowing it would eventually require this. I believe it will be worth it, and that I am making the right choice. I will say this to myself for the next three days, as I drive east. Right until I show up at his doorstep and see his face.

So I watch, still and quiet, until the hushed peace of early morning is washed away. I appreciate being by myself. And then I get in my car, start the engine, and turn the wheels east. Leaving is something I do alone. Arrival: Bed on the Beltway

November 2007

“Where are you?” Jarrad asks.

“On the beltway. In traffic,” I answer.

“Yeah, welcome to D.C.,” he says. “City of stand-still freeways.”

“Hopefully I’ll see you in an hour,” I say, taking my car out of gear and coming to a complete halt. Far ahead, I see only red brake lights.

“Let’s make it two.”

Ninety minutes later, I’m creeping south into Georgetown. The four-lane beltway around Washington D.C. has narrowed into a two-lane highway teeming with cars, buses and bicyclists. Large brick apartment complexes, restaurants, shops and bus stops line the streets. I pass the towering National Cathedral and turn right on Tunlaw Road, adjacent to bustling Wisconsin Avenue. A half mile down, directly behind the Russian Embassy, is

Jarrad’s apartment building.

My apartment building.

I find a space to squeeze my car and park. After stretching my lower back and sore knees, I walk toward Jarrad’s red front door. Outside, the temperature is fifteen

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degrees warmer than when I left Colorado three days earlier. There fall was finishing up, the Aspen trees almost naked. Here, one day before Thanksgiving, it is balmy. Autumn seems to have barely arrived--the grass is green and lush, and vivid red maples and yellowing elm and oak leaves rustle in a light breeze.

I turn a corner and there Jarrad stands, waiting. Bare feet, jeans, a loose gray button-up shirt, hands in his pockets. Smiling at me. He reaches out.

I relax into his arms and breathe in his familiar smell. As I exhale, I try to release the past few months of anxiety--trying to sell my house without success, selling nearly everything I owned, leaving my place empty and hoping for renters or buyers. I had said farewell to my good community of friends. I had left my mountains. All of it had been for this single moment, here on Jarrad’s stoop.

“You’re here,” he says.

“I am,” I answer, my lips against his neck.

“Welcome home.”

His studio is in the basement of the complex next to the laundry room, its two windows offering a view of brick window wells. There are two neat, narrow bookshelves, and a small table with a microwave. The tiny kitchen consists of a mini fridge, a single sink, and one foot of counter space. Jarrad’s desk sits in one corner, laden with papers and stacks of medical texts. In the opposite corner, a lumpy futon mattress slumps on the

floor. It is an entirely utilitarian space, ideal for someone who needs only a place to shower and sleep between classes and hospital shifts and the other demands of medical 114

school. I’ve been here a few times, as a visitor. But it is so much different now that I will be calling it home.

“We need a real bed,” I say.

“Yeah, the futon serves me well enough, but I know it’s not ideal for the both of us. It’d be nice to get a new one.”

“You drive,” I say, handing him the keys.

“Now?”

“Why not? Tomorrow’s a holiday.” Our plan is to spend Thanksgiving weekend settling in, since Jarrad doesn’t have to be at the hospital.

Four hours later, we are exiting IKEA with a queen-sized mattress, a plain pine bed frame, and some new bedding. We’ve taken my Subaru instead of Jarrad’s black Jetta because of one feature: the sunroof.

“This isn’t going to work,” I say as we lob the mattress on top of my roof.

“Might be sketchy,” Jarrad replies. “But we’ve got some rope.”

We wrap rope around the mattress in several directions and tie the ends to door handles. Inside the car, through the open sunroof, I grip the rope with one hand and grasp a handful of the plastic surrounding the mattress with the other.

We eek out of the parking lot and back toward the beltway, mattress hanging over all sides of the car. Then we begin picking up speed on the freeway on-ramp.

“Oooh, ooh--it’s flapping! Slower!” I shout as the mattress bucks against the roof in the increasing wind. I laugh, trying to tighten my sweaty grip. 115

“Got it,” Jarrad replies, reaching to grasp a portion of the plastic as we attempt to merge. No driver is willing to let us in, so we are relegated to the shoulder of the highway, our left blinker flashing.

“Let me in, jackasses,” Jarrad says to the impenetrable line of traffic. He reaches down to shift from third to fourth gear. “It’s slipping!” I call as we pick up more speed.

“Pull down, pull down!” he said, trying to both steer and shift, giggling as other drivers honk their horns and cast disdainful glares at our pitiful setup.

“Ooh! There’s an opening,” I say, pointing to a half-car length window of space between a black SUV and a semi trailer.

“Pull down hard!” Jarrad yells. “I’m going to go for it!”

I rise up to my knees in my seat, smash my head against the mattress, shove my right arm beneath the mattress and as far out of the sunroof as I can, and grasp the plastic- covered mattress side, pulling it down with all my weight. Jarrad guns the gas, and we

finally sneak into the lane.

“Sweet,” he says. “Now just thirty miles left to go. Who needs a moving truck?”

“Mrrph,” I say into the plastic. Big City, Small World

January 2008

Washington D.C. was a fishbowl. Self-contained, guarded by glass. A city of energy and noise, flickering, fading in and out, changing from block to block. Taxi cabs whisked by, weaving like centipedes on the narrow Georgetown side streets. Buses with large glowing windows growled and prowled, their engines spitting out great clouds of black exhaust. Music from BMWs blared and bumped. Revelers laughed in the dim,

flickering light of restaurant windows. People doing their wash in laundromats were bathed in sallow yellow light. Storefronts everywhere reflected streetlights, car lights.

Apartment windows flickered high above the crowded streets, and row house bay windows offered a sneak peak of the life inside through heavy drapes. The Key Bridge over the wide Potomac River was forever stuffed with cars, bumper to bumper, while joggers and bikers and runners whizzed by on the pedestrian trail alongside them.

Once, before I’d ever visited D.C., Jarrad had mentioned the Potomac river. I’d said, “Great, can we raft that?” He had laughed, knowing that to me, living in Colorado,

“river” meant gushing whitewater and paddling a small raft through narrow, rocky canyons. He’d replied, “Bobbi, people sail the Potomac,” he’d corrected. “No rafts.

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Think yachts.”

That idea summed up my new city well. Think yachts. Everyday people need not apply. My new neighborhood was filled with Georgetown types: businesses people and lawyers, hill staffers and lobbyists, all stalking deliberately down the streets while speaking into the tidy, black electronic cockroaches attached to their ears. Senators ran by on their early morning jogs. Flitting, carefree undergrads filtered out from Tombs,

Georgetown students’ preferred bar. Medical students in short white coats streamed in and out of the hospital doors, trudging up and down Reservoir Road to and from their classes or shifts. Busy crowds of people tromped merrily toward back-alley clubs on

Wisconsin Avenue or M Street.

I felt like the answer to “Which one is different and does not belong?” An unsophisticated girl without a high-profile job, who worked for an embarrassing salary at a tiny nonprofit. I didn’t wear heels or business suits, I drove a rusty Subaru, and I sometimes stretched across park picnic tables at night beneath big trees and pretended I was in nature. Those first early months, I was deeply homesick. When I thought of

Colorado, my chest ached.

January was dark and sleety, and we spent more time than normal in our studio.

One evening during dinner, Jarrad was working on updating my computer’s operating system. I made us macaroni and cheese, and we sat cross-legged in the middle of our 118

apartment to eat. We had no dining area or table, but we enjoyed our nightly carpet picnics. We ate while data transferred, and then Jarrad returned to the screen.

“Uh oh,” he said, clicking the mouse several times.

“What?” I asked from the kitchen.

“Well--give me a minute, let me figure it out.”

“Tell me.”

“Your photos,” he said. “I thought I transferred them all over to the external hard drive before dumping everything, but now it’s telling me they’re not there.”

“How can they be not there?” I asked. I placed the dish I was washing in the dry rack and went to peer over his shoulder. “They have to be there.”

It was a collection I’d been working on since moving to Colorado in 2001. More than a thousand of my favorite images: me atop mountain summits, shimmering yellow aspens in the fall beneath Cottonwood Pass, snow-covered peaks, brewpub nights with friends, rafting and camping weekends. And at least one photo of every trail I’d ever hiked.

“I don’t know,” Jarrad said, doubt in his voice. Twenty minutes later, after reading web forums and consulting Apple support, he said, “What happened is that the icons were there, in the file on the external hard drive. Like placeholders. But the actual photo data wasn’t completely transferred yet.”

“Oh. Well how do we get it back?”

“I began the new install before the data transferred.” 119

“Well stop the install,” I said.

“It’s already in progress Bobbi,” he answered.

“Yeah, I get it, but how to we retrieve the data?”

Slowly Jarrad said, “We...don’t.”

“What? No. I’m sure there’s some way we can re-boot or take it to someplace to

find them or --”

“There isn’t,” he said, setting the laptop aside and joining me on the bed. “I’m sure. I’m so sorry, Bobbi. I really didn’t know. I never would have done it then. You know that. I...they’re gone.”

“They’re not gone,” I snapped. “It’s stupid, to think all my Colorado stuff could just be gone.”

Silence. I turned to look out our window, seeing only the dirty brick window well and steady sleet under the glow of streetlights.

“It’s not your fault,” I finally choked. I covered my face with my hands and sobbed. He placed a hand on my knee, a long arm around my shoulders, and let me cry for a long time.

March 2008

“VA Property,” I said. It was four in the morning. 120

“Huh?” Jarrad responded from the kitchen, packing himself a lunch for the day.

We’d installed a small light beneath the cupboards for him to use when preparing for work, so that I might sleep better. I woke up anyway. It was inevitable in our small space.

It became a habit, waking up with Jarrad no matter how early he rose. Sometimes, it was the only time of day we had to talk.

“Your scrubs. That’s what it says across your butt in bold letters.”

“Oh, yeah. The VA hospital requires me to wear these. Can’t wear my normal ones.”

“Why the big label? As if you’d want to run off with them.” They were a hideous seafoam green, not the navy or black he preferred because they hid stains and patients’ bodily fluids.

“At least they’re free,” he said.

“True. And a fun reminder that your ass belongs to the hospital,” I said, tossing a pillow in his direction.

He laughed. “For about four and a half more years, it does.”

“And then?”

“And then residency will be over and life might be normal,” he responded. He walked to his desk, loaded a few books and his stethoscope into his messenger bag, and then came to the bed to bend down and kiss me on the cheek.

“Seems a bit too far away to be thinking about just yet,” I said.

“Tell me about it. I’ll see you sometime tomorrow afternoon.” 121

“Text me when you’re on your way home, and I’ll walk your way. Love you.”

“Sounds good,” he said. “I love you too.”

In the three months we’d lived together, I’d gained far more respect for what

Jarrad was trying to accomplish. When I’d been in Colorado and he’d been too tired to talk on the phone, I sometimes grew frustrated. Once we shared space and I witnessed his daily rhythm, the reality was sobering. His entire life was studying and work. I lived with three versions of Jarrad: usually, it was Exhausted Jarrad. Sometimes it was Zombie

Jarrad, beyond all hope, who just needed to sleep. Only occasionally did Well-Rested

Jarrad appear.

Every day, without question or complaint, he rose, studied, went to work.

Standard work hours and weekends meant nothing. Holidays meant nothing. There was always another rotation, forever another test, and a greedy, growing amount of pressure as medical school progressed. I could only watch him struggle to study, pass tests, and juggle his crushing workload.

Some days, when he got out of the hospital at a reasonable hour, I would walk down the hill toward campus. Jarrad would walk north through Rock Creek Park or along

Reservoir Road. Somewhere along the way, we’d meet. Strolling back together, he would tell me about the patients he saw or the procedures he practiced that day. I’d tell him about any news at my office. Sometimes we wouldn’t say much at all, and just walked with our hands clasped along blocks and blocks of row houses and parked cars, on our way toward home. 122

I’d never been anyone’s partner. In a situation where I learned quickly that I was helpless, because the struggles of medical school were mainly his, I learned to wake early to talk with him. Walk down the hill to meet him. Like seeing he had clean scrubs or making him a decent meal on the nights he was home, they were small things I could do.

I learned too not to always wait for him. When he was gone for long periods of time, during those early months when I had no friends, I walked alone. I strolled to coffee shops to work or write. On weekends I walked to Whole Foods for grocery stapes, to the gigantic Barnes and Noble on M Street to browse aisles of books for hours. I walked the

C&O Canal, walked over the Key Bridge into Virginia. I walked down Embassy Row to

Dupont Circle.

In Colorado, things sprawled. No more room for the people, the buildings and roads? Go further east, out onto the endless plains. But the nation’s capital was a tight cluster. A series of crowded neighborhoods wound together by narrow, snaking roads.

Narrow, stately row houses of brick with petite wrought iron fences stretched three or four stories high. Every bit of space was claimed by buildings, roads or sidewalks. Parks were small and packed with people. Rock Creek Park, the large swath of land that ran from Virginia through D.C. and all the way to Maryland, thrummed with energy--runners, bikers, dog walkers. Space was finite, and people were everywhere you turned.

But by walking alone, I discovered delightful secrets: A hidden trail off Reservoir

Road through the trees, so I didn’t have to breathe constant car exhaust. An alley off M

Street with a small creek and quiet, secluded benches. A fountain down by the Potomac, 123

where I could see the Kennedy Center across the river. A tiny coffee shop with a great tea selection and a shady back patio. They became my urban retreats.

I’d lost my photo collection and decided it was a sign: don’t hang on. Remember

Craig. If you yearn for things too long, you allow them to become bigger than they really are. Don’t lose sight of what’s here by yearning for what’s not, I told myself. Colorado is gone. For now.

So I began collecting city places and city routes, and they came to feel like mine, just as St. Mary’s Falls and Waldo Canyon in Colorado Springs had. I walked through

Rock Creek Park, imagining myself in deep, far away woods.

September 2008

Seth’s bearded face peered around my office door. It was 4 p.m. on a Friday.

“What are you up to tonight, Bobbi?”

“No plans,” I said. “Home I guess. Food.”

“Jarrad working out west still? Arizona, right?”

“Yeah, he won’t be home until January.”

“Right,” Seth said. “Nice of him, having you move here and then bailing on you for three months to go back west himself.”

“The things we do for love,” I said, fake-fluttering my eyelashes. “What about you?

Maureen coming down?” 124

“Planned to, then bailed,” Seth answered. His longtime girlfriend was a first-year law student in Philadelphia and had moved away the previous summer. Sometimes she visited on weekends, but often she cancelled due to her school load.

“Sorry. I know how that goes. Lame.”

“Yeah it is,” Seth said, coming in to my office and taking a seat across from me. “So

I’ve been on the Hill all day in policy meetings, and I’m done for the weekend. Would you be interested in joining me for Shabbat?”

“Does it involve leaving the office in a few minutes? If so, I’m interested,” I answered. I’d been writing copy for a catalog all day and scouring photo archives for good images. I was bleary-eyed. I had been promoted from outreach coordinator to communications manager at our small nonprofit, and I worked a lot. Especially that particular fall, because Jarrad was on the road for months.

“Definitely,” Seth said.

“And what is Shabbat, exactly?”

“Jew thing,” he said. “Come over and I’ll cook you dinner.”

An hour later, we’d taken the metro to Seth’s Columbia Heights neighborhood, walked through the cold sleet to the grocery store for chicken, garlic and some potatoes, and retreated to his studio apartment.

“Sorry. It’s a shoebox. But cheap,” Seth said, moving clutter aside to make some space in his tiny kitchen. 125

“Hey, you’ve seen where we live. The finest rathole in Georgetown,” I answered, unpacking the bag of groceries I’d bought. “You’ve got a way better kitchen.”

“You’re right, it does have more than two cupboards. Fancy,” Seth agreed.

“And a full-sized luxury refrigerator,” I said, sweeping my hand like one of Bob

Barker’s Price is Right girls across the duct tape holding the fridge door closed.

Seth unpeeled the tape and reached inside. “Yours for the bargain price of eight hundred a month. Here,” he said, pulling the top off a frosty brown bottle with a yellow and purple label. “Have a Golden Monkey. Belgian. Amazing.”

I sat on the floor and took a long drink. Seth began prep work, refusing my offers to peel potatoes or cut chicken. We talked about work and Seth’s plans to quit and establish his own consulting firm, and we discussed where Jarrad and I might go for residency, since he would finish medical school in the spring. Ohio was near the top of our list, I told Seth, and he told me a bit about living in Wooster for his college years.

A half hour later, he declared, “Food’s about ready. Let’s give Maureen a call and wish her happy Shabbat.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“Give Jarrad a call too?”

“He’s in the ER late. I’ll call on my way home. You dial Maureen, I’ll make us plates.”

They talked briefly while I assembled our dinner. With Maureen on speaker phone,

Seth sang a short prayer in Yiddish. 126

“Happy Shabbat, friends,” he said at the end.

“Happy Shabbat, Bobbi,” Maureen said. “Glad you’re there. Sorry I’m missing it.”

“Happy Shabbat to you both,” I said. “Glad I’m here, too.”

Seth and I ate and drank. After, though it was still early, I put down my beer and declared, “This should be renamed ‘super-awesome liquid happiness.’ And I definitely cannot drink anymore.”

“Yeah, nine percent alcohol. It hits you,” Seth answered, polishing off his own beer.

“One bottle left though, you want it?”

“No, my face is numb. I’ll start giggling if I have more--and possibly vomit on your couch. Not great for my first Shabbat.”

“Actually, I’d say this has been a very fine first Shabbat,” Seth replied. “It’s good to have a friend in D.C., dude.”

“It is,” I responded.

That autumn, when Jarrad was away working in Colorado and Arizona, D.C. opened up for me. I had learned to be alone there, and had then decided to go searching for my own places and develop my own rituals. After nine or ten months, I began to feel my own life making sense, separate from Jarrad in a positive way.

My job was a surprisingly good career move, with the promotion and the chance to learn digital design skills. Our nonprofit lobbied for hiking trail and open space protection around the country, and I found my co-workers were all hikers and bikers. So Seth, 127

Maureen and I went hiking, exploring parts of the dense, green Appalachian trail. I went to Baltimore to spend weekends with Heather, another co-worker, browsing art galleries and shops around Fells Point and Camden, eating crab cakes and key lime pie by the harbor. I rebuilt hiking trails in Rock Creek Park with a volunteer group and visited the

National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian museums when they had new exhibits. I went on a mission to discover the best Thai food in the city. I saw bands perform on the

National Mall and regularly browsed Politics and Prose bookstore. Out my front door was a city alive with energy and possibility. There was always something to do, and I learned to take advantage.

Jarrad learned too. When we’d made the decision to be together, he promised that he could make me a priority as well as medical school, though he was gone a lot and always needing to study. He learned that together, we could turn a dismal, cramped space into a cozy, welcoming little home. He learned that I needed to get outside each day after work for a long walk or run, and that planning an outing to Virginia to hike on a rare weekend off could do more for my attitude than ice cream or flowers. He upheld his promise, making time for me each week even if was simply reading to each other for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon.

Amid the difficulty of his medical school and the stress of my uprooting, we had adapted. We shared the feeling that we were outsiders in that city, and decided it didn’t matter. We made a home. We built friendships with a few of Jarrad’s classmates. We learned to be broke, and that we could be happy boiling noodles for dinner and strolling 128

the streets of Georgetown. We learned to be apart but remain connected. We created our own little world in which the city was only the backdrop to something greater. Perhaps we did not belong there. But we belonged together.

“Marry me,” Jarrad said one night, as we were falling asleep.

“Okay,” I said.

* * *

We went to Ghost Ranch again. We climbed the mesa again, just Jarrad and me.

Midway through his final year of medical school, we had no money for a wedding.

Neither did we wish to save and plan for months. We didn’t care about matching dresses and ties, tiered cakes or monogrammed napkins. Neither of us wanted to get married in a building. To us all that mattered was the place, and the words. We knew that Ghost Ranch was where we should say our vows. So we flew west.

In Colorado Springs, after swearing to the clerk that we were not brother and sister, we paid ten dollars and self-solemnized our marriage license. It took ten minutes. And then we drove south, into New Mexico.

The following morning, our marriage day, we were in a cozy rented casita in Santa Fe with a bright fire burning in the adobe fireplace. It was a brisk day, two days before

Thanksgiving, and the sky outside was heavy and gray. 129

“Should we get ready and head out then?” Jarrad asked from the bed, softly shutting the book he’d been browsing.

“I’m ready,” I said. I rummaged through my bag to find the crumpled sheet of paper with the vows we’d written.

We drove north out of Santa Fe. The city faded away, turning into desert scrub and open sky. After the village of Abiquiu, we made that familiar turn back toward the canyons of the Piedra Lumbre--cliffs of shining stone.

Ours was a wedding party of two. Our music was whatever played on our small

Honda’s stereo as we drove to the ranch, some acoustic songs from Jarrad’s iPod. There was no ceremony, no microphones or people coming forth from the audience to read verses. We climbed Kitchen Mesa in silence, enjoying the peace and stillness of the morning. The aisle we walked down was the wide berth of the mesa covered in snow white gypsum--our decoration, our dance floor. We dined on water and granola bars from our backpacks. I wore hiking boots, not heels, and we donned light sweaters to cut the chill of the morning. I wore no makeup, nothing borrowed or blue, and my hair was straight and plain. The wedding rings were simple silver bands. I’d never felt even a vague desire for a diamond. I sometimes wore the Lindy Star sapphire ring my mother had given me, which my father had given her when they were dating. It was not worth money, but it was blue like the New Mexico summer sky.

It was only Jarrad and me, standing and talking to each other in the stillness. We said some typical things--the sickness and health, the faithfulness--but also other, equally 130

important things. We would pursue adventure together. We would create an original life with one another and grow together, not just grow old together. We would listen to each other.

It did not take a long time. When the tears in my eyes spilled over, he smiled and squeezed my hands tight. We kissed, framed together in a single shape by Mount

Pedernal’s dusky gray outline. Perhaps in that moment we looked part of the landscape itself, natural and timeless. Hundreds of miles from any kind of city noise, we stood still and silent at the mesa’s edge. We clasped hands and looked out over the desert, the long western horizon we both yearned for. As the wind rose in light gales around us, the winter sun surfaced from behind high, thin clouds, turning all it touched to silver. Leaving: Match Day

March 2009

They made us wait until noon to open the letters. Match Day tradition, of course.

Everyone in Jarrad’s fourth-year medical school class was stuffed into a large classroom on the Georgetown campus, alongside partners and family members. Overhead bright lights burned, and the hot yellow room was cramped, claustrophobic. Bottles of champagne sweated beside the rows of chairs. Hands wrung white envelopes, waiting.

It was March 19, one day before my 29th birthday. Match Day is always the third week of March. Jarrad and I stood near the back with two good friends, Steve and Sanne.

Steve and Jarrad had been partners in their first year cadaver lab, bonding over cutting up an old, dead body. They named her Connie because she’d died of congestive heart failure.

Now, Steve was matching into anesthesiology, and Jarrad into emergency medicine. Our friends were hoping to return to their native California, while Jarrad and I were simply hoping that we didn’t end up in Buffalo or Detroit, the last two options on our rank list of ten. We were finally about to find out our locations--as soon as noon struck and we were allowed to open our letters. Inside, a single sheet of paper would tell us where we would be living for the next three years and what residency program had accepted Jarrad.

131 132

Steve and Sanne felt as we did about D.C.--it was a place we needed to be to accomplish a goal, not to make a home. Their place was just down the street from ours, overlooking Wisconsin Avenue. On the rare occasion we all had an evening free, we cooked wonderful dinners together at their condo and sat out on their rooftop patio overlooking Georgetown. We talked politics, music, travel--things outside the medical world.

Now we just waited, silent, clutching our envelopes.

The end of 2008 had been a blur. Jarrad was on the road from October through

December, working in emergency rooms in the west and interviewing for residencies around the country. In November we’d eloped, saying marriage vows on top of a mesa in

New Mexico. Then I’d returned to D.C. while Jarrad finished work on an Indian reservation in Arizona. Early in the new year, when he got home, we submitted his rank list. Then began the long wait until March, with so much daily wondering and worry:

What if we go to Kansas City? What about St. Paul? Had we done the right think, ranking two Ohio programs first? What if we don’t match at all?

And now our time in D.C. was almost at an end. We’d weathered the worst--and we’d made it. All of it had been for a single day, the one sheet of paper, for whatever

“yes” was inside.

“I know where you land is going to be the absolute best place for you guys,”

Steve said to me, his arm around my shoulders. Sanne was next to me. I held one of her hands, and she crinkled their white envelope in her other one. Jarrad stood silent and 133

calm, waiting. It was stupid--what did we care about Georgetown traditions? Yet none of us opened it a minute early.

Two minutes to noon.

“You open it,” Jarrad said, handing me the envelope.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

One of the medical college deans began a slow countdown into the microphone on stage.

“Ten...nine....”

“Come on California, come on,” Steve said.

“Eight, seven, six...”

“You’re going to go, man--I know it,” Jarrad responded. “They’d be crazy not to take you.”

“Three, two, one...”

We opened. Steve’s eyes filled with delighted tears, Sanne yelped, they hugged.

I threw the envelope aside and unfolded the white sheet of paper. There, in block letters:

CONGRATULATIONS, YOU HAVE MATCHED INTO:

SUMMA HEALTH SYSTEM, EMERGENCY MEDICINE 134

“What? What’s that?” I yelled. Why didn’t it say the location? All this time I’d only been thinking of cities. I didn’t know the hospital names. I thrust the sheet of paper at Jarrad with a shaking hand. “Where, where is it? Tell me!”

He read it. “It’s Akron,” he said, his voice even and quiet.

“Ohio,” I said.

He smiled. “Ohio.” Arrival: Rootless

Akron, Ohio

They lit the hay bales in the farmhouse basement mid-morning. In the early afternoon, I make the call.

“Hi, Mom.”

“HI--hi, Bobbi, what are you doing?” Her voice is loud, and higher than usual.

Clipped short and tight.

“I’m calling to see what’s going on there.”

“Oh, well, we’re sitting here outside on the lawn.” I hear men’s animated voices in the background.

“Is it done?”

“Yep, yep, the house is down. So we’re all sitting outside on the lawn here and drinking a beer.” My mother rarely drinks. This is a tone I know, one that says things are dandy! when it is obvious she is decidedly not dandy.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine. I’m fine, I--Rick Erickson is here, you want to say hi?”

“What? Why? No I don’t want to say hi. What the hell is he doing there?”

135 136

“He’s one of the firemen, and Justin Bogie too, and Joey Alexander. Aunt June is here taking pictures. A bunch of people are out here.”

This is how it works in a town the size of Starbuck. Rick and Justin were my high school classmates. My sister worked with Justin’s father at the post office and graduated with Joey, class of 1994. Rick’s uncle Mike plowed the farm’s driveway and yard every winter. The fire was big news around town because there was rarely a real need for the trucks to be called out, and little else happened most weekends other than everyone went to Frannie’s Bar, owned by Frannie the elementary school playground supervisor, whose husband Shorty died at a VFW supper a few years back, choking on a piece of steak and wasn’t that just awful? Of course, he was a terrible alcoholic.

And so on.

“Oh. Well--that’s weird.”

“Oh I don’t know, it’s pretty busy here. Some have brought their kids out too, you know, so they’re running around and playing,” Mom says, talking like the fire is a car wash fundraiser or church potluck.

“Sounds like a real party,” I respond dryly.

“Oh, and Rae is here.”

“Why?” She was a neighbor I’d grown up knowing. I babysat her grandchildren when

I was in high school.

“Oh, to be my moral support,” my mother said with more brief, nervous laughter.

“Where is Toni? And Dad?” 137

“Gone, both of them. Toni’s at work. Your dad, who knows where he is. Working.”

They’d divorced a few years ago, and Mom was doing her best not to care about anything related to my father.

“They didn’t want to be there?”

“No. No one did,” Mom replied.

A few weeks later, I’ll received a disc of photographs in the mail from my Aunt June.

I will see step-by-step how the house burned. I will see images of people I used to know wearing volunteer firefighter garb and smiling in front of windows with roaring flames inside, and images of children playing on the wide lawn while various family members and neighbors sit and stare at the burning house. I’ll surge with angry irritation, thinking that to them, the fire was nothing more than a spectator event.

“So what happens now?” I ask.

“Well, they’ll start digging the foundation for the new house,” Mom says. “We’ll have to take out some of the trees, you know, since the new one will sit different on the lot than the farmhouse did.”

“What trees? Not the birches,” I say. The lawn west of the farmhouse had three beautiful birch trees, some of the largest I’d ever seen.

“Oh, well...you know. Have to make space for the new house. But how are you,” she said brightly, wanting to change the subject. “How’s the new place? Feeling like home?”

“We’ve been here two weeks, Mom,” I say. 138

That evening when Jarrad returns home from work, I’m still on the couch. Sitting, looking out the window.

“You okay?” he asks.

“They burned it today,” I say. He’d left for work early that morning and we hadn’t had a chance to talk. With his work schedule so busy, I didn’t think he’d remember.

“I’m sorry, Bobbi. Is there anything I can do?”

“No. It’s done. I just feel like I should have been there.”

“You’ve been gone a long time.”

“I know. I just--being here, not feeling like it’s home yet, it all feels wrong.”

“It’s okay to be upset about it. The farm was a really big part of your life,” Jarrad says, taking a seat on the couch next to me.

“I just didn’t expect to feel this bad about it. I should have been there.”

“Well, we’ve been busy--this past month, graduation, you quitting your job, moving here. It’s been a lot. Stressful for both of us,” Jarrad says.

“I know. I just feel--I don’t know. Kind of lost. I don’t have a job here, we don’t know anyone. Why didn’t I go back for it? What made me think I didn’t need to be there?”

Tears begin running. “Everyone seems to be taking it so lightly, like it’s no big deal, and it is, it is, and I wasn’t there.”

“You didn’t know how things would feel,” Jarrad responds, rubbing my back.

“But now it’s gone,” I choke. “It’s not home anymore. I just--I ignored it. And this doesn’t feel like home either. Nowhere does.” 139

“It will,” Jarrad says. “It will. Come on,” he stands up, reaching a hand out to me.

“Let’s go for a walk.” Dr. and Mrs. Dungeon Master’s Dinner for Dorks

The Dungeon Master has promised me this: his merry band of adventurers coming to call tonight shall eat whatever is set before them.

But do orcs, elves and wizards enjoy pasta? What about rogues? And what to make for the hobbit, the one who rides the dog?

A worrisome image plagues me: a clan of six irate men lobbing my goat cheese and vegetable lasagna in barbaric handfuls across my dining room, tossing salad bits about like their imaginary foes’ entrails, and pounding their glasses on the table while chanting “Meat and MEAD, woman! Meat and MEAD!” What will I do if they refuse to begin their perilous journey through the world of Golarian, in pursuit of the evil

Molthune army, until I’ve served them giant, dripping turkey legs? What if they demand I do so in a tightly laced corset, like a proper wench?

Alas, it is a mere hour away from game time.

The lasagna will have to do.

* * *

The Dungeon Master has many names.

140 141

For his entire high school career, he was Launchpad the Werewolf. Some people still only call him by his werewolf name, like his best friend Impact. They played

Werewolf: The Apocalypse every waking minute--before school, at lunch, and into the wee hours of most mornings, fueled by an endless supply of Mountain Dew and junk food. Really, he hardly stopped being a werewolf. And it was awesome--you can’t even picture how cool it was.

Or so I have been told on several occasions.

More recently, he has been Ryltar the dark elf monk. And Ghost, the albino elven sorcerer. Last month he was Legion the human fighter with a great black war horse. And tonight he’s Shade, a blind elven ninja--though it remains a mystery how an elf can be sightless and also kick ass.

In real life, at work in the emergency room, he’s Dr. Maiers, wading through his three-year residency. At home he’s simply Jarrad, my husband. A grown-up, for the most part, but whose real life is occasionally overtaken by his substantial imagination. Who must gather regularly with his fellow role-playing friends to go on grand, life-risking adventures.

All of which take place entirely in their heads.

When we moved to Ohio in May 2009, we were both alone a lot. Jarrad’s daunting intern year was a lone, black highway stretching out before us. He was gone, working, or he was home, sleeping. He spent eighty hours a week or more at the hospital.

I worked from home as a freelance writer and graphic designer. I was busy but isolated. 142

We did not know the city or have family ties in Akron. All our friends were time zones away, and I had been deeply jarred when my family home in Minnesota was burned down. I felt rootless. I yearned deeply for concrete things to make our new city feel like home, rather than the temporary stop D.C. had been. I wanted new beginnings, to feel full of possibility and opportunity in our new place. I wanted to belong and hadn’t figured out how.

It wasn’t clear to me then that home was something I needed to feel. I could not force it into being but had to trust that time would help create it. And I had no idea that it would be Jarrad’s imagination, his sweet silliness, and his pressing need for a respite from work that would ultimately help us both feel like we belonged.

* * *

There was a time before role-playing, before the sound of twenty-sided dice clattering on my dining table was a familiar signal for me to retreat upstairs to watch a movie. I didn’t know Dungeons and Dragons existed, that gamers created characters with different numbers assigned to different skills, and then rolled dice and did a lot of math and that, along with a leader called a Dungeon Master, determined the character’s fate on imaginary group adventures. I didn’t know any of it until long after I’d met Jarrad.

But there were hints that revealed his true nature. The first movie we saw together was Star Wars, and Jarrad answered my numerous questions in meticulous, exhaustive 143

detail. One of our first dates was to the Colorado Renaissance Festival--my first experience there, while he had his own collection of costumes. The Galactic Empire and medieval outfits and jousting, all in the span of one weekend. No wonder we ended up hosting regular role-playing gatherings around our dining room table for a band of dorks.

I’d married one.

What I’ve learned from years of observation: being a dork is something deeply embedded in you. You can’t just role-play to rightfully earn the title. Being a “geek” or calling yourself a “dork” might have recently become cool, but wearing T-shirts that reference old-school video games cannot, alone, make you legitimate.

Real dorks have been being dorks long before it was trendy. Knowledge of all things related to George Lucas is an important cornerstone, and the most adept dorks will possess a tedious understanding of the plots, sub-plots, characters and behind-the-scenes details of Star Wars. A dream of being Indiana Jones or Han Solo is common. Devotion to Star Trek is cliché. Gaming, both role-playing and videos, is standard. Good dorks will probably also have a decent collection of comic books (Jarrad would interject here that they are graphic novels) and perhaps possess a cluttery collection of action figures, role- playing miniatures, bags of colored dice and Legos. They might have art on their walls depicting dragons, lords and ladies. It is the kind of art you hope, once you cohabit a space, will only be displayed in an office or man cave. For instance, Jarrad owns a framed print depicting a gallant, iron-clad knight on a massive white destrier (a big horse) 144

ferrying a delicate maiden safely through a forest of snow-covered trees. She has a demure profile and dark hair and clings suggestively to the knight’s steely waist.

Were this displayed in plain view in some common part of our home, I worry it might impede the forming of friendships with non-dorks.

“Welcome!” I might say when they arrive for a casual dinner.

“Thank you!” they might answer. “It sure smells great. Say, what’s that painting over your fireplace?”

“Oh that?” I’d say, and give a nervous wave. “Well, it’s a maiden princess. Being carried to safety by, you know, a mighty lord. Who just finished defeating an evil dragon to rescue her.”

Here the prospective friends’ faces might fall, or they might exchange a worried glance.

“Take those chairs, the ones by the commemorative statue of King Aragorn assuming his rightful throne,” I’d suggest, hoping we might find some common ground with Lord of the Rings characters.

“Yeah...we--oh, gosh!” one might say. “We forgot, we--have a thing! A thing to go to. So sorry. We’ve got to be off.”

And we would be left alone with our dinner and our dragon statues.

Beyond comic books and science fiction knowledge, there’s another activity true dorks often embrace: Live Action Role Play--otherwise known as LARPing. It’s like 145

taking whatever resides in one’s gaming imagination and bringing it to life, costumes, swords, battles and all.

This is one thing I didn’t ask Jarrad about for a while. Role-playing at home in an imaginary world is one thing. Running about a public park in a cape, waving a sword and physically attacking real people, is quite another.

But then, as he was reading an “Ultimate Magic” gaming manual in bed one night, I realized I probably had nothing to lose.

“Tell me about your LARPing past,” I said to him, as he browsed a section of his book detailing Inner Sea World creatures.

He laughed. “That’s not fair.”

“Please.”

He sighed. “When I was sixteen I belonged to something called IFGS --

International Fantasy Gaming Society. And we would dress up in costume with foam swords and go beat each other up and vie for the attention of the good-looking women there.”

“There were good-looking women there?”

“Okay, there were women there. But when you’re sixteen most of them are good- looking. Because of the corsets, mostly.”

“And because they’re running around calling you ‘m’lord.’”

“Yeah, that too.”

“And what would you do to get their attention, Jarrad?” 146

“Hope that I was a better sword fighter than the other guys were. That had sway in that crowd. Only place I’ve seen in life where skill with a sword is a valuable reproductive trait.” He put away his gaming book and turned over to go to sleep.

“Did it ever get you any action?” I asked as he shut off the light.

“No. No it did not.”

* * *

The rest of the merry band of adventurers shows up around 6 p.m. Until the game begins, they are Bill, Jim, Brian, and Benn. Like Jarrad, they are grown-ups with real jobs. Bill is a teacher working on his master’s degree, Jim and Brian are chemists, and

Benn is a nurse. With the exception of Benn, who works in the emergency room with

Jarrad (dorks tend to gravitate toward one other), Jarrad met the guys while attending weekly evening gatherings at a local game shop.

In addition to being regularly employed grown-ups, most of the guys are in committed relationships. Benn, Jim and Bill all got married during the first round of gaming, and Brian was engaged and planning a wedding. They completely contradicted the stereotype that role-players are all reclusive weirdos who live in their mothers’ basements and can’t talk to girls.

There was, however, Eric. 147

He always showed up an hour early. He did not possess an indoor voice, and he was fired from his computer coding job during the first round of gaming because of several instances of poor personal hygiene. He was hefty and a little sweaty, and he did indeed live on the lowest level of his mother’s home. He was a sweet guy, I think, who just needed a bit of a social life unrelated to gaming. The only problem was that Eric had a hard time...being Eric. Instead he wanted to be Anaerian, his nature wizard character who spoke in an annoyingly high-pitched voice and often turned into a bird for no reason at all. Eric attended, it seemed, not to enjoy the creativity of gaming but to prove to everyone else how totally awesome his character was. Any foes the Dungeon Master might conjure--vicious owl bears, a giant herd of bloodthirsty orcs--Anaerian could cast a spell and defeat them. Or he’d turn into a bird and make a grand escape.

Eric was eventually disinvited. No dork likes a showboat.

The real draw, I liked to think, was that I agreed to make dinner for each gathering. That first night the vegetable lasagna disappeared in record time (due in part to

Eric/Anaerian’s ferocious appetite) as did the enchiladas and black beans and spanish rice a few weeks later, the baked ziti after that. I think they would have appreciated any basic fare beyond pizza and potato chips, but the group became a way for me to indulge my kitchen fantasies, most of which include heavy cream and butter. I tried new recipes for soups and pastas. I refined my sweet-tooth recipes--pumpkin and butterscotch chip cookies, rich apple cake with raisins soaked in bourbon. I made a breakfast-for-dinner feast of waffles, mushroom and leek strata, bacon and lemon scones that seemed to be a 148

hit, as was my homemade macaroni and cheese. It was a perfect excuse to shop at my favorite local speciality foods store, too, making Dork Night costly and wonderfully caloric. And it was an excuse to fill our house with voices, energy, laughter, and fill my kitchen with enticing food aromas.

Early on, while the guys talked and got set up and I finished the meal, I eavesdropped and picked up small details about role-playing rules and regulations.

I spent a lot of time feeling confused.

For instance, the rules related to morphing into an animal were unclear. Some characters could do it and some couldn’t, and I was baffled as to when they could and couldn’t and how it worked. One particular evening Jim, who was playing a goblin wizard disguised as a gnome (I think), mentioned something about an animal being a

“familiar” but they were too engulfed in conversation for me to jump in and clarify.

“What’s it mean when something is your Familiar?” I asked Jarrad the next day.

“Like just that it’s close to you? Like an animal friend? Or is that some D&D term?”

“It’s a D&D term. Technically, an Animal Companion is different than a Familiar because the magical bond is different. Druids have Animal Companions. Sorcerers have

Familiars.”

“A druid is like the nature thing, right?”

“Yes, a Druid is like...(sigh)...somebody who draws magic from the forces of nature.” 149

“Like Galadriel. She’s all magical in the forest,” I said. This much I know--in The

Lord of the Rings, there’s an ultra magical elf who lives in the trees and glows and gives

Frodo stuff, and she looks a hell of a lot like Cate Blanchette.

“All elves are magical in the forest. That’s just being an elf.”

“So what’s the difference between a sorcerer and a druid?”

“Sorcerers derive their magic from their bloodline.”

“What’s the difference between a wizard and a warlock? Warlocks are dead, right?”

“No,” Jarrad said, “classically a warlock is a male witch. A dead wizard who is undead and still casting evil spells is called a Lich.”

“Like a zombie wizard? Then what is--oh, nevermind.” I stopped there because that line of questioning could continue on for hours. I went to stir the chicken corn chowder simmering on the stove instead. I may not have known when you use a perception check or what a mage is, but I was certain that the Dorks liked things with bacon in them.

* * *

Sometimes I wondered if Jarrad wished he’d married a fellow dork, some other grown-up role-playing woman who would never have to ask elementary questions like

“what does it mean to be a Paladin? The Knight of the Flowers is a Paladin, right?” while we’re watching Game of Thrones on HBO. 150

So once, I attempted to play.

“I want to be something big and ugly,” I told Jarrad on a walk, a few days before game day was scheduled.

“You can be a half-orc,” he said.

“Yeah!” I said, picturing the Lord of the Rings orcs--the dripping, drooling, ruthless killers.

“You’ll need to pick a name,” he said.

“Are there girl orcs?”

“Yes.”

“Sally.”

“Bobbi,” he said, drawing out my name in a sorrowful whine. “You should try and take it seriously.”

“Okay, okay--I’m sorry. You can help me pick a name,” I said.

On game day it was decided that I would play a simple human fighter, because I was new and humans were the easiest to play, I was told. I thought I might get to be magical and cast spells, but apparently those things were complicated. I would have to focus my energies instead on kicking basic ass. So I decided I would be a hulking Viking woman (no half-Orc) named Heiwas.

I lasted two hours, rolling dice and adding up numbers. I am better in the kitchen. 151

I always found role playing games amusingly complicated and exhaustingly detailed. But it wasn’t until Dork Night began that I learned their purpose--why

Launchpad and Legion and the rest needed to exist.

In medical school and during his intern year, Jarrad coped by force, staying awake, working and studying for inhuman hours. As he learned to talk about what he dealt with on a daily basis, I learned that just pushing through wasn’t all he needed to survive. He watched people suffer and die, and spent many of his days delivering bad news. He didn’t just need a physical break from it, but a mental one. He did not read comic books and play imaginative games because he was just a kid refusing to grow up.

He did those things because they were his escape. From the time he was seven or eight, he’d been retreating into his imagination, first to avoid two unhappy, screaming parents, and then to deal with a father who forgot him most weekends, a small boy waiting on the curb with his backpack for a ride that never came. As a teenager it was a way to have adventures with similarly-minded friends, the outcasts and weirdos of his suburban

Denver high school.

To truly, fully retreat from the real world ER, full of drunks and drug-seekers, suffering and neglected people, cases of assault and abuse and the daily uncertainty of what might come through the doors, he wanted an imaginary world in which he was a little more powerful, more capable. One where he could control all the variables, and where magic and mystery could fill in the holes that science and medicine could not.

Game Jarrad can be any number of things--elf, orc, wizard, knight. 152

I love them all. I loved him when he was a soldier, volunteering for deployments to help pay for medical school applications. I loved him when he was wandering the country, jobless and living out of a backpack, trying to be accepted to the right school. I loved the student and the cautious, stressed intern, just as I love watching him become whatever imaginary character he wants to be. A lot of people in his line of work end up drinking heavily or hooked on prescription narcotics, and many of them burn out early.

Jarrad just imagines himself something else for a while, and uses his vivid imagination and love of storytelling to conjure grand adventures. It’s the same imagination that he uses to bring laughter and silliness to our life together. So just as I love the doctor, I love the dork.

* * *

These game nights may have taken place entirely in imagined realms, but they were one of the first things that made real-world Ohio seem familiar to Jarrad and me.

After a while we found a rhythm: the guys would show up around six with their backpacks of gaming supplies and some late-night snacks. We’d all catch up and make small-talk while I finished dinner and they helped themselves to drinks. We’d share a meal together around our big dining table, seven of us squeezed together, and then we’d all clear the dishes away so they could get down to that night’s forbidding quest. Maps and the tan gaming mat and character sheets replaced dishes and glasses and silverware.

And very late, 2 or 3 a.m., I’d hear them laughing downstairs, or crying out at some surprise dice roll that rendered some evil wizard powerless against their band of fighters. 153

I didn’t belong to the gaming part, and I didn’t need to. I’m not that kind of dork.

I was happy being a silent witness. That they came, that they filled the house with energy and imagination, was what was important to me. I wanted a house filled with voices, and with the rich smells of garlic roasting and homemade pasta sauce simmering. I wanted a reason to light a few candles, turn on some lively music, bake something decadent and enjoy a leisurely meal and good conversation with people. This is how Akron came to feel like our place. Not with fancy home decor and expensive furniture, but with animated voices mingling over made-from-scratch food. With my stacks of books and

Jarrad’s stacks of gaming manuals. We needed the companionship and warmth those friends brought with them each game night. We both needed to create and belong to something, so that Ohio, our first new place together, could feel like home. Ladder to the Moon, part 2

Ohio is a place we never imagined ourselves. I never saw Akron until the day we came to look for a place to live, a few weeks before moving. We find we’re more content here than we’d expected--after the chaos of D.C., we appreciate a smaller, less congested city with kinder people. Quiet, wide open spaces aren’t so far away.

Yet I still yearn for the west. No matter where I am, or what contentment I find in temporary homes, I view the west as the place I belong. I wish for the dry air and wide skies of southwest Colorado and northern New Mexico. For the vastness of the Colorado

Plateau. I yearn for Ghost Ranch.

And I have returned, three years after our marriage day, to seek the part of Ghost

Ranch that no one knows.

It was first Jarrad’s sacred place to show me. When I stood atop the mesa and gazed outward, I wanted it to be mine too. And it is a place we call ours because we fell back in love and said our vows to one another there. But long before us, the painter Georgia

O’Keeffe claimed it--the fierce, opinionated, isolated artist who was from the midwest, as

I am. Who ventured to the southwest and loved the bareness and wide blue sky more than cornfields and forests--the same things that drew me. Who treasured Ghost Ranch and

154 155

was changed by it, as I have been. Who took the desert landscape and abstracted it, drew it down to its simplest form and most basic beauty.

There are so many stories about the painter: Her spirit haunts Ghost Ranch’s casitas, some say. Her house is far down a barricaded road. No one goes back there. You can glimpse it if you climb to the very top of Chimney Rock. It’s inhabited by a caretaker who makes sure no curious wanderers set foot on the property. No, no one lives there but it is far away, and tall fences keep you from really seeing anything.

I want to see it as O’Keeffe must have the very first time she visited. We both know what it is to love something selfishly and claim it. It is the same thing I feel each time I drive south and welcome the familiar shift from blacktop to gravel and inhale the red desert dust. It can belong to her first. But because we love it the same way, perhaps it can belong to me too.

* * *

Around the Ranch, O’Keeffe is a kind of contrived ghost. She is kept alive by people who claim to have known her or met her or worked for her or heard first-hand stories from people who did, a spirit for long-time locals, ranch historians and paid tour guides to conjure because tourists like to hear stories and tell themselves they are authentic. But visitors are not to make any attempt to see her actual Ghost Ranch home, which she bought in the forties and lived in for the next nearly four decades, somewhere down a 156

gravel road blockaded with a “Private Property No Trespassing” sign and a locked gate.

Biographies tell me it is named El Rancho de los Burros and was built by a wealthy man named Arthur Pack and rented to Georgia when she demanded a more secluded summer place to stay because she was tired of battling tourists and ranch hands for private painting time. She bought it and a few surrounding acres a few years later because she loved the direct view of Pedernal from her front yard and lived there until old age and macular degeneration forced her to move to her more accessible home in the village of

Abiquiu. It is stressed again and again that her ranch home is private, privately owned, privately maintained. No visitors and no exceptions.

Throughout the week here, climbing once again to the top of Kitchen Mesa, to

Chimney Rock under full moon light, walking the more secluded areas of the ranch, I’ve tried to explore what real parts of her remain here. I visited the casita she first rented when she came in 1936. I read stories, accounts, her letters. I listened to the stories and myths, poured over biographies. I’ve visited her Abiquiu home and talked to tour guides and to locals, whose parents or grandparents or cousins or friends cooked or cleaned or gardened for O’Keeffe. But there was no real sense of her in those things.

To find that and see this place as she did, I need to look out beyond fences and gates on her actual landscape. See Pedernal from her own vantage point, and be still. 157

It is a full moon night. Solstice time, when the sun rises high and lingers, setting slowly over the mesas near 10 p.m. I begin my trek around dusk, setting out from our campsite in search of a roadblock.

Ghost Ranch is the kind of place I can wonder if what the Navajo believe about creation and death and the spirit lands might be true. They believe that the spirit world and the living world are not separate, and that your spirit can walk the land you love after your bodily form has expired and joined the dust. Georgia said once, when I think of death I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore, unless the

Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I’m gone.

If the Navajo way is true, perhaps she has become as much a part of the landscape as the rock spires and red dust. Perhaps she be there tonight when I hop the fence and go searching for her, did not die blind in Santa Fe at age 98 but simply retreated into herself in the place she loved most and became a part of the myth of the ranch. I think of her waking early to watch the New Mexico sunrise turn Pedernal from gray to blue to purple, as vivid in real life as it is on her canvases. I think of her turning a sour stare in the direction of Ghost Ranch whenever any commotion could be heard, because she was notorious for being particular, demanding and fiercely private. I think of her walking out into the badlands she called the Far Away, wandering some secluded, hidden canyon and searching for the perfect scene to paint. 158

Dusk is when all lines of the landscape blur and settle into one another, creating a single conglomerate object rather than discernible rocks, trails, or clear lines between earth and sky. It’s been too long since I walked in complete, true stillness. At home walks are accompanied by a constant soundtrack of traffic noise, lawnmowers, snippets of backyard conversations floating out from patios and porches. Here, it is only the wind, the road, the dusky landscape, and me.

The blockaded road is easy enough to find, narrow and stationed between one of the ranch houses and a horse pen. I step around the white boards painted with red words. I walk past a small caretaker’s home with a few lights burning in the windows. Beyond a thin grove of trees there is a green metal gate blocking the road with a small metal box where you’re supposed to type a passcode. I climb over quickly, my shoes shaky on the narrow bars.

Beyond the gate the road widens. The quiet becomes different, less comforting than it was before the gate. I’m worried little now about being seen, but what else accompanies me out beyond the fence in the desert night? Coyotes, snakes, scorpions. Mountain lions.

Spiny cactus. My pace picks up.

After a time my eyes, fully adjusted to the dim light, discern a familiar shape. A fence--some kind of wire anchored with wooden posts. There is a shape beyond it, what looks like a flat rooftop. I walk the perimeter--wire fence, lined along the top with rusted barbed wire. Beyond that, tall wooden fence posts and a high steel gate, heavily paddle- locked with a large rusted chain and various white signs with black lettering warning me 159

to keep out, not trespass, that the property is under local surveillance, and that it belongs to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. Who, I wonder, fifteen miles outside the tiny town of Abiquiu, could possibly be surveilling it?

I return to the wire portion. Reach down, grip tight, yank upward until my hands burn. Sit, slide, and dirt mingles with sweat beneath my shirt. A minute later I’m under the fence and out in real O’Keeffe country.

I approach the back side of the house gingerly. It is a large horseshoe-shaped structure with a flat roof and many windows. I wonder, was this back window her bedroom window? Her studio window? White filmy curtains hang inside. Did one of them move just now, ever so slightly? What if she really were here, some Navajo painter spirit? The darkness, my aloneness, makes every fantastic thing I’ve imagined actually seem possible, probable. I’ll stroll up to the door and it will ease itself open for me and I will encounter her back--her black dress, her white hair knotted in a bun. She will be facing an easel with some desert landscape in progress. I’ll want to watch, witness, but I imagine

I’ll stumble or make noise or distract her somehow, and she’ll turn slowly around. Maybe she’ll look alive, leathery and sun-baked, or maybe her skin will be ghostly transparent.

She’ll raise a stern eyebrow, look me up and down and then turn away and continue with her landscape.

I wait, breathe in, then reach out and with the tip of my shaking finger I graze the doorknob. It is warm, I swear it--latent heat from someone’s recent touch? I take a deep 160

breath, grip fully around the warm knob. My hard, confident twist is met with a slight give, and then a solid stop. Like a hand was straining to hold it shut, rather than a lock? I quickly let go and step back and back, going around the side of the building.

There I see a ladder, the traditional style seen on the sides of many adobe homes.

Georgia would often climb the roof of her Ghost Ranch home to study the early morning sky and the nighttime stars, intrigued by the sky. I think of her painting, Ladder to the

Moon, believed to be her last image of Pedernal. Its night sky is a kind of Caribbean blue green, not the pure deep ocean blue of the New Mexico sky I know but what I imagine it might be like in winter. Pedernal is at the bottom center of the painting, hardly discernible unless you’re familiar with its shape. A neat, exact half moon rides high in the sky, the color of a pearl.

I wonder if she knew that painting would be her last one of the mountain, so instead of a simple landscape, she painted her wish on canvas--to suspend Pedernal in a place where, from its craggy top, she could make her way to the heavens.

I make my way around another corner and find the inside of the horseshoe adobe structure. And there is Pedernal in dim grays, indigos and blacks but spectacular still, a dark chimney vaulting into the wide desert sky. This she woke to every day she lived here and painted nearly thirty times. I thought if I painted it enough, God would give it to me, she said once. I understand the desire to own something no one could ever truly possess. 161

I thought if I were to find this spot I would linger long into the night, taking in the peaceful silence of the desert. I thought I might even watch the sun come up as she must have done so many times. But rather than a feeling of quiet peace I feel encroaching dark, so deep and great it might swallow me whole. And something beneath it--restlessness, urgency. Something unfamiliar I’ve never felt at Ghost Ranch. More than simple fear about what real things lurk on the ground or hide off in the scrub and canyons, what wakes and prowls at night. This place feels too silent and strange, like I’ve stirred a part of the desert that totters on the edge of myth and needs to be left alone. I’m not meant to linger here.

* * *

I do not know where she is, or if she is. I know that in all my searching for her, my reading and my wandering around this place, that night out alone in the dark badlands is the closest I have come to understanding. She wished for solitude. And the desert belongs to solitude, to wide-open emptiness and unfettered landscapes. So I let rest my questions and curiosity and be content that we share this place in a small way, she who loved it as I do. But sometimes to love something is to let it be.

In ancient Celtic tradition, it is said that heaven and earth are just three feet apart, but that in thin places, old places where spirits rest, that space grows smaller or perhaps 162

disappears entirely. Some people say that Pedernal and other parts of northern New

Mexico are thin places, like Sedona or Stonehenge or Ayers Rock.

I do not know about those things.

But I know what it is to discover a place and feel, instantly, that you belong there, on a field of snowy white gypsum with pure desert sun raging on your shoulders, Mt.

Pedernal in the distance and a wind song in your ear. And I like the idea of a place that allows you to step from this world into the spirit world. And I know Ghost Ranch is old, timeless, has been many things over the ages.

I know that of all the places I have ever wished to belong, Ghost Ranch is the only one that seems magic--a kind of thin place, where I could step from a real world into a spirit one, if I could just find the right shadowed crevice in that deep box canyon, and listen as echo turns to invitation. Where I can choose to belong, for a day, a week, or even a mere moment recalled after it is long passed. Ghost Ranch is a place where I become a thing of the desert--whittled down, dried out and centered, a sun-baked clarity of mind rising up slowly as hours pass and the sun arcs over the mesa. To call Ghost Ranch home is to claim peace itself, to hold it in your hands and exhale. It is the earth at its simplest: land, sky. A long horizon, stretching off into shimmering something you can’t be certain is real.

No one can own it--her, me, even Jarrad and I, despite what we found atop the mesa on our gray November marriage morning. If this piece of the desert truly is a hole in the fabric of reality where time stands still, then only spirits can claim it. 163

Driving away, dust billowing and the sun setting over Pedernal, I imagine how it might come alive once all humans have gone. Somewhere out in the lonely badlands a painter watches the sky, waiting for Him to reach down, pluck Pedernal like a flower and place it carefully into her wrinkled hands. Atop its peak Navajo Changing Woman is born a baby wrapped in colored lights on a full-moon night, the guardian of this world’s natural order. Where ancient cliffs shimmer like new gold, spirits walk and weathered bones shine. Where you can climb to the moon from your own adobe roof, and God can hand you mountains. Leaving: Little Tree

The brown chair is staying. It is the only thing left in the living room.

In it, I sit and wait. Aqueduct Street is strangely quiet. Outside rain falls, a light summer mist just enough to cool the air. June rain, droplets dripping down from the full tree branches hanging over our front yard. It’s so green here, and I’ve tried these three years in northeast Ohio to never take the deciduous canopy for granted. In D.C. it felt suffocating, trees crammed in any available space, blocking out the light just as the buildings did. So tight around me, over me. But here in Ohio, there’s room to spread out and sprawl a little. I like to drive down into the Cuyahoga valley and out Riverview

Road, to the Towpath Trail and the cornfields, to wide open Howe Meadow. It feels a bit like where I grew up in rural Minnesota.

In a short while Jarrad will pull into the driveway, officially finished with his residency at the local hospital. And right after that, we’ll be off. Jarrad’s taken a job in

New Mexico, so far north that we’re going to live in southern Colorado. The far western slope of the Rockies. It doesn’t seem real yet--but we know that we don’t want to waste any time. The day he’s finished, we’d decided, is the day we leave. Lingering makes for more difficult goodbyes.

We’ve spent the last week saying tough farewells to friends over dinners and drinks.

164 165

Jarrad has watched most of his fellow residents, his good friends throughout the past three years, peel off one by one, heading off to new jobs in new cities. I’ve said too many goodbyes to people I worry I won’t see again.

I have nothing to do but sit and listen to the rain. Every other room in our house has been emptied. I’ve spent the past two weeks going through closets and crevices, packing, and dropping off boxes at Goodwill. I’ve cleaned out the basement and garage. I’ve scoured the kitchen and given away food to nearby friends. So familiar, all this moving preparation. I wake early, tie my hair back, put on comfortable shoes, guzzle caffeine, and go. Begin making the calls: what is really worth taking?

A few days ago those things rolled away on a moving truck bound for Colorado. This morning, I deflated the air mattress we’d been sleeping on and packed our few remaining clothes. With a bed I made for our two cats ready in our small Honda’s hatchback, and the air mattress ready to be shoved beneath a seat, I have nothing else to do to prepare for our 2,100-mile drive.

From Akron we’ll drive to Minnesota to visit my family. It makes sense to stop and see everyone, I told Jarrad. Really, I simply yearn to spend time in familiar places amid this upheaval. I feel no rush to arrive in Durango, Colorado, our new home. I feel like going out fishing with my dad, frying the fresh walleye and eating it out on the porch so we can watch the fireflies. I want to take a long walk with my sister in the Glacial Lake

State Park, and stop by my mother’s workplace to bring her lunch. I just feel like driving 166

down that long, familiar gravel road to the farm where I grew up. Even though I know that at the end of it, nothing is the same.

After Minnesota we’ll head over the Rockies. From where I sit now, with green grass and leafy trees outside, light rain falling, it’s strange to imagine the red rocks and parched dust of southwest Colorado.

When we moved to the house on Aqueduct Street, we hung a piece of art we liked on the landing beneath the archway that led from the living room to the upstairs bedrooms. It is a silhouette of a large, leafy tree, with a deep blue-gray background. A thriving

Midwest tree--an Ohio tree. High in its branches a single yellow light burns in a child’s treehouse. At the base of a tree is a bicycle, and near it, a dog sits, silhouetted and sad. Its head is turned upward, awaiting whoever is inside the treehouse.

You can see that picture from outside our house, through the large living room windows. It is framed perfectly by the archway and illuminated by a single well-placed light. No matter how late Jarrad is expected to return from the hospital, I leave the light on so that when he pulls into the driveway, he can see it and doesn’t have to fumble in complete dark.

One night shortly after we’d settled in, we pulled into the driveway late in the evening, looking in on the glowing light shining down on the landing and the framed print. “Little Tree,” Jarrad declared. And that became our house’s name.

Now, eventful years have passed in this old house on Aqueduct. Here, we found a happy rhythm. He learned to be a doctor, while I learned to embrace being a writer. I 167

painted my upstairs office bright green and wrote words to the sound of Emmet, the neighbor boy, playing on his skateboard in the driveway next door. In this house we’ve hosted wonderful groups of friends for dinner, filled the rooms with laugher, good food and warmth. In this house I learned how food can help connect people, and that I needed that kind of connection for a house to feel like my home.

Here in Little Tree, we worked and wondered and waited. In this house I lived for three months alone while Jarrad went on job interviews. Late at night in the living room, I talked to him on the phone as we weighed job options. We felt excitement. We felt discouraged. We felt hesitant.

In this house I believed I could stay--right here at the edge of Highland Square in

Akron, in our quaint house with creaky hardwood floors and a sunny kitchen. I pondered claiming northeast Ohio as my home, after leaving so many others.

But then opportunity came--the right job for Jarrad, in a place with mountains so enchanting and beautiful I couldn’t say no.

So like the street’s name, this house is a vessel for us. A thing we have passed through on our way to something else.

I hear a familiar engine sound as our blue Honda pulls into the driveway. Jarrad steps out, shutting the door quietly.

When he opens the front door he sees only me, sitting in a brown chair in the corner of our empty living room. There are tissues in my hands and tears streaming down my face. 168

Jarrad comes to kneel by the chair. His face is work-weary, his eyes bleary.

“We were so happy here,” I choke out.

“We were,” he said, reaching to embrace me. “We were.” Epilogue: Home Fires

Durango and Colorado Springs, Colorado

June 2012

We drove toward home, through a state ready for fire.

All of Colorado was a tinderbox that summer, awaiting a spark. The past two winters had yielded only 13 percent of the average precipitation. With temperatures reaching 100 degrees in June, and relative humidity in the single digits, the conditions were frightening. Forests were parched. Leaves wilted, and the sun-baked earth groaned for water. Pine trees were gray-brown with dust. Everything suffered.

It would take only a single dry thunderstorm, one crack of lightning, a careless cigarette. Even the tiniest rock hitting a hot muffler and causing a spark, flying in the wrong direction off the highway.

The morning we headed to Durango, on the final day of our cross-country road trip from Ohio to Colorado, a single plume of smoke rose out of the forest just west of

Colorado Springs. It was in Waldo Canyon, the first place I ever hiked when I moved to the city in 2001. Smoke in the city’s nearby forests, in an area inaccessible to fire trucks.

It was too close--too near backyards and doorsteps.

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It was an unsettling day. As we drove, there were news reports of other blazes breaking out around the state. Thousands of acres were afire, from Estes Park and Fort

Collins in the northern part of Colorado, to Pagosa Springs in the south, where 22,000 acres were burning out of control in the backcountry. Closer still to our new home, a wildfire burned in Mancos, just thirty miles from Durango. There were fires in Boulder,

Leadville, Elbert. All of Colorado, it seemed, was ablaze.

It was difficult for me to pass by Colorado Springs on the way to somewhere else. It was the city most familiar to me, a place I’d loved, claimed and never fully surrendered.

The further we drove, the more strange, unsettled and afraid I felt. We arrived in Durango to an empty house--the moving truck wouldn’t arrive for two more weeks--and I could only blow up our air mattresses for the bedroom, unpack our clothing, and monitor the news.

Of all the blazes, the fire in Colorado Springs was the worst. The plume of smoke early that day, drifting into the sky out of Waldo Canyon, had been a signal of disaster.

By late afternoon it was a full-fledged, unyielding wildfire, erratic due to high winds.

Flames jumped two different fire lines and then leapt northeast into Queens Canyon from nearby Rampart Road, where firefighters had been struggling to manage the blaze. Wind gusts as high as 70 miles an hour pushed the wall of flame directly down the Front Range.

It grew enormously, consuming everything in its path, fed by dry land and parched pine trees. At dusk, an ugly, black-orange glow encroached on Colorado Springs. On the 171

southwest side of the city, soot flew, cinders as large as newspaper pages blowing on the wind. The air was smoke.

Too soon, the hot red wall of flame would reach neighborhoods. Doorsteps.

That night I didn’t sleep. I’d imagined, leaving Ohio, that once I returned to Colorado

I’d feel some kind of peace and be instantly at home. But Durango was not yet home, not at all familiar, and I could only focus on the Springs, my old city. All night I was online, messaging with old co-workers in the newsroom, texting and calling friends who may have been evacuated.

I couldn’t quiet the feeling that I should be there. I was helpless, had never felt smaller or more helpless before. But that early day in Akron, when the farmhouse burned down, weighed on my mind. I had sat on the couch in a strange new place, knowing that

1,000 miles west, the home I loved was ablaze, and I wasn’t there to bear witness to its end. It had been a mistake, something I would eternally regret.

At two a.m., Jarrad turned toward me in bed. “We can pack you up in the morning,” he said. “You can head out as soon as you wake up.” He knew.

We were weary from a week on the road and all the upheaval moving brings. But all I could think about was getting back in our car and speeding up the freeway until I saw those foothills. I had claimed Colorado Springs as my home when I was twenty-one years old, and love for that place made it my home still. This time I would be present, a witness to the smoke, flame and aftermath, whatever it would be. 172

Early that morning I packed the car again and drove for six hours, through unfamiliar mountains toward the ones I knew well. South of the city, sickly gray plumes of smoke rose into the sky and obscured Pikes Peak and the entire Front Range. The wind was wild, and the city smelled like campfire.

The Waldo fire burned hot and hungry that afternoon, lighting up Blodgett Peak and continuing north and west. Many neighborhoods were evacuated, a total of 32,000 people, with other areas on standby. Traffic was clogged. Ash rained down on the central part of the city, all the way to the eastern plains. The foothills fire everyone always dreaded had come to pass, and there was no hope for containment.

That night, atop bluffs to the east of the city, residents stood and watched as 350 foothills homes burned to the ground. All I could do was join in the disbelief and mourning, and feel helpless alongside everyone else. From a distance, with so much of the city engulfed in red and orange, black smoke shrouding everything, it looked like hell.

At some points in my life, fire had been a comfort--the warmth of the woodstove in the farmhouse, staving off the bitter Minnesota winter chill. The friendly glow of Alaska campfires, keeping the eternal damp at bay. The first time I realized how different fire could be, how terrifying and relentless, was in Colorado in 2002, the summer after I’d moved there. The Haymen Fire broke out in June, between the Kenosha Mountains and

Pikes Peak, turning 138,000 acres of pine forest and alpine plain into charred black 173

nothing, and burning 133 homes. No matter where you were in the state, you could see and smell smoke. It was then I understood the very different nature of fire in the west. For the first time, I was daunted by the place I lived, saw it as dangerous and out of control.

Beautiful, but treacherous. I understood why people prayed for snow in the winter, rain in early spring.

The barren, ashen plots of land where Colorado Springs homes once stood were too familiar. I thought of the farmhouse, and how fire had erased everything it had been. It seemed for a time that our lives there had been erased as well. Places that burn can never be what they once were. Fire mandates renewal. Just because you call a place home doesn’t mean it will always be the same. The face of the farm was forever changed, re- shaped, the day the house burned, just as the city of Colorado Springs was forever altered by the Waldo Canyon blaze.

As I drove alone back to Durango, I thought about all the places I’d called home.

Each had seemed to have a timeframe--he farmhouse,was home until I was old enough to take command of my own life, and give in to the draw of new places, and Craig was home until I’d learned the lessons I needed, to grow up and move on. Colorado Springs was home until I fell in love with a man more than I loved the mountains.

Yet all of them, along with D.C. and Ohio, still felt like homes in my mind. I remembered them, carried them with me. They hadn’t stopped being my places simply because I didn’t live there anymore. And I had mourned for them, just as I would mourn for what Colorado Springs had been, before the fire. 174

But I believe in the power and possibility that a clean slate provides, whether it comes from choice or tragedy. I believe memory survives along with land. I believe in beginning anew. Out of the blackened ash of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I know that green sprigs will eventually rise, just as, from the naked, black foundation where my childhood farmhouse once stood, a new home was established. The land will be forever changed. But a new sense of home, a new understanding of place, can arise. If we are patient.

Establishing a home in Durango would take patience as well. The trails and terrain weren’t familiar like the areas around Colorado Springs. Yet I have always felt embraced by mountains, cradled and protected by the comforting, shaded valleys they create.

Friends from the east sometimes commented on how unsettling the West felt to them, how unsafe and exposed they seemed to be under the wide western sky. Without tall trees to shield you or towering buildings to obscure your view, you have nothing to protect you from the wild elements--lightning storms, rushing rivers, craggy peaks so high that if you reach the top, you’ll hardly be able to breathe. So much sheer wide-openness.

I have never felt fear about being exposed. Rather, I have felt elation, climbing to the bare tops of mountains. But the fires that summer did remind me that seasons in the west bring untamable things--raging wildfires, gushing whitewater rapids in spring, the foreboding chance of avalanches in the backcountry in winter. Life here can make you cautious. 175

At times I am daunted by the sheer wildness of the Rockies. Yet I have yearned for that wilder kind of beauty, since my departure from Colorado. In all my time away I have longed to look out my window and see snow-topped peaks and towering stands of evergreens--the harsh, hearty landscape of the west that long ago claimed my heart.

I’ve come to a place that rests on the dividing line between two lands I love: mountains and desert. Here at the edge of the Colorado plateau, there are snow-capped peaks to the north and desert badlands to the south. I live at the foot of the La Plata mountains, in the slope of the great Continental Divide. Even now, seven months after our move, I’m amazed at what lies out my back door. Ghost Ranch, my desert retreat and marriage place, is only a short drive from our little town. In the middle of so much sacred land, yearning to be rooted in a place not for years but for decades, I believe I can call this place my home.

Because home, I have found, is many things.

It is the memory of a large white farmhouse, with me still. It is the familiar feeling of turning from blacktop to gravel, and driving down a long country road toward the trees.

Home is a worn Kelty backpacking tent with a tattered rain fly, and a forty-year-old

Gibson guitar, still broken, and still beautiful.

Home is Pikes Peak out my bedroom window, topped with white. It is every rocky, winding mountain trail that remains after fires die.

Home is the cornfields and green, leafy canopies of northeast Ohio, thriving in the deep humidity of July. 176

Home is Jarrad, wandering downstairs from any room in any city, wrapping me in his familiar embrace and telling me he can’t sleep if I’m not there.

And home now is the mountains, rising up into blue Colorado sky. The kind of blue people sing about. So when I need familiarity, I go to the them. I climb, breathe thin air, and find comfort in the geography, knowing everything else will come in time. For all the difficulty I’ve known in leaving places behind, I have been rewarded with a collection of places I can claim as my own.

And I carry them.

Rather than ache for all the places I have left, all more familiar than Durango, I embrace beginning again and give in to the beauty of starting over. Here, now, Colorado is new once again and full of possibility. For the first time in my life, there is no cutoff.

No countdown or reason to leave, nothing pulling me away.

So I declare these mountains, this valley, as my place. I lay claim to this landscape and fall in love each morning as sunlight spills over the cliffs. In awe, and in lingering disbelief, I realize I am surrounded by all I need to feel at peace. To be truly home, and content. It is far more than my fair share of joy.