goodbye to Rick’s folks, packed up what I’d take with me, and we were on our way to the Colorado-Utah border and the little town of Gateway, population 52.
Fish for dinner caught fresh from the Dolores River and wild asparagus picked on the riverbanks was appealing for a while, but after eight months, living in a plain two-bedroom farmhouse with Victor and his girlfriend got old. And mining was taking its toll on Rick. Hard physical labor in a mineshaft a mile down into the earth for minimal pay was anything but a cowboy’s dream. It was time for something new.
For years Rick had thought about becoming a farrier, making a living shoeing horses and being free to go where he wanted. It was a perfect job for a cowboy, and it sounded like a fine idea to me. Rick found a farrier school in El Paso, had a friend there we could stay with, and we moved again, squeaking by on savings until he got his license and could get some paid work. When farrier school ended we were just about flat broke, my divorce was finalized, and the settlement check on its way would buy us a ticket out of there. We begged the managers of a bank in south Texas to cash my out-of-state check, then drove the dying pickup to a used car lot and bought a shiny new truck complete with a camper trailer. California would be the next stop, and this camper would be our traveling home.
Arnie lived in Woodland Hills outside Los Angeles now, in a spacious suburban house, and Robin was much happier there. There were other kids in the neighborhood, and the swimming pool entertained her day in and out. We visited them on our way north, promising to come back to visit often. We wanted someplace rugged and green, a place with a lot of horse ranches and great big skies.
The Northern California coast along Highway One is famous for its expanses of rolling hills dotted with grazing cows, stunning rocky shores, and empty beaches. Dairy farms and ranches, private estates, and rural dream houses fill the area, and we chose this area for our destination, parking the trailer in a campground near Point Reyes State Park, about thirty miles north of San Francisco. There was lot of money in Marin County, and we expected a thriving business. The campground had good showers, laundry facilities, and corrals for the horses we would bring out soon from Colorado. The sleepy little town of Point Reyes Station, with its bookstores, galleries, and bakery where the locals hung out was just minutes away, and it offered some balance to the life of solitude I led. Mostly I sought the peace of the windswept beaches and hiking trails through the sloping hills and redwood forests and along the serene waterways of Tomales Bay. We had enough money to feed the horses and dogs and enough for our ground chuck and potatoes stew, and somehow we always scraped together enough change for gas, Skoal and Marlboros, and homegrown, which was pretty cheap back then.
Rick would need a horseshoeing rig to get started; our fifteen-foot “home” hauled from El Paso just wasn’t going to do it. He found a used produce trailer, hung a sign on the side—“Garvan’s Horseshoeing Service”—and he was ready for business. I set up my jewelry-making tools and sat down with a lot of new ideas. I would sell what I made at local craft fairs, and there seemed to be a lot of them in the Bay Area.
Rick’s country ways were adorable to me. He was polite, gentle, helpful, kind, and always ready to lend a helping hand to anyone who asked. We made love every morning or night, after his efforts to earn his living. We didn’t talk much, it just wasn’t Rick’s style, and for a while I didn’t mind, but after a time I began to miss having friends to talk with. I found classes in Hatha yoga in town and stayed up late reading books about metaphysics and past-life regression. Rick wasn’t interested in any of it, and I had to keep my thoughts to myself. I’d always known our styles were different, but they were beginning to scrape against each other a bit—the sweet, simple cowboy and this Kansas girl turned New York wife, turned suburban mom, turned jeweler and mountain woman, turned California soul searcher. Our quarters started feeling cramped, and sometimes I’d lose my patience. Climbing over Rick in the middle of the night to get to our tiny toilet, I once stepped into a smelly tobacco can that had been ripening for months. “Can’t you keep your goddamn spittoon outside?” I’d cried, pounding on him, and he wrestled me down and tickled me until I collapsed in laughter and love.
A year into life on the California coast, we decided it was time for a change. Jet Spencer, a friend of Rick’s from Durango, lived in Ojai, an hour north of Los Angeles. Jet was an artist with a crowded art studio, but he had floor space for a couple of friends until we found our own next home, and our dogs wouldn’t be a problem. Work seemed promising in Ojai. The inland winters would be shorter, which could mean more work for Rick, and Arnie and Robin would be much closer. Rick drove the horses in the horse trailer all the way back to Durango to his folks’ ranch, and I packed everything up and got ready for the move.
I hadn’t been in touch much with Grandpa Nank since I’d left Arnie and headed west; in fact, I had been silent for several years. How could I explain to him what I was doing? Johnny told me Nank was living in a nursing home in Kansas and not doing too well. He was ninety-two. As soon as Rick got back from Colorado and we were settled into our room in Ojai, I used the last of our savings to fly to Kansas City for a long-overdue visit to my beloved Nank before it was too late.
As the cab from the airport in Kansas City turned up the drive to my roadside motel, I felt my stomach tighten as I tried to rehearse what I would tell Nank I was doing. I had to have a better story for him than the truth. How would this self-made man, this farmer’s son who graduated college and became a veterinarian in 1908, feel about his “daisy” sleeping on a mattress on the floor in her boyfriend’s friend’s back room, living off meager earnings from her jewelry sold at craft fairs and his paltry earnings shoeing horses? Nank had bought me a beautiful four-bedroom home in New Rochelle and set me up for the good life with my husband so we could adopt our first child before I turned thirty. What in the world could I say?
But as soon as I got to the nursing home, I knew there was no need to worry. While I was so busy living my life, Nank had grown old and senile. I had expected to sit with him and hold his hand, to kiss his face and tell him I loved him, to thank him for loving me more than anyone in my young life.
He didn’t recognize me.
“Nank, it’s me!” I cried, sitting in the chair they’d put beside him for our visit. “It’s Carolyn … your little daisy. Don’t you remember me?” He looked ancient and lost.
“You don’t recognize anyone, do you, Dr. Graham,” the nurse said, straightening his collar and stepping back to look at us both. She saw this all the time, didn’t she? I noticed a small card extending from the end of a plastic stick at the center of a wilting bouquet of spring flowers. I tugged it free and read, “Love from Mary”—my mother. She knew her dad was here. Did she care? Did she visit him? I had no idea what anything meant to her anymore. I had tried to reach my mother over the past few years and she had never answered or returned my calls. I just wanted was to make sure she was all right in her little apartment alone. I looked at the second bouquet, the fresh one. The card tucked into that bouquet read, “I love you, Elizabeth.”
“His wife comes here every week,” the nurse told me. I gave her a weak smile. Maybe I should call Elizabeth. Or maybe there was no one to call.
Guilt nearly sickened me as I held Nank’s gnarled hand and asked him to forgive me, certain that any moment he would break into a smile and we would talk, like old times. I reminded him of how Johnny and I used to salt his coffee at breakfast when we stayed there, biting our tongues to keep from laughing. “Mmmmm, delicious,” he’d always say. He taught us to play gin rummy and canasta and let us win and collect our candies and shiny quarters. I told him all about that, too.
He fell asleep while I talked, mouth open, drool snaking its way down his roadmap face.
After that first visit to Nank I nearly ran the mile back to my motel room to get my bearings. My grief seemed boundless. I cried and cried, and then I rallied and put myself back together. This was why I’d come, wasn’t it? To see Nank. I splashed cold water on my face, brushed my hair into place, and headed back out.
For the next three days I was at that nursing home, getting to know the people who made up Nank’s