An outsider is unprepared for the onslaught that is New York City, where the senses are so bombarded with stimuli that they blur and dull, making visitors gape. This physical phenomenon begins with the eye which has to take in and translate the myriad messages of colors, shapes, letters, images, a hand, a package of cigarettes, legs, cars, trucks, cabs, traffic lights, flashing neon, street signs. The sensitive inner ear is ground by deafening subway brakes; badly programmed messages boom at twice their intended sound level. Buses roar by, discordant horns shatter the air, a cacophony of tinny music swirls overhead. The nose cannot trust even the occasional draft of sweet air. One might be tricked by it and find themselves inhaling a great gulp of the pissoirs that the lamps, the streets, the subways, had become in the early ‘80s. To visit New York City means to enjoy it and then escape. If you live there, it is your world. There is no escape.

I came to the city on the heels of death. Acting too rashly, perhaps, after Carson’s death from complications caused by Potomac Horse Fever (see my July 7th essay), within the month I submitted my resignation to the publisher (after only 18 months, my young magazine was about to fold anyway), threw my belongings in storage, gave away the rattiest of my furniture, found temporary homes for the dogs and the cats, and ran away, arriving in New York City needy, frightened, but determined to find a new world.

Camping on a sofa in a relative’s tiny living room, I looked for work in a city where you begin first as either an insider or an outsider. Jobs in New York are scarce commodities. If you are from the outside, they are nonexistent unless you find some Catch-22 way to become an insider. For weeks, I walked or took the bus so as not to confront the distressing puzzle of the subways. For weeks, the grid-like avenues and streets all ran together into a haze of meaninglessness and I walked slowly among the oppressive crowds, the noontime surges of people who swelled the sidewalks, who strode purposefully toward an unknown appointment or an office, store, or restaurant, eyes distant and hostile. Unlike them, I had nowhere to go and only ghosts were my companions.

The past haunted me with its great, clear expanse of fall sky that had wheeled over the 300 acres of Maryland cornfields where the shabby, sprawling farmhouse stood on a hill and where dark Vs of Canada geese came to land heavily and feed amongst the golden stubble of the stalks. The images of my past life lived just on the other side of the city slush, the dirty snow, the homeless with rags on their feet, the chic New Yorkers in black who had fur coats, maids, downtown lofts, and homes in the country.

At that time, in the early ‘80s, the homeless were not yet invisible as they became during the subsequent boom years. One February day, I watched a gnarled old man wake from his doze in the subterranean waiting room of Grand Central Station. In the cold hum of the cavernous room and under the harsh fluorescent lights, he sat up and began to slowly gather his four patched and stringed shopping bags that were filled with newspaper. Oblivious to anyone around him, he tidied up his territory, picking up a few superfluous newspapers on the seat next to him. He held them tenderly in front of him with twisted, reddened hands and shuffled painfully over to the wastebasket that stood across the vast room, depositing them carefully, and then shuffling back to his bench at a snail’s pace, rocking back and forth on arthritic legs. Arriving at his bench, he slowly picked up his four shopping bags and arranged two in each hand. Bent and crooked, he made his way to the other side of the building and proceeded, just another invisible old man, up the ramp, the busy commuters giving him wide berth and occasionally bumping his shopping bags.

It rained and rained and rained some more that spring. One day, still without a job, I found myself standing on 6th Avenue and Bryant Park trying to find a taxi in the rain that would take me to the doctor’s office. Crippling spasms radiated down the backs of both legs that were threatening to buckle. My stomach curled in pain and fear, and my knuckles turned white as I gripped the umbrella and struggled to stay under control. The New York doctor, after he observed me trying climb onto the table and checking my wild reflexes, advised that I should be immobile for several weeks, preferably in the hospital.

* * *

After a month of lying flat on my back but not in the hospital, the first walk I took in New York City was to the elevator and out through the lobby. The warm, early May sun fell upon me as I moved out of the building’s shade and made my way across the street to the entrance of Bryant Park. Putting one foot ahead of the other and moving upright made me feel lightheaded and alien. Near the entrance stood a bush covered with lime green furls. Ignoring the clumps of sketchy men hanging out in the background, I slowly walked to the shrub and cradled a just-spread leaf in the palm of my hand. The afternoon light rendered it brilliant, fresh, tender. The cars and the noise and the buildings and the men of New York faded away until all I saw was this new and small green life in my hand.

 * * *

My days living according to the rhythms and demands of the natural world, of a deep New Hampshire winter or an early Maryland spring, were over. After I fully healed, I lived in yet another world, one where I stopped to briefly marvel at the brilliantly colored building over Madison Square or the deftness of the messengers on bikes, or the glittering cityscape at twilight as seen from the D train on the bridge. Looking much like the busy people I saw when I first came to the city, I too would soon have places to go: to a job in book publishing, to my own new, small apartment in Park Slope.

And with therapy, I found the strength to dump the lover who was torturing me.

But often, during that winter of 1984, as I strode confidently to an appointment, office, store, or restaurant, I remembered what it felt like to ride Carson bareback through the deep woods of New Hampshire back when I was a wild girl-woman, the dappled light filtering through to the forest floor, a thrush fluting unseen in the trees, and the rush of cool air against my body as Horse and Girl ran together.

Our new home was an historic 1750 farmhouse, an unrestored architectural gem that sat on 300 acres. Of major interest to me was the gigantic timbered red barn, a behemoth of a building full of cobwebs, old hay, junked furniture, and rusted farm implements. There was a small field for Carson in the old fruit orchard just off the kitchen where the old well still stood next to one gnarled apple tree and a towering pear tree. All we had to do was mend the fence, put up a new gate, and reinforce the stall in the barn with plastic sheeting so Carson would be warm in the winter.

We moved our two wood stoves and our wood supply down from Larks Haven, along with our crummy furniture and twenty cases of preserved food from the previous summer’s garden. The Epping white colonial house with a central hallway had eight spacious rooms, but we immediately closed off most of them since again we would be heating with wood. Our bedroom faced a line of ancient, bare maple trees and two large snowy hayfields. We set our mattress on the floor and located a supply of hay for Carson. Underneath the horsehair plaster and lathe, the insulation in the walls consisted of the original corncobs. After 200 years, they were now wizened, miniature corn cobs that mice and the cats would occasionally drag out and leave in the hallway, so ineffective a cold barrier that the winter gales whistled through the chinks in the wall, freezing the dogs’ water dish at night and gently wafting our hair in their draft.

We snowshoed over that winter’s heavy snowfall to a big stand of pines to gather the dry pine twigs I favored for kindling or to look for piles of owl pellets made of undigested rodent bones at the base of the trees. We learned to cross-country ski and on dazzling winter days hosted skiing parties for our fellow students. I poured hot homemade vegetable soup fresh off the wood stove into thermoses, cheap wine into animal skin flasks, and carefully wrapped up cheese and bread and chocolate in waxed paper. Dressed warmly, we skied for a few miles through the woods, smoking a couple of joints and giggling at our mishaps, until we reached the large frozen lake where we carved a hollow in the snow and built a small fire that crackled merrily while we ate our incomparably delicious meal. Still giggling, we held races on the frozen flatness and found short hills in the wood around the lake on which to execute daring, thrilling downhill rushes.

All was not idyllic, however, in our pastoral New England neighborhood. One icy January day, while on the university’s winter break, I was alone in the farmhouse preparing for a day of bread-baking since the roads were glazed with a coat of sheer ice from an ice storm the night before. It was bitterly cold; the wind chill lowered the temperature to far below zero and the incongruent weak sunshine only emphasized the fierce cold. The dogs huddled around the wood stove.

In the early afternoon, I happened to glance out of one of the frosted windows and glimpsed, in the white distance, a police car with its blue lights glittering silently in the driveway of the farmhouse just down the road from ours. Besides the flash of the lights there was no other visible activity. When I returned to the window a few minutes later, I was startled to see the police car climbing our long driveway, spinning its tires on the ice. It was marked “County Sheriff.” When it stopped, two officers with guns jammed in their belts jumped out hurriedly and made their way over our icy path to the door. The dogs leapt up at the knock and barked madly.  Ack!  The fuzz!

“There’s a gunman hiding in the area,” one sheriff announced brusquely as I warily opened the door, desperately hoping that our hash pipe was not in view. “We’ll check out your barn. Keep your dogs inside and your door locked.” Then they turned on their heels as I hung onto the frantic dogs and locked the door behind them in disbelief.

Through the window I watched them as they climbed the slippery slope up to the barn. After a few minutes, they emerged and skidded back down the hill, trying not to fall on their big stomachs, outstretching a steadying thick arm to each other like a rural Laurel and Hardy. There was a soundless, animated argument discussion about who was going to drive, then the blue lights flashed back on and they flew back down the driveway in reverse.

By now, other police were converging on the old Victorian house, state police cars as well as county vehicles, lights swirling and parking hurriedly along the driveway and parallel to the huge snowbanks that lined the road. Even from inside my house, I could hear the crackle of radios. Uniformed figures armed with long rifles milled around the property. An ambulance arrived. More police cars pulled up, fast, until they clogged the road.

What if the gunman was still in my barn undetected by the bumbling county sheriffs? What was going on? I picked up the phone, my only available link with the outside world, and called my parents on Cape Cod, some 150 miles away. My father picked up. Dad, I said, my voice shaking, I’m scared.

My father was not known for his parental skills, but he stayed on the phone with me for hours, constantly reassuring me as I described the events that I was watching through the ice-encrusted window. Police dogs arrived on the scene, handled by men wearing big boots and thick jackets with fur-lined hoods. Behind my barn, I could see officers tramping around on snowshoes and riding black snowmobiles. Two helicopters hovered low over the tops of the trees behind my house, and a roadblock had stopped traffic on the road. Manhunt.

Several hours passed before a state police car drove slowly up our driveway. I ran to open the door to the crisply uniformed officer. He was guarded, looking oddly at my worn jeans, my flannel shirt, my long curly hair. I held onto my excited dogs and begged him to tell me what was going on.

“Your next-door neighbor has been murdered,” he said bluntly, watching my reaction.

“What?” I sagged downward to my knees, almost touching the floor. I waved him inside and gave him a chair. He was still watching me carefully as I sat down nervously petting my dogs. After a few minutes listening to me make stunned conversation, he seemed persuaded that I knew nothing about the crime that had just occurred next door, that I was just a peace-loving hippie and not a Charles Manson-like groupie accomplice.

The subsequent investigation revealed that my neighbor had been a drug dealer in New York City. A deal had gone bad. A trip to New Hampshire by the wronged was necessary to make it right. The visit had also gone badly.

The evening of the murder, the dog belonging to the couple next door, a fawn-colored Great Dane, who had witnessed the ambush and then spent the chaotic afternoon hours wandering around, forgotten and distraught, finally found his way into our kitchen for temporary sanctuary. His name was Sundance.

* * *

The next spring, we again planted a gigantic garden. We poured horse manure and natural fertilizers into it, rototilled it into airy lightness and experimented with all kinds of seeds and hybrids. We bought a chest freezer to store some of the vegetables we liked better frozen than canned, peas, beans, corn. The potatoes, onions, and winter squash from last year’s harvest had lasted almost ten months. We were conscious of the food we ate, sticking to natural grains, little meat, no preservatives, and fresh food whenever possible. We even ground our own flour from wheat berries in a French stone mill as heavy as a boulder.

On the long summer nights, when the air was cool and soft, Lance and I would walk out to the garden and stand there hushed, holding hands in a magical circle, imagining that we could hear the breathy woosh of the corn stalks as those great green erect fibers of life pushed themselves to the sky. With the summer insects buzzing their rhythmic background music and the heavens above us bright with the light of the stars and the moon, we wandered silently amongst our garden, scratching at our mosquito bites in our holy church, brimming with wonder and reverence at the mystery and beauty of it all.

Again, there were mountains surrounding us. They rose to our west where the sun set, forming the foothills of the White Mountains further north. This time they did not dwarf us, for our farmhouse sat high on a ridge. We closed off the enormous cold rooms upstairs and slept in the downstairs parlor because it was closer to the wood stove in the next room. Without enough money to heat the huge, drafty farmhouse, I hauled in a clunky wood-burning stove and a giant sky-blue porcelain Glenwood cookstove, preparing our meals on the big monster which, with its many gaps and drafts, burned wood hot and fast. The fire would only last for an hour or so without being fed, so by the time we returned from classes, it was long dead, the house was frigid and the pipes were thinking about freezing, so we’d have to start the whole fire-building process over again.

This elephantine Glenwood was a double bonus, enabling us to strip off our soaking gloves and outer garments, drape them over a nearby chair to steam dry, and pull up a seat next to the radiating heat. I learned how to cook good country food on that old-fashioned stove, succulent stews with wine and butter, floated with chunks of meat, carrots, potatoes, and onions; rich vegetable soups with tomatoes, zucchini, onions, and green beans; fluffy homemade breads and muffins that emerged nearly black on one side and white on the other until I mastered the art.

The house didn’t come equipped with a refrigerator, and as desperately poor college students, we couldn’t afford its luxury, or that of a washer and dryer, for that matter. So the first winter, we went to the laundromat and used a small shed attached to the kitchen as our icebox. When spring came and the milk started to spoil in a few day’s time, we scrounged up an old, rusted refrigerator at a junk shop for $50 and thus became a modern couple.

Wood fuel was our primary concern. Because we hadn’t brought any with us and because it cost, in 1974, $50 a cord and was too expensive for us to buy, we had to find our own heat source that winter. Luckily, there was an existing wood lot at Larks Haven Farm and soon after we moved in, we cut down and culled the dead or dying trees, stripped them of their branches, tied them in huge bundles, and attached the rope to the horn of Carson’s saddle. He dragged them over the snow down to the house to be split and stacked. I rode him out to pine stands on our property where I broke off the lower dead branches and made great bunches of the dried pine to lay in front of me over the saddle. Back at the house, I’d break them into smaller pieces and place them in the wood box for tinder.

Carson bore the fierce winter well. On cold days he’d huddle in the protection of the house, tail against the wind, head down, eyes closed against the slanting ice and snow, his coat and mane glazed with freezing rain. Even in the worst weather, he preferred to be outside, coming in only to eat his grain. At night I shut him inside anyway because it made me feel better to think of him in his warm, tight, fragrant stall protected from the storm, with dry hay to help him pass the time, fresh water that would freeze solid by morning, and soft bedding to cushion him when he laid his great body down.

His stall stood at the end of an enclosed walkway so I could walk out to check on him late at night without having to put on layers of clothing. Before the fire was stoked one last time, I took a semi-frozen carrot from our makeshift refrigerator/shed and felt my way out through darkness of the various attached buildings until I reached the barn. The single light bulb only dimly illuminated the cobwebbed, raftered area where miniature hills of snow mounded on the floors and crossbeams, blown through the door and cracks in the planked walls. Blinking in the sudden light, Carson stretched his neck out toward the carrot, the rest of his body calm and still. I matched myself to the sense of animal quiet, laying my hands on his warm, sweet-smelling thick coat and listening to the last crunches of the carrot. He turned his head around and nosed me hopefully. I placed my hand on his long face, its bones finely etched, the long wolf-hairs bearding him, and brought his huge head into my arms for a moment. He allowed just a brief amount of this indulgence and gently rested his head on me, his eyes softening as if he were about to doze off. Then he roused and shook free of me, turning his head in dismissal back to the rest of his hay.

*  *  *

On winter afternoons, we ranged far over the stark countryside, walking on the deep snow that covered the streams and rocks, that hid the topography of the earth with a thick blanket three or four feet thick. I prepared eagerly for these expeditions for it was a delicious journey out into the elements, the wilderness, after too many days cramped and hot in the house. In those days, pre-climate change, one had to dress carefully for these forays into the frigid depths of the New Hampshire winters. I wore tights, long underwear, two or three pairs of socks, a heavy turtleneck and flannel shirt, a sweater, a down parka with a hood, a knitted hat and scarf, insulated winter boots, chaps, and heavy mittens. The steamy kitchen I left behind at Larks Haven Farm was fragrant with a big pot of soup that bubbled gently on the side of the wood stove or with the rich smells of the bread I had just finished baking. Ahead lay a dazzling winter’s day, or even better, the gray hours before a storm when the atmosphere was heavy with stillness.

The dogs lounged around us while I groomed and saddled Carson, eyeing me surreptitiously. At my signal they jumped to their feet and began to fall over each other, tumbling with growling fits of energy and tongue-dripping grins of anticipation during the remaining minutes while I checked the girth and hackamore once more. We rode off into the sun or the pale softness, depending on the weather. Carson walked with exaggerated movement through the deep snow, kicking up white puffs, the dogs bounding ahead or bumping into each other in the horse’s tracks. Soon the house had receded and we were alone on vast sparkling fields or in woods. The winter forest was still, majestic, motionless except for an occasional cardinal or chickadee that dipped from tree to tree. Now and then there was a sprinkle of snow from some heavily laden bough, a little shower, a cascade of glittering crystals. The only sound was the sighing, an almost weightless sound, of this snow falling onto snow in the deep, evergreen, cathedral forests of New Hampshire where all was holy and private. The dogs forged ahead, their playfulness now settled into purposeful, ground-covering trots, tongues lolling, tails waving gracefully from side to side.

It was a simple world out there in the woods. As a high-flying red-tailed hawk would see us, I was a small figure on horseback, a vulnerable human being swaddled in civilization’s clothes, winding her way among towering spires of pines, across frozen brooks, the two dog creatures guarding me. We were just tiny moving creatures on earth.

*  *  *

One late afternoon, Carson and I set out again. It was a sullen day. An ice storm a few days old had left the forest’s branches weighted down with ice-encrusted heaps of snow. The snowmobile path we followed down into the valley was choppy enough to afford Carson a sure grip, but on either side of us the snow was covered with a thick frosting of ice.

Darkness was approaching, but I felt a restless, pressing need to get outside where the bitter-cold weather would purify me. My legs started go numb as they hung motionless in the stirrups, isolated from the rest of my body’s warmth. Carson’s breath rhythmically steamed out in puffs of vapor that crystallized into tiny drops of ice coating his whiskers. His breath and the muted scuff of snow were the only sounds in the deepening valley.

Winding down around the stately, hushed pines, I turned him to follow a trail leading to the railroad tracks. We climbed carefully over the huge snowdrifts, lethally slick, that lined the track. Ahead of us were miles of straight railroad track, converging into a pinpoint that curved to the west on the horizon. Carson quickened his walk, moved easily into his jerky trot, and then into his smoother canter, his head already bowed into his chest. We covered almost a mile at this slow gallop, his front legs reaching out and pulling in snow, his massive hindquarters pushing us ahead in rhythmic grace, me easy on his back.

The snowy footing was good for him, firm, sure. I half stood in my stirrups, bending over his mane to take the weight off his back and we pounded on and on down the ribbon of snow. He was pitching his weight against me, sitting on the reins, bulldogging me. My eyes started to tear with the wind created by our speed, blinding my vision, and tears ran down my face. With my cheeks burning with the wet and the cold, my shoulder and arms began to feel the effects of his straining against me. He started to move more powerfully, his legs reaching out for more snow. We were now at a full gallop.

But this was mere play stuff. He wanted more. He was no longer Carson, but Horse, and this horse wanted this road, this track. He wanted me off his back, wanted more speed, wanted no one controlling him. On we swept; he pulling against me relentlessly. We were traveling at a tremendous rate of speed now but still this horse was like some coiled spring, holding back phenomenal reserves of energy, waiting for me to loosen the reins. My arms burned. He pulled more insistently. Then, sensing my suddenly weakening strength, he, alarmingly, started to bring his nose away from his chest. His head rose in the air, his steady strides increased in power and speed.

We had run a mile and a half and he wasn’t even breathing hard, having found the pace and the footing for a long-distance flight. We pounded down the track, the trees blurring into dim smears, blurs of ecstasy, speed, and flight. I could only hold on to his mane, having loosened the reins in answer to my screaming muscles. The only other alternative was to turn him off the path in a circle, deflecting his forward movement, but we were imprisoned by icy snow banks on each side, funneled into the flight toward the horizon. My muscles began to sob with fatigue, my mouth frozen by the wind and the cold into an open O, my eyes streaming, my nose running.

I gave up trying to stop him. Once I had a firm grip on his mane, once my feet were securely weighted and the horse was thundering in a steady motion forward, there was little else to do except wait until he tired and I could regain control. Secretly, I was thrilled by the speed, by the rate at which I was traveling over the snow on top of this ground-eating beast, by the hypnotic stretching of his delicate-looking but incredibly strong, furred front legs, his pricked, intense ears, and his supernatural strength.

The horse was beyond me now, totally unaware of the human on top of him, freed of human bondage, even from the bondage of his own body. He was caught up in this mad frantic flight, in the craze and ecstasy of his own drumming hooves. I would have to wait until he showed the first sign of fatigue, just as he had waited for mine, wait for the first crack in his frozen joy. In the meantime, I could rest my arms.

Just as I registered that thought, my body still balanced in a crouch over his neck, I squinted ahead in the distance through streaming eyes, once, then very quickly again. There was a light. There was a light coming toward us on the track. It was a train! There was a train approaching us and I was on top of a crazed animal running headlong into it! Grabbing tight the reins, I wrenched them violently. The horse shook his head back, shook me through the reins, wildly, rebelliously. He was not yet finished.

Sawing at the ineffective hackamore, standing in my stirrups, sawing back and forth, back and forth, I was like a fly on his back. He swept on contemptuously, increasing his speed. My arms began to burn again with the renewed frenzy. We were going to be killed, a train was hurtling down the frozen track, belching dark, loud sounds and smelling of death. I sawed on the reins, called upon every cell in my cold weak body, my pitiful hands feeble, my shoulders and arms rebelling at my commands.

With the wind whipping my howls back in two channels along my cheeks and neck, I lunged forward over his neck and grabbed the reins where they connected with his hackamore, yanking to no avail. Reaching up with one hand, I seized one of his ears in my mitten, bending it backwards and crushing it ferociously in an attempt to pierce his consciousness. If he wouldn’t stop, I decided to ditch him at the last minute, dive off, save my own life. He would run rider-less in ecstatic insanity into death, to be ground up in front of me by this chugging monster.

Through my blinded vision, I saw the light almost upon us in the winter gloom. In a split second, over the woosh of our speed and my fury, I began to register that the noise was much higher-pitched than a train’s would be, a buzzing almost, and as soon as I had deciphered this auditory data, it was upon us.

It was a snowmobile, only a snowmobile! As it caught sight of us, a sobbing girl with snot and tears streaming down her face and a pounding, sweat-drenched horse fighting her, tossing his head, startled back into some semblance of awareness, it veered abruptly to our right, careening and bumping over the mounds of icy snow to buzz its way off into the stillness.

With the horse’s first falter of purpose, I gathered up every reserve of my energy, now born of wrath, and twisted him down into a hand gallop, then a canter, pulling him insistently, fiercely down to a trot, and finally wrenching my arms back one final time to make him walk. I poured him over the side of the track; we stumbled, we slid on the ice, I didn’t care anymore if he broke his leg. He was breathing heavily but still had a cockiness, a bounce, to his walk. With one frozen hand, I wiped off my face, then reined him down into the lee of the track on the edge of the forest, and pounded his ribs with my heels, swore savagely, jerked his head back and forth, forced him to dance round and round in a tight circle, sawed at his hackamore, whipped him with the ends of my reins, pummeled him with my fists. Gasping with rage and wind-drained breath, my eyes still streaming, my arms aching dully, I thrashed him futilely.

Carson withstood my not-very-powerful assault with his usual stubborn dignity. He was drenched in sweat and breathing hard, still tense from the flight, still proud, still free, when I finally hung limply over the saddle, exhausted, my body shaking and my tears freezing on my face.

Eventually we moved off slowly toward the path home. Carson was subdued, far away. As we picked our way up the ridge, walking carefully through the winter’s darkness, a kind of peace eventually fell over us, a forgiving truce. We wound around and around through the dark silent night, through the forest and the cold, up to the faint yellow lights of home.

*  *  *

When the mighty New Hampshire winter finally receded sometime in April of that year, it was as if a great magician had slowly pulled away a white cloth to reveal the landscape hidden when we had moved in. The blanket of snow started first to sag and then crumple as the spring sun rose higher. Crusty holes created by small-scale avalanches appeared, and the brook freed itself, moving fast and full under bridges of dripping and waning ice. All became water, water trickling from the patches of crystallized snow, water flowing over drowned, frozen ground, water pushing around soggy dead leaves into muddy bogs. Life was not yet visible, but you could feel it, smell it, the fecund, sensual smell of the woods, the fetid odor of decay and birth. And then came the first growth, just the fragile, furled head of something tiny but inexorable and green, that brilliant color against the gray sodden landscape, its spire raising its head and piercing the leaf under which it had seeded.

When not taking classes at the university or studying, Lance and I took long walks in the woods that early spring, sloshing through the marshy undergrowth and charting the progress of life. We felt possessive of the land and regarded every sprout, every welling bud and newly freed stream, as our own. The first leaves were always the best. We watched the tree buds quicken and then bulge and unfold; the tiny curled fresh leaf of pure emerald would unwrap with its delicate creases like the new whorls and lines on the hand of a newborn. Soon, tree after tree sprang with life and the forest took on a faint green fuzz, a feathering. The birds came alive and their competing songs awakened the woods.

As the temperature warmed, clusters of residents began to emerge among the pine-covered ridges of that mid-eastern part of New Hampshire. It was a prime tourist area, but though the summer people hadn’t yet opened their seasonal homes we were able to meet the neighboring farmers. For all our scruffy appearance, we were remarkably accepted by the locals; we were their first real acquaintance with hippies. My hair was long, with wild tendrils and curls; I wore tattered, faded jeans and was usually obviously braless. My boyfriend had straight blond hair that hung in a thin ponytail halfway down his back. He insisted on wearing an old straw hat from his days working as a landscaper. (By now it had lost its shape and was sweat-stained and faded, but he loved it and I suspect it somewhat endeared him to the farmers.) We may have been curious-looking to them, but we were friendly and respectful and our new acquaintances responded to that. And they never did turn us in for the lush marijuana plants that loomed high above our compost heap.

We were serious about the gigantic garden we had planned for the summer, having spent winter nights reading seed catalogs, gardening magazines, and drawing plans. In late spring, after mud season, the farmer across the street came over with his tractor and plowed up half an acre of our field, which we went over many times with a rented rototiller while swarmed by maddening clouds of black flies.

There is a tangible sense, in northern New England, of the evanescence of summer. Winters are so hard and so long here that their threat lurks even behind the torpid heat of the short summers. In response, there is a runaway lushness across the landscape in a New England summer, an almost maniacal growth of grass, weeds, bushes, flowers, and trees. Even the birds seem crazed at times, as if all living things have to squeeze all their aliveness into a compressed time and do so with abandon. It was hot and steamy in the woods mid-day; the moisture of the early summer forest bred giant insects that were ravenous for blood. The heat made the paved roads soft, the white brilliance of the sun reflected off the maple leaves, and the shrubs and bushes and trees were a blinding emerald. The smell of the piney woods and its soft carpet of needles became a cathedral for the senses. We filled the house with violet lilacs; I put them in every spare jar in every available space, four or five fat clusters of the fragrant purple spires in a room. Sunlight filled the old house.

Carson lived in his spacious field overlooking the valley, grazing indolently on a carpet of little white mayflowers, a haze of black flies fanning him. His pasture butted up against the house and he liked to stick his head in the screen-less downstairs bathroom window where I had stashed a secret supply of carrots behind the toilet. He would poke his head in the window hoping for a treat, looking like a mounted live trophy on the wall, his huge eyes taking in the little room. He made me laugh out loud.

Our garden was a majestic effort, an unparalleled success. The radishes grew as big as our fists but though perfectly formed they were too spicy to eat. Our twenty-five tomato plants yielded unimaginable amounts of massive tomatoes. The ten zucchini plants bore so much fruit that the excess grew to freakish proportions under the broad, prickly leaves. During the month of August, wave after wave of successive corn harvests threatened to overwhelm even the horse. There was so much bounty I bought a canner and twenty cases of Mason jars and learned how to put up tomatoes, corn, green beans, peas, zucchini, pickles. By the end of the summer, we had put away almost as much as the farmer and his wife across the street who had been doing it for a quarter of a century.

The above essay is a chapter from an unpublished book.

Stay tuned for more Views From Mt. Pleasant

After I finished graduate school with a master’s degree in literature, I taught writing to freshmen and sophomores at a university located in New England. While I thrived on the electricity that can occur between student and teacher (I was only a few years older than my students) and the congenial brain-trip of a college campus, it took me less than a year to realize that the grand sum of $8,000 a year would not pay my bills, and that without a Ph.D. I would never be tenure-track and able to earn a better salary. I decided to switch careers and look for work in the “glamorous” world of publishing, which is about the next lowest-paid profession above teaching available to those who defy practicality and insist on becoming English majors. And as a single woman, I was free to relocate.

Not ready to enter the prime-time publishing world in New York City, I searched for work in the Washington, D.C. area, and eventually managed to convince the elegant, sexy publisher of a group of equine magazines to hire me. The brand-new horse magazine I was put in charge of was still only an undeveloped concept upon my arrival at the suburban Maryland publishing headquarters, and with no more license than the slim measures of faith inspired by my academic vitae and my obvious passion for horses, the handsome publisher immediately dumped me with the responsibility of creating story ideas, locating writers and photographers who might take pity on a young innocent editor by agreeing to write articles for practically no money, develop all the in-house magazine systems, as well as write, copy-edit, and proofread this new publication which had, as yet, no voice, no back-up, no credibility, no framework, no editorial or advertising schedule. And, alas, hardly any budget. Volume One, Number One, they call such an infante terrible.

I was a wreck.  It was a nightmare. It was the perfect job for me.

Lucking into such a starting-gate position, while making me borderline insane, allowed me to participate in almost every level of publishing. The magazine’s focus was broad and serious enough to challenge my scholarly bent with its articles on art history, art criticism, world culture, history, and mythology. When we needed a piece of literature for the second issue, I found myself on horseback riding across the cornfields of the Potomac valley with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin, then the Library in Congress Poet-in-Residence.  She agreed to let us publish her poems after we talked horses.

For another story about the role of the horse in the Civil War, I spent a memorable day in the photo archives of the Library of Congress looking through original Matthew Brady black-and-white glass-plate photographs. The author Jerzy Kosinski was persuaded to contribute an excerpt to illustrate a photo shoot. After our premiere issue appeared, I received a handwritten letter of congratulations from another famous horse lover, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

* * *

My new home was a dilapidated rental farmhouse on White Ground Road, once a plantation manor. Situated on hundreds of acres of farmland and woods, the house rose statuesquely at the top of the hill and commanded a princely view of the surrounding countryside. The myriad rooms actually composed two sections of the house. For a short time, a family with noisy, ragged children who stripped off their dirty diapers and left them strewn in the red dirt outside lived on the other side of our walls, but soon they were evicted, leaving my roommate and me alone with our ratty furniture in the peeling manor house with windows that rattled in the wind.

After returning home from the office on hot, hazy, late autumn afternoons in those early days of my publishing career, I would hike out to the middle of the deserted fields, fling myself down among the stubbly dried corn stalks surrounded by my sympathetic dogs who stuck wet noses into my ears, and cry out my failure and my inadequacy to the corn-blue sky. I was stupid, inexperienced, lost, afraid, I had a horrible headache, I would let everyone down. Then the next morning, I would resolutely head back into the office and tackle another seemingly insurmountable project.

A large stable located at the end of White Ground Road, tucked amidst the rich, spreading Potomac valley cornfields, agreed to let me field-board Carson until fall. Because he was only a mile away, I could see him each day and occasionally ride him to the house, almost like the old days when we lived together in New Hampshire. The new stable was an old milk barn festooned with dangling, cracked harnesses and dusty cobwebs, surrounded by vast acres of field. Carson immediately set himself apart from the rest of the pastured herd. After he endured their nipping and chasing, he seemed to be contented to graze alone on the rich spring grass, although just a little tense from the sheer number of new horses in the big field. Horses are gregarious herd animals with a strict sense of hierarchy and vicious ways of enforcing that pecking order. Carson rarely kicked and never bit. He preferred just to move away from bared teeth and steel-rimmed hooves.

* * *

One clear August day, only a couple of months after his arrival, I stopped by the stable after work and discovered Carson standing in the tiny pond the horses used for drinking water. Stepping into the mud in my sandals to reach his head, I put on his halter and turned away to pull him after me. Meeting with resistance, I turned around, surprised, and pulled harder. Carson’s head followed my lead and his neck turned too, but it seemed as if he was having trouble getting his feet out of the mud. I leaned on the lead rope, pulling hard to help him. He slowly backed out, the sucking sound of water closing up his deep hoof prints. Pulling more, with my hand on his halter, he obeyed my insistence with uncharacteristic reluctance. He took a few more steps.

Something was terribly wrong. His body was all off, moving as if he was partially paralyzed. We inched forward a few more steps. His head bobbed violently in pain, his back end was drawn up under him, and his front feet seemed wooden, dead. His eyes were dull with effort and pain, and he moved only because I asked him to. I watched him with growing horror. Something had taken over his body. I kept pulling him, pulled him all the way back to the barn, afraid that if we stopped he would never start again. He bobbed and inched along, snorting and blowing with the pain, every step an obviously immense effort of will across that long field. I alternately pled with and soothed him, hating the agony I was putting him through, but we had to get to the barn for help. He took each of those excruciatingly painful steps, lurching front to back like a rocking chair, just for me. When he hobbled into a bedded stall, he grunted and I felt flooding relief that he was in softness now that the long walk was over.

The vet diagnosed grass founder, and his illness required immediate and intensive treatment. I listened as he told me that he must be walked for ten minutes at least every hour, followed by another ten minutes of hosing with water, in addition to being given massive doses of an anti-inflammatory and a pain killer. Here was my sleek, gold animal hobbling on electrified hooves, sweat starting to darken his coat and his eyes unable to focus on me, with each standing moment a torture. The vet assured me that his condition was routine, that there was nothing to worry about, that after a week of treatment he would be fine.

If a horse eats too much spring grass or gets into the grain room, the delicate balance of his intestinal system may be affected and disturb the fragile chemistry of the blood flow to the hoof. Since horses weigh so much, their legs and hooves are complex systems and, together with their gastrointestinal system, form the most sensitive and vulnerable parts of their bodies.  If a human being eats too much chocolate, he or she might have a stomachache for a day and perhaps put on a pound or two, but the human body ultimately can handle such a minor imbalance. In a horse, the digestive system can soon overload, emitting a shattering mayday call that upsets the carefully regulated blood supply to the hoof, thus affecting the internal tissues, blood flow, and hoof structure.

Founder, officially called laminitis, is probably the most excruciating disease of the horse’s hoof. The horse bears all its 1,200-pound weight on those four hooves. When a horse founders, all the blood vessels are shunted away from the hoof, making any burden agonizing because of the gradual death of the supportive structure of the hoof. The foot is on fire. You’ll see foundered horses leaning back on their usually unaffected rear hooves in a futile attempt to redistribute the weight. They are rigid and trembling, their eyes concentrated on the fire within, sweat drenching their bodies, for they are being slowly electrocuted. Complications from laminitis are what ultimately doomed the Kentucky Derby winner, the magnificent Barbaro.

* * *

Racehorses and show horses usually live at veritable world-class horse hotels. The knee-deep soft bedding cushions these sleek, muscular, and extremely valuable equine athletes. Plush, colorful bandages protect their fragile legs. Their complex feeding schedules are meticulously monitored. Daily veterinary checks accompany scientifically calibrated workouts. Trained grooms are stationed outside stall doors to make frequent checks.

Yet with all these precautions, things still go wrong. A horse will colic mysteriously or step wrong in the ring and bow a tendon or pull a shoulder muscle on the track or contract bronchitis. You can make a midnight trip to the barn with a carrot and an affectionate pat for the night, and in the morning when you slide open the stall door, the horse is cast up against the stall walls, his gut twisted from colic, his leg broken by the impact of savage flailing against wood.

Horses live on the margin, no matter how pampered they may be, and because of this reality they are our window into a precarious existence. They make you live day to day. All is well today. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

And they die big deaths. Some are lucky and lay their mammoth bodies down for the last time almost gracefully. Others are down already and an injection pulls their head to the bedding one final time. But you still have to watch the hooves; those iron-clad weights are lethal even in the last convulsive moments. And then there is another way to die.

* * *

In August of 1982, on the Maryland horse farm in the Potomac Valley where Carson now lived, I came upon a young woman leading her Thoroughbred around the paddock. He was obviously very unwell. He staggered and veered, stumbling now and then, his eyes sightless, the weight of his head and body fully taut against the lead rope. Each time he neared the paddock edge, he’d trip and pull towards the rail fence, blindly careering off it when he was hauled back by the frightened teenager.

“Call the vet again!” she yelled when she saw me. She was panting and wide-eyed. “I don’t know how much longer I can hang on!”

The horse stumbled again, drunkenly bouncing off the fence, dragging her with him. I ran to the phone. When the vet arrived, he decided to put the colicky horse into a big box stall in order to administer more medicine and let him rest a bit. But after only a minute or two, the pain grew too much and the dimensions of the stall too small. The horse began to bang against the stall walls, blind and crazed with the agony of its insides. Its ton weight was thrown senselessly against the wood paneling that crumpled like balsa. The stall door broke off its hinges and hung crazily as the horse lurched about within, its eyes blank, its giant legs striking and crossing over themselves, its great body thrashing with power out of control.

Someone raced for a potent tranquilizer and someone else, as the horse fell to the floor of the stall, sat on his head. “JESUS CHRIST!” shouted the owner of the stable. His wife’s hands trembled violently as she tried to fill the syringe for the vet.

The injection quickly put the animal out of its misery, but the sedating effect lasted only briefly. After just a few minutes, he shook himself awake, shuddering and heaving himself back up like some great behemoth, his staring eyes fiery and red. He slid and stumbled out into the concrete aisle, throwing off the vet, the helpers, the ropes, like annoying flies. His legs trembled from the powerful drugs and, unable to bear his immense weight any longer, splayed like a newborn foal’s. The iron-shod feet struck sparks as they clattered and dragged along the stone surface.

With his wild momentum, the horse knocked over pails, stools, barn implements, another stall door. The onlookers scattered. As he crashed into a stall wall, the air was filled with the sound of cracking wood. Bouncing off that, he staggered into a narrow straight stall and began to fall forward, his halter catching on a hook. The weight of those giant limbs and great barrel body pushed forward against his imprisoned head and twisted it around and back to his shoulder. The hook broke before his neck did.

Still propelled by the drugs, by pain, by fear, he fell through the wall of the stable, all legs and eyes and red, crashing through the splinters of the wall into an outside stall where another horse was quartered. The vet and the onlookers scrambled, and I ran to snatch away a pitchfork lying in his path.

Once in the open paddock, exhaustion finally overcame him and he calmed. Perhaps surgery would help, the vet said. Somehow, we managed to load him into a big horse van whereupon he fell to his knees, bending a steel bar in a 45-degree angle as he went down. Blood ran into his unseeing eyes from gashes on his forehead.

He died several days later from a twisted intestine, a victim of a new mysterious equine epidemic sweeping Maryland’s Potomac valley.  Today, most horses in the United States receive inoculations for “Potomac Horse Fever,” one of the deadliest equine infectious diseases in modern times. Carson’s stable was one of the first equine centers hit by the new epidemic.

* * *

Three months after Carson’s laminitis appeared, I was still nursing him intensively. I had moved him to a friend’s backyard where he could receive the close attention he required and where lived a friendly goat for companionship. By then, he could only take a few agonizing steps because the inside of his hooves had putrefied to jelly.

Most of the time he spent lying down. The number of painkillers needed to keep him comfortable increased. He was injected with penicillin twice a day; his hooves soaked in Epsom salts and warm water every few hours. Wounds spread on his elbows and eventually on his hindquarters from the pressure of lying down. No amount of medicine, anointing, disinfecting, bathing, bandaging, or love could stop them. But again and again the vet stopped short of advising euthanasia. He still ate eagerly; his eyes were still bright.

I laid next to him in the straw those clear, fall days and fed him choice heads of timothy, which he took as daintily as ever with his rubbery lips. His brown eyes watched me when I stroked his gold coat; they tracked me as I fed, watered, and groomed him.

One cold November night, under a lone street lamp in the backlands of the Potomac Valley, Carson let me know what to do. He broke out of his enclosure and ran clattering down the road, seemingly oblivious to any more physical pain. His bandages unfurled behind him like gay trail markers. I retrieved him and after a hurried phone consultation with the vet, began to walk him around the small yard.

As we circled under the eerie lamp and the cold stars, waiting to walk out the pain, waiting for the vet, he became purposeful and quiet. Each time we reached the long, dark road at one end of the yard, he stopped and looked far away into the night, straining against me gently.

A short while later, his groans as he lay on the ground were interspersed with happy little interludes when he snatched a few juicy mouthfuls of the still-green grass. I looked up to the stars and the heavens for help but there was none, there was only me. When the vet finally arrived, we walked out to the back pasture. Carson was eager and willing beside me in the dark and we walked together as we had hundreds of times over the past decade. When we stopped and I put my hand on his nose to say goodbye, he shook it off, impatient with any more of this world. As gentle hands pulled me away while he received the injection, he went down one more time, this time without pain. I did not hear the sound of his falling.

He was buried the next morning where he fell, a clump of sweet green grass still clenched between his teeth. Someone brought me a few clippings of golden brown hairs from his mane and tail, and they remain, all these years later, tucked away in my jewelry box.

A bright dun horse with a full brown mane and tail, his flesh was firm and muscled, his coat dappled with good health. He was a small and neatly put together Quarter Horse-Cross with a certain delicacy about him except for a pronounced Roman nose that gave him a touch of aristocracy.

My rather favorable first impression of him disappeared after I spent some minutes trying to lift his hind leg that had become a rooted tree. As I pulled at it, trying to inspect his hoof, he stolidly settled his weight against me, and his young owner laughed without much conviction, explaining lamely, “He doesn’t like to pick up his back feet.”

Waiting until he was off guard, I nudged my shoulder into his flank to get him off balance and quickly yanked his hoof up with all my strength. He stood quietly and when I was through picking it out gave me his other hoof with little persuasion. But our battle of wills had just begun.

After I saddled him and began to tighten the cinch, he blew out his stomach preventing me from buckling the girth. Again I waited, this time until he couldn’t hold his breath anymore and led him around a few steps so he was forced to take another breath.  As I quickly drew up the slack, he whipped his head around and tried to bite me.

It was July 1974. I had just turned twenty-one. He was mine within a day.

I lived then in the tiny town of Ashland, New Hampshire, nestled in the foothills thirty-five miles south of the White Mountains. I had dropped out of college after my sophomore year and traveled and worked in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Florida, slinging food, serving drinks, and mucking stalls. I ended up back in New England, living in a communal farmhouse with eight other people.

That afternoon in late July, I returned home to the farm to make plans for my new horse. With little means of supporting myself and possessing only a ludicrously low bank account, there was every reason to reconsider my decision to spend $800 on a horse. But as I had worked out a series of time payments with the previous owners, I felt only a transporting joy as I transformed the garage across the narrow country road into a makeshift stall, building a rickety gate, scattering clean straw and sawdust, installing a water bucket and a feed pail, stacking hay bales, and neatly lining up a few brushes.

On Carson, in front of the ancient maple we sugared. Notice no helmet, but headscarf instead.

In that verdant, hazy summer of 1974, I was thoughtless, carefree, like so many in my generation caught in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and exhilarated at living life on my own. My new world consisted of a dilapidated, sprawling farmhouse set among 250 acres of hayfields and a river, a cast of loony characters, nightly parties, and little money. We were part of a hidden legion of people in their early twenties clustered here and there across the country, young people who perhaps went to college for a year or two, or perhaps never went at all, young people who were disillusioned with the events of the ‘60s, the marches, the anger, the assassinations. After that time, there was a retreat from the real world. Some who had protested were burned out and disappeared for political or personal reasons, usually into the woods; others followed them, even those too young or too insulated to have gotten involved in the protests.

We were still part of the consciousness and we went into the woods like hurt animals to find a place that was safe and quiet. The woods gave us a simple life, one that was controllable, predictable. There is the garden. There are the fields. This is the woodlot. Here is the barn. These are my chickens and my dogs and those are the mountains. This is life. Back to the land. We’ll start over.

And I was there.

Mornings, that summer of 1974, I crossed the road to my makeshift stall in the foggy hours before the sun burned off the mist and dew to discover my birthday present, Carson, pieces of hay and straw sticking crazily out of his mane and tail, bug-eyed with excitement over the grain I carried. He stamped his hoof irritably at my slowness in throwing his hay in the stall. When I entered with the grain, he plunged his head into the bucket before I could withdraw my hand, pushing greedily, sinking his teeth and great lips and muzzle chin-deep into the sticky, sweet-smelling oats and molasses, his eyes half-closed in primal ecstasy, his entire being concentrated on the wealth in that bucket.

In the open fields outside my bedroom window, the cracked mullioned window in front of which I could sit and gaze upon upon my good fortune, I built a paddock for him. With no money to buy supplies, I used what material could be found around the old farm: wire, half-rotted posts and lumber, existing trees and bushes. While I hammered, Carson stood contentedly in the field, tearing at the rich grass, his long full tail sweeping down and disappearing into the tall timothy, the sun glinting off his coat, the bluish mountains in the distance.

Those first few days were anxious ones as I discovered my new horse was a master escape artist. Daily, he stepped through or under the fence to explore greener pastures, and, duly alarmed, I tore out of the house, grabbed a fistful of grain from his stall, and ran barefoot across the fields through the knee-deep grass, my hair wild, my India-print skirts hiked up in one hand. He watched me out of the corner of one eye, wisely calculating my distance, my intent, and the ratio of possibility for his escape. When I neared, pursuing him clumsily, he swished his tail and moved deftly away from my snaking fingers. Once he lowered his head to graze, I sneaked after him again, whereupon he snapped his head up, flicked his tail, presented me with his hindquarters, and moved unceremoniously over to another part of the field.

This choreography continued until I learned that he was more interested in food than in freedom. Now I would creep up, expressing exaggerated interest only in some pretend choice morsel contained in my hand. It was mine, all mine, not for him, no way. Or I would focus on something of great importance and probable tastiness on the ground near him, all the while hiding the telltale halter behind my back and humming, avoiding direct eye contact with him.

Still watching me from the corner of his cinnamon brown eye, he reluctantly, after a time, allowed his curiosity and animal hunger to overcome his wily judgment and stepped slowly over to where I was crouched in the dark green grass. I must have looked, there in the sweep of the field and the vacant, egg-blue sky of midsummer and the smoky line of mountain ridges behind me, very far away to him, a small white thing, a human childling.

* * *

As I became more confident about my riding ability, I began to let him do what he liked best. Run. Actually, there was no other choice. He fought my hands and the bit constantly, and his mouth was as hard as I’ve ever felt on a horse, rendering his snaffle bit practically useless. The sight of the huge expanse of our open fields, once a primitive airfield and now a hay field, electrified him just as if he’d been plugged into a generator. My arms ached and burned from trying to keep him at a walk on the dirt road that snaked along the outskirts of the fields around which we would make one or two giant circuits at a nervous, jiggy trot. When I sensed he had used up a fraction of his nervous energy, I finally let him go. He gathered himself together and poured forward into a fearsome gallop. As we streaked down the open road, my eyes tearing from the wind, the trees and mountains outside of me were blurred and whipped, and my mouth was split open from the rush of air pressing against it.

I thought my heart would stop with fear and joy.

Jumping Carson in a western saddle, a bit-less hackmore, and wearing only a headscarf ... yikes, I was fearless!

On the edge of the vast fields lay our river. The Pemigewassett River wound down from the White Mountains through the college town of Plymouth and past our farm. On languid summer days, the river was the bearer of rafts and rubber tubes carrying cold beer and shouting, sunburned college kids and townies. Our stretch of New England river beach was the site of many parties that summer. We piled one of our old vehicles full of beer, charcoal, a grill, food, inner tubes and towels, the men in charge of coordination, the women in charge of the food. Friends pulled up in rusty trucks and battered VWs, the women in long skirts and braided hair, the men with beards and hair halfway down the middle of their back, pulled into ponytails, wearing patched blue jeans, with a beer in one hand, a joint in the other, and a smile creasing everyone’s faces. Down to the river we drove or walked in groups accompanied by a large pack of romping, excited dogs. Often I would ride Carson down to the party on these shimmering, hot July days when the skies were deep blue and studded with dreamy clouds. We had no worries, no responsibilities. There were just the stories, the laughter, and the night ahead.

One of the trends that summer was the new freedom of the human body. At these parties someone would strip for a swim, quickly dive in the river and spend a long time submerged there, to rise somewhat reluctantly, skin raised with goose bumps, and face the group’s casual but all-seeing eyes. Then the others followed. My conservative upbringing made me cringe subconsciously, but I forced a nonchalant ease to conquer what I thought was my singular Connecticut-bred hang-up. Thinking back on all the handsome young men and women standing around stark naked, drinks in hand, Carson grazing pastorally in the background, the dogs play-fighting, the air filled with the chatter and laughter of a Manhattan cocktail party, I feel both embarrassed and tender.

Ed and The Hont lived in the house. Ed was a lanky comic, still a gawky student at the state college, who possessed a rubber face that he could twist into any expression he needed to accompany his long, expert stories. He loved to laugh, but he was a little afraid of women, especially in those days of not-quite free love. He roomed with The Hont, a musician with a ponytail, handsome cheekbones, and a shy gentleness I adored. He was even more afraid of women than Ed.

Downstairs in the parlor, the room with a cool tiled fireplace, lived Pat and Beth. Pat, tall and lean, willowy, ethereal, like a giant wisp of something, had soft crinkly eyes and the ubiquitous long ponytail. His voice was so quiet that sometimes he seemed just to be moving his lips soundlessly and he gave the impression of gliding noiselessly above the floorboards. Beth, shorter and slim with thick curly hair that framed a heart-shaped face, had a trace of a lisp, a baby voice, and a vague, disembodied manner. They operated at a different speed from the rest of us, talking to each other in slow whispers. They raised kittens.

And then there was Ken, a small, wild-haired lithographer and etcher, who was later to blow his mind out on acid at another party and end up in the hospital, changed forever.

The old brick farmhouse was rickety and dirty; its shutters hung at weird angles to the windows, its doorways sagged, and tall weeds climbed up and around as if to embrace the foundation. There were no trees shading the building or the decrepit barn, just the long lush fields that stretched out on either side and in back. The dusty, pot-holed, dirt driveway was strewn with Frisbees, rusty retired vehicles, and cooking pans put out for the dogs to lick and then forgotten. In the summer, the doors were always left ajar, and you entered one lopsided doorway to face the dark, cool interior of the kitchen. When your eyes adjusted to the gloom, you could barely make out the cold black shape of the ancient wood stove in front of the defunct crumbling fireplace and the old porcelain sink piled precariously with mugs, glasses, and plates. The linoleum was yellow and dingy, with great pieces peeling up. Water glasses or Mason jars stuck here and there offered dried, dusty flower or weed arrangements in tired compositions. The two rooms off the living room, which had been formerly sitting rooms or salons of some sort, were now used as bedrooms; sunlight streamed through the low-slung windows. Once a respectable country gentleman’s proud abode, it was now a hippie house. We decorated the bathroom with an official portrait of Richard Nixon.

My wild hair has long been the bane of my existence. Here I am circa 1975 with my new Lab puppy and my brother, Tad. Notice the Special Plant in the background.

Meals were put together haphazardly. One of the group’s favorites, concocted by Ken, was a vegetarian dish. Fresh zucchini, string beans, onions, carrots, and whatever else was lying around were stir-fried and spiced up with what we fancied an exotic flavoring, Worcestershire sauce. Then the special gourmet ingredient, Campbell’s tomato soup, was added, the gelatinous substance melting into a pasty sauce to which we added cheap grated cheese. We ate this mess with chopsticks. As Ken was strict about not washing his cast-iron fry pan in which mold was growing, the clean-up was easy.

The women of the house tried not to take full responsibility for organizing all the meals, but we usually ended up cooking most of them as well as doing the dishes. There was a halfhearted attempt at devising a uni-sex system: it was so and so’s day to cook, another’s at the sink, someone else’s to sweep. But such organization reeked of bourgeois compulsiveness and so the dishes stayed dirty until someone got disgusted and washed them, or someone else could no longer stand the dried balls of mud on the carpet.

When evening fell and the voracious mosquitoes drove us from the river, we quickly threw everything back into the trucks and gathered back at the house. Someone set up the keg and put on music and the crazily lit house filled with people perched on stools, squatting on the floor, leaning against the cracked and chipped walls, sitting on the cold wood stove. More friends arrived, friends of friends, people we didn’t know. They entered, some self-consciously, others certain of their welcome.

There were so many people it was difficult to thread your way through the house. Their sunburned faces thrown back in laughter, people told long, loud stories using exaggerated hand gestures, until finally, carried away by the heat, the sunburn, the pot, the beer, the music that was cranked to top decibel on the Garrard turntable, no one could hear anyone else. We became stoned, fragmented performers on our own private stages with no audience.

Then Ed crossed the threadbare rug, entered a bedroom, and picked up a guitar. The Hont followed and a little music would start, a counterpoint to the blasting Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones on the stereo. People drifted in to hear the softer strains, the stereo was turned down, someone fetched the old tambourine, another the bongo drums. Someone else got some spoons from the kitchen and the pots and pans to bang on. There was an old sour fiddle. There was even an old washtub with a broomstick sporting one thick string that went BUM, BUM, BUM.

Finally, most of the party, some twenty or thirty people, was crammed in that small room, the windows dark with the night, the room illuminated by one small light, maybe a candle or two. Ed and The Hont were bent over their guitars, their long straight hair falling down over their eyes, oblivious to anything but the music. The people around them were shaking the mariachis, gently beating the bongos between their knees, strumming the washtub, their eyes half closed, the light flickering off their faces, making shadows of their cheekbones, under their eyes. Those who didn’t have instruments used their voices and added a wordless chant to the music.

Most of the time it was a pretty terrible cacophony, all the instruments wielded by inexperienced musicians who were wasted. We didn’t care. Sometimes, just once in a while, there were moments when we all seemed to know just what this jam was, when the guitars, the spoons, the bongos, the fiddles, and the voices swooped and turned like a flock of small birds, in harmony, in rhythm. Then our very stoned eyes narrowed and we chanted more carefully, more steadily, louder and louder in that strange room, stomping on the floor, carried away by the very stoned tunelessness and the noise that consumed us, the beating that could have been our own hearts, all linked in some dimension by the flickering light, the primal, gut-thudding noise. And we pounded until someone broke off and another missed, and then the spell passed, and we one by one fell off into a very stoned kind of breathless pause, unable to sustain it all any longer, our very stoned eyes bright and now somewhat timid with recognition.

The rest of that summer passed in a slow, meandering way. My days were structured only by the schedule and needs of Carson. Feeding, watering, grooming, and mucking his stall were chores I lingered over, devotional efforts, relished as one cherishes changing the dirty diapers on a newborn. We explored the surrounding countryside, riding in damp glades, on shaded roads. I lazily swatted giant horseflies off his neck with a leafed branch. We stopped and stood in the river, the cold water pulsing around his legs. I waved off more insects. Carson dozed. The sun warmed my back and arms. He had learned to trust me, nickering at me in the mornings in a low voice and at other times delighting me with long, cool gazes. He didn’t run away from me any more. I curried his smooth bright coat until it shone like satin.

And what was I to him? I wondered occasionally. An outstretched hand? A pressure in the ribs, a presence at the end of the reins? The bringer of grain, the hider of treats? A bundle of pulsing emotions, sensed with some otherworldly radar?

What do animals perceive, think, feel?

* * *

On an miniature island in the fork of the river lived a woman, alone in a teepee. She had creamy skin and thick red curly hair that cascaded down her back like a Renaissance painting. Poised and kind, there was something otherworldly about her. You had the feeling she knew a whole lot more than you did, about things too private, too holy to say aloud. She had even been married once.

She lived there on a wooded island in the river that summer in her one-room canvas teepee, washing her clothes and her dishes in the stream. Nuts, grains, and dried fruits filled canisters stacked neatly in one corner of the tent. Indian prints and rugs were laid on the floor and hung on the walls. A camp bed stood in the corner in the dim inside light. A hundred yards from the teepee, down a foot-beaten path through the weeds and bushes, was the homemade sauna. Only about four feet high, you had to bend down to enter, crawl in on your hands and knees, then remain sitting. A fire with wet rocks produced steam and heat.

One late afternoon, a group of us visited her and stayed for a dinner of brown rice, fresh vegetables, yogurt, and nuts with chopsticks around the fire. We listened to the sounds of night coming in. The bats flew over the water and trees at dusk, the mosquitoes hummed, the river flowed by. The mountains sank in darkness and owls called. We smoked dope, drank beer, and built a fire in the sauna. It was excruciatingly claustrophobic and humid in those tight quarters, and together with my fogged mind and the oppressiveness of the sauna, it was not a moment too soon that we opened the flap and ran out naked to the river where we were supposed to jump in for the final stage of the sauna experience. I slowed as I approached the river and came to a stop. The water was pitch black and fast-moving. The moon reflected on the pebbles and stones on the opposite sand spit. The dark spires of pines encircled us. I looked down at the coal water that swirled around the branches and miniature cliffs of the shore. I could feel its coldness in the air without it touching my skin. Just as I was backing up, having changed my very stoned mind, someone pushed my back from behind, giving me enough of a shove so that I fell, grabbing futilely at the air, off the shore and into the river.

The water hit me like a sluice of ice, sobering me immediately, but allowing me no time to control my panic. I struggled amongst invisible, slimy, knotty underwater roots and branches to find something to hold onto. Eels and rats and ooze and things that bite filled me with dread. I flailed, gasping. Someone on the bank realized the fun was over and reached down an arm to haul me up, shivering, not so very stoned anymore.

They dried me off and I put on my warm clothes. Eventually our host led us back to the road through the forest along a narrow winding path that wound precariously up over wooded hills, giant tree roots, around swamps, down through treed glades, the woods deep, mysterious, and silent around us. Our lantern attracted immense insects that flapped around our heads, the light casting a blinding sweep into the gloom around our party.

Our teepee friend and guide could have navigated her way through the forest blindfolded. Not me. The river had been so cold, so dark. The woods now were foreign and wild.

I couldn’t see, even with the light.

* * *

As summer ended, the parties and the lifestyle at the farm lost their laid-back veneer for me. I had seen Ken the night he went mad. He was talking loudly and volubly, about God, whom he had just met, and his eyes were pinwheels. The people we lived with were very stoned good-hearted but something was missing; there was no discussion of politics or literature, no newspapers were read, and the only books around were cheap bestsellers or the badly written sentimental novels from the early 1900s that someone had dug up out of a moldy box in some forgotten house, interesting to us just because they were from a time past. They were “vintage.”

Our house was furnished with mattresses on the floor, an ancient massive wood cooking stove that no one knew how to work (its stove pipes were finally hooked up the winter before, an elaborate undertaking that, on first testing, emitted so much black smoke that we were all driven outside onto the seven-foot snow drifts, the shivering women triumphantly derisive of the very stoned macho know-how that had smugly taken over the job), crummy broken chairs, overstuffed sofas with the insides pulled out by the cats, half-dying plants dripping down walls or hanging dryly off windowsills, frayed rugs flecked with clots of animal hair, and mawkish, ornate Rococo reproductions layered with dust and soot hanging crookedly on the wall.

We saw ourselves as anti-consumers, the preservers of a simpler past where nature and backbreaking labor dictated the values of a purer time. But our group didn’t know how to garden (we had planted a half mile of useless kale that summer, ignorant of what kind of vegetable it was, how to harvest it, or even how to cook it), nobody ever came close to performing backbreaking labor, and we had no philosophical or political curiosity. We lived in faint mimicry of other, more serious and dedicated, communal groups. This was simply a group of very stoned kids in their first flush of adulthood, living together sloppily, happily, without care.

Twenty years later — long after I finished graduate school, long after Carson the horse and all the rest of my animals had died, and after my mother died, long after I married and bore my daughter, Brooke — I returned to the old hippie farmhouse in Ashland. It had been turned into a country club, and the lower field, abutting the river where we staged our parties, was a manicured golf course with a fancy name. The upper field, the one where I built Carson a pasture and where we eagerly grew 200 useless kale plants, was now the parking lot for new brown condominiums. In gentle Pat and Beth’s parlor bedroom, the one with the fireplace, sat a cash register and displays of tee-shirts and golf balls. A spiffy antiseptic cafeteria was appended to the venerable old brick building, replacing our funky kitchen.

I was quite certain that dishwashing was finally a priority for the current occupants of the house.

The small aircraft, just a silvery glint in the blue Vermont sky, rapidly grew larger as it approached the county airfield in Bennington to make its descent. The stiff breeze swung it slightly from side to side before the wheels touched the tarmac, once, twice; then on the third contact, it settled solidly on solid ground and slowed dramatically. At the end of the runway, the Piper Saratoga turned to carefully taxi back to the cluster of people waiting near the hangar.

As it rolled to a stop, the propellers died and there was a flurry of activity in the cockpit. Through the cockpit windows, mirrored sunglasses flashed. As the co-pilot unbuckled the seatbelt and moved swiftly to the back of the plane, the pilot threw open his door and jumped out to secure the plane’s tires. After a minute or so, the compartment door of the body of the plane slid open to reveal my brother, Tad, the plane’s co-pilot, bent solicitously over a bundle of blankets swaddling a figure slumped in a back seat. The waiting ambulance pulled up close to the plane and the two EMTs unloaded a gurney, popped the wheels in place, and rolled it up next to the cargo door of the little plane. Within a minute, the men had gently lifted my father from the back of the plane, placed him on the ambulance gurney, and tucked his blankets back in place to protect him from the cool June breeze.

My father lay flat, only his face visible as the attendants strapped him in. Though frail looking and pale from his singular aeronautical journey to Vermont from Cape Cod, it was immediately clear he was exhilarated, so much so that when I ran over to him he couldn’t manage to speak more than an unintelligible stutter. His eyes were wide and bright with excitement, his teeth chattered and body trembled, and a few tears coursed down his cheeks as he loosened his one good arm, the one we called “Leftie,” from the blankets to clump me affectionately around the neck. His huge crooked smile mirrored all of the myriad emotions felt by the witnesses to this remarkable scene. For weeks, kind strangers had enthusiastically participated in the complicated travel arrangements for this vulnerable, disabled man, from the nurses and administrators who had packed his bags and transported him from the Cape Cod nursing home to the Hyannis airfield, to the Pennsylvania pilot who had offered his services and his plane to my brother so this journey would be possible, to the Vermont nursing home located just a few miles from the Bennington airport that eagerly awaited their new resident, to the local ambulance workers who now wore big grins of satisfaction from their special part in this thrilling family reunion.

* * *

A month later, Dad sat rigidly in the wheelchair as I pushed it gently across my back yard. Bump, bump, bump went the wheels over the cropped lawn. My jolly black Labrador frisked about us. We made a slow procession because Dad was nervous in large, open spaces, and because his paralyzed right leg would periodically slip off the chair’s metal footrest, his shoe catching softly on the grass, and I had to stop our progress to gently reposition it before carefully moving forward again. In her paddock, my spidery black Thoroughbred, Athena, snapped her head up and stood at rapt attention as we appeared around the corner of the house, presenting an alarming, rolling apparition of gleaming steel, strange wheels, and unusually placed human legs and arms. Her ears were frozen forward in an effort to read us; her dark eyes stared at us fixedly. She remained utterly motionless as she monitored this potential predator and triggered her flight instincts into high alert.

Fiercely concentrating on the physical effort of keeping his wooden body secure in the wheelchair, Dad finally relaxed enough to lift up his eyes and look at my property with its small barn, Mount Equinox in the distance, the lush perennial gardens, and the statuesque black horse watching us so intently. Slowing his wheelchair to a stop, I put my hand on his shoulder. He surveyed the pastoral scene and chuckled. But his appreciation could only be momentary as he started to shiver even in the warm midsummer air, so I pushed him back to the protection of my farmhouse porch, locked the wheelchair wheels, and helped him into his light jacket, carefully pulling his locked, twisted arms through the sleeves and smoothing the fabric across his back.

The dog lay down protectively at his feet when I went to the kitchen to fetch an iced tea and a sandwich and a homemade brownie. Brooke, now grown to an athletic, blonde teenager of fourteen, wandered out on the porch to kiss her grandfather and to chat about school and sports. After finishing lunch, we joked around and listened to the summer birds until the Red Cross wheelchair van pulled in the driveway to return him to the nursing home after his daytime outing to my home. Once strapped in securely by the jovial driver, he waved farewell to us all the way down the road until the van disappeared from sight.

***

After living in an assisted care facility near me in Vermont for nearly four years, my father’s condition grew even more fragile from repeated bouts of pneumonia and other complications from being bed-ridden; his body eventually wearied of battling thirty years of paralysis and, at the end, it refused to even swallow food properly. His great soldier’s heart finally began to fail.

Today, sunlight from the mid-fall morning streams through the window that overlooks Vermont’s Green Mountain range and the hospital playground below on which no one is playing. His shallow labored breathing rises in sticky ragged rhythm over the hiss of the oxygen machine. The doctor will increase the morphine level and add Ativan for his anxiety when he is awake. We can put him in a deeper sleep anytime. I am having trouble with this option for if we do so, I understand he will not awake again. And I understand that if we do not add intravenous fluids, it will take two to three days for him for him to take the last breath.

His beard is growing. How odd to see stubble, seemingly healthy stubble, sprouting from his cheeks and chin while everything else in the rest of his body is shutting down.  I want him shaven, but I don’t want him disturbed because when he is awake he realizes he is dying and he becomes frightened. I  saw that in his eyes last night.  I saw the realization dawn on him, just as I saw in my mother one sad January night back in 1985, that dark, dark moment of  “I am dying.”

I fear most, after his suffering, the aloneness of watching this. My brother and sister have not yet arrived, so I have called friends to let them know that I need their company and support. A former lover visited several hours with me last night.  He arranged his lanky body on the lounge couch next to me and fell asleep. He did not want to be in my father’s room or even to look at him, but I selfishly needed the brief comfort of the sleeping living, so I stayed with him in the visitor’s lounge and ran down the hall every twenty minutes to check whether my father still lived.

* * *

The vigil continues. His sleep is deeper but he still rouses slightly to the sound of voices around him. His pain is minimal, or at least I choose to think so.  But he is having great difficulty breathing.  His neck muscles contract and his poor swollen belly rises and falls sharply. Ragged, moist bubbling and gurgling accompany each breath.   I croon soft words of encouragement to him as I would to an infant, murmuring him that he’s a good boy.  He likes to hear this.  He pauses in his labored breathing to listen to what I’m saying.  Dying is hard work.

I find myself humming little melodies, adding to his dying experience the lilt of tender mothering. I am singing to the dying. I sing tuneless, aimless, soothing impromptu songs, wandering up and down the scale with the softest of voices. I lay my head on his pillow next to his and put my lips right up to his ear. He is listening. This simple, wordless comfort seems to calm him. I take my own breaths when he draws in his noisy air and I weep, tears flowing down my cheeks while I try to sing through them.

Friends visited yesterday to lend support. I find new respect for the few who can face this dying process. My brother arrives today and Dad is waiting to hear his voice. Then maybe he can let go.

* * *

My brother and sister are now both here and we are camped in the hospital. Last night was hellish, endless. Our father’s breathing changed to shallow and his hands and feet grew cold. We thought the end was imminent. Now, at mid-morning, his breathing is still light as a feather, but his hands are warm again and one actually makes the faintest of gestures. Occasionally, his eyebrows rise expressively and his lips move as if he is in conversation. Or chewing.

Considering that he hasn’t eaten solid food in weeks, I hope he is enjoying a fantastic last meal. Lobster or swordfish from Cape Cod, perhaps.

I hope he is flying in space, talking, laughing, running.

I hope he is whole again.

* * *

A beam of sunlight falls across his face, which is turned to the yellow light of this fall afternoon. His eyes are closed. We open the window this warm day and let the mild breeze gently stir his hair and caress his face, like the slightest ocean breeze.

Sail away, Teddie, sail away on this fine day . . . sail off to the horizon.

Go. We love you. Be free.

And then he is.

1999.  The two-stall horse barn I had built on my property was finally complete.  A local builder constructed it as cheaply as possible for me so the miserly bummer downside is that in a strong wind it would probably blow away, but for the time being, it would be shelter and home to Athena. I could view her new palace, silhouetted by the double hump of Equinox Mountain in the background, right from the kitchen and from my wide bedroom window.  There was enough room for 150 bales of hay and a spacious tack area. I happily twisted hooks into the walls to hold water and feed buckets, and neatly arranged the bridles, saddles, blankets, pitchfork and wheelbarrow, and grain tubs.  I strung electric wire on cedar posts to create two acres of pasture. There would once again be a horse in my backyard.  Two horses, actually, as a pony, Taffy, would be a small, bitchy bossy companion to Athena.

When their trailer pulled slowly into the driveway after the fifteen-minute ride south from Eastbrook Farm, I could hear their hooves drumming the rubber mats. Mysterious bumps and thuds echoed from within as the horses moved around nervously.  After the ramp was dropped to the ground, I backed Athena onto my land.  When I let her loose in her new pasture, she erupted into volcanic bucks and mad gallops along the fence line, her eyes wide and long neck arched high.  She looked as thrilled as I felt.

* * *

Horses like the sound of the human voice more than we suspect.  They are listening to you, waiting for you to communicate to them, waiting for reassurance, waiting for belonging, for praise.  Athena practically purrs when I tell her how beautiful she is, how perfect her gait.  She arches her neck and gentles.  She floats.  Horses don’t edit your communication.  They want you to hum.  Sing.  Proclaim.  Orate.  You can tell by the flick of their ears, the motion of their eyes.  You can feel their body calm.  Your low voice keeps their attention focused on you and their performance, not distracted by the threatening tree branch in your path.

After body language, horses communicate through sound in the herd: the shrill call, the long whinny, the explosive snort, the sexy whicker.  When I call to Athena in the paddock, she will seemingly ignore me, diverting her gaze as if I am unworthy of her.  She’s avoiding the direct eye contact that, in the equine world, is challenging.  But actually she is quite interested in my next activity. As herd animals, horses are tuned into their human group, and given the chance, many will interact with us almost like huge domesticated dogs, following on our heels as we do chores in the barnyard, hanging around like bored adolescents.

Horses drink water in long, greedy but strangely delicate draughts.  Their swallows roll up their throats and their ears flick backwards with each steady gulp.  As they slowly lift their heads, satiated, long silvery drools drop into the water trough from their whiskery lips.  They look contemplative while their stomachs gurgle.

When one horse decides she’d like a good roll on the snow or in the mud, she will spend a little time finding the right spot.  She’ll paw a bit, turn some, paw some more, and then fold her forelegs and sink down to her knees, shifting her weight to her huge hindquarters.  There is a pause, then a ground-shaking thud when she allows her huge hindquarters to collapse, followed by the ecstasy of the turn over on her back and the actual bump-and-grind roll, an undulating wiggle almost embarrassing to watch.  Their long slender legs wave in the air and they grunt and groan with pleasure.  You used to measure a horse’s worth by assigning $100 to each complete roll over from side to side. Athena never makes it completely over to one side because of her high, spiny withers, but Taffy often makes it to $200.

* * *

One mid-winter thaw day, the horses stand in lazy somnolence under a warm afternoon sun next to the barn, hips cocked, their sleepy eyes half-open.  I muck the stalls, the radio tuned to loud oldies, while sunlight fills the barn. Athena wanders over to the double barn door where I am momentarily resting.  After a few minutes of subtly assessing the situation, she decides that my folded arms and quiet are too passive.  She wants to play.  Moving closer to me, she begins to pass her huge long head rhythmically from side to side over mine, expertly gauging just how close she can come to brushing me without actually doing so.  She’s agitating for action.

After a head pass or two more, she begins to nudge my arm with her nose.  Her stablemate, Taffy, moves closer, wanting to be part of our herd.  Athena deftly cuts off the gesture with a defensive block and proceeds to continue to work me with head passes, then another nudge.  When she gets stronger with her push on my arm, I blow directly into her nostrils as a warning blast, and when she continues to test me, I resort to a firm verbal reprimand, not enough to scare her, but enough to up the stakes and warn her about the unacceptability of her dominance pattern on the human female who pays her bills.

The barn has had its weekly thorough manure dig, the heavy urine-soaked bedding stripped from the dirt stalls, a good airing, a sprinkling of lime, and then fresh wood shavings piled lushly in the center.  Outside of the barn, the horses stand in a dwindling snow patch that reveals the brown and nasty-looking manure splotches.  Today it was warm enough to drain the water trough that’s been filling up with accumulated hay and muck, give it a scrub clean, and fill it with clean water.  The de-icer won’t be unplugged for months because of the freezing night temperatures.

Early spring birds call with increasing frequency from the hedge boundaries of my land and the mountains rise in a gray splendor in every direction around us.  Sound is conducted in a gentle, strange acoustic on the snow-cushioned landscape.  The angle of the sun has obviously moved higher and I am happy with all the light, with my equine buddies close by in my backyard.

The horses’ coats are long and dandruffy; they look itchy and sweaty in the vacillating temperatures of this season. They are shedding the first long hairs of the season, a precursor to the annual flurry that will soon fill the air, the barn floor, and stick to my clothing.  By June, Athena’s sleek and statuesque form will have emerged from the hairy chaos. But first there is mud season to withstand.

There’s been no work or exercise lately because of the ice and frigid temperatures, but on this spring-like day, I ache to slip on my riding boots, throw a saddle on Athena, and take her to the fields, letting her plunge over, down, through, and across the brilliant snowy landscape, her great shoulders and hindquarters straining, both of our hearts leaping with the simple, primitive joy of bounding through the snow on a sunny day.

* * *

If you don’t like the weather in Vermont, they say, wait until tomorrow. And sure enough, after our time-travel forward to spring, there is a blizzard today, a silent white giant that creeps in from the south.  The horses have been waiting patiently outside the barn door for dinner, a soft white mantle of snow forming over their shoulders and backs.  With school cancelled, Brooke wriggles into her jacket and snow boots and bends her way into the storm to help with barn chores, kicking up the light powder on the now invisible path.  The horses watch her progress from house to barn intently, their eyes and ears trained upon her every movement.

At the critical point where they are certain that dinner is imminent, there begins the food dance.  Athena starts to stamp and prance in place, while Taffy takes the opportunity to position herself in front of the door so that when it opens she will be first inside to eat.  As Brooke disappears inside, Athena whirls suddenly and bounds over, neck arched and weaving like a cobra’s, to chase Taffy off.  The pony wheels away, shows her heels but not too threateningly.  When Athena tries to spin and recover from the momentum of her larger body, clever little Taffy manages to line herself up in front of the barn door again, first in line.

Athena explodes closer now, snow spraying off her body, to chase Taffy off with bared teeth and flashing heels, but Taffy deftly recovers and repositions herself at the barn door.  She is first yet again.  At this, Athena coils her body, head, and neck in her threatening snake movement and strikes out with her forefeet, not quite connecting with Taffy as the pony moves deftly just out of range.  This time, Athena manages to place herself first in front of the barn door just as Brooke throws it open to announce dinner.  She wins this one.

Watching their antics from the kitchen window, I can’t hear the snorts or see the eyes rolling as both the horses greedily shove their muzzles deep into the grain, but I know the script by heart.

* * *

Sometimes a backyard horse seems like a whole lot of muddy, frigid, hard, heavy, and expensive work.  Particularly when it’s seven degrees outside, when you have a cold, want only to crawl into sweatpants and bed, and the horses have been imprisoned in their stalls for two long days because of bad weather.  The magnificent creatures you have idealized now have long, dusty coats caked with mud, and seem like animals good only for excretion and consumption.  Several manure loads have piled up because of the ice.  Two hundred pounds of grain wait to be hauled from the back of your truck to the barn via Brooke’s old pink plastic sled.  The water line has frozen during the deep freeze, so buckets of fresh water have to be hauled daily from the bathtub of the farmhouse to the barn.  During the thaw, your yellow barn clog stuck in the mire, got left behind, and you sank into mud in your thin sock.  You smashed your icy thumb instead of the nail on the stall door.  The hay supply has suddenly dwindled.  Taffy has a cough.  The Vermont winter and subsequent mud season seem interminable.

But as we all know, this too shall pass.  Everything does.

Stay tuned for more Views From Mt. Pleasant.

Dazed by stuffy plane interiors and the accumulated buzz of continental travel after rigorous flights from the East Coast, we unwind during our automobile tour of Anchorage’s confusing grid of strip malls and low buildings. We hoot and holler as we wheel around and around the one-way streets, happily interrupting each other and singing along with the radio. No longer mommies, no longer diligent daughters caring for elderly parents, at least for the time being.

I raise my eyes above the frontier utilitarian kitsch that provides the pepper between the sophisticated, salty, neon glow that pronounces Anchorage a hotbed of social activity. Scribing wild profiles on three sides of this capitol town like encircling shark’s teeth, the mountain ranges jut sharply in dark, serrated silhouettes into the clouds above the garish signs that hawk lube jobs, subs, auto centers, fast food joints, RV centers, motels, and cocktail lounges.

When we see a store called “Swinger Books” with blacked-out windows, Georgia serves into the other lane. Jane puts her foot down. “NO. You’re not going into a store like that. I’m sorry. I’m all for . . . you know. But my girls are not going in there.” Uptown girl meets “this tacky mess.” We laugh and laugh.

After three hours of aimless driving, we locate “The Look.” Jane sits in the car. The sex shop turns out to be a tame head shop selling funky clothing (amongst stiletto heels, G strings, and pot pipes) to mothers and daughters on the first floor with a discreet corner upstairs devoted to sex toys and aids. Unbelievably, we locate a cheerily packaged fishing lure with the little pink dildo fake male appendage impaled on it (it must be a funny Alaskan staple at parties around here). “We’re having a party for boys,” we announce brightly to the salesgirl with the purple hair. She smiles warily. Is this at all an unusual comment up here in male Frontierland?

Upon returning to the hotel, Calamity Jane breaks in her new Stetson, a dandy idea since it resembles a park ranger’s chapeau perched stiffly on her head. After three Bloody Marys on the hotel’s terrace followed by a three-hour nap, we assemble again for more drinks overlooking Lake Hood, the float plane capitol of Anchorage. It is my 43rd birthday. At 8:15 at night, the sun is still in an early afternoon position in the sky; the mild breeze tempers the surprising heat of this Alaska day. Then it really sinks in: the sun does not go down up here. We are still wearing sunglasses at 9:30 at night, shielding our eyes from the glare with raised arms and feeling a slow sunburn on our cheeks.

Our group is composed of Georgia, the plucky fly fisher/pilot who has organized this ten-women fishing trip to Alaska; Kay, the dryly funny Vermont innkeeper who has never fished before; Jane, the sophisticated New Yorker who changes for dinner and owns six fly rods; and me, who filed for divorce just last week and still weeps at the drop of a hat.

We have a full day to explore Anchorage before heading out to the fishing lodge tomorrow and decide to check out Earthquake Park where, in the ‘60s, the west side of Anchorage dropped into the sea and the harbor drained in seconds. But at the Park, we find no museum, no signage, only the low expanses of mud flats below sharp cliffs that were created by the land shift, and, far beyond, on the other side of the inlet, the Chigmit Mountain range. To the Alaskan initiate, the mountains look at first like hallucinatory clouds, so high do they poke into the sky and blend their snowy flanks with white drifts of clouds.

“Just you wait,” Georgia says knowingly with a smug smile. “This is nothing.”

As we continue to drive out of Anchorage, I wonder why is it that 5,000 miles away from the source I feel closer to my pain than last week when I signed the legal separation papers? Perhaps because the child-rearing responsibilities that have framed my domestic nuclear meltdown are far distant now so I can range wildly about, exploring heretofore off-limit emotions. Wiping away annoying tears, I say enough of that! I can do this.

1997 was a summer of then-unprecedented warmth. Daytime temperatures stayed in the 90s and one brilliant day the porch thermometer at the lodge read nearly 100 degrees. The side channels of the powerful, wild rivers had become rocky, sandy roadways and the streams had shrunk to Vermont meadow-size. Yet the crimson Sockeye and giant King (Chinook) salmon still forged their way up the shallow rivers from the ocean to spawn, driven by irresistible ancient instincts, with dorsal fins gliding above water like pink sail triangles.

Alaska, 1997

One morning, the flight from the lodge in a refurbished Sikorsky helicopter to a small, privately leased, world-class river to fish for ocean-fresh Kings felt like we were being transported through the air in a floating living room. The floor-to-ceiling windows on either side of the seats put you smack into the landscape that passed below you or smack into the mountains that rose above the helicoptor’s rotor blades. At the sight of the untrammeled majesty of the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge and its miles of bouncy tundra, meandering streams, and rock-pocked mountain slopes, tears began to roll again down my cheeks. How can one human heart contain such impossibly indescribable feelings of awe and gratitude when witnessing landscapes of such glory and power?

* * *

The young grizzly limped grotesquely along the edge of the Agulowak River, his right front foot obviously fractured at the ankle. He was alarmingly scrawny and moved forward with halting agony on his useless, dangling paw. Those of us in the canoe, downwind of his nose and invisible to his dim eyes, gasped in compassion. Despite his injury, he was ready for some recreational activity. First came a long scratching session on a pine tree accompanied by a few muted woofs of pleasure. Then he limped over to a crude log bench along the riverbank. Over it toppled as he snuffled around underneath.

Then it was the grizzly’s lunchtime. With the Alaskan salmon moving upstream to spawn and then dying slowly along the banks, the salmon rivers are like slow-moving cafeteria conveyer belts for grizzlies at this time of year. The adolescent bear hobbled confidently into the water and, relieved of gravity, shed his disability. After floating gently for a few moments, he plunged his head underwater to search for fish with only his round, golden ears visible. We held our breaths with him until he finally burst up with a wriggling salmon in his mouth. He shook out a spray of sparkling water droplets from his spiky blond fur, rolled over on his back, and used his crippled paw as a plate while he nibbled with surprising delicacy on the fish.

After lunch, he lumbered out of the water, gave a few full shakes of his bony body, and then moving another few yards upstream discovered a giant set of discarded elk horns to maul.

* * *

Sometimes, in Alaska, you can walk a riverbank, winding through the willows and the brilliant fireweed, and imagine eyes upon you, the dim-sighted gaze of the grizzlies who suddenly crash through the brush or the keener vision of a tundra swan or that of a piebald, immature Bald Eagle or else the omniscient eyes of the invisible god who has granted this splendid outpost of the North American continent somewhat of a reprieve from the plunge into human domination embodied by much of the rest of our country’s landscape.

Sometimes you can follow the quite-fresh prints of a grizzly sow and her cubs that are ambling down the stream looking, without much hunger this plentiful summer, for a juicy Pacific salmon meal.

Sometimes you can choose to laughingly believe a lanky, strong fishing guide with amazing bone structure when he admires your fly-fishing prowess and tells you he’ll protect you against everything, even grizzlies. Sometimes you can lie down in the grass, pull your hat over your face, and brush softly the blades nearest your fingertips to remind you that you really are alive and napping on the Alaskan tundra just inches away from your Jimmy Stewart guide.

Sometimes there are no mosquitoes.

Sometimes back at the lodge, when the music plays real loud, you have to climb up on the bar and just dance (with your clothes on).

Sometimes you can walk upstream on the gravel in the wildlife refuge and turn the bend and there is revealed before you a mountain range and valley of such staggering beauty that you want to fall to your knees and weep or pray, if you knew who to. And if you didn’t have to march back down the stream, the two of you Lewis & Clark explorers, in order to meet the others at the float plane in time to make it to the lodge for dinner, you two might just keep going, walking into your halcyon vision, never to be seen again.

Sometimes, when it gets hard to be a human being, you just have to put your foot right into a grizzly bear’s paw print, the one embedded deeply in the mud on a riverbank in Alaska.

(“Alaska” is a chapter from an unpublished book manuscript.)

Stay tuned for more Views From Mt. Pleasant!

]]> http://margotpage.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/the-view-from-mt-pleasant-alaska/feed/ 3 margotpage fishing-in-alaska http://margotpage.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/the-view-from-mt-pleasant-just-middle-aged-me-and-my-bike/ http://margotpage.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/the-view-from-mt-pleasant-just-middle-aged-me-and-my-bike/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:44:32 +0000 margotpage http://margotpage.wordpress.com/?p=176 ]]> Biking is my three-season source of sheer joy, mental therapy, and physical fitness. The sheer joy comes from my extreme speed through time and space and from traveling across a landscape that showcases the varied natural glories of southwestern Vermont. Now that it’s springtime here on Mt. Pleasant, the vernal ponds are throbbing screaming with peepers and single files of wild turkeys strut in long prehistoric lines over corn-stubbled fields. The gravel back roads I prefer to ride on are a little too greasy at this time of year, so I’m sticking to paved roads for the time being. Wherever I cycle, returning spring birds bugle and trill with increasing frenzy in their annual establishment of avian territory and search for sex partners mates.

First, let me qualify my level of bike riding: I don’t do hills. Or rather, I can’t do them. (Asthma, you know.) I can ride my bike on flat roads till the cows come home (except for a sore, numb ass), but put even a moderate hill in front of me and I start to wheeze at the very sight of it. If I am with companions, I tend to ignore my body’s red flags, and before I know it I’m in dire respiratory distress, marked by a deafening distinct gasping for air. It is just too alarming to listen to, both by others and by me, so I’d rather ride alone, at my own speed on roads of my own choosing.

On my preferred route along the Battenkill, there are picturesque, weathered red barns, charming white farmhouses, undulating mountains (a safe distance from me and my bike), mossy stone walls, grazing horses, and half-hidden crumbling foundation remnants of long-ago buildings. I stop mid-ride at the Wayside Country Store in West Arlington, Vermont, for a break. Here I strip off helmet and gloves, take swigs of water, and sit on the rocker on the front porch for a nice hamstring stretch and an easy chat with whomever drops by for milk and the paper. Norman Rockwell’s former studio is just a couple of miles down the road from the Wayside; some of the local inhabitants who patronize Wayside are often descendants of his former models. To many minds, it is still Rockwell country around here.

The mentally therapeutic aspect of biking is evident to young and old practitioners. When I was a young girl growing up in Connecticut suburbia, my world was pretty simple: it was a) me and b) my bike. Well, okay, there was also my c) pet white mouse. A most excellent day in my life back then was when the current white mouse decided to disappear into the bowels of my house to search for his long-lost cousins and thus I would have to ride my bike five miles to the pet store to get another one. I would purchase a baby mouse all by myself (one of the rare times I conducted solo business transactions as I was a pathologically shy child) with my coin hoard, and then carefully place the box housing my newest white mouse into the handlebar basket. The ride home was delicious—me, my bike, and my new pink-nosed, pink-footed pet. Wow, life didn’t get much better for that 10-year-old! It would only be a couple of months before I would neglect to put Mouse back into his cage, and off he’d scamper to join the (probably) hundreds of white mice living in the bowels of my house. Time to go to the pet store again! On my bike!

Psychologically, bike riding for youngsters is giddy freedom. Freedom of movement, freedom from parental control, freedom to explore the larger immediate world surrounding them. It’s the beautiful stage between dependent adolescence and driving a car, the tender years where we learn to assess road conditions, traffic, weather, vehicle speed, motion, and control, albeit in bicycle-land.

Biking for oldsters is also giddy freedom. Freedom from adult pressures and expectations. Thirty-five years after my infatuation with mice and bikes, living in Vermont and newly divorced, I needed to be free again: to ride my bike very fast and for long distances. The wind and the rapid movement were cleansing. The rush of fresh air into my lungs, nose, and eyes seemed to blow away the day’s turmoil, and I would return to the heavy responsibilities of my old Vermont farmhouse and my young daughter with a measure more of peace and hope. At least until the next day, when I would be compelled again to move, move, MOVE, and very fast at that. Bike riding probably saved my sanity during those scary early single years, and among other things provided me with a vital link back to my girlhood, to a precious, more innocent me. No Boys Allowed.

Biking is also my key to physical fitness. When I am in good bike shape, in my imagination my calves are carved, my thighs are lean, my butt is tight(er), and my tum is as good as it gets at middle age. My wind and stamina are at high levels, and my back and arms are somewhat cut. Because I don’t have a road bike but rather a hybrid, or a crossbike (something between a mountain and a road bike to handle to the gravel/dirt roads I prefer), my road distances and road speed are pathetic compared to that of the Lance Armstrong–like bikers who streak past me in brilliantly colored, hunched-over packs. But since I gave up feeling inferior for my 50th birthday a few years back, I don’t waste that energy anymore, so now when I bike, it’s proudly solo so that I can establish my own pace and respect my body.

The middle-age journey to biking fitness has been a particularly tough one this year. I gave up my gym membership last spring after Brooke had her car accident, convincing myself that I could continue my workouts at home without the added time away and expense. Well, let’s just say it didn’t happen that way, and then by the time the biking window had shut (i.e., November, here in Vermont), I was headed downhill to a soft, winded, and weak Margot.

The weather has warmed up early this spring so I’ve been out training for a month now, but man, you know it don’t come easy! At the beginning it felt as if I was pushing cement blocks instead of pedals, and I could barely stand to pedal up mild bumps inclines. So I just have to be patient with my body, putting in the time I need to slowly build up stamina while adding another mile each week. I recently discovered that if I split my bikes into two daily training blocks of forty minutes or so, I have time to physically recover between each and can almost double my mileage.

Well, I’m not lean or toned yet, but this week I think I notice a slightly sharper curve to my calves and certainly a happier (girlish) mind space … which I call freedom, at any age.

Stay tuned for more Views From Mt. Pleasant.

Now, in what is currently 2009 Vermont, I lie in my queen-sized bed and my skin is crawling and the bedsheets and my tee shirt are uncomfortably soggy with sweat. I am ice ice cold, shivering visibly at the same time that fever is consuming me with its inner heat. Familiar dangerous bees are starting to buzz in my head like a distant gathering menace. Only three minutes have elapsed from the time I managed to screw open one swollen, aching eye to look at the clock … ow, the light, the light, ow, my eyeballs! My head wants to explode with juicy, liquid pressure. I cannot turn off the flush of my nasal spigot and thousands, it seems, of damp white Kleenex flowers litter the bed and floor. My head thuds audibly with each heartbeat. Only 100 more hours till morning. Panting shallowly, an invisible boulder crushing my chest, I try to patiently abandon myself to my body’s natural course as the fever burns through me. I dread the epic journey I shall soon have to endure while navigating my shaky way to the bathroom. Stabbing muscle pains streak like lightning across my back. My throat is swollen, there are microscopic itchy gremlins tickling with poison rakes every cell in my body, my very cheekbones hurt. Pant, pant … ommmm. Oh no! here comes another sneeze! Find the Kleenex quick… oh my aching, aching head! Aauugghhhh.  Just leave me alone and check back in the fall.

I am solidly in the merciless grips of my annual spring virus. But unlike what happened last spring, this year, I can nurse my feverish, snotty, sneezy, pathetic, moaning misery privately, ensconced in the peace and security of my own cozy home on Mt. Pleasant.

Not so about one year ago when I had no such luxury.

The Typhoid Marys

Here’s some of the story: Returning to Vermont from a long weekend in Massachusetts with my sister, Diana, I was elated. How beautiful life can be! Oh happy days! Despite her kids being sick with rotten colds, we had celebrated her 49th birthday with a memorable sisterly hike through sunlit woods, giving thanks while jumping over vernal brooklets for the bountiful family and health blessings in our middle-aged lives and for our individual triumphs over long personal struggles. The whole weekend was a joyful time of focused appreciation, a pinnacle party, so to speak, and I was still bubbling over with this joy when I drove home to Vermont that afternoon to meet Jim at his father’s house in Manchester. After I hugged him merrily, I started to tell him about the trip, laughing about some detail, when my cell phone interrupted us.

It was my daughter calling from her study-abroad program in Ecuador. Heeeyyyy, how you doing, daughter!

Brooke, one year later

Mom, where are you? she asked curtly, her voice serious and rushed. Is Jim with you?

… ummm, yes.

Good, she said. And then she started to talk, hurriedly, nervously, and over the scratchy cellular phone line connecting our two hemispheres I heard the words every parent dreads. She was in a hospital. There had been a serious car accident. Yesterday. She didn’t want anyone to call me until the doctors had completed the tests. Her pelvis was fractured and there were internal injuries. Her program advisor was with her. The other car passengers were in another hospital. She was the most severely injured. But she was strong and she was going to be okay.

At the word hospital I sharply inhaled and by serious car accident, I exhaled in a muted but high-pitched keening. Parents can only hope that they will be strong, rational, and useful at times like these, but no one can predict how the combustible mixture of bad news and parental emotions will affect us. I passed the test … but barely. It crossed my mind briefly that while I had been frolicking in the Massachusetts woods, Brooke was probably in an Ecuadorean ambulance speeding to some unknown hospital.

Brooke’s program advisor, at her bedside, was anxious to talk to me so Brooke handed the phone to her. In developing and third-world countries, speed limits or traffic lights have little effect on drivers, and vehicular accidents are among the most dreaded dangers. Brooke and her host family had gone out for ice cream after a day of sightseeing. The kids had done nothing wrong. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their car was hit by a driver speeding through a red light at over 70 mph, which hit them broadside and rolled their car. Twice. Brooke managed to crawl out of the wreckage, despite her pelvic injuries, and lie immobile next to the car. The others were trapped inside until the rescue teams arrived.

The director assured me Brooke was in the best trauma center in the country, that she had been given sophisticated imaging tests, that she was being treated by a fine doctor, and that surgery didn’t seem to be necessary—of enormous relief since she possesses a rare blood type. Brooke was a very strong girl and she was (this was stressed repeatedly) very lucky to be alive. This is when my tears kicked in.

As I write this now, I cannot recall much about the rest of that day as I plummeted from the heights of joy to the depths of fear and shock, except for an unending series of emergency phone calls and e-mails. The next day was shitty, too, with more terrible emotions, phone calls, and e-mails as the number of her pelvic fractures went from one to two. By now, the heavy-duty role insurance companies play in dramas like this was also becoming part of the picture. Brooke was covered, but by whom?  She would need to be flown back to the United States.  How?  Who would cover this potentially enormous expense? And just how severe were her injuries?  How could her parents, a continent away, get comprehensive medical information? Phone contact to Ecuador was spotty and e-mail simply unreliable.  And I didn’t speak Spanish.  When would she be stabilized and fit to travel?  What kind of care was she getting at this Quito trauma center?  The phone conversations we managed to have were increasingly worrying. She was developing a fever. They were going to conduct a particular nasty test on her innards. She was refusing pain medication because she’d had a frightening reaction to the morphine. There was no hot water in the room. She was having periods of panic and anxiety.

My friend Kathleen (a veteran world traveler), upon hearing the news, called and announced that since Brooke’s father apparently wasn’t going to do it, I, her mother, needed to get my ass down to Quito to be with her. Oh no, I thought, I can’t do that, I haven’t been in an airplane in six years, I don’t have the money, it’s all TOO BIG for me, I can’t handle it. But no, not only did I have to go, Kathleen said, but she was going to accompany me there!

In two hours, Kathleen was sitting on my couch with a cell phone in one hand, a laptop next to her, and a notepad in the other hand as she made our plans. No one can resist Kathleen. She is a force of nature. She even made a call to the president of Brooke’s university to make sure she had the full power of her academic institution behind her to ensure her safety.

And so, I flew down to Ecuador with her the next day. Two moms on a mission.

But, as I mentioned before, I was feeling like shit. It wasn’t just the horrible shitty feeling you get when your daughter calls from a Latin American country to say she’s been in a car accident and that she is immobilized in a trauma center with pelvic and internal injuries. It was the especially shitty feeling that you get because you’re coming down with the debilitating, nasty virus your sister’s kids were sick with over the weekend at just about the Worst Time Ever in the Whole World To Get Sick — like, at just about the time your daughter needs your strength more than she ever has in all her 21 years on this planet.

Yes, just one day after answering my cell phone to get The Call All Parents Dread, I helplessly started the hallucinatory slide into the feverish, shaking, sweating, chilled nightmare known as the Living Death Spring Virus. Only this time, I had to pack a bag for conditions unknown, get on a couple of planes, and fly down to Ecuador to be by my daughter’s side.

I write this story completely aware of the irony that while I complain about my shivering, snotty, feverish travel nightmare, my daughter was lying immobile in an Ecuadorean hospital recovering from her traumatic car accident. There is no comparison of our respective experiences, and I write only to point out the sicko twist of fate that we are all familiar with, that ultimately ironic godly comedy of errors whose curtain always seems to ascend just at times like these, in this particular instance to ravage me with weakness and fever and phlegm and near-incapacity at just this critical moment in time. Brava!

Luckily I was, within a short few hours, too miserable to dwell on it. And luckily, strong, competent Kathleen The Great would more than adequately become the leader of my migrating little tribe. There would be no curling up into a little ball at the side of the trail for me. No, my formidable leader kicked me upright and frog-marched me forward to find my daughter in the wilderness, holding me up by the armpits when I stumbled or sagged.

Before I knew it, Kathleen The Great had booked us a hotel room in Newark en route to the next day’s flights to Quito, Ecuador.  Before I knew it, as my fever and delirium and sweating and chills and exploding congestion escalated at an alarmingly exponential rate, we were in her car headed for New Jersey.  I didn’t dare tell her how sick I’d become for fear she’d abandon me and my disgusting cooties, and I desperately tried to avoid breathing, sneezing, or blowing my nose on her for fear my fearless leader would get as sick as I was and then we’d both be helpless heaps at the side of the trail.  Somehow the luggage had gotten packed.  Somehow my passport and $300 cash were in my bag.

About forty minutes into our four-hour drive to Newark, I had a ferocious asthma attack and we had to stop by the side of the road so I could claw through my bag looking for my inhaler while I willed my labored breathing to slow.  I took a thousand half a Xanax to calm down my system. I remember later falling asleep in the hotel room by virtue of a mother-of-a sleeping pill that muted my fevered shivering, nasal honking, and desperate snufflings.  In the early morning, Kathleen efficiently loaded her Zombie charge and our bags into the shuttle bus and ushered us through ticketing and security, while I shuffled behind her like a dazed but obedient child, mentally confused and beginning the consuming sweats and chills again, a little packet of Kleenex clutched to my bosom.   She settled me into my seat on the plane while pocketing my passport and tickets, and sat protectively across the aisle from me, briskly typing away on her laptop.

I remember little of the dreamy, floating hours mid-flight, the gulped but ineffective Bloody Marys, an inaudible, incomprehensible movie, an uncomfortable half-doze after another thousand half-Xanax.  There was nothing I could do for Brookie in my giant silver cigar seven miles above the earth’s surface as we streaked southward with no access to emails, no phone calls.  My head lolled and pounded, and the pulsing brilliant fever encased me in a hot gauze of surreality.

When the giant silver cigar suddenly descended, bounced and landed (somewhere?), I, still suspended in my existential tropical delirium, was led by my staunch angel friend into a private frequent traveling club with padded leather couches and free refreshments. The fever raged through our five hours of numb layover, then I was led onto another flying silver cigar, settled into another seat, and hurtled through the darkness over the ocean and Central America toward my daughter lying in her sickbed in the Quito hospital, far from Mt. Pleasant, Vermont. My only thought, my only prayer:

Oh Brookie, what will the future hold for you?

One month after the accident (crutches hidden!)

Epilogue: A week later, Brooke and I were medevac-ed back to the U.S. by private Learjet after she was deemed fit to travel.  A supplemental emergency insurance policy (something I highly recommend for all international travelers) covered 100% of her considerable medical and repatriation expenses. After a period of rest and then physical therapy, she recovered rapidly from her four pelvic fractures, thanks to her strength of spirit and young bones.

Oh, and Kathleen never did catch my spring virus cooties.

A membership with International SOS provides you with extensive medical and travel assistance, including full medical evacuation and repatriation services, whether you’re traveling for leisure, business, or spending a semester abroad, and can be as inexpensive as a few hundred dollars a month, well worth the peace of mind.

Stay tuned for more Views From Mt. Pleasant!

]]> http://margotpage.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/the-view-from-mt-pleasant-the-sickbed/feed/ 2 margotpage cropped-dz-liam3 img_18281 brooke-and-mom-at-truman