Before long, it became evident that we couldn’t stay in Dallas. The human psyche and the ego embedded within it are curious and malleable entities. You can’t surround yourself with what my investment planner cousin calls “TMM” (too much money) and a preoccupation with status, privilege, appearance, designer labels, and the very latest trends without falling under their spell. After a while, the pore size of my nose was only one of my concerns. I was feeling underdressed, for example, because I could only afford $300 dresses instead of ones that cost $1500 (in 1980s’ dollars, mind) to attend the parties that we were kindly invited to in the Keltons’ circles. I would hear someone laughing about a person who was wearing “last year’s colors!” and feel dowdy. My teeth weren’t white enough, either. Apparently.

 

Not only that, our time in far northern California and the wilder parts of Costa Rica had kindled a deep love for wilderness. There was none to be found within miles and miles and miles of Dallas—just like my home town Kansas City, where I would often take refuge in two square feet of unlandscaped foliage in my backyard as a child in a desperate attempt to feel close to nature. In Costa Rica, we had been able to body surf for hours along unspoiled beaches and hike for miles in the midst of wondrous, wild, natural beauty. In northern California, I had been able to ride my mountain bike for miles and miles in vast, rugged mountain ranges, and swim in one of the clearest, cleanest lakes in North America, where bald eagles, ospreys, herons, and otters lived and fished.

 

So we started saving all the money that I made from shopping so that we could move back to northern California. We hoped that the economy might have improved enough for us to find work there now, but we worked to save enough that we could live on for several months just in case it proved to be a challenge. We were sorry to leave the Keltons, Dotti, Fred and Toni, and Rod and Toki, and when Richard approached Jane about buying the Honda we’d inherited from her son and daughter-in-law, her typically generous response was, “Aw, it’s used—just take it, honey.” There were definitely people and places we were going to miss, but we felt excited about returning to what we thought of as home.

 

When we finally moved back to Redding after seven months in Dallas and a year-and-a-half in Costa Rica, however, the job market had not improved much. The best part was the time we spent with Kathleen, Joe, Patrick (now an energetic, hilarious, and rambunctious toddler), and Jessie, the extended family dog (also energetic and hilarious). And I had a chance to completely finish the hexagon, although I almost gave myself heat stroke while laying a hardwood floor on a day that the temperatures got up to 110 degrees. While looking for work, Richard took a semester’s worth of accounting classes at Chico State to improve his chances. I did some carpentry jobs for money and worked on a novel. But no real work was forthcoming until a skipper that Richard had met in language school in Costa Rica offered Richard a job on his salmon fishing boat that would be fishing off the shores of Alaska.

 

As it happens, salmon fishing off the coast of Alaska was a dream that Richard had nurtured for years. I was offered a job as the cook on the boat, but this was not, actually, a dream that I had nurtured—ever—and the last time I had been on a boat on the ocean, I had become horribly seasick. Still, I went to Seattle to check out the situation with Richard, but the minute we stepped on the boat for a tour, I knew there was no way I could do that job. Just the smell of diesel fumes alone would make me sick, not to mention the claustrophobia that living on a trawler would induce. I hated the thought of spending two or three months away from Richard, but at the same time, I figured our relationship would fare better if I didn’t join him. There was never any question about his not taking the job. I wanted him to be able to fulfill this dream, and if it was a good season, he could make enough money for us to live on for an entire year.

 

So I left Richard in Seattle and returned to Redding while I made plans for my summer. I decided to spend some time in Manhattan and Boston with friends, and then head over to England to spend a few weeks with my sister Cathy who was living outside of London with her husband. My brother Hal was going to be in Paris for the summer on a research fellowship, so I made arrangements to visit him there as well.

 

I had fun, but not as much fun as I would have if Richard had been with me. I bought a BritRail pass and did some cruising around England and Wales, but I did it alone since Cathy and Rob both had to work and didn’t have the time to go with me. I know that some people enjoy traveling on their own, but I’m not really one of those, unless I’m hiking or biking in the wilderness. But on one trip, I was sitting by myself on the train and the conductor, an older gentleman, saw me traveling alone and shared his lunch with me, a ham-and-butter sandwich and a thermos of tea. His kindness made that trip stand out in my mind more than any of the artistic or architectural marvels I took in at my destinations.

 

And of course, it was wonderful to have the time with Cathy and Rob, who included me in everything they could, such as an outing to a county fair where Cathy was playing her harp, and planned special excursions whenever they could, such as a trip Cathy and I took to Kenilworth, a romantic-looking ruin of a castle from medieval times. There we had an amusing interchange with a lovely woman who ran a little tea shop near the castle, of the “two nations separated by a common language” variety.

 

We sat down in the cozy room, the small tables covered with cheerful English floral prints, small bouquets of fresh flowers in glass vases dotting the centers. The proprietor came out, wiping her hands on her apron, and inquired if we would like morning coffee.

 

Neither Cathy nor I drank coffee; we wanted tea and a scone, so we said no, we were here for breakfast.

 

“Oh,” said the woman, wrinkling her brow and twisting her apron. “Well, I suppose I could cook you up some eggs and I think I’ve got some bacon …” So British! This, we inferred, wasn’t on the menu, but she was perfectly willing to go into her home, which was attached to her business, and rummage around in her own fridge to accommodate us.

 

“Oh—no,” Cathy replied. “We’d just like some tea and a scone, perhaps, or a tea cake?”

 

The woman looked relieved and said, “Of course!” and vanished to start preparing what we now gathered was our “morning coffee,” just without the coffee.

 

I spent a week with Hal in Paris, which ended up being rather droll for a funny reason: I had studied French in high school and my first year of college (where prep-school educated girls and mean-as-a-snake professors made the subject a misery for me), so I had enough familiarity with French that I could understand it when spoken to me. More or less. More than Hal could, since he studied Latin in high school and German in college.

 

I’ll take a short diversion here to tell one of my family’s favorite stories. My parents generously took the family on one of those “If This Is Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium” style tours of Europe when I was 17 and just graduated from high school. Cathy was 15 and Hal was 19, having completed his second year of college. We spent three days in Paris and stayed in an elegant hotel in the city center. The family wanted to attend the opera while we were there, so I was assigned the task of procuring tickets from the concierge, since I had just won the French Award at my high school and I had studied the language for five years. In my experience, it’s really only the very occasional Parisian who is snotty and disagreeable, but the concierge turned out to be one (was perhaps related to one of my college profs!). I had heard her speaking English to the couple in line before us, and thinking that her English was probably better than my French—not to mention that I was painfully shy, even though I had created a persona to belie this trait—when our turn came, I asked her my question in English. Probably thinking I didn’t speak French, she answered me in French. When I then replied in French, she responded in English, presumably to insult my French.

 

 

“But you speak French!” he exclaimed, reasonably enough.

 

 

“I don’t know,” he said.

 

“Please?” I begged, clasping my hands in front of me, melting his sweet, big brother’s heart.

 

 

The man looked as if someone had just jabbed him with a cow prod. He bolted up straight in his chair, his eyes wide, his eyebrows raised. I, meanwhile, had turned my back and clamped my hand over my mouth to keep from bursting out laughing. But as Hal continued to stand there in all innocence, giving the guy a friendly smile, I think the man decided that Hal was simply an idiot who didn’t know what he was saying and he gave him the tickets.

 

Once we got far enough away from the ticket booth, I dissolved into uncontrollable giggles.

 

“What?” Hal demanded.

 

“You just called that guy a mutton mouth!” I gasped. “You said, ‘Two tickets, mutton mouth!’”

 

“Oh, ha ha,” he said. “Just wait until we get to Germany! I’m going to order you some elephant toe jam!”

 

 

There were times that summer—say, when I was riding the train in England or the bus in New York—when all of a sudden I would become seized with a suffocating feeling of horror and dread, certain that Richard’s life was in danger. These were the days before cell phones (it was now 1985), so there was no way for me to contact him. I had to hope that he would call me and catch me at one of the places where I was staying. He wouldn’t tell me about his close shaves while we were separated, but when we finally got back together, he confided in me that there were times when a storm whipped up out of nowhere and threatened to sink their boat. There were times when giant waves almost capsized them. There were times that the crew had somehow gotten turned around and were misreading the radar and they barely missed running aground.

 

And then there was the fishing itself. When the nets were full, Richard would stand in the hole while hundreds of pounds of fish would come pouring down all around him. Sometimes they had inadvertently scooped up a shark, which was thrashing around and biting everything it could sink its teeth into. You had to be careful not to lose your fingers in the winch. And when they were fishing, they had to take the opportunity to fish as long as they were allowed, which meant that everyone on the boat was up for twenty-four straight hours or longer, sleep-deprived, exhausted, and clumsy. He told me about the time that a nearby boat accidentally got a whale caught in their net, which almost pulled them under. Only by frantically cutting away their net could they manage to save the boat and themselves.  

 

It’s impossible to know whether or not my premonitions matched up with the times that he was in danger, and the fact is, he was probably in dicey situations a lot of the time. But he also told me about the magical experiences of having whales breaching right next to the boat, of a pod of orcas or dolphins surfing along their bow, or the phosphorescent plankton that would luminesce in the dark ocean in the dead of night. He told me about motoring past islands where no humans lived, but scores of bald eagles soared. He had the time of his life, and he also worked harder than he had ever worked—harder, even, than when he was training race horses before we met.

 

 

Unfortunately, we had to burn all of his clothes, which smelled like a revolting combination of salmon guts and diesel fuel. I washed them three times in hot water and the smell never went away.

 

Also unfortunately, the season had not been a good one. Richard earned about a third of what he had hoped. So we had only a few months’ worth of income and we were going to need to figure out a new gig. The employment situation in Redding wasn’t promising. So we started looking around to see what we could find.

 

At first, the prospects were grim … .