The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (11 page)

I smiled slightly, shook my head.

He laughed. “Wha-at?”

“I love it when you say, ‘C’mere,’” I confessed, climbing astraddle.

He lifted almost imperceptibly, from the hips.

A shiver ran through me and I fell on his chest. “God! What you do to me.”

“Oh darlin’.”

•   •   •

W
ARD’S BED WAS DIFFERENT FROM HIS CHAIR.
He insisted that I think of it as our bed, not his. The same with my bed in Laramie. It was ours. Our beds felt almost sacred to him, he said, although he realized that “you have to be careful mixing religious language with sex. Tends to put a damper on things.”

Our Kansas bed was the same one his aunt and uncle had slept in, part of the suite of dark furniture that caused me to imagine we were on the set of an old Western movie. Even though I’d succeeded in slowing him down, the love we made was bumbling at first. I hoped that his aunt and uncle had done better. But it took me years to become uninhibited enough to talk about sex, and—call it my prejudice—I didn’t think those conversations took place often in Kansas.

“I need to tell you something about me,” I murmured.

“I had a feeling we were going to have this talk.”

“So you probably know what I’m going to say?”

“I think so.” Ward gave me a reassuring kiss on the forehead. “But tell me anyway. You can tell me anything.”

I guided his hand to the spot.

“What do you want me to do?”

Ward’s other lovers all had hair triggers, he guessed. “Lucky them,” I quipped. I had little doubt they’d been faking, as I had done when I was younger.

Ward reassured me that he loved me all the more because I was special in this, as in every other way. On hearing the word “special,” I literally bit my tongue. I held it between my teeth until the urge to spill anger all over him subsided. But once I’d coached him, he was so responsive to my needs that the umbrage I took at that word faded, then disappeared.

In our beds, images were born in both our minds that sustained us during our long separations. One foggy March morning he awoke from a dream in which I hovered over him, wearing only the red satin jacket I’d worn when we went dancing together on New Year’s Eve in Laramie.

He told me that he spent the remainder of the day in a state of grace. As he mended barbed wire in one of his far-flung pastures, the vision reappeared, warming him even as the cold mist thickened to rain and wet his clothes through to his skin. We were able to see each other only about once every month, and he had been feeling down about the seeming impossibility of our ever being together permanently. The dream buoyed him up.

I loved the stillness of his room at night, the stars out his window. His metabolism was slower than mine, calmer. When I lay on his shoulder, that calm emanated from him and into me. It brought to mind the cottonwood tree beside the spring where we’d met. He seemed as solid as that tree.

And when I pulled out of his yard, beginning the
three-hundred-mile drive back to Laramie, he would stand as still as that tree, watching me go. Standing there all woebegone in his thick Carhartt jacket, he reminded me of my father in his wool-lined denim jacket, although my father never would have found himself alone at age fifty, unless Mom had died. Even then, I couldn’t imagine Dad looking romantically forlorn. He was not a romantic man. The two men were very different. Yet they were formed by the same soil.

A B
ODY
IN
A
P
LACE

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil

is no freedom for the tree.

—
R
ABINDRANATH
T
AGORE
,
“Fireflies”

1

C
ALIFORNIA, 1976.
The Sierra Nevada Mountains. I am twenty-six, and my boyfriend is leading the way up a trail into the Desolation Wilderness. On my back is the olive-green pack he helped me pick out at the REI store in Berkeley. It contains my share of everything we will need over the next two days and nights—the sleeping bag and pad he also helped me choose, the set of tin dinnerware his ex-wife used when they camped together, two boxes of macaroni and cheese, one can of tuna and one of condensed milk, a round of smoked Gouda, six bagels, fuel for the stove, matches, my Swiss army knife, a comb, lip moisturizer, and a smattering of clothes. Somehow these few items add up to a shoulder-straining, back-breaking weight that I bear resentfully and in shock.

Although I moved to San Francisco in 1968 at the age of eighteen, and San Francisco is a city of many hills, I’ve only recently begun getting used to walking up them. On our weekends together my boyfriend and I often trundle up and down between his Telegraph Hill apartment and the North Beach coffeehouses, restaurants, and jazz clubs. But this isn’t a hill. It’s a mountain. Other than the windmills on our farm when I was a kid, it’s the steepest thing I’ve climbed in my entire life. It doesn’t help that my boyfriend carries a larger pack and strides ahead of me—up and over rocks and tree roots, across streams, always up, up, and up—faster than I can manage and as if it costs him no effort at all. I stare maliciously into the back of his head and his narrow shoulders,
which he holds in his usual thrown-back straight manner despite the weight they carry. I wish I could focus hatred like a magnifying glass focuses the sun, causing a fire to light in his curly brown hair.

During all these city years, I have been an astronaut floating in space, the lifeline of my identity always securely fastened to Kansas, the mother ship. But I don’t realize that yet. Nor do I have any way of knowing that I will eventually remember this day as the beginning of the journey returning me to earth. In fact, I think of this guy I’m following up the mountain as my lifeline. He is the one who scooped me out of the ocean of loneliness I inadvertently dove into by finally getting the nerve to divorce my affable, spacey, totally incompatible husband.

Before I met my husband, I’d dreamed of going to San Francisco, where the hippies were having love-ins; the war protesters were nailing establishment hypocrisy; and Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane were penetrating the darkness of the times, trailing psychedelic colors and my generation behind them. But short of sticking my thumb out, I didn’t have any way of getting there. I wasn’t foolhardy. I enrolled in college instead. I’d attended one summer session and was in the middle of my first fall semester at KU when along came this exotic guy with a plan. I hitched a ride on his volition. I know that I’m doing it again. It is not only the pace my boyfriend is setting, but the fact he is setting it that makes me want to burn holes into the back of his head.

What is this? He’s stopping. He turns around, walks back to me, and with this ecstatic look on his face, takes me by the shoulders. “Isn’t this, isn’t this . . .” He tightens his jaw theatrically.
“Err-grrr!”
Apparently lacking a sufficiently exalted descriptor, he leans me back for a passionate kiss, then steadies me as I begin to topple under my unbalanced load.

“Yes! It’s . . . fantastic!” I pretend to share his enthusiasm over this brutal climb through a dark forest just as I pretend to enjoy the frenetic, Coltrane-style jazz he drags me to most weekends. The one positive thing—the strain on my lungs prevents my craving a cigarette. I’ve been
struggling to quit smoking since my divorce. Not the best of timing, I realize.

Begrudgingly, I do allow that this seeming death march will probably have a payoff, like when we cross the Golden Gate Bridge and go to the beaches in Marin County, where we run barefoot. He has a philosophy for exertion outdoors, as he does for almost everything. Holding fingers to thumb in a teacherly circle and his pinkie in the air, he has explained to me that most people are “herd animals” who lack independent spirits and will not walk, let alone run, far. All you have to do to escape the crowd is put out a little effort. The same goes for moods. You have to power through them. Be physical, and the endorphins will kick in, elevating your spirits. Go even if it’s raining. Usually the sun comes out and you will have the beach all to yourself. At the very least, the effort in the face of opposition will win a revelation of some kind.

We got up at five a.m. this morning, had our cappuccino at six, arrived at the trailhead by nine, and the sun is now at its zenith, so he’s been keeping up this grueling pace for three hours, most of that time in the trees. They were gloomy to walk through. I hated not being able to see far, but now that we’re getting above the timberline, the mid-July heat weighs on me and makes my pack feel twice as heavy. Admittedly, the vistas are terrific—gray granite slopes with waterfalls cascading over them, and now a solitary clump of tall trees, the last of their kind, leaning skyward like exclamation points. “Look at those amazing pine trees,” I call out, hoping he will stop to appreciate them.

He turns his head but doesn’t even slow down. “They’re lodgepoles.”

Thank you and fuck you too, know-it-all. The strap of my canteen is pinned under my pack and I can’t lift it high enough to get a drink. But damned if I’m going to ask him to stop. The muscles in my thighs ache, yet I continue to punish them, straining now through a boulder field, each step so high above the last one, I can barely lift myself onto it. “Just put one foot in front of the other,” he’s told me before. Well, I’ll do that one hundred times, then I’m stopping whether he does or not.
One jerk. Two jerk. Three jerk. Four prick. I ration the pejoratives, afraid I’ll run out before I get to a hundred. Five prick. Six pri—

His neat hiking shoes and straight-legged jeans are planted on the step above me. The toes are pointing toward me, not away. “How ya doin’?” he asks, with real concern, like a coach who has suddenly realized his drill is on the verge of murdering his pupil.

I’m almost woozy enough to pass out. I wish I would. That would teach him. “Great!” I say as convincingly as I can muster, but hearing the hollow ring in my voice, revert to sarcasm. “How are you doing?”

He laughs. “Don’t worry. This is the final assault.”

My fists clench at the enticing images that word conjures. He waves his hand at a vertical wall of rock to our left. Only now do I see that the path turns here, to go straight up it. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

He frees my canteen for me. “Here,” he says, pouring water into me as if I were a plant. Or a child. He takes my hat off, pushes my hair off my sweaty forehead, jambs the hat back on with two hands, pats my shoulder as if placating a tiger. “It will be worth it, Juleney. You’ll see. I promise.”

“Thanks,” I say, liking that he at least acknowledges my anger. I picture the campsite we will build on the shoreline of the lake. Tomorrow morning we will sleep in together in the comfort of sun-dappled nylon and plush down. I remind myself that I have good reason to be optimistic. He’s proven his theory to me many times. When we go to the ocean and those magical endorphins heighten my awareness, something as commonplace as a sand dollar can fascinate me. Once, a pod of seals followed our progress along an otherwise empty beach, their rubbery black heads bobbing in the surf so close to us that we could see their whiskers and limpid black eyes. Another time, a couple of miles up the beach on a foggy day, we discovered a driftwood hut to shelter in. Sitting in that tepee with cold, gray sky showing between the sea-smoothed slats, the fire we’d built casting its warmth over me, I imagined a buffalo rug beneath us and the walls sheathed in hides. I speculated that if we lived mostly outdoors, the way the Indians had, we would experience the gratitude we were feeling in that moment every time we stepped inside.

My boyfriend remarked, as he often does, on how the prairie shaped my aesthetics and my imagination. He thinks of the plains as a pure and open place, an outer representation of my inner nature. He puts me on this pedestal and I know he’d be appalled at the impure thoughts coursing through me right now, but when he says things like that, I feel almost as proud of my Kansas roots as when I was a kid singing “Home on the Range,” the state song. It was written only about seventy miles from where I grew up, I liked informing him. He grew up among New York intellectuals, went to an Ivy League school, and has a successful career. Yet he says that sparks fly between us because we are “equals but opposites.” Being admired by a man with such lofty credentials and who has such a correspondingly high opinion of his own worth gives me a higher opinion of mine. His thinking I am his equal makes me aware of my potential and fuels my lonely weekdays, which I spend at my bookkeeping job as the only employee of an accountant.

My boyfriend scales the virtual cliff before us, then stops on what I hope, for God’s sake, is the crest. “Eureka!” he shouts.

I grab on to boulders to keep from losing my balance and climb. My eyes, as always, are aimed toward him, but the sun blinds me. As he reaches down, all I can see is his dark silhouette outlined by blue sky. He pulls me up beside him. We stand on the edge of what he tells me is a cirque, a silver-gray cup of granite filled with glacier melt as clear as the air. A few trees grow on the shoreline protected by this wall of granite, and in their shade on the water, we can see the undersides of boulders and the sandy bottom. My boyfriend beams a dare at me, then slaloms down the gravelly path, tossing his pack, his hat, his shirt. He is putting on a show, but I can’t take my eyes off the water.

It beckons glasslike, receptive. The world’s purest element in its purest form. Seemingly innocent, yet I suspect it is so cold that a prolonged immersion in it could kill. Every cell in my body and every neuron in my heat-addled brain thirst for that immersion.

I make my way down the path faster than feels safe, skidding over talus, banging my hip on a boulder, and almost falling more than once. I drop my pack on the pine duff along the shoreline, then my boots,
socks, and jeans. An unusually dark boulder with mica sparkles in it calls to me, but it’s almost too hot to touch. So I dip my hat into the startling cold water, scooping it onto the rock, then lower myself into the now wet and warm shallow depression down the boulder’s center. I hang my arm off the edge, and, trailing my fingers through the water, begin a slow, delectable flirtation. The high-altitude sun presses my back as with a dry iron, while below me, riffles slap rock. Glare refracts off the water, dappling my arm and flashing hypnotically on my retinas.

I am irradiated, intoxicated. I rise to my feet, pull my now wet shirt and underwear off and try not to notice where my boyfriend is or whether he notices me. I don’t care about his shouts of cold and pleasure or the splashes he makes cavorting. This is about me and you, I think toward the lake. Not me and him. Go, I urge myself. Go! Go!

I’ve done something really, really stupid, like jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. The lake is liquid ice, the cold so shocking I panic at first. Echoes of my scream circle the jagged peaks. So do those of my boyfriend’s “yee-haw!” His example and approval help me resist the urge to splash ashore. It only takes a half minute or so and I’m willingly giving myself to the water and it is giving itself to me, driving me into my body the way good sex does, only better, the climax unending. I am nothing but sensation, all of it glorious. I dive back under. I’ve never swum naked in broad daylight and I love the water’s silken feel on my skin. I love watching my hands move underwater, as if I were a creature who evolved in this medium. Drifting like a fetus in a womb of laced sunlight, I ponder the startling clarity and whiteness of my hands and feet.

But I’m beginning to feel this strange, hot sensation high in my stomach, as if a burner has ignited inside me. This cannot be good. Because my brain has lost all sense and thrown me into this predicament, my body is resorting to metabolic triage, my blood abandoning my limbs and rushing to save my vital organs. I climb out and, shivering, lie down on my boulder. Soon the sun’s high heat penetrates me, lifting and nullifying the lake’s deep cold. Enlivened, awakened, I savor all to which I’ve been reborn—the rasping call and obsidian sheen of a raven
slicing the depthless blue above me, the tickle of my arm’s sun-bleached hairs as I drag my lips over them, breathing my skin’s smell. The fragrance doesn’t come only from the lake, but from granite, ozone, and pine.