After searching for work unsuccessfully for several months in the Redding area, Richard and I began casting a wider net. Richard had occasionally worked as a production assistant for a documentary film company that some friends of ours owned in NYC, and our friend Candia, who was living in Manhattan with her husband Lawrence (the brother of the one of the filmmakers, NYC natives) called and told us that there was a six-week film shoot coming up that Richard and I both might be able to work on. If it came through, this would be good money; so we spent a chunk of our remaining cash from Richard’s salmon fishing on plane tickets to New York.

 

When we arrived, Candia and Lawrence (who some of you might remember spent six weeks with us in Costa Rica), generously offered to let us stay in their newly acquired railroad flat in the Upper Upper East Side, on the southern edge of Spanish Harlem. Lawrence’s parents lived only a few blocks away near Central Park, in a tony part of the city, but this area was a tad dicey. On our way to visit his parents, we took a very particular, zig-zagging route under Lawrence’s guidance. “How come you never go down this block?” I asked him one time. “No point it getting caught in stray gunfire,” was the answer.

 

Noted!

 

He added that the street possessed far too many alcoves, stairways to subterranean flats, and recessed doorways—in other words, too many places for muggers to lie in wait. By taking a route just two blocks to the north, we could walk along the front of some seamless, blank-faced brick dorms that served a nearby medical school, which, Lawrence said, had security guards on duty 24 hours a day.

 

We had a ton of friends living in New York, so we had a blast visiting everyone. There was only one problem. The job kept getting postponed. And everything was more expensive in Manhattan, so the amount of money we had left over from our plane tickets dwindled fast. At one point, we ended up needing to borrow some money just to get by, which was definitely a low point as far as I was concerned. Finally, we decided that we should leave in order to conserve the money we had borrowed as much as we could, since after six weeks, there was still no firm date for the start of the film job.

 

Back in Redding, just when we were getting desperate, when even odd jobs were getting scarce, an offer came through for Richard. Our brother-in-law Ted was going to be managing the restaurant at his family’s lodge in Grand Lake, Colorado. He needed someone to help him and the accounting classes that Richard had taken at Chico State were exactly the kind of skills Ted required. So we packed up the hatchback of our Honda Civic and headed to Grand Lake for five months, the time during which the lodge would be open for summer guests plus an extra month in May to get the lodge ready and the staff trained. We also took Jessie, as she was part Husky, and the Redding summers could be hard on her. In Colorado, we were going to be living at a cool 9000 ft, in the woods. We were excited to have her with us; she was a smart, funny, delightful dog—great company—and I was going to be on my own a lot over the summer. Richard’s job was going to be demanding, with long hours and few days off, and most of the other employees were college students. I surmised they would have a social scene that wouldn’t necessarily include an old lady of thirty-three.

 

The lodge where we worked and lived that summer, The Grand Lake Lodge, had been built in 1920. Interestingly enough, my grandmother used to travel from Kansas City to come stay at this lodge, in the 1930s, to escape the murderous ragweed season. My mother loved to tell the story of the family traveling along the narrow, winding roads with precipitous drops through the mountains, my uncle Emmett driving, my grandmother in the front passenger’s seat, while Grandfather (whom I never met, as he died in the 1930s) and any other members of the family sat in back. Whenever Uncle Emmett began driving the Model T faster than my grandfather thought was safe, he would smack my uncle on the side of the head with a rolled-up newspaper. Pretty soon, Emmett was keeping a sharp eye on the back seat of the car in the side-view mirror, and when he saw the newspaper coming, he would step out onto the running board while continuing to hold onto the steering wheel. This put an end to the newspaper whacking, according to my mother.

 

 

 

On the other hand, I would be able to write most mornings, except when I was doing some carpentry work and painting around the lodge. And most afternoons, I could escape into the high country. Richard and I had brought our mountain bikes with us, and I was in good biking shape, so, once I acclimated to the altitude, the high country was easily accessible to me, either on foot or on my bike. I couldn’t ride in the park, but national forest was everywhere, and also within reach from our cabin.

 

Richard worked sixteen-hour days, up before I was and often not coming back to the cabin until I’d already gone to bed. So I focused on enjoying the freedom I had to write, and in getting to know the spectacular wilderness that was at hand, with Jessie in the national forest, without her in the park (but employees often “borrowed” to go on hikes with them in the national forest, she proved so popular). It was interesting, the more time I spent in the Colorado Rockies, the more its grandeur etched itself into my bones. I spent hour and hours surrounded by massive mountains, gigantic stretches of tundra and granite, herds of elk, bighorn sheep, marmots, and pikas, and insane, dramatic weather. Spending a lot of this time by myself somehow made it all the more enchanting and mesmerizing.

 

I suppose that maybe it wasn’t smart to burrow so deeply into such an austere environment all alone, but I never really met up with any mishaps. Occasionally, I would feel the hair rise up on the back of my neck and I would wonder if some predator—animal or human—was checking me out. At the time, cougars were not thought to be in this part of the Rockies, but the next summer, when Richard and I were in the heart of the park, we heard a cougar scream. No one believed us at the time, but sadly, a few years later, a four-year-old boy was killed by a mountain lion when his family was hiking one of the trails. So I’m pretty sure there were cougars around. But the worst thing that ever happened while I was on my own was encountering a weird guy in the middle of the Never Summers. His Samoyed charged me and grabbed my sock in his teeth while the guy stood there and laughed about how his dog just had a thing for bicyclists. Even after I dismounted the dog kept after me. Creepy. But fortunately, the dog never broke skin and I eventually got away.