Early morning trail ride

Some Saturdays I rose before dawn for early morning trail rides with my friend Stephanie. Everyone else was asleep. Her father never knew of our morning escapades, and my grandmother didn’t seem to mind. But I also didn’t tell her where we were going, as it was too far from home for a child on her own. I was on my horse, somewhere deep in the hills, and therefore, safe. At least she never said anything to me. My own parents were in absentia, my father deep in a bottle, my mother in one asylum or other. Steph‘s dad was a little more controlling. See, her mother, who was a Russian translator for the UN, blacklisted by McCarthy, knew all about silence. She drank in silence, and because of that silence, she died in the fire. A short in the dryer. Because Les couldn’t protect his wife, he was over-protective of Steph. The boys, her two younger brothers, not so much. Bucky was close to our age but Gooby was still in diapers. We’d simultaneously sneak out of the house just as the sky was beginning to lighten, and meet up at the county road. The morning fog was like a tight glove protecting us from the mid-20th century. We could’ve been anywhere in time. Sometimes we’d sneak through her upper pasture, past Old Grandad, the Hereford bull, to get to the fire road that led up to Mt. Barnabe. But the stiff barbed wire gate gave our small hands pause. The top of the mountain facing due west was our goal. It was always a spectacular view from the crest of the ridge, the morning mist parting to reveal the sheathed silver sword of Tomales Bay, tracing the trench of the San Andreas Fault, and the clenched bare fist of Elephant Mountain. It restored my equilibrium to see the word from a raptor’s viewpoint. These refuges, these steep hills and valleys were the coping weapons of my youth.

4/12/23 

TheNarrativeMethod.com prompt

Mad donkeys

Someone posted photos of donkeys wearing floral headbands, they looked so angelic. But looks can be deceiving.

My donkey Joshua was one of the mean ones who didn't like kids. She plotted all forms of nefarious revenge for riding her. One time I was feeding her a carrot and she latched onto my finger, knowing it was my finger, and then ground away, and sawed her jaw back and forth, hell-bent on severing my finger. I had to pound on her somewhat hollow head in order to get my finger back.

Josh was plain old mean to the bone. She didn't like kids, and I was stuck with her because no one else could, or would ride her. Or get past her teeth. Born under the mean tree. She taught me to be wily. She'd dump me in the most awful of places. Ditches, briar patches, thistles. 

She'd bloat, would wait for the cinch to loosen up, hit a gallop (she was otherwise lazy and dawdled), then slam on the breaks at a strategic spot. She even broke my arm (but I never knew it until I was in an accident in 1997, as I hid all wounds from my granny....) 

There are many sour donkeys out there. I love Jim Dodge's descriptions of Ol' Pissgums in Not Fade Away. Our neighbors had tall grey donkeys who were sweet. More like Irish donkeys. I wonder if it was the particular breed that was so ornery? Josh was the smaller brown Spanish type. She had the Latin temperament down cold.

 I'd rather take my clever, scheming Shetlands (who kept me up nights) any day. Luckily Joshua's lame daughter Nay-nay was sweet. My horses were sweeter yet. I understand there are sweet donkeys out there...but Josh was not of that tribe. 

One of the few times Josh was a good donkey was when we were part of a Christmas pageant in Marin City. We began at the top of the hill, and there I was, Joseph, decked out in white sheets (al la KKK) leading Josh down the hill with my friend Step as Mary on her back.... (everything hinges on the location location location...I knew something was off, but I didn't know what.)

I do wonder if the type of donkey has something to do with their temperament. When I was young, I thought there was only one breed, I was astounded to discover there were many breeds of donkeys. I suspect Josh was a Spanish donkey, the donkey breed of the American West, and of prospectors. She came from Clear Lake, and lived a very long time...

A photo of my friend Steph and Nay-nay, caught diving through the fence. (She got stuck...) Sadly, I don't have a photo of Josh.

Donkey Wars
EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

Bad -tempered bulls

I have to laugh when people post photos/videos of affectionate cattle. And everybody falling for that image—hook, line and sinker—especially the vegans. Cooing like pigeons. Not the norm at all. Trust me. Nothing like a bad-tempered bull gunning for you—because you happen to be in his line of sight. Hereford bulls are often cranky at best. It must be the red hair. Last year, I was attacked by the Gallagher’s new handsome black Angus bull, Theodore. I shredded my favorite down vest diving through the barb wire fence. My crime: I stepped between him and his ladies.

My neighbors once had a Jersey cow, Ralf, that managed to escape each spring to find the bulls. She had a Hereford bull calf that my best friend Stephanie named Thumbelina, who so sweet when he was young, but later, full of hormones, he treed me up a telephone pole with poison oak. You never know when they'll turn on you. It didn’t matter that he knew me since he was a baby. Once the hormones are running, all bets are off. Or maybe it was revenge for being named Thumbelina. Mr. Stone gave my grandmother the bull’s heart, our revenge was eating his heart. Literally.

Even Mr. Schmitts (a runty Herfie), who had the personality of a doorknob, was cranky when spring came, and he wasn't very bright either. He didn’t have a lot of redeeming qualities—other than he loved my ponies...and I do mean loved....erm. As in the carnal sense. Nothing like a piggyback ride with a stunted horny Herfie. And the sucker had real horns as well. We used them as handlebars, because he often tried to gore us.

Then there was Old Grandad, their gentle sire, who loved a good chin itch. He was so mild-tempered that eventually there were no more calves. Mr. Nunes shipped him off after a few seasons. His idea of foreplay was to pizzle on his own head. Ugh. Poor old man.

From a Facebook post, some revision.

Jazz Hands and Second Dinners

Me with my faithful pet skunk named Flower,

In the very early days, the school bus dropped us off at the bottom of Arroyo Road, and it was over a mile to my house. Pete's house was about a quarter of a mile up from he highway. I was tired of walking, so I'd follow him home...I was also nearly a year younger than most of my classmates, so I was really a baby walking that long walk home.

Pete's mom, Chuck Sutton would feed us peanut butter sandwiches, and she sometimes gave me a ride home in the green VW bus. Peter never ditched me, though he could've, having two brothers. Even when they made a blanket fort and wouldn't let me in because I was a girl. I'm sure I was a pest. I remember building Lincoln logs with him. I'd never seen Lincoln logs, I was fascinated.

I was devastated when the Suttons moved to Lagunitas. No more free lunch. No more playmates. Nobody ever had any money in those days, and feeding the neighborhood kids was the norm. I remember eating cereal at 5PM with Adair Lara Dalys mob in Lagunitas too. Tony the Tiger. Roarrrrr!

Apparently I had a voracious appetite. I went from house to house grazing with the other kids. Scott Waver's mom made the most outrageous sugar doughnuts. Billy Joe Bianchi's grandmother fed me spongecake and raviolis, saying, "Mangia, mangia." "Eat, eat." And so I did, but I was a skinny kid, so skinny, Jimmy Bohman used to sneer and call me "Skinny" in eighth grade.

Stephanie Stone's blended family was so big, they never even noticed another ravening mouth at the table. Micaela Wall Marsden's stepmom Betty Lang Wall had an open larder policy too. I practically lived hat her house when we were tweenies. Then, I'd go over to another neighbor's house, usually our next-door-neighbor Agnes Vincilione's house for Second Dinner. I must've had a tapeworm or something. Now I'd love to be able to eat like that and still be called Skinny.

Pete Sutton's famous dad once played a concert for us at Lagunitas School. Kevin McConnell reminded me. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven....so cool. The original Loony Tunes. What were we, 2nd graders? We all danced and made jazz hands, little starfish hands keeping rhythm to the tunes. And Steve Tristano playing his dad's (Lennie) famous boogige-woogie chords on the piano afterwards, I thought Mrs. Burges was going to have a stroke. No wonder we were so delightfully warped.

Pete posted a ditty that spurred this memory:

Over in the meadow where the grass grows so even, 
Lived an old mother frog and her Little froggies seven. 
"Spring," said the mother, "We spring," said the seven, 
and they sprung all day where the grass grows so even.

The silly ditty. Think of the soundtracks of those old cartoons from the 50s, that was Pete's dad at the keyboard playing stride piano. Of course, he played more famous jazz tunes too.So what rainsong would Ralph Sutton play, if he was still with us, this morning? Was a time you couldn't find anything on him on the internet. Didn't realize he lived in Aspen. He's been rediscovered. I found references to Ralph on the internet, but (no mention of "Chuck.")

Katelin asked, Wasn't it Tristani?

Lennie Tristano. Another name out of childhood. When I was a kid, I thought all good piano players had to be blind, like Lennie, and also Kent Weaver (Scott Weaver's bro), so when someone offered us a piano (and lessons), I didn't want it. NO siree! I liked my eyes.

Lennie played cool jazz bebop, using chord progression. The Wiki article says Steve only met him once after 1956, but I remember meeting him walking down the road (SFD Blvd) to the Lagunitas store—two blind piano players and their entourage cut quite a swath in the imagination of childhood.

Making Butter

When we were kids, an after-school job at our neighbor's house was to churn butter as we watched Rin-Tin-Tin or Sea Hunt on the old black & white TV.  We were mesmerized.

In those days, TVs were a luxury item, and there were only two to four channels—that often broadcasted snow, depending upon where you lived. Reception was bad in the deep pocket valleys of Arroyo Road. The Stones lived on the Lagunitas side of Barranca Creek. I lived at the end of the canyon on the Forest Knolls side.

I remember watching Les Stone hitching himself up to the top of the tallest tree, lugging up an aluminum arial, and armloads of copper wire. Elaborate arial setups laced to the tops of tall pines worked, until the next big storm. They were like weathervanes. Long flat arial lines from the top of the Douglas fir to the house had to be maintained. A crack in the plastic cable, during a storm, and the line would short out. No TV. Just loud snow. The sound of deep space hissing.

So it was pretty exciting to be able to even watch TV. Stephanie Stone and I were horse crazy so we were partial to Lassie Come Home and Dale Evans and Roy Rogers. Rin-Tin-Tin was OK, because he looked like Ky-dog the German Shepherd—even if there were no horses.

One afternoon, it was my turn to churn the butter. I churned and tumped and churned until it felt like my arms were going to fall off. I churned my way through Rin-Tin-Tin to the 6 O'Clock News. My aching muscles were afire.

Still no butter. When I peeked into the churn, it was clotted, like snow on the TV. A loud thundercrack overhead. Lightning arced and struck the arial. Buckets of rain. In this way I found out that butter won't churn during a thunderstorm. It came down to science. Much more mesmerizing than the TV.

I grew up on the other side of Mt. Barnabe...

I grew up on the other side of Mt. Barnabe, on the southern slope, in full sunlight. Barnabe's mule bones have long since slipped back into the earth. We used to loiter by the pools of Lagunitas Creek, Carson Creek, Devil’s Gulch, and Arroyo Creek when the salmon were running, we waited for that flash, coinage of silver, vermilion and green heralded the fall.

Though the Devil's Gulch route was the most direct route over the mountain, and was one of my grandfather's favorite hikes, it was such a long, hot and desolate ride over the summit of Mt. Barnabe to Camp Taylor, we kids avoided it.

Following the flat railroad bed from Lagunitas, or the creekbed to Tocaloma was the easiest route.

There was also a more northerly route over Mt. Barnabe that avoided the summit. It took us along the hogback ridges through abandoned apple and bitter pear orchards down to the deserted settlement of Devil's Gulch. I felt so far from home, thankful for the warm reassurance of my horse under me.

It was in Devil's Gulch where my mother, as a child, stumbled into a wasp's nest and was nearly stung to death. My grandmother cooled the poor child off in the creek and covered her stings with fine clay mud to draw out the poison. My grandmother said it was always a longer walk home. But when something went wrong, the road home doubled in distance.

Sometimes I made a circle up over Mt. Barnabe and down its steep slopes to Camp Taylor and then returned home up the railroad bed to Lagunitas and Arroyo Road. At one point or another, I've ridden most of what's left of the railroad beds from Woodacre to Tocaloma.

Early mornings, we'd race our horses along the flat stretches of railroad bed to the park gate. I always pulled out ahead at the quarter mile, but a two-mile course fatigued my quarter horse, and the nags would always pull ahead. Even Brenda Bullock's Icelandic pony, Helgar, or little Susie Mattsson's plug could beat my mare on the two-mile run.

Soon after that, my mare pulled up lame, but I was 15, and addicted to racing, I avoided the warning signals. Riding her bareback at breakneck speed was an unmatched thrill. She was pure verve and muscle, it was like riding a barrel down Class Two rapids.

One time when Becky Dart ran away with me at Kent Lake, I sawed on the bit until flecks of blood and foam decorated us, her tongue nearly cut in two by the metal snaffle bit. But still she ran, a Three Bars mare at heart. I just had to let her run it out.

It was spring, my sorrel mare was out to grass, but foxtails carpeted her wound. Every day I had to tweezer the stickers and oats out of the raw flesh, which I cauterized with silver nitrate. Daily I was reminded of what I'd done to this animal by racing her, firing her up like that. I was reminded that she came from a long line of champion race horses, it was in her blood to run.

Granddaugher of the fabled Three Bars, my mare had the thoroughbred lineage of kings in her blood. She was one degree removed from The Preakness, the Kentucky Derby, Sarasota Springs. When my aunt's friend Chuck traced her pedigree, at first, he thought it was forged, but he said, If this proves to be true, you've got quite a valuable mare there, she could beget champions even if her knees were bad.

It was like finding a secret treasure in the woods, or a Vermeer hidden under an artless painting. There wasn't another horse in the valley who could match her at the quarter mile, and no one would race me unless it was a long track.

It was precisely on those kinds of afternoons when you knew spring had arrived. We'd ride and ride for miles on the open road. Time took us on a curious echoing quality. I can still recall the poignancy of late afternoon rides and the dappled roads under tall trees. Bleeding hearts, checker lilies and false Solomon's seal nodding their heads. Trilliums spreading their tripartite wings.

Riding horseback was as natural as walking or breathing. My best friend Stephanie Stone and I rode everywhere. We grew up and lost touch. I hadn't heard from her in years. Her brother Eric said she had a horse in Arizona to ride and that helped to keep her sane through a loveless marriage. But that's when the drinking began. She kept it to herself. Held it in until the cancer ate her marrow.

At seventeen, after my mare tragically died of colic, from eating too much new spring grass in the Bianchi's pasture, I worked for the Lehman's training stable. I showed their horses at gymkhanas, I collected armloads of blue and red ribbons, but I didn't want to own another horse, losing her was devastating. She was big and beautiful, there was so more of her to love.

At nineteen, my other interests, my art—demanded that I move into the larger area of the world. I was at odds. Two worlds colliding. I had a chance to travel, a work-study job in Switzerland. I was sorry to leave, I almost didn't go to Europe, but Edie said, Don't be silly! It's a chance of a lifetime. Go! Have fun!

There were plenty of other girls, like Donna Lopez—who once unscrupulously kicked my horse right when I was in front of the judge, costing me the blue ribbon—girls like her were only too happy to step into my coveted job. And so she did.

I felt a crippling loss, separated from the horses like that. There was nothing much left of my childhood landscape. And so I sometimes dream of horses, and wake up with an inconsolable sense of longing. Everyone else moved into bucolic Marin. They came from LA, and from back east, they bought up the valley, they quickclaimed it and put up plywood palaces, they put up electric fences, they dammed the creeks and gated the roads.

They brought their urban nightmares with them. Runaway horses on the precipice.

When the invaders came, we lost more than our right of way. We lost our way.

The wild creature within me has slowly become urbanized with time. But I still dream of following the horses on endless fire roads running along the horizon.

Twenty years later, laid up with a bad knee, I am remembering it all as if it were yesterday. No point, no point of view. Merely Bob Hass's rivers running uphill against memory and time.

Up with the chickens, freewrite

Rising with the chickens is not exactly my cup of tea, nor is it within my parameters unless the night is long, and the craic is good and and the idea of bed is but a distant thought. Of course, when the moon is full, it tends to confuse the chickens who will cluck all night long, and lay eggs under the moonlight. The roosters are plum-tuckered out by daybreak, having nailed everything in sight for the past 24 hours. They stand on the fence and beat their wings, but can only manager rough croak, more like a toad than a fowl.

I met a Scottish dancer at the Clan Gun banquet who is studying avian science, nothing exotic like herons or snow snow egrets, but poultry science. She said she loves chickens. I like them fried and baked, barbecued, fricasseed, but not live beneath my window at night during a full moon. They nice enough to look at nestled in the trees weather in Key West where there’s a wild wayward chicken for every resident, or the wild jungle fowl that roam the streets on the backside of Kauai’i. With their brilliant feathers  they’re like exotic ornaments. I’m reminded that chickens came from China, so it is said, but it must’ve been a long time ago by way of the silk road because they’re central to so many cultures whether Roman, Celtic, or Mayan.

Once I had to take care of the neighbor’s chickens, we began with 40 chickens. but as the days passed, the flock grew smaller and smaller. The sly fox in the henhouse, such a cliché. It could’ve been a raccoon, I suppose. One moonlit night he polished off half the flock. The neighbors were distressed, having named all 40 of them. And when they returned home, they were only nine chickens left out of 40.

We always wanted to hypnotize the chickens, draw a circle and put their beak in the center, or flip them upside down and stroke their bellies—but catching them was the biggest challenge. We weren’t up to when they were all nearly as big as we were, and were not above chasing us or the dogs. Come daylight, they were fierce as tigers, but in the darkness they were sitting ducks.

Me, I liked slipping my hand beneath their feathers, to feel that promise and weight of eggs, warm to the touch, some eggs were the color of moonlight and others, the color of the sky, and some were speckled as if strewn with shade but the egg timer went off and that’s the end of this freewrite.

9/10/2004 Writers’ Group

Dream journal: Stephanie Stone

17 July dream journal (see also Aug. 8 dream about Steph too.)

I dreamed my childhood friend Stephanie was still alive, but close to death. She and her father were spending a week up at Tahoe, or somewhere—maybe even up at Clearlake. At her nana and grandpa‘s house. Les’s parents.

I said that I had to work during the week; how about if I came up on Friday evening for a visit? Was I also housesitting for them? Stephanie loved the idea. But Les was distant and cold, and also weird. I was upset, I said, look it was only a suggestion. You can say yes or no, but don’t make me feel like shit. And then I ran away, crying.

Steph and Les fought like crazy, she was exhausted. The bone cancer was relentless. He carried her towards the house. We were at her other grandmother Mimi‘s place at the bottom of the hill, standing in the driveway. She was saying goodbye to all her relations.

I had run to the top of the field, to the far left corner and hid myself in the shrubs and sedge clumps. He carried her near to where I was hiding and put her down. They were both crying. She heard me sob, and they gathered me up too.

All three of us crying over the inevitable. There was blood all over the place. Why was my hair done up in multiple braids? Long ropes of dark hair like an octopus on the ground. 

Curiously, I was lying downhill trying to hide in what little cover there was in the upper pasture. My head and a purse or a bag—black objects. I was afraid they were too noticeable in the blonde grass.There was such sorrow among all of us. I still grieve for Stephanie, my childhood friend.

Creative discourse, summer, 1988: There is so Much We Save from Childhood

 

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There is so Much We Save from Childhood

Stephanie's mother died in the fire. A beam caught her on the forehead. She fell behind the door and Joe Bianchi never saw her until it was too late. They said the smoke killed her. They later blamed a faulty wire from a clothes drier, they blamed her drinking.

Smoke rose up like a thick black dragon snake to the empty blue sky as we walked through the fields from the bus stop. We were home from school. When he saw the source of the smoke, her brother Eric darted towards the house and the adults came running out from all sides trying to head us off but we were errant calves headed toward the barn, toward the burning light.

Steph and I stood by the corral trying to find a way to comprehend what we couldn't understand. I was almost ten. The oldest one. I held her hand. We retreated to the lower field and watched the flames eat the sky.

In the glistening cinders, we found a dog-eared photograph, an armless doll, the bent tricycle wheel, some hair tied with a grubby ribbon the color of rust and baby roses. Johanna's childhood toy horses covered with real fur and had real manes and tails that were miraculously unharmed. We indiscriminately admired the beauty of charcoal and emerald green sprouts of winter grass amid the rusted nails and glass rubble.

The end of a life, of an era. Of childhood. No more late afternoons, where we dozed off, bees buzzing to Brahm's Lullaby, when sonorous sleep blanketed the eye with the pale light of summer. The familiar gesture of a stranger, the face of a father. Not my own.

When we were impatient to grow up. Her father said, Stay children always. Stay young. His spaniel voice hung mournfully from our ears as we played. Stephanie listened and found that if she quit feeling, quit eating, Time stood still. While I hid the shame of my hunger, she denied its existence. She had climbed up out of this carnal world to a higher plane of existence. She left no ladder for me to follow.

One morning, Les placed the sick lab puppy with the blue tongue and cold feet on the oak stump to ripen in the winter sun. Its tender black ears like velvet moleskin gathered in no sound as the hatchet bit into the oak. We suspected the worst.

Somehow we got through it. We placed one foot in front of the other. As one foot lifted from the earth, we compensated for the earth's pull. We developed a trust for the way our feet brushed the surface and though we tottered on stilts always falling forward or backward, we caught ourselves at each step.

I have a vague memory of my own father asleep with his head on my mother's lap. She stroked his hair, the ocean pounded and the windows covered with spume.

When Stephanie's mother Johanna rode Binty, she let down her long black hair, a night waterfall. Binty pricked up her ears and tail, gathered in her haunches and leaped from the earth to fly up the driveway. She was no longer of this earthly plane with that precious cargo on her back.

And Binty's sister, Sununu, the red Arabian swallow, whinnied out a welcome as if her heart were about to burst.

Gravel scuttled in all directions, like our childhood.

Stephanie confided in me that her mother was a Russian translator for the United Nations. Johanna majored in Slavic languages at UC Berkeley. She was being watched by the government. We overheard words like McCarthy and FBI. Mimi spoke little English. Devuchka, she'd say.

Speaking the language of the enemy was enough to condemn a person during the purges. This I learned later. Hellman. Hammett taking the Fifth. Red diaper baby! It became a dream to go to Russia because of Johanna but I never rode troikas in the snow.

Astride Binty, Stephanie's thin legs barely reached half-way to the mare's sides. Binty knew the weight of the rider was not of Johanna, so she ran us into the sides of barns, and off cliffs to rid us of the memory.

Soon no one but Steph would ride her. Whether by grief or boredom, Binty began to chew on the barn. First the manger disappeared, then the stalls, soon the barn was as hollow as our hearts.

Binty turned white with age. Stephanie got married, moved away to the desert, got thin after the children were born, it was as if the Arizona sun sucked all the moisture from her bones. Later the cancer would come and drink the marrow from her bones but on some level, Steph was already gone.

They said Binty died with a splinter in her throat from chewing on too many fences. She'd eaten most of the barn with her nervous cribbing. They tried everything to make her stop. Creosote, electric fences, but she chewed that wood as if she was trying to devour every last molecule of scent from her lost mistress.

Johanna no longer needed watching. But sometimes Binty would raise her tail like a banner and run in the pasture as if Johanna were astride.

Stephanie and her two brothers moved into their grandmother Mimi's house at the foot of the road. We made daily pilgrimages past the charred house to feed the horses. Scoured, blackened wood glistening in the rain-heavy grass mesmerized us with its jewel-like splendor.

Perhaps it was because we were both raised by grandmothers, my mother was alive but not present, or because we born a year and two days apart, we were psychic twins.

I remember Johanna so clearly. In spring, she drove us the long way to the store. Sometimes we took the low road to Forest Knolls or the back road around Mt. Barnabe to Olema. As she pointed to Bolinas Ridge, the dark green oldsmobile gently nosed into the stonecrop-covered cliff for a closer look.

Next spring, I took Johanna's name for my conformation name. When it was my turn to approach the Bishop, I solemnly marched up to the altar and kissed his alexandrite ring, but he stopped and said it wasn't a Christian saint's name. He said he couldn't confirm me. The music stopped. Mortified, I replied I didn't care. She was someone I loved. My best friend's mother. She was with grace.

He asked, Would I take Jane? NO. I was so frightened I nearly peed myself but I didn't waver, though it meant excommunication. Eyes of the church upon me. The horrified nuns buzzed in each other's ears, they came up with a solution, and put Joanne, a diminutive Joan of Arc, on my certificate.

Stephanie's horse, Gay Girl, the thoroughbred, didn't get up one winter morning. Steph's brother placed the muzzle of the rifle very carefully over her small white star. A part of our childhood disappeared, locked into memory, as close as kin, as close as air.

A rusted snaffle bit hangs on a nail inside the barn where the swallows gather cobwebs ladened with powdered hay dung. I can't bear to look at the ridge without remembering the way Johanna admired the view of the purple fringed hills and dark shadowy forests on the north slopes. This place, a refuge.

Poor Johanna, living in the country, trapped by domestic life, a brilliant mind, branded by fire. I never knew her maiden name. That day when the house burned to the ground, Stephanie and I became blood sisters, we both had open wounds.

© Maureen Hurley. A shorter version of this was printed in Creative Discourse, Petaluma, CA 1988.

Other horse bits

Horse chestnuts

Sitting Deep

Helgar the Horrible

The Little Shits

There is so Much We Save from Childhood

AFTER THE SOLSTICE, MACHU PICCHU 

WILD HORSES IN THE RAIN 

LATE HOUSEWARMING POEM TO WM.T.WILEY 

HORSES RUNNING THROUGH THE STREETS OF ZENIA AT NIGHT

Red Heifer on Trenton Road, Ralf in the Swimming Pool, Best friends

THE OLD HEIFER

The elderly red heifer on Trenton Road in Forestville, lived in an upscale horse paddock; she was daily fed grain and good hay, windfall Gravensteins and an occasional carrot. Somebody’s pet, probably an abandoned 4H project, the child having long since left home.

The old couple faithfully feed their ward, sometimes grooming her red flanks, as she cuds the alfalfa. A Hereford heifer, never bred for milk, not for beef, she leads a solitary existence, the people who feed her have become her herd. She bats long white eyelashes, rolls her eyes nervously until the whites gleam like marbled fat.

Her coarse tongue flicks rhythmically from nostril to nostril in nervous anticipation. That sandpaper rasping noise of her tongue, threads of saliva spool and stretch in the wind like spider webs. If you come too close, she’ll back off—blowing, but soon curiosity will get the best of her.

But today, the fat, barren lady is gone from her whitewashed paddock and I fear the worst. Did they finally give her to a rancher where she’ll have to learn the ways of being a cow? Did she die old and in the mud of the back pasture or was she slaughtered for beef?

How I miss her corpulent exactness, somebody’s pet. Or am I homesick for another life? Did they buy her as a token pet to keep them in touch with themselves? The past she kept alive in me?

*        *        *

RALF IN THE SWIMMING POOL

We called her Ralf because we liked the rough transition from the tongue into the air—like the feel of her tongue on our bare skin as she bathed us so tenderly, we were her changelings. No amount of parental explaining would convince us to change her name into something more suitable for a Jersey lady cow with the hugest eyes you ever saw.

When my best friend Steph’s dad dug the hole for the swimming pool, it filled with rain water and Ralf went in to quench her thirst but couldn’t get out. It took several men to rescue her from the shallow end.

Ralf was a consummate escape artist. She also get stuck climbing over the electric fences—she’d always forget that her udder hung well below her hocks, and she’d mournfully low for help until someone came along to rescue her from the electric fence. Zap. Zap. Zap.

Ralf was a wayward cow, she'd disappear each winter to find a bull, then sneak off each spring to give birth to a fawnlike calf. We’d track her down following the calf’s mustard yellow milk spoor and marvel anew at the life quivering in its luminous blue eyes.

Ralf gave Stephanie's family many calves siblings: there was Thumbelina, Thelma (yeah, a bull calf), Mr. Schmitz, also a bull calf, who having been raised by ponies, thought he was one—forsaking the company of split-hooved ungulates for horses.

Mr. Schmitz was also confused about his sexual orientation. He’d mount the ponies and then with a look of utter despair he’d slide off them, and resume chewing his hay as if nothing had happened. In the company of ponies he remained a miniature Hereford bull that we’d sometimes ride, with our legs dangling to the ground. We used his horns as a steering wheel, but soon he got wise to us and would kneel down to dump us off. Or he’d ride the back end of the ponies, as we rode them—a strange piggyback beast. We were in constant danger of getting horned in the back.

Captain Beefhart, AKA Thelma, was Ralf’s first bull calf who grew into stupendous well-muscled Hereford proportions and eventually we ate him—a just revenge for the time he treed me up the telephone pole covered with poison oak. I didn’t know I could climb such a pole so fast. He turned mean when he bulked up.

Not like Ole Grandad, the Hereford bull up on Mount Barnabe, who was a bit long in tooth but was still able to put out, or should I say, get it up, so Ralf  managed to pull off a yearly tryst.

When the freezer filled with white wrapped parcels we didn’t think too much about where they all came from, until the house filled with a strange dark aroma of beef heart for dinner, more powerful than new blood. It was the odor of the soul, of life itself, dressed in laurel leaves and thyme. It escaped from this world and the small lessons of death filled our stomachs that night.

Death in the barnyard was not something new to us. We’d seen the chicks, kittens and puppies that didn’t make it. At the time we had no name for it, but the idea of soul was something new.

*        *        *

Ralf’s idea of being milked was to stand in the milk bucket or to kick the pail across the goatshed but Steph's mom, Johanna must have managed it somehow because I remember how sore my arms were from churning the butter lifting and plunging as we took turns while watched TV: Rin Tin Tin, or Sky King. We also learned that butter won’t churn during a thunderstorm.

I spent most of my waking hours with Steph. We were blood sisters. Kinship—these stories are not about my family they’re of kinship, of bonding. Like a stray cat, I adopted, and was adopted by people. Maybe I was following the traditional kinship patterns of Irish foster parenting: maybe it's because of my own divorced parents who left me with my grandmother, so I gravitated toward that strange unit, the nuclear family. From each family, I learned a little of how to survive. The same is true of recent friends and lovers—they are my teachers. I only hope I gave them something in return for all the meals I ate as they gave me much more than food.

*        *        *

How much to trust memory with adult concepts of childhood feelings? Memory is faulty, a kind of fiction, what we remember and want to believe in, searching for patterns in this chaos we’re born into.

School in a random universe would have no logic; it is like memory—or false cognates in a foreign language— meanings suggested because our experiences with our natal language but the word means something entirely different—like exito in Spanish does not mean exit. When I was young, I remember saying to myself: Remember your childhood, remember your dreams, remember, remember everything because you will write about this one day when you are seeking something that was lost. And so my apprenticeship began.

7/1/ 1987

Slightly revised 2/26/2014

San Francisco to the Bahamas at 27,000 feet

April 26, 1985

Below me is an unnamed lake in a bowl tinged with green mountains on the west. One  side of the range is green, the other is brown, in a rain shadow.

The Central Valley and the edge of the Mohave Desert, a dividing line of plenty rain and no rain. Soft undulations of land and hills give way to pinnacles and mesas, fantastic forms, and the patchwork of crops along the I-5 highway.

Trees cluster on the north sides of slopes, etched on the steep mountainsides, are giant stairstep terraces, from the departure of the great inland seas and lakes. 

Waves of topsoil flow from one field to the next. Commuting in the wind. Playing out the dustbowl. Again. You can literally see the wind patterns in this great inverted bowl. The Imperial Valley is moving itself southward towards even less fertile ground.

It's agribusiness as usual, enormous grades and scars from where small farms once stood, now turned to alkali flats. Toxic nitrogen poisoning in the soil. We passed an enormous cloud of dust that hangs over the middle of the valley like a brown fog bank, but it's too early for the photosynthesis of smog at 8 AM.

Miami is almost 3000 miles away. For every thousand miles, the clock goes forward an hour. It takes the sun three hours to travel across the state, not distance as the crow flies, but distance as the sun shines, or as the Earth turns. 

We travel down the West Coast, the plane buckles in the wind. Air is something you can't see or touch. But if you take one quart of air and compress it into a pint, you have a working knowledge of E = MC2. It's all relative. 

How do I tell the kids what Einstein is remembered for: the bomb, and he is responsible for Reagan being in office? Write him a cowboy poem about how life used to be. Write him a postcard of what you will miss. That redwood tree. Because I haven't yet seen them all.

Brown brown brown San Fernando Valley. Alkali peeling off like skin from the sunburnt earth. Runoff hurries down to the sinkholes before the sun plays havoc with it. Small truck farms fringing the edge of existence.

Below me, is the trajectory and support system of the space shuttle. Call it Edwards AFB. Call it China Basin. Mothballed planes. And Jim just cinched up his car, belly kicked it, and drove south across the Mojave, just like that—so desolate, hills freckled with creosote and mesquite.

Dry riverbed – the Colorado? Funny circular irrigation: Israeli style farming kibbutzim? Kidney-shaped farms. Renal failure? A vast circular disc glints: maybe it's a colander in the desert. Panamint Mountains emerge from under a low tide of drifting sandstorms, that obliterate the view of the Sierras.

Reservoirs and dams abound, like small jewels in a land so arid, even the river can't coax the green out of its banks. Borax mines further south, drain the sky of color. White noise of the desert, extinct species, and dry riverbeds meander through the silent desert.

Now you can see the oases: 29 Palms. I wanna know who counted them all, and if they got it exactly right. Will they have to change the name of the town if another palm tree grows, or dies?

You can't have an oasis without a drought. So many beginnings and endings of dreams in this agricultural desert, this cultural desert, this emotional, just desserts? People come, and go, but the desert remains, obdurate as an enigma, this is the truest face of the desert.

The last plane I rode in, you couldn't see out the windows because the sharp ash of Mount Saint Helens had ground the surface into frost. Helens—why is she plural? Is she more than one duality? Sovereign mount?

We fly back out to the coast. The fringe of habitable land. Living on the western edge of this continent becomes a real phrase. Owning language, reclaiming it, mean what you say. Say that again until it becomes you, and you become it. 

Like geography, I remember making that topo map of California out of dough and salt on the rusted stove. Grease catcher tray, little top knob at the Mexican border. My mother's blue oil paints became the inland sea. I painted. I remember feeling ashamed because my map looked so different from the other kids' maps, but I used what tools I had.

Magnificent cloud formations across tumulous clouds, or is it cumulous tombstones? Rain and a dusting of fresh snow on the peaks. A desert plateau with precipitation, is a gentler desert.

The buttes jigsaw together, I marvel at how the land fits sublimely together. On the banks of this conundrum, houses and greenery. Clouds change they become cirrus, they become fog, as we enter into the heart and the soul of clouds patterns, changing slowly with the shape of the land.

I never seem to tire of looking at the land from above, it's pure magic. We fly sandwiched in a free zone between two cloud formations. Quite bold, white below. Flying over Arizona. 

Poor dear Stephanie. I am not response from my pain. Did she object to the line where I wrote how the Arizona sun is soaking her dry? We were best friends once. But years go by without a letter, without a call. So much flatland out there. Arizona? Texas? How did she suffer in her silence? I grieve for her. My best friend.

And Jim, I forgot his address, he's down there in the suburbs—somewhere in Houston. After all this time, I'm surprised by how much I miss him, and I don't know what to make of his wife Rochelle calling me up on their 18th anniversary just to have somebody to talk to. Didn't think I would miss the friendship. 

Carolyn says you feel all this because at one time you really loved him. It was over at least a year ago, it was really over. I guess the body never forgets. We made love before he left. It was dry like the back of the throat after a bad dream, and a thirst that leaves you wanting.ut not for more.

And now Geoff. God, I sure know how to pick them. One minute wanting to live with him, be with him, have babies. Then he goes away to Fiji for three months. And I go through it all. Again. The doubts the fears, should I, or shouldn't I, and the decision is out of my hands once again. In balance. What do I do this time? Stick around? Like I did with Lee? Become a masochist? 

Last vacation, it was Jim I was pining for, this time, it's Geoff. Will I spend all my vacations mooning over one man or another? With Geoff, it forced me to consider what I wanted out of life, besides make babies, that is. Something I do have to come to terms with, and soon. 

I am ambitious. I want recognition. I am getting it slowly, slowly. I have a fear sometimes, but my writing isn't good enough, so I do a little bit of everything to make up for it. Journalism, photography, anything to get my name, my persona out there—and it does. But what are my goals? How do I envision survival one, two or five years from now? 

Part of me wants the whole ball of wax, the kids, the home, the dream. But it's not real, though billions of people go through the motions. Desperate, like the cat wanting in, only to want out again. It becomes a dream of nirvana. Or rather, the Maya veil. 

I can also picture the other side too. I know how awful it can be to be tied down with responsibilities that I couldn't get out of. I thought of Geoff. Would I be the type of woman to abandon her children for a career if it came to that? Assuming it didn't work out but that's just how love is. Be with a man of few years, have kids, and then what? 

A fragile thing, love, but maybe that ball of wax is the placebo. I think I won't have to worry about supporting myself if I have a relationship with kids. I won't have to worry about the future because I will no longer be in control. Then there's no fear of failure but it's a case of real bad yeah-buts. Is important to keep a clear perspective and not be flooded with emotions and fantasies of a life not lived.

Not having children, is that something I can live with that without? Sure, if I wanted to. I could find an anonymous father, or a turkey baster, but that's not what I want. I want love too. 

This is a very occasional diary journal. I write this stuff when I travel because this is the only time when I'm free. Free of the confines of home and the narrow paths. Last year, I made a vow to travel two times a year. So I could free myself. Perspectives are so different. 

Geoff took off for three months of travel, already his perspectives have changed, and what he writes of now, is not having to own the other person's life. Fear of what? Jealousy? Need, let it go? To hold your need in your hands, there's the question.

There is a strange shimmering blue light below the clouds, or should I say, between the clouds and the land. It looks like water. Must have something to do with atmospheric conversion, illusion more got a Fata Morgana. A mirage. All that flat land, the wonder of it all with no boundaries.

Below me is a dam, and another reservoir, the land is so flat that the waterways training into the lakes are backed up for miles, and there are many lakes. Two huge links. We must be flying over Texas right now. Three and four huge reservoirs. Maybe it's Phoenix, Lake Havasu or Lake Powell? The waterways go on for miles and miles and the distance never comes closer, not matter how far you travel.

April 26, 1985

slightly revised 11/8/2015.