Tantra Goddess. Caroline Muir

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СКАЧАТЬ When a lightning storm approached, you had to tie up the horses and mules and take cover crouched against an embankment and away from tall trees. Rick said more people died in those mountains being struck by lightning than are killed driving the highways.

      Rick taught me all about mountain life as we camped by crystal clear mountain lakes, catching trout and frying them up within minutes out of the icy water. The flesh was succulent and the pinkest I’d ever seen. Even the boxed mashed potato flakes tasted like pure heaven when they were drenched in butter, and the instant biscuits from a mix melted in our mouths in seconds flat. We watched herds of elk cross the green velvet meadows, humbled by their majesty and their number. Wildflowers peeked out of the undergrowth in the pine forests, and every night we warmed our fingers and toes in front of a roaring campfire. Many times I was sure we were lost, but Rick always found the disappearing trail and led us through the wilderness until we finally dropped low enough in altitude to follow the railroad tracks into the old mining town of Silverton.

      In Silverton, a nineteenth-century mining town, I felt on top of the world. Tourists seeing us ride into town might have taken us for real prospectors as we rode in pulling our mule train, dusty and covered with the proof of having lived in the wilderness for thirty days. We tied up our horses and mules to the wooden rails lining the unpaved road and walked into town with our dogs. Rick had an old girlfriend in Silverton, and we visited her and rested for a few days, until Rick’s dad could come to collect us with his horse trailer. We loaded the horses and mules into his trailer and climbed into the pickup, eager for our familiar roof and real bed.

      Back at Rick’s family ranch, it was time to consider our next move. I had no plans besides creating more jewelry to sell at local craft fairs and galleries for food and gas money. Rick had an idea: let’s take the top off your jeep and drive to New York to see your daughter, then see what’s around the bend. What a grand idea! Four days later, windblown and sunburned, we pulled into the driveway of the older house further in the country where Arnie had moved with Robin after selling our New Rochelle house. My old life was completely gone except for the people who inhabited it and some familiar furniture.

      Robin squealed when she saw us pull up in the jeep, three dogs barking in the rear, and she ran into my open arms. Arnie welcomed us warmly, giving Rick a warm handshake. When we had a few private moments, Arnie admitted to me that Robin often woke during the night crying for her mother. It broke my heart to hear it, but I didn’t know what to say. I knew Arnie had climbed his own mountains: packing up a life that had split wide open, selling the house, finding a simple place in the country to live. He was writing and working freelance so he could be home with our daughter and serve as both mother and father to her. I ached hearing all of this, yet I praised him, as did Rick, for the good man he so obviously was. We regaled him with stories of our high-country adventures, and somehow his heart opened to Rick, who from then on he called “brother.” I swore to him and to all who would listen that our friendship would remain with us for life.

      Robin was another story. Right away, Robin and Rick were inseparable. With me, though, Robin was cautious. She hung back. In later years I would learn that the scarlet letter had left its mark, as it had on me, although I wasn’t willing to admit it.

      All the way home to Colorado, I blamed myself for failing as a wife and mother. I hadn’t kept up my part of the commitment. It was a hard reality to take. Another reality I couldn’t avoid was that I had to find work. Victor asked us to go with him to his uncle’s uranium mines in Gateway. “You oughta join me up there for a while. He needs a few hands,” he told Rick.

      We were clearly “on the run,” though from what I’m not sure. All I knew was that adventure and travelin’ that lonesome highway were leading us where we needed to go and feeding this pioneer girl’s spirit. As long as we had a destination, we were happy. I sold my Jeep for a pickup, waved goodbye to Rick’s folks, packed up what I’d take with me, and we were on our way to the Colorado-Utah border and the little town of Gateway, population 52.

      Fish for dinner caught fresh from the Dolores River and wild asparagus picked on the riverbanks was appealing for a while, but after eight months, living in a plain two-bedroom farmhouse with Victor and his girlfriend got old. And mining was taking its toll on Rick. Hard physical labor in a mineshaft a mile down into the earth for minimal pay was anything but a cowboy’s dream. It was time for something new.

      For years Rick had thought about becoming a farrier, making a living shoeing horses and being free to go where he wanted. It was a perfect job for a cowboy, and it sounded like a fine idea to me. Rick found a farrier school in El Paso, had a friend there we could stay with, and we moved again, squeaking by on savings until he got his license and could get some paid work. When farrier school ended we were just about flat broke, my divorce was finalized, and the settlement check on its way would buy us a ticket out of there. We begged the managers of a bank in south Texas to cash my out-of-state check, then drove the dying pickup to a used car lot and bought a shiny new truck complete with a camper trailer. California would be the next stop, and this camper would be our traveling home.

      Arnie lived in Woodland Hills outside Los Angeles now, in a spacious suburban house, and Robin was much happier there. There were other kids in the neighborhood, and the swimming pool entertained her day in and out. We visited them on our way north, promising to come back to visit often. We wanted someplace rugged and green, a place with a lot of horse ranches and great big skies.

      The Northern California coast along Highway One is famous for its expanses of rolling hills dotted with grazing cows, stunning rocky shores, and empty beaches. Dairy farms and ranches, private estates, and rural dream houses fill the area, and we chose this area for our destination, parking the trailer in a campground near Point Reyes State Park, about thirty miles north of San Francisco. There was lot of money in Marin County, and we expected a thriving business. The campground had good showers, laundry facilities, and corrals for the horses we would bring out soon from Colorado. The sleepy little town of Point Reyes Station, with its bookstores, galleries, and bakery where the locals hung out was just minutes away, and it offered some balance to the life of solitude I led. Mostly I sought the peace of the windswept beaches and hiking trails through the sloping hills and redwood forests and along the serene waterways of Tomales Bay. We had enough money to feed the horses and dogs and enough for our ground chuck and potatoes stew, and somehow we always scraped together enough change for gas, Skoal and Marlboros, and homegrown, which was pretty cheap back then.

      Rick would need a horseshoeing rig to get started; our fifteen-foot “home” hauled from El Paso just wasn’t going to do it. He found a used produce trailer, hung a sign on the side—“Garvan’s Horseshoeing Service”—and he was ready for business. I set up my jewelry-making tools and sat down with a lot of new ideas. I would sell what I made at local craft fairs, and there seemed to be a lot of them in the Bay Area.

      Rick’s country ways were adorable to me. He was polite, gentle, helpful, kind, and always ready to lend a helping hand to anyone who asked. We made love every morning or night, after his efforts to earn his living. We didn’t talk much, it just wasn’t Rick’s style, and for a while I didn’t mind, but after a time I began to miss having friends to talk with. I found classes in Hatha yoga in town and stayed up late reading books about metaphysics and past-life regression. Rick wasn’t interested in any of it, and I had to keep my thoughts to myself. I’d always known our styles were different, but they were beginning to scrape against each other a bit—the sweet, simple cowboy and this Kansas girl turned New York wife, turned suburban mom, turned jeweler and mountain woman, turned California soul searcher. Our quarters started feeling cramped, and sometimes I’d lose my patience. Climbing over Rick in the middle of the night to get to our tiny toilet, I once stepped into a smelly tobacco can that had been ripening for months. “Can’t you keep your goddamn spittoon outside?” I’d cried, pounding on him, and he wrestled me down and tickled me until I collapsed in laughter and love.

      A year into life on the California coast, we decided it was time for СКАЧАТЬ