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[Flysheet]
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SANCTUARY
Rebecca Myers
Manuscript submitted to the Faculty of Goucher College in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction
2017
Manuscript Faculty
Philip Gerard
______________________________
Madeleine Blais
_______________________________
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Copyright by
Rebecca Myers
2017
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For Jennifer and Adam and my family
and all souls who
seek sanctuary
Remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you.
— Rumi
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
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Prologue – Leaving Eden, August 1982
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Chapter I – The Beaver Lady, February 1973
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Chapter II – Adirondack Arrival
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Chapter III – Not in Kansas Anymore
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Chapter IV – The Awakening
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Chapter V – Spring Attraction
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Chapter VI – The Nature Center, May 1973
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Chapter VII – Wild Orphans, 1973–1976
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Chapter VIII – Shady and Shasta, 1973–1975
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Chapter IX – My Daughter Athena, 1975
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Chapter X – Music in the Mountains, 1974–1976
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Chapter XI – Partnership and Boundaries
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Chapter XII – Sweet Promise of Spring
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Chapter XIII – Independence, 1976–1977
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Chapter XIV – Motherhood, 1977–1981
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Chapter XV – Two Goodbyes, 1982
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Epilogue – 2017
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Appendix, Photos and Illustrations
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This manuscript has been six years in the making. For years I had told stories, then started
writing them as personal essays in Emory University’s Creative Nonfiction Writing
certificate program. Suzanne Van Atten was my first writing teacher. When she critiqued
one of my stories and declared to the class, “This should be a book,” I was shocked, thrilled,
and scared. Up to then, I had only told the stories I loved to tell. To flesh out an entire book,
I would have to go deeper to the shadow side. Did I have the courage? I was fortunate to
have a writing family who attended Van Atten’s invitation-only master classes for four
years and helped me workshop through the beauty and the tough stuff: Beverly Armento,
Allison Auerbach, Louis Cahill, Tiffany Courtney, and Pamela Wright. I’m ever grateful
to you.
In 2015, I attended the Pittsburgh Creative Nonfiction Writing Conference and took a
master class with Leslie Rubinkowski, the director of the Goucher College Creative
Nonfiction Writing MFA program. Over lunch I overheard her talking about the program
with an alum, a current student, and a person newly registered. It was if a portal had opened.
I leaned in and asked her, “Is it too late to join the program?” She hesitated, then said,
“Get online and read what is required, and if you can send it to me by Friday [5 days away],
we will consider it.” I got all the materials in by Thursday, and she kindly called me on
Sunday to give me the happy news. I started the program within just a few months.
The Creative Nonfiction Writing MFA program was just what I needed to transform my
essays into a book and to plunge even deeper into difficult territory. The mentorship of four
outstanding writers and teachers took my writing to a higher level as I weaved in and
braided storylines: Diana Hume George, Suzannah Lessard, Philip Gerard, and Madeleine
Blais. Each of you gave me both tough love and confidence in my writing and this
manuscript. You celebrated with me as I experimented, made breakthroughs, and delivered
on your suggestions and beyond. You remain in my heart. In my teaching writing, I hope I
can give to other writers the care and precision you imparted to me.
The MFA program provided another community of excellent writers as we strove to
complete our manuscripts. During residency, we took joy in the student readings, and in
workshops, we supported and respected each other’s work. I am grateful to this lifetime
camaraderie of writers. One student most especially became my writing buddy, Juanita
Ramsey-Jevne. Her keen insights and wisdom are reflected in these pages as she pulled
scenes and ideas from me how to make the story richer. May we appear on the same book
tours and media interviews!
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PROLOGUE
August 1982
I snap three-year-old Adam into his car seat next to his five-year-old sister,
Jennifer, her calico cat mewing in the carrier at her feet. Their blankets provide comfort
and their favorite stuffed animals are piled around them. The trunk is full of my few
belongings, their toys, clothes, and the photo albums that capture their young lives where
we lived and worked on a wildlife sanctuary in the Adirondacks of upstate New York.
I shut the door on our life here. Their father, withdrawn and sad, stoops to kiss
them good-bye. He clears his throat, but his words “I love you” and “Enjoy Grandma and
Grandpa,” croak with emotion. He waves until he gets smaller and smaller in my
rearview mirror and I can no longer see him. The pine trees block my view and their
branches droop as if they are sad to see us leave.
Jennifer knows we are going to live with my parents in New Jersey, but Adam
hasn’t quite grasped this, and full of joy, he asks every few miles in his high, chirpy voice
if we’re there yet. Jennie reads him some stories, and they share Cheerios. Together we
look for cows (Adam’s favorite), horses, and trucks. We sing the “Wheels on the Bus”
and the “Itsy-Bitsy Spider.” With Jennie’s help, we look at billboard signs and call out, “I
spy A” for Adam, the only letter he recognizes. At some point they drift off to sleep.
During the three-hour drive, I dredge each emotion—love, grief, anger, and
fear—about my ten-year marriage. As the memories surface, I rub them like colored
stones worn over time, feeling their weight and texture. The golden joy of giving
programs at the nature center and guiding nature trail hikes. The green beauty and peace
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of the Sanctuary. The purple shame of my welts and bruises. The red anger of my
husband’s volatile behavior and refusal to stop or get help. And the blue fear that if I
stayed, my daughter would someday expect abuse from her husband, and my son would
someday mimic his father’s behavior to his wife.
The idyllic vision I once had of living on the wildlife sanctuary can no longer
survive. Living there with my husband provided no protection for me. But abandoning it
is much harder than leaving my husband, at least the sad and frightening part of him that
chose not to control his anger.
As the miles go by, the Sanctuary lingers in my mind. The verdant velvet moss
carpeting the forest, the shy white violets peeping out of heart-shaped leaves, the shafts of
light filtering through the trees like rays of hope, the flute-like voice of the wood-thrush
calling me to take joy, the deer tracks looking like broken hearts.
We are driving into a new, uncertain world. A noisy, suburban world full of noise,
shopping malls, and traffic. A world without winter silence and solitude, sprouting green
ferns and peeping frogs, and beaver ponds reflecting the dying maple and poplar leaves
shimmering in scarlet and gold.
My mother’s blue eyes shine with fierce relief when we arrive in northern New
Jersey. Her eyes say, “At last, you are safe.”
I hug my mother with gratitude for the chance to start over. But my body sags
with overwhelming questions my mind buries until I can sort them out. I’ve uprooted our
lives to find safety. Only later can I ponder, is sanctuary just about safety? What about a
feeling of peace, of being whole, a deep sense of connection? A communion with nature?
How can I ever be whole without the Sanctuary?
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I never forget my lost love. So many decades later, the Sanctuary remains inside
me as I write. I close my eyes and it is there. Sometimes I can smell the blooming lilacs,
the swaying pines, the damp, moss-covered earth. I hear the familiar hoots of the greathorned owl calling me to return. I sing back, “I never truly left.”
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CHAPTER I
THE BEAVER LADY
February 1973
Larry and I first glimpsed her house when we curved along her private driveway
and crossed the wooden bridge over Middle Sprite Creek. A picture of woodland charm,
the cottage was covered with cedar-shakes, and smoke swirled out the stone chimney. We
walked up the shoveled pathway to the side entrance, then kicked the snow off our boots
on the steps. Dorothy Richards flung open the door. Strands of silver-white hair escaped
from her bun. She pushed back her bangs and beamed a toothy smile. Despite her bent
stature of about five feet, she had a commanding presence. Her round, wrinkled face and
smile reminded me of the beaver she loved.
This elderly wildlife conservationist was the legendary empress of Beaversprite,
the hundreds of acres she named after her favorite animal and nearby creek. She had
donated Beaversprite to the Florence Jones Reineman Wildlife Sanctuary, which
combined, now spread more than 1,300 acres located north of the Mohawk River Valley
in upstate New York near the southern edge of the Adirondack State Park. In return, Mrs.
Richards would remain there for life, and beavers would be protected in perpetuity after
her death.
Arriving the day after our wedding in Kansas, Larry and I were here to live and
work on the other side of the Sanctuary to create a nature education center. As we entered
her small kitchen, a waft of musky odor nearly knocked us over. A narrow door next to
the kitchen had a jagged twelve-inch hole at the bottom corner that looked like it had
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been gnawed.
“Oh, that was Eager,” she laughed, noting our gaze. “I accidentally shut her in the
bathroom, and she was smart enough to chew her way out.”
As another example of intelligence, she told us how the beaver sometimes
followed her when she went to the bathroom and together they would do their business,
Eager leaving a puddle next to the toilet. She pointed to an old black-and-white photo
postcard on the kitchen wall with a beaver sitting in a chair at a linen-covered table while
dining on a plate of lettuce and sliced apples. A younger Mrs. Richards sat across from
her furry guest.
“Dining with me was all Eager’s idea,” she recalled. “She insisted on this nightly
routine and climbed up into the chair opposite me. Eager was so smart, she even dragged
in pillows and stacked them, so if she fell off—which she did once—she’d have a soft
landing. She lived with me for nearly twenty years before she died.”
We had expected a wildlife conservationist, but the chewed bathroom door,
postcard, and dining story threw us off. Larry and I raised our eyebrows at each other.
What were we getting into?
As Mrs. Richards led us into the living room, the wide cherry floorboards spread a
rich, rustic warmth. She stopped to throw feed out the front stoop for the birds and
raccoons, and they suddenly appeared as if in a Disney animation.
“They’re always waiting for me,” she said. “Now, it’s time for my beavers to pay
us a visit.”
Decades ago, the state had granted her a permit to keep captive beavers for
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educational purposes and to help repopulate the beaver in the area. Mrs. Richards
shuffled over to the opposite side of the living room to an addition walled with glass.
Peering through the glass, we saw a small concrete swimming pool, about the size of a
one-car garage, filled with water. Naked sticks without bark were piled in one corner.
This is where her pet beavers lived. She affectionately called it, “the Y” for the YMCA
swim club.
“Their teeth keep growing, so they have to constantly chew,” she explained.
“Poplar leaves and bark are their favorite food.” Jack, her hired hand, had just brought
fresh branches of poplar for them to eat and gnaw on and placed them at the edge of the
pool.
Mrs. Richards had kept many pet beavers over the four decades she lived in her
home. She once had as many as eleven. She released the kits back into the wild when
they turned two years old. She gave them names like Chunk and Hunk (the parents of
Eager), Bounce, Waddle, and Twigs. She had two when we arrived, but I don’t recall
their names. Mrs. Richards often boasted about the beavers’ reasoning abilities. She
routinely left a large bucket full of beaver-chewed sticks in the living room for them to
grab and take back to the Y while visitors were present.
“One day,” she said, “I forgot to fill the bucket by the fireplace, and a beaver
dragged a stick from the Y, and put it in the bucket. He paused and looked at me, and
then picked the stick up with his teeth and dragged it back to the lodge.... See how smart
they are?”
But they didn’t know how valuable some of her antique furniture was. A beaver
had gnawed the legs on her genuine Hitchcock chairs, dated late 1700s to mid-1800s.
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Larry, an avid antiquer, was aghast when he pointed it out to me.
“Alright now, time to come out,” she cooed and coaxed as she swung open the
Dutch door to the Y.
On cue, a large adult beaver waddled his sixty pounds into the room on his
webbed hind feet, his paddle tail painting watery designs on the floor. His wet fur
glistened and his large front teeth flashed orange. I hadn’t realized how big beavers were.
“Beavers are the largest rodent in North America and the engineers of the animal
kingdom,” Mrs. Richards said. She sat in her chair by the picture window, placed a
wooden foot stool in front of her, a worn blanket over her lap, and offered her pet
cornflakes from a wooden bowl, then sliced apples.
Through a picture window, the slanting afternoon light illuminated their daily
routine. One beaver climbed into her lap and dug into the corn flakes with black paws as
dexterous as hands—his fur dampened her lap blanket. A sweet, strange scene. A second
beaver pulled a small antique rug towards the open door of the Y. Larry quickly closed
the door, flashing me a smirk and rolling his eyes.
“Oh, she always tries to get away with that,” said Mrs. Richards, barely pausing,
as she told us how beavers build lodges to live in and dams along streams and rivers,
creating ponds that attract all kinds of wildlife. How their ponds add nutrients to the soil,
help the environment in times of drought, and prevent flooding. How they are the key to a
healthy habitat for all wildlife. How millions of beaver once inhabited North America,
but for two centuries they were trapped nearly to extinction for their fur.
We were relieved to hear some natural history and science about beavers. They
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certainly were nature’s engineers, and we longed to see them in their natural habitat. I
asked her about her first encounter with beavers in the wild.
By the 1930s, she said, only a few beaver were left in the Adirondacks and the
New York State Conservation Department scouted for suitable places to restock them.
They approached Mrs. Richards and her husband, who gave permission to release a
mated pair on their property.
“I didn’t give a second thought to the pair of beavers the New York Conservation
officers brought us,” she laughed and shook her head. The officers determined the Middle
Sprite Creek was too swift near her house, so they tramped up the muddy hill to the Little
Sprite where the creek was slower. They lugged the beavers in a burlap bag and released
them.
Five months later she remembered them and walked to the Little Sprite.
“I looked out over a miracle!” She paused with tears in her eyes.
“There before me was a pond, a lodge, and a dam. The whole area had changed.”
Her face softened.
I could well imagine how excited I would be at discovering this transformation.
“It’s horrible what trappers do to them, drowning or maiming them and breaking
up families. And beavers mate for life—better than most people I know,” she huffed.
I rubbed my gold wedding band, looking down at the embossed beaver. My art
professor crafted our gold wedding bands with bas-relief panels we designed with
animals, including a beaver and a Canada goose. Both animals mate for life and beavers
symbolized our new life at the wildlife sanctuary. A beveled square of translucent grass-
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green jade glowed in the center of my ring like a promise.
As the beavers ate their corn flakes, I loved seeing them up close but was taken
aback by the crazy mix of circus and science. The smell of the beaver musk, fermented
leaves, wood smoke, apples, and something else—perhaps urine—permeated her cottage.
I had definitely stepped over the threshold, not just into a marriage, but an Alice-inWonderland world.
Mrs. Richards pointed out the window to where she had spread corn on the front
stoop. Three or four raccoons were feasting on the bounty. “See how they love me,” she
said.
When she fed raccoons, she drew them away from their own territory. “Her
feeding the raccoons will spread disease,” Larry prophesied, which sadly became true. A
few years later, a diseased raccoon seeking food at her front door would die of mange
under her front step, spreading the disease to other foragers. This unnatural congregation
enabled the spread of disease when the raccoons carried the disease back to their own
territories.
This is just one reason why national parks forbid this practice. Signs are posted to
“Do not feed the wildlife.” But it’s so hard for most people to grasp that loving wildlife
means not feeding them.
I saw Mrs. Richards as a lonely eccentric who cherished these beaver pets as
friends and companions that linked her to wild beaver. As a biologist, Larry was
horrified. In his view, Mrs. Richards was not a scientist but a dangerous eccentric who
anthropomorphized animals out of their natural dignity. Having a house zoo, an indoor
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swimming pool for captive beavers, was surreal.
While we waited for our moving van to arrive from Kansas, we spent a four-day
honeymoon at Mrs. Richards’ house. We slept in a cramped bed in an open alcove under
the sloping roof just adjacent to her bedroom. During the day, Larry would escape
outdoors, helping Jack gather poplar for her beavers and getting a feel for the land, while
I remained inside with Mrs. Richards. Her cozy cottage, the frozen bend of the nearby
stream, the snowy embrace of evergreen and bare trees illustrated a northland fairy tale.
The scampering of raccoons and chipmunks at her front porch made me giggle. The
acrobatic antics of squirrels and flittering of blue jays, nuthatches, and chickadees at her
feeder filled me with joy. The dashing of deer through the woods thrilled me.
I peppered Mrs. Richards with questions about her life and how she had built her
part of the Sanctuary. She and her husband had once owned a stationery supply store in
Little Falls, a small town in the Mohawk Valley about ten miles away. She had purchased
the cottage as a summer home in the 1930s from money her mother left her, and then bit
by bit added hundreds of acres to their property surrounded with No Trespassing,
Hunting, and Trapping signs. Not a welcome sight to their rifle- and trap-toting
neighbors. And in their family and community, she said they had been criticized for
another reason. She and her husband had chosen not to have children, an unusual
intention for her generation.
Mrs. Richards was almost seventy-nine years old when we first met. She was born
on April 7, 1894, just two years after the Adirondack Park was established. Before they
settled in Little Falls, her husband had worked in forestry and traveled all over the State
Park. With six million acres of spruce and pine forests and clusters of maple and poplar
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trees, the Park is the largest protected area in mainland United States. According to the
Park agency, it is greater in size than the combined national parks of the Everglades,
Glacier, Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone. It’s a rugged and wild country, even if the
tallest mountains are only about 5,300 feet.
I asked her about the nearby community. Oppenheim, closest to the nature center,
had only a quick-stop grocery store with a single gas pump. Dolgeville, closest to her
house, was about three miles away, named in 1887 for Alfred Dolge, a pioneering
industrialist who built sawmills and wool felt-making and wooden sounding-board
factories for pianos. He established New York State’s first public kindergarten.
Dolgeville’s main street was lined with small storefronts all locked together near the East
Canada Creek, a tributary of the Mohawk River.
She shook her head at how neighbors dumped their cars or machinery like junk
weeds around their tired, run-down houses or trailers. The area was as economically
depressed as the Appalachian region in the South. Most people in the area either worked
for Rawlings Adirondack Bats producing major league baseball bats, or the Daniel Green
factory making expensive slippers the workers couldn’t afford.
Mrs. Richards had visitors almost every day. I watched a rerun of our first entrance:
the greeting, the exclamations at the chewed hole and the postcard on the wall. The
beavers waddling in and eating cornflakes from her lap, the spiel about beavers. Within a
few days, I could repeat it all.
She could be very charming to her visitors, but the moment they left, she made
rude, judgmental comments dripping with scorn, especially if they were city dwellers or
clumsy around her beaver. “Did you hear the stupid questions they asked?” “That fat man
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never took a walk in the woods.” “People are so dumb about wildlife.”
She seemed to like me those first few days, but I couldn’t quite trust her mercurial
displays of affection. Only to beavers did her emotional compass point true North.
When Larry walked in, bending his head at the front door, she soured, noting his
leather belt. She also took me to task for my embroidered Persian lamb coat, a gift from
my brother, who had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan.
“Wearing leather is wrong and causes animal suffering. I gave up wearing leather
and eating animals long ago,” she snapped. “You should, too.”
I would pack away my precious coat when I replaced it with another jacket, but
Larry would still wear his leather belt.
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CHAPTER II
ADIRONDACK ARRIVAL
On the other side of the Sanctuary from Mrs. Richards’ cottage, the Mayflower
moving van finally arrived from Kansas in the middle of a snow storm. The snow had
started as big, puffy flakes, making the pine forests look like a blurry wintry landscape in
an Impressionist painting. As the temperature dropped, the snow on the road hardened
into ice. The moving van made futile attempts to climb the hill. Spinning and sliding,
spinning and sliding. The wind-whipped powder stung our faces as we looked at our
predicament. We were so close, perhaps just a mile or so from our house, but going
nowhere.
We wondered aloud, “What would be big enough to pull the moving van home?
Who could help us?”
Just when our patience and hope were running out, a shadow emerged through the
snowfall. A bent, scruffy man scurried past us wearing a plaid wool hunting jacket and
cap, the only red in a white-and-gray world. Up close, I could see cigarette burns on his
jacket. His toothless smile clamped a long-ash cigarette. I couldn’t take my eyes off that
extended ash—it hung on even as he worked.
With a nod in greeting, he trudged past the moving van, lugging a thick steel
cable with bare hands that looked like cracked leather. He waved his truck to pass in front
of the van. His truck was loaded with huge logs as if he had cut down the pillars of the
sky. He hooked the van to his truck. The wiry logger waved some more and barked
orders to three burly men who had jumped out of the truck and towered over him.
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They grabbed chains and wrapped them on their tires to give more traction, then
jumped back into the cab of the truck and revved the engine. Larry and I climbed back
into the moving van. The chains bit into the ice, and the cable pulled tight. The logging
truck dragged the van up the hill like a toy.
As we churned up this lonely stretch of road, we passed a skewed, Pepto-Bismol
pink house on the left with snow-covered junked cars in their front yard. I wondered
about our neighbors. Would they be friend or foe? Lovers of nature or poachers? Would
we have anything in common? One of the main missions of the nature center was to
educate our neighbors. Farther up on the right, far off the road was another house. I can
almost remember the names of the handsome young couple who lived there. They had
emigrated from suburban Connecticut. We would become casual friends until we
suspected the man shot a doe yearling with a bow and arrow at close range. Up another
stretch on the left was a house trailer parked parallel to the road, our closest neighbor
where five children lived. We would grow fond of the Rasbachs, especially the three
oldest children, Kenny, Clarence, and Susie.
Traveling farther up the road, we began to see barbed-wire fences along the forest
with signs that read “Private Property–No Trespassers–No Hunting.” Surely we were
getting close.
Then a clearing appeared on the left, and we were home.
The house was small and simple, like a picture any child might draw. Covered in
gray asphalt shingles, it wasn’t the pretty log cabin I had envisioned, but I didn’t let
myself feel disappointed. Behind the house was a stone-walled meadow where cows once
grazed, but now only overgrown blackberry brambles made humps under the snow.
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Beyond the meadow, the old red pine forest with snowy epaulets saluted in perfect
formation. Behind the house and to the right stood an old dairy barn. After staying with
Mrs. Richards, I was relieved just to arrive, have a chance to set up my own household,
and get started living this new life as a young bride—only twenty-three years old. I was
certainly buoyed by the friendliness of the loggers.
Our rescuers—Poke Johnson and his sons Sonny, Kenny, and Eddie—insisted no
thanks were needed. Carved from generations of living in the mountains, they were
simply our neighbors giving us a hand. Sonny, the eldest, was a Vietnam War veteran
with a heavy round face and sandy hair under his wool stocking cap. Kenny had a ready
grin. Eddie was still in high school, his dark curls framing a sweet shyness.
“Ma and Elsie will drop by to see you when you’re settled,” Poke assured us.
“Come to the town meetin’ next week—a good place to meet yer neighbors.”
As small towns go, I could well imagine everyone already knew about us—the
new tall guy and his petite wife. I wanted to be a mouse in their pocket and hear how they
described our rescue. It would make a good story.
With ‘possum grins, pumping handshakes, and final waves, the Johnsons left us to
explore our new home while the driver unloaded our few pieces of furniture and scores
upon scores upon scores of boxes.
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CHAPTER III
NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE
In the southern Adirondacks, the foothills slope like the reclining body of a
woman with generous hips. What a contrast from home in the flat plains of Kansas.
Larry and I had spoken our wedding vows at the University of Kansas in the stone
chapel directly across from the Dyche Museum of Natural History, where we had met
and worked. Larry was a doctoral candidate in systematics and ecology studying bats. I
had a Bachelor of Science in Education and managed the museum’s fledgling educational
programs. He was one of several experts I hired to lead museum field trips for kids.
Unlike the geologist, entomologist, herpetologist, and ornithologist, Larry was a gifted
and well-rounded naturalist, not only as a biologist and mammologist, but as a lifelong
lover of nature—his sanctuary during a turbulent childhood.
Larry could name all the mammals, birds, snakes, and plants. He could drive the
old blue bus on field trips and even fix it when needed. How that impressed me, as did his
six-foot-four tan, muscular frame whenever he took a t-shirt off his long back and drove
the bus down hot, dusty roads. Chiseled cheekbones from a distant Choctaw heritage
distinguished his handsome features. Large blue eyes from his Nordic-English side
radiated intelligence with a shadow of sadness—the kind of countenance that reminded
me of Mathew Brady’s photographs of Abraham Lincoln.
After graduating high school, Larry had taken a job with a veterinarian, mostly
cleaning dog kennels. The veterinarian inspired him to rethink his life—he was too smart
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for this kind of work. Larry worked hard to get a college education, taking on odd jobs
like digging graves to help make ends meet. One day he lucked out when an older man
visiting the cemetery watched him sweat while working and asked him about his story,
his dreams. That person became his personal benefactor and paid his college tuition and
expenses for his masters and doctoral degrees.
“I’m an old man,” Larry complained to me during a break between instructing his
undergraduate class of biology students. He was twenty-eight years old at the time, nearly
six years my senior. Larry liked my heart-shaped smile, big blue eyes, slender figure, and
waist-long dark curly hair I strove to straighten or control. He towered over me and his
hands engulfed mine. We rarely danced, but when we did, my head rested against his
heart.
Larry was divorced, but unlike other boyfriends I’d dated, he wanted children. On
one field trip, he pointed to a blond, curly-headed boy and said, “I’d like one of these
someday.”
His declaration was one of those key moments that send you down another path,
like a road sign you swerve to follow. One day, our golden-curled Adam would fulfill
that wish.
In a house on the outskirts of town, Larry stayed rent-free in exchange for fixing
up the property of his ornithology professor. He got people to pitch in and work
whenever they visited. I helped him strip the 1951 flood-stained wallpaper and paint the
rooms. In my suite of rooms in an old Victorian house near the museum, he helped me
build an eight-foot cage. This cage would house an orphaned skunk I mothered for the
museum as a live exhibit—she was descented and no longer had her scent glands.
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After dinner, Larry held my hand as he walked with me to the museum up Mt.
Oread—the one hill on the plains where the university was built. I always had something
to finish, the planning of the museum open house or educational programs, and counting
inventory items or tallying sales in the museum gift shop that helped pay for the
programs.
Our romance grew around work.
His upcoming interview for a job managing a private Adirondack preserve
changed the pace of our developing relationship. The Sanctuary trustees in Philadelphia
wanted a married man for stability in this remote location, something I didn’t know at the
time. By then we had dated for only four months. Before Larry’s interview, we flew to
New Jersey so Larry could meet my parents for the first time. They drove him to his
interview with the trustees in Philadelphia. During the drive, I wondered what would
happen to our relationship if he was successful. We had never discussed it.
My parents and I waited at a nearby diner while he had his interview. When the
trustees offered Larry the job on the spot, we celebrated at the diner with my parents.
Larry turned to me and took my hand.
“Well, are you coming with me?” he asked.
“Are you asking me to marry you?” I blushed.
“Yes, I reckon.”
“Sure, I’ll come,” I said with no hesitation—all this in front of my parents.
That night, I asked my parents what they thought about my marrying Larry.
“If we liked him only half as much,” Mom said, “we would still say yes.”
19
Dad smiled and nodded. Larry’s deep knowledge of natural history amazed him,
and Larry’s stories about wildlife charmed him. Dad admired his skill as a hunter and
handyman—a kind of man’s man, who could make do and would take care of and protect
his daughter.
How could I not accept? The Adirondacks would be an exciting place to start our
new life together. What an extraordinary opportunity for us both—enough for Larry to
forsake completing his doctoral dissertation and for me to switch from developing
programs for the museum to programs for the nature center. Both sets of my grandparents
had happily worked side by side in wonderful partnerships—one on the farm, and the
other in a small town grocery store—and I envisioned us in that way. I had grown up
taking family camping trips in national parks throughout the United States, so I loved
nature, too. I could only see an idyllic, adventurous life, raising children surrounded by
the beauty of nature.
***
Accepting a marriage proposal to live on a wildlife sanctuary wasn’t so outlandish
considering that camping in the national parks was my family’s annual ritual every
August for a decade. My first trip explored Yosemite and the Sequoia National Parks in
1952 when I was three years old. I just have a patchwork memory of that first trip: strong
pine scent, pine needles caught in the cuffs of my red jeans lined with soft plaid flannel,
scaly bark, sticky pine resin, and a skyward view of the giant trees as I must have
20
sprawled on my back. The trees seemed to have faces. I felt they liked me, and I liked
them back. My parents told me they were very, very old. Even older than Grandpa Jones
and Great Grandfather Broughton. I could not know then how important the seeds my
parents were planting in me—this love and wonder of nature that would blossom on the
Sanctuary.
On these trips, wildlife was always close at hand, whether it was a bird, squirrel,
chipmunk, prairie dog, marmot, or deer.
When I was five years old, signs of Smokey the Bear were everywhere, and so
were black bears when we traveled to Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, the
world’s first national park in 1872 and the grandmother of America’s national parks. One
bear cub had trouble getting out of a metal trash can behind our log cabin. A Brownie
photo shows me with honey-blonde pony tails, looking at the cub with Dad squatting next
to me, holding me back. Going to the communal bathrooms was always a spooky
adventure with spiders. But one night my brother, then ten years old, led the three of us
kids with a flashlight to the bathrooms. They were well lit. I saw a black bear coming out
of the farthest stall. First I giggled, then gasped. I raced after seven-year-old Paula, who
was already dashing out of there. Danny froze holding the flashlight, but we grabbed his
hand and pulled him with us, back to the safety of the cabin.
On that same trip to Wyoming, we kids straddled the curves of a cliff while Dad
shot a photo at an artful angle from below us looking up at Devil’s Tower. Dad didn’t
realize it was better to keep the sun to our side than directly at us when taking a photo.
My forehead winkles and my eyes squint while I grin, so I look worried and happy at the
same time. Looking at the photo now, I laugh thinking how this countenance aptly
21
mirrors my personality that strives to be happy in the midst of uncertainty. This favorite
photo also reminds me the landscape was ever embedded with native lore and legends
that personified a place. Stories of how a giant grizzly bear clawed the sides of the
mountain to make the corduroy-ridged tower filled my dreams for years.
We watched as our father came alive on those trips. He didn’t talk much, but his
silence spoke as we followed his gaze towards the mountains, breathing in the crisp air.
He pointed out the beauty to us everywhere—even as he gave us our camping chores and
kept us hiking one more mile. Once an Eagle Scout, he always admonished us to leave a
place better than how we found it.
Dad was a veteran of World War II, and we camped with equipment stamped U.S.
ARMY on olive green canvas tents, woolen blankets, towels, spade shovels, wooden
footlockers, and steel ammo boxes that kept our matches dry and held our tent stakes.
Everything was heavy, not the super light gear made today. Our tent poles were made of
dense wood. Dad had tent pegs made from steel, pounded to his specifications. The army
tents had no floors, so we laid down a plastic tarp. He directed the back of the tent
towards the wind. Dad always ditched the tent, spading a trench around it—no rain water
would get in our tent, by golly.
We kids had our assigned chores. Danny helped pitch and ditch the tent, Paula
gathered firewood, and I blew up the air mattresses with lots of huffing and puffing and
usually needed help. Mom had brought food she canned from our garden along with chili,
goulash, and beef stew.
We lived in Kansas City, so the first big push was driving west as close to the
Colorado mountains as we could by sunset. Kansas is four hundred miles long, and
22
Kansas City is on the northeastern edge. When Mom and Dad awakened us just before
dawn, the car was already tightly packed the night before with the bulk of the camping
gear stowed on top. When the sun rose, we kids climbed in with our books to keep us
occupied. No seat belts strapped us in. No car air conditioner cooled us, so we kept the
windows rolled down. I was stuck in the middle, and I envied my older brother and sister
feeling the wind across their faces.
Water towers displayed the names of the towns we sped by. We delighted in
reading aloud the occasional road poetry of Burma Shave signs: “The monkey took/ One
look at Jim/ And threw the peanuts/ Back at him/ He needed/ Burma Shave.” When the
sun climbed higher, waves of heat rose from the tarmac as we drove past the endless sea
of wheat and corn fields. We searched for the first blue haze of the mountains off in the
distance and wanted to be the first one who cheered like a sailor in a ship’s crow’s nest,
calling out the first glimpse of the Rockies.
The landscape ever changes when traveling by car over such long distances. We
witnessed the flatness, then the curves as we climbed in altitude. Squares of patchwork
fields transformed into grazing land, then rolling hills, then what was once peaks of blue
haze suddenly loomed over us and we were engulfed in the mountains—no longer seeing
miles into the horizon unless we hairpin-turned our way upward.
There’s something about this that stays with you. Perhaps the varied landscape
helps prepare you for the twists and turns in your life, when at some point you start with a
clear-eyed vision, and then suddenly you don’t have a clue about the next bend in the
road. About the swelling upheavals in life when you think you’re on a straight course.
How change is always the one thing you can count on.
23
But more than a metaphor, there’s also something about how the landscape
actually transforms you. How people who live in those particular landscapes are different
from people who live in a different setting. How some people who never leave those
places, never know what it’s like elsewhere. Never know a larger point of view.
The child only senses it’s a long, long way, perhaps longer than an adult’s
knowledge of the distance. But throughout those early camping trips, this changing
landscape became an important part of my life and my family. We left the mundane, the
flatness behind us. We sought the adventure, the joy, the struggles of the new landscape.
Each trip would have different vistas, different challenges, different stories to tell. Like
strata on a mesa, those weeks of camping would add another layer to our lives and to the
people we would become. Each trip would fill the year as we shared our adventures with
relatives, friends, and at school.
One year we followed Lewis and Clark’s route through Idaho, Oregon, and
Washington. Another year we headed to South and North Dakota, to Rapid City’s
Dinosaur Park, and to the Black Hills National Forest and Mt. Rushmore. The giant
statue of a brontosaurus lit up at night. Through our motel window, he kept me awake
thinking he might come down the mountain to get me. But somewhere you start to
understand about time and that these creatures don’t live during the same time as you.
You start to wonder about things bigger than yourself and things that take a long
time to finish, like Mount Rushmore National Memorial, with the faces of Presidents
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt carved on the mountainside.
We three kids took art lessons at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and
often visited the paintings and sculptures. So this monstrous sculpture was a marvel. The
24
brochure showed Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, dangling like a gnat in the presidents’
eyes. How could he even see those faces in the mountain? Forever curious, I piped up
with endless questions.
Looking for historical markers was a constant vigil along the way. Wherever we
went, we read them aloud. Our trips made history real, like when we visited the Little Big
Horn Battlefield in Montana. We didn’t much like General Custer, so we weren’t sorry
for him. Standing on that sloping grassland with its wide vista, the wind moaning, there
was that feeling of time removed—that first inkling of standing in a place, yet for a blink
of time, we’d live in a different story. Years later, I would see the Seventh U.S. Calvary’s
lone survivor—a horse named Comanche—on exhibit at the Dyche Museum of Natural
History in Lawrence, Kansas, where Larry and I first met. I would think about that
windswept battlefield.
Camping taught us to be resourceful and prepared. Another year found us in
Glacier National Park in Montana with Mom trying to fry bacon while hail bounced off
the Coleman gas stove. Through our binoculars, we spied white mountain goats with
black horns, big-horned sheep, and eagles. It was so cold at night, the cold wind
penetrated our bones. We gathered large rocks, heated them near the fire, then wrapped
them in towels, shoving them into our flannel sleeping bags to keep us warm. Before
hiking, Mom packed our lunches in brown paper bags and placed them in the hoods of
our sweatshirts like a backpack. We always had rain ponchos, too. When a park ranger
wanted to turn back because of the rain, we just pulled out our ponchos and continued our
hike.
Meadows of alpine wildflowers enticed me to pick a bouquet for my mother’s
25
camp table, and too late, I saw a sign not to pick them. I blushed hot with shame when the
ranger pointed it out to me, and I handed them over to him. I never did it again.
Nature could also be terrifying. At Lake Erie, the storm clouds rolled in,
producing fierce winds. Dad positioned the tent against the wind and rain. The storm
surged so, we couldn’t sleep for the powerful gales. We were no strangers to storms—we
lived in tornado country—but in Kansas we had a basement for protection. Here the sides
of our tent flapped violently, like it would blow away any minute and us with it. Mom,
Paula, and I fitfully slept in the station wagon while the wind rocked it back and forth.
Dad and Danny stayed in our tent and kept pounding down the tent stakes all night long
whenever it wanted to become a kite. In the morning, our tent was the only one
standing—the others were blown away or caught in the trees.
Nature could make us feel small and insignificant. One morning in the Grand
Canyon in 1960, Dad told us we would be hiking down the canyon. I yawned and
thought, yeah, sure, Dad. I should have known he wasn’t kidding. The Bright Angel Trail
wound nearly five miles down to Indian Gardens. It took us girls (including Mom) nearly
two hours to hike down, and seven hours to hike back up. Danny, Dad, and Uncle Bev
trudged even farther to a point where they could see the river.
We started the hike in the dark cool of early morning. As the day wore on, my
aluminum Campfire Girl canteen seared my side, even with the blue and red canvas
cover. We refilled our canteens at three rest stops along the way. Mule manure plopped
along the trail. When a pack of mules loped down the trail, I had to press myself against
the canyon wall to let them pass. I winced at the thought of the mules slipping over the
edge. They were so much larger than most horses, and they towered over me. My socks
26
collected dust from the colored strata as I strode down the switchback trail—I laughed
thinking my socks looked like Neopolitan ice cream. Going down, I thought, gee, not so
bad. I passed by hikers coming up who didn’t look so happy. Later, I would wear that
same look. At the turnaround point, Indian Gardens was a bit of an oasis with trees for
shade and a paddock for mules.
Trudging back up the trail, I kept my eyes on the United States flag, just a speck
of red and blue at the top of the rim. Up was the only way out, and whining didn’t help. I
sang songs to myself, made up stories, looked at fossils in rocky ledges, took sips of hot
water, imagined Brighty the burro from one of my favorite books nudging me from
behind, looked for chipmunks and eagles, kept to the inside so not to fall off the edge,
and counted steps until the heat melted my thoughts. When I finally stumbled to the top, I
kissed the hot flagpole. That hike taught me about perseverance and perspective. Looking
at the splendor of the Grand Canyon from the top can feel awe-inspiring, but hiking back
up to the rim is nothing but survival and sweat.
Yes, this early camping experience surely beckoned me to the Sanctuary.
***
In the Adirondacks, the same stone walls, barns, music, and ways of doing things
had remained unchanged for decades. The mountains felt far removed from Lawrence,
the Kansas University town where change had swirled all around us. We had lived smack
in the confluence of social upheaval protesting the Vietnam War, supporting civil rights,
awakening to women’s rights, and protecting the environment.
27
My college years (1967–1971) were underscored by historic events: the
assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., race riots, the first man on
the moon, the escalation of the Vietnam War that caused the doubling of the draft for
eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old men and the shooting of student protestors by the
National Guard at Kent State. Anti-war protests and demonstrations grew in Washington,
major cities, and campuses across America—even in the conservative Midwest at the
University of Kansas. Across campus you could hear strains of Bob Dylan’s “The Times
They Are A-changin’,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water,”
and Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Many of us Baby
Boomers were the first generation of our families to go to college. This was certainly true
of Larry and me. Neither Larry nor I were radicals or hippies, but we joined in the
discourse of our generation.
Before I met him, Larry had been drafted. He appeared for his physical, packed
his bags and waited for his final orders to report for duty. But the orders never came and
he never inquired. Perhaps the burning of several Midwest state and county records saved
him from the Vietnam War. He never knew.
I protested the war by touring the state in a musical theater production called
Earth Song, a mix of pro-environment, anti-war sentiment. Staged as an intimate theaterin-the-round, we often performed in churches or schools, where our audience sat around
us. Accompanied only by acoustic guitar and wooden flute, the nine cast members
intermingled with the audience. After the show, the audience asked us questions. Often
they devastated us young actors by sharing their grief and the sacrifice of their sons or
friends in the Vietnam War.
28
When we students weren’t protesting the war or supporting civil rights, we were
trying to protect the environment and expand the rights of women.
The Whole Earth Catalog was first published in 1968, detailing ways to live a
self-sustainable lifestyle. The cover depicted the Earth seen from the astronauts’
viewpoint—the famous blue marble photograph. The image gave us our first global
consciousness, a sense that our cherished planet was fragile. We were already deeply
influenced by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, a lyrical indictment of
the toll of toxic pesticides like DDT on the natural world. So increasingly, a back-to-theland mentality developed, creating the birth of the environmental movement and the
launch of the first Earth Day in 1970. Our moving to the Adirondacks in 1973 was part of
this wave of change to support the environment.
While working at the museum, I helped broadcast a program over Lawrence’s
national public radio station, KANU, to support the conservation of the Tallgrass Prairie
in Kansas and to establish a national preserve near the Flint Hills. I interviewed Dr. E.
Raymond Hall, the former director of the museum, who had helped to establish the
Redwood Forest in California and was working to preserve the last prairie ecosystem of
its kind left in the United States. Alas, the preserve wouldn’t be established until 1996—
almost twenty-five years too late with barely four percent of America’s tallgrass left. This
grass had nourished millions of buffalo, the staple of the Plains Indians, and held the
precious layer of topsoil in place before the Dustbowl of the 1930s.
In 1970, the women’s movement spurred the publishing of The Female Eunuch
and Our Bodies, Our Selves. In 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and
sent it to the states to ratify. In January 1973, the Supreme Court issued their landmark
29
decision in Roe v. Wade. Activists also brought up the problem of domestic violence and
battered women, but any prosecution of abusers would be uncommon before 1990. For
centuries, women were lawfully the property of their husbands—along with their
children—and had to submit to patriarchal dominance, even if it meant severe beatings.
In the early 1960s, people often got married after high school and started families
right away, but by the time I graduated from high school in 1967, many pushed back
marriage until after college. My friends and I debated whether we would change our
names when we married, a new choice. I would compromise, using my maiden name as
my middle name. Some hyphenated their two last names. We talked about our future
careers, not just about becoming wives. Although birth control was available, very few
doctors would prescribe them to unmarried women, so we shared information about those
doctors who did.
As our wedding day approached, my Methodist minister invited Larry and me to
meet with him for premarital counseling. Reverend Culver had opened my eyes to civil
rights and protesting the Vietnam War and comforted us teens through three
assassinations. He asked us to play a question-and-answer card game designed to identify
our core values and potential problem areas in our marriage. I remember one of my
answers in particular upset Larry.
The card asked, Would you do something against your conscience if your spouse
asked you to do it?
I had mulled over other questions, but this one I replied vehemently and without
hesitation, “Absolutely not!”
30
Larry startled and cleared his throat in irritation. In a measured, strained voice he
said, “Do you mean to tell me if I told you to do something, you might not do it?”
“Not if it’s against my conscience. What if you asked me to rob a bank or do
something wrong?” I explained.
I would strike the word “obey” from our traditional wedding vows. But Larry
forgot. In the Adirondacks and in his marriage, he wanted unquestioning obedience and
control—as if we lived in older times, as if we weren’t on the cusp of social change.
31
CHAPTER IV
THE AWAKENING
Buried in snowdrifts, our gray house sagged on its old stone foundation. Any
small critter that wasn’t hibernating could crawl in. An opossum this far north surprised
us when she scurried across our dark, dirt-floor basement. An ancient creature with a
marsupial pouch, she disappeared into a crevice between the stones.
We entered the house by the side door into what would someday become our
office. Past the office was a combined living room and kitchen, followed by a bathroom
and back pantry. The place was smaller and shabbier than my Victorian rental house in
Kansas. It felt as roomy as a stuffed cracker box. Our labeled boxes stacked up layers
deep, hiding the vinyl pine panels on the wall. Fortunately, we didn’t have much
furniture—just a small daybed couch, a table, my Grandma’s rocker, some floor lamps,
and a waterbed mattress and frame. The bedroom was upstairs in a half-story, where
Larry had to stoop to avoid hitting his head. We discovered the refrigerator didn’t work,
so until we replaced it, we stored our food in metal bins and buried them in snowdrifts. I
liked how we could make do. But I also had a mother who worked for Sears and
Roebuck, and she ordered a new refrigerator for us right away.
Eventually we would rebuild and expand the rent-free house to three times its
size, but for now it would remain cramped and full of boxes. They mostly contained
books—perhaps even more books than the nearest library in Dolgeville. This burden of
books had made the van too heavy to climb the last hill.
Larry had a fine collection of antiquarian and modern natural history books. His
32
first-edition collection of Ernest Thompson Seton books had won a prize at the
University of Kansas. Seton was an 1800s wildlife naturalist who signed his name with a
wolf’s paw print. Larry added this paw print to his wedding band along with the same
two bas-reliefs of a beaver and a Canada goose.
Larry’s books covered all types of wildlife. Each box was clearly labeled:
Mammals– Bats, Mammals–Canines, Birds–Raptors, Birds–Waterfowl, Birds–Songbirds,
Snakes and Frogs, Plants–Wildflowers, Field Guides, Fish, Insects, Scientific Journals,
including his own published studies, like “The Bats of Jalisco, Mexico.” Also some of his
favorite authors from the late 1800s, early 1900s, and recent: Seton, Enos Mills, C. Hart
Merriam, Farley Mowat, Olaus Murie, Peter Matthiessen, and Barry Lopez. But we
couldn’t unpack them until we built book shelves, and the nature center came first. To
support his collecting, Larry also sold out-of-print natural history books by mail-order
catalogue, so those books were also packed. We would operate this side business together
after we got the nature center started.
During our first winter, our new world narrowed in scope to the barn and the
house. We were committed to opening the nature center by May, so we had only three
months to design and build the exhibits. Until then, our old life would remain mostly
boxed up.
The barn would be Larry’s domain. He constructed the workshop downstairs and
the exhibits upstairs and contracted the Johnsons to help, then later hired staff. The
neighbor boys, Clarence and Kenny Rasbach, would stop by after school to see what was
going on or lend a hand. Whenever I’d peep in, there seemed to be such a sense of
camaraderie in the sawing, hammering, and drilling—except when someone was sloppy,
33
not paying attention, or not cleaning up his mess. Larry didn’t tolerate sloppiness or tools
not being cleaned and put back in their correct places—and they’d hear his temper flare.
Many years later, one staff member complained he threw a hammer at him.
The house would become my creative realm for designing artwork and
promotional materials for the nature center. I drew pictures, wrote text for brochures and
calligraphy for displays, and designed wooden signs. I helped plan the program schedule
and contacted guest speakers. I must have stopped for food or welcomed an occasional
neighbor or New York State conservation officer—I only remember the joy and driving
intensity of the work that had to be done on time. The work was good, and we were
persistent. This tandem work would be one of the best parts of our new life together.
***
The huge late-1800s dairy barn, about twenty steps from the house, would
become the nature center. It towered above the forest, a wilderness cathedral made from
hand-hewn beams of beech and woodpeckered planks of pine.
Inside the bottom floor of the barn, we could see the stalls and worn wooden
floors once scuffed by workhorses. Larry rebuilt this front area into a workshop. Close to
the workshop, Larry would one day build stalls for the two horses we would later
purchase to patrol and explore the Sanctuary. Next to the stalls we would store our
saddles, antique sleigh, cart, and sledge. On the opposite side were the wooden
stanchions and mangers where the cows used to feed during milking. These would be
34
torn down to make space for storing a tractor and vehicles.
We had to walk up the hill to enter the front, top floor of the barn through
mammoth double-sliding doors. Our predecessor had spent two years hammering in the
pine flooring, relining the inside walls with planks from another barn, and installing a
two-story fire escape out the back door. The top of the barn soared in height, so different
from our cramped house. I loved its expansiveness—anything was possible here. The
barn seemed glad to be of use and to come alive again.
We envisioned a future library of nature books for visitors to borrow. A seating
area where we could speak to school groups or host guest lecturers and show nature
movies. Interactive exhibits mounted on the walls. On the opposite side, built-in glass
tables with displays of preserved specimens: stuffed bats with out-stretched wings. Bear,
coyote, fox, and beaver skulls. Deer antlers, shed snake skins, reptile eggs, bird nests, a
glass-covered working beehive. In the center, a large model beaver lodge heaped tipistyle with beaver-chewed sticks, where kids and slim, adventurous adults could crawl
through.
When we eventually rolled the doors open for our programs, we would welcome
our congregation into the Notre Dame of nature, transforming our neighbors of would-be
poachers and wide-eyed children into true believers of protecting the wonders of nature.
We were like missionaries stationed on a remote island, assigned to preach the gospel of
humankind’s interconnectedness with—not holy dominance over—our environment.
A nature trail would start at the back door, down the two-story fire escape, past
the stone base remains of a silo and along a natural deer trail through the brambled
meadow into the pine forest, across a footbridge over Little Sprite Creek, and end at a
35
beaver pond, where we would build a platform in the trees so visitors could watch the
beavers.
But all this had to wait until the snow melted.
***
Adirondack winters resonate with a deep solitude that I find not at all lonely. The
heavy, soft stillness is broken only by the community of wind, the cracking of trees, the
bright-day dripping of melting icicles, and the snapping of fire in the wood-burning
stove. Even in the sleep of winter, the woods feel alive. I’m surrounded, embraced by
their grace.
Nature came alive as I sketched animals for the nature center brochure. I pulled
out some of Larry’s books as references. Secretive lynx with tufted ears, spotted fur, and
huge paws. Curious raccoons with opposable thumbs, ringtail, and bandit mask. Flighty
deer with watery black eyes and white tails that stiffened into a flag as they leapt. Solitary
porcupine with their soft, dark hair mixed with silver sharp quills. Lumbering black bear
with shiny coat and nose pawing for grubs. Colorful wood ducks nesting high in trees
with their ducklings peeping out. I needed no reference for skunks, because Flower, my
orphaned ward, curled at my feet.
Mostly that first winter, I remember the silence, an ever-present visitor. I had
never before experienced such a living presence as this silence, so cloaked was I in its
winter softness. I don’t remember turning on a radio—certainly not a television. I only
36
recall wrapping myself up in the stillness as I drew.
It’s the kind of silence a deep-sea diver might experience, sensing the
consciousness of life around him and hearing only the sound of his own breathing. I often
feel like that when I work, diving deep into the watery depths of it, emerging hours later.
When Larry walked into the house, I would startle and surface. Weeks and months flew
by in a timeless meditation of work.
Ink stains splotched my fingers. I was nearly finished with a pen-and-ink sepia
drawing of a beaver with a twig in her mouth placing the final line to the B in the
chewed-wood letters in “Beaversprite.” Intended as a birthday present for Mrs. Richards,
she would love the design and use it as a template for her stationery, and we would print
it on the cover of the nature center brochure. I eyed it at arm’s length, happy with the
realistic results and joy of the image. For all the years I knew her, Mrs. Richards
displayed my original drawing on her fireplace mantle.
We were still snowbound in April, although we heard occasional dripping icicles
from the eaves of the house. But this day, I heard a faint steady noise I couldn’t place. It
was audible enough to stir me to consciousness, but too soft to be discernible. I perked up
my head and cocked it like a bird listening for predators. What is this sound?
I was at a good stopping place. I put down the drawing, cracked my knuckles and
neck, did a half twist, and stretched while I listened. It was a low, continuous hum,
almost like it emanated from the earth. Something urged me to investigate. First I
eliminated any house noises. I checked all the rooms, even the upstairs bedroom. No,
nothing here—must be outside.
37
What does a bear hear when she’s urged from deep hibernation to leave the dark
womb of her cave? Perhaps only the growl of her empty stomach, but maybe something
else drives her to emerge. What causes the skunks to shake their underground sleep and
find a mate? Or the woodchucks to shimmy out of their snug den, no longer fat after a
winter’s sleep? This sound was a pull of nature I couldn’t refuse.
I put on my hat, down jacket, and thick felt-lined rubber boots. I crunched over
the sun-packed snow toward this sound that summoned me. What could it be?
My tracks broke through the crust, creating a new path through the white
meadow. Above me the cobalt sky soared to infinity, so unlike the low gray clouds
pregnant with snow. My eyes squinted at the brightness. The snow crunching was so
noisy, I had to stop and listen for the sound.
My curiosity and I followed the tremolo across the meadow through tangles of
snowy brush and bramble. I finally stomped up to the stone fence bordering the far end of
the meadow and climbed over it into the beginnings of the pine forest. I stood still and
picked up the trail of the sound—getting louder now—down a steep hill. I slid in the
snow as shafts of light penetrated the dark forest.
And there before me lay the source of the mystery.
The ice had cracked and melted from the sun’s warmth, allowing the creek to
burst through and gush its way impatiently to life. Awakened, the water was roaring. The
only other sound in the crisp air was my laughter pealing through the forest, ringing over
and over with joy.
38
CHAPTER V
SPRING ATTRACTION
Spring overpowered winter with the warmth and will of new life. All around us
was a deep stirring. The white canvas of the Adirondacks transformed to green.
Chartreuse buds crowned the sugar maples along the road. Grass appeared. In front of our
house, the 100-year-old lilac bush budded. In the meadow near the woods, fern
fiddleheads bowed in grace, their spiral tips soon to unfurl a dance in the breeze. With
such a short northern growing season, the plants didn’t yawn and stretch—they sprang
out of bed.
A concert of birds migrated into the area. More than 200 species find their way to
the Adirondacks each year. Chevrons of Canada geese announced their arrival. Scarlet
tanagers, orange Baltimore orioles, yellow warblers colored the forest and meadow as
they sang. A single whip-poor-will serenaded at dusk outside our house. Such a big voice
from a small body.
“Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will.”
He was so earnest, insistent, and loud, he captured my attention, and I mused
about his finding a mate.
“Oh, I hope you do find her,” I wished aloud.
Birds and frogs attract their mates and claim their territory through song. All
around us, spring peepers trilled their sexy chorus. The woods and the meadow were
alive with returning and yearning. With such a chorus of lust all around us, where was
our call? Larry and I explored the woods more than each other.
39
That first year, we often hiked the Sanctuary together. Larry was excited to show
me what he had discovered on his own. One day, he wanted to point out a mile-long loop
that would make a great nature trail, starting from the back of the nature center. Deer had
worn a path through the meadow in our back yard, into the woods, across the Little Sprite
Creek, and beyond to a beaver pond.
He led the way with his navy stocking cap slightly askew, tufts of honey blonde
hair sticking out, his rubber boots muddy from many hikes. I plaited my long, dark hair in
a single braid, wound it into a bun, and tucked it under my green stocking cap. We wore
jackets against the chill. I had trouble keeping up with Larry’s long-legged strides.
At every turn, the woods surprised me—the plant kingdom of the Adirondacks
was so unlike the Midwest. Moist from the melted snow, moss and lichen covered the
earth and rocks and crept up the trees in hues of chartreuse, emerald, and pale blue-green.
As the woods thickened, Larry halted and held up his hand to stop me from moving. He
made a shushing gesture and pointed up. He waved his finger, accenting the cadence of
the wood thrush’s song. The avian aria filled the forest like Pan playing his pipes.
Larry showed me how to identify animals through sounds, glimpses, movements,
and tracks. A flash of red might be a red-winged blackbird, a scarlet tanager, or a
cardinal. A flit of yellow a yellow-shafted woodpecker, a golden warbler, or a goldfinch.
Did it have a short, fat beak or was it slender? Was the tail long or short? Did it perch or
nest at the top of the tree, the middle, or the ground? Did the song sound like “Drink your
tea”?
And not just birds. He pointed out tufts of deer fur caught on brambles, old
scrapings on trees the bucks’ antlers had rubbed during mating season, deer droppings
40
like chocolate peas. He amazed me with his keen observation, honed since his childhood
escapades in the woods. I loved him for opening my eyes and ears and making the hidden
visible. Life was all around us if we knew how to pay attention. In the woods, Larry and I
were our most intimate, like we shared a secret, the secret of discovery.
The trees were just budding and the winter ice had broken branches, so more light
reached the woodland floor. Larry carried an eastern wildflower guide book to help us
learn our new environment. In patches of sunlight, little delights peeped through spots of
snow.
Larry squatted and pointed, “Look, trout lily… speckled sage leaves, yellow
petals.” The little beauty’s petals arched back, her head bowed as if she was shy with all
our attention. He read aloud how Indians had crushed the leaves to treat wounds and the
root for fever.
“British soldiers, over here,” he waved. Tiny scarlet “flowers” marched on
lichens, the red vivid against the pale blue-green.
“Here’s a red trillium!” he exclaimed. Behind a tamarack tree near the stream, we
spied a single, large garnet flower with three petals and three leaves. A showstopper, this
diva beauty was deceiving. “Their color and noxious odor attracts carrion flies,” he read.
My dreams had taken root even before we left Kansas. Naive and starry-eyed, I
loved the mission of our future work at the Sanctuary, protecting wildlife while teaching
about nature. When I met the Sanctuary, its wildness nourished me—that part of me I
didn’t know was lacking or disconnected. But I couldn’t fully know the depths of that
embrace as I do now. Just as the stream had broken the ice and gushed to life, the woods
41
were awakening me to another level of consciousness. While we learned our new
environment, I could feel life in everything and our kinship with the woods, the birds,
flowers, stones, and animals. A living presence I inhaled with every breath. I wanted to
convey this sense of connection to our visitors.
I fell truly in love, deeply and profoundly. Larry and I were both passionate about
this wild land, as if we had given our vows to the Sanctuary, not each other. Even now,
after several decades apart, what remains between us is the love and gratitude of the work
we did together.
The purple violets from my wedding bouquet flowered in white and yellow here,
their blooms surrounded by heart-shaped leaves. Other white delicates sprinkled like an
upside-down constellation of stars across the dark forest floor. Heaven truly was on
Earth. Larry stopped and identified them: lilies of the valley, spring beauty, foamflower,
goldthread.
Near the stream, we disturbed a red-spotted eft, a dainty, neon orange salamander
almost three inches long, counting the tail. I marveled at it—I hadn’t known they existed.
“They’re amphibians,” Larry explained, “so they start out as green newts in the water
with gills like tadpoles. They turn orange when they breathe air, grow legs, and live on
the land.”
Questions bit at me like the no-see-ums we slapped—the first pesky tyrants to
emerge in a wet spring. Summer would bring the mosquitoes and biting black flies. In
nature, creatures like the newt adapt. Could we? Could we transform from two separate
entities into a single unit and become sure-footed in our marriage? Could we grow both
independently and together?
42
As I followed Larry through the forest, he quickly crossed the stream. I tried to
match his choice of stepping stones, but I slipped on the moss and got wet. Eventually we
would build a foot bridge here. Larry was already up the hill and around the bend. I
caught up with him and continued to follow the deer tracks. In the damp earth I put my
fingers in the tracks to feel their fresh impression. Here’s where I first realized the tracks
looked like broken hearts.
Despite our occasional shared jaunts into the Sanctuary, something was out of
synch in our young marriage. We had quickly established different rhythms. Larry rose
before dawn and headed for the woods and later to work in the nature center. He would
fall asleep not long after sunset. I stretched the later boundaries of the day. We all need
hours we can call our own, but are mealtimes together enough?
“You’ll see, I get very protective of my mate,” Larry told me the first time we had
sex when we dated. His initial possessiveness had made me feel loved and safe—at first.
But with the intense drive to prepare and open the nature center in three months, it
seemed we had no time for affection, appreciation, or attention. We gave it all to the
Sanctuary. Those small myriad acts of intimacy that cause love to grow—a warm touch, a
loving note, a kind gesture, an embrace, a joy in friendship—just weren’t there. Instead,
the thrill of working our dream together became the focus of our passion. Sex, when we
had it, was just sex. When we talked, it was only about work. Perhaps after we opened
the nature center, it would change, I thought. But I certainly signed on, wanted, and loved
this work together.
I’m not sure what I had expected from marriage.
43
My parents didn’t spend their days together, but kissed each other good-bye and
hello at the front door during the 1950s and 1960s. Besides camping, my father showed
us the world through travel benefits at Trans World Airlines. My mother built our world
at home. They were weekend farmers in the spring and summer. We all worked together
in our backyard vegetable garden and helped pick strawberries, peaches, and cherries in
fields and orchards outside of Kansas City.
My mother was the quickest to anger—my father always like a splash of cool,
reasoning water. When their disagreements sometimes escalated, they raised their voices
behind closed doors, but the disputes were always vocal, never physical. Dad certainly
insisted we respect our mother and vice versa.
We grew up hearing how they had fallen in love. Just before World War II, they
had met at a business college in Kansas City and competed for top grades. At a school
dance, my father peacocked up to my mother, who was likened to the movie star Loretta
Young. “I’m going to marry you someday,” he declared. Just nineteen and twenty-one
years old, they eloped when my father was drafted into World War II, instead of waiting
until the war was over as their parents advised.
Looking back, my idea of marriage probably was fashioned more after both sets
of Missouri grandparents. I loved how my mother’s parents worked together on the farm
and my father’s parents in their small town store.
Within their togetherness, they found their independence.
On their eighty-eight-acre farm near Fayette, Grandma took care of the chickens,
geese, eggs, and milking, and was in charge of the money from her part. She spread the
44
feed for her birds, softly clucking, wearing her homemade sunbonnet that flapped over
her eyes and skirted her neck and an apron that covered her entire front and half her back.
For supper, she chased a non-laying hen, wrung her neck, scalded and plucked the
feathers, then floured and fried the pieces in a big iron skillet. She patted her few cows,
especially the Guernsey, and deftly milked them with her strong hands—giving the ratkilling barn cat some squirts of warm milk directly from the teat. The cream was thick
and delicious on our morning cornflakes with fresh strawberries. Grandma churned her
own butter.
Every time we crossed the holler on the rutted dirt road towards their farm, I
would help her swing open the big white wooden gate and waited for it to come.
Grandma would always pause and smile while looking down the curving lane at her twostory white house with its green copper roof surrounded by trees. She’d sigh and say, “A
little piece of heaven.”
Grandpa was responsible for the crops and large livestock and their sales as he
shouldered the plow behind his team of horses, wearing his denim overalls and chambray
shirt. Wiry and fit, he never did own a tractor. He kept cattle and hogs, and grew corn,
oats, and hay. Hired hands helped with the harvest and to hoist and stack the bales in the
hayloft or load the corncrib. He built a smokehouse for ham and neutered the male pigs.
His dog Lou-Lou would help him round up the cattle. Grandma and Grandpa came
together through meals and quiet times sitting on the porch swing watching the sun set
and listening to the crickets before turning in. Their day followed the sun, but they rose in
the dark before it awakened.
In the small town of Hardin, Grandmother and Granddad welcomed their
45
community into their dry goods store where they also sold a few groceries, meat, and
eggs. Their store helped many families during the Great Depression when their customers
bartered for food and goods. Grandmother, a wiz at math, kept the books and they always
seemed to have a kind word for their patrons. When the front door bell tinkled,
Granddad’s baritone voice boomed a greeting and Grandmother added a sweet high note.
Both couples had a way of life where they worked together, looked out for each
other, and laughed together. Their affection wasn’t overtly physical, but it was obvious in
their tone, their endearments, their helpful actions towards each other—the way they
lived in harmony with their values. They seemed like such great friends. My grandparents
might softly disagree, but they knew each other’s character, and often their differences
were eased or appreciated through self-deprecating humor—even our great grandparents.
Like when Great Grandfather Broughton told us youngsters with a twinkle in his eyes
how he was always up first, rushing to the barn to milk the cows, only to turn back
toward the house. Half-way back, Great Grandmother would meet him with the milk pail
he had forgotten, shaking her head about his feet working faster than his mind.
Larry and I had the work part down. He praised my ink drawings, my routered
wooden signs, my ideas for the exhibits, and the nature programs I created. Larry listened
to my suggestions on how to make a lecture more engaging. He was an excellent teacher
of nature, and I loved learning from him. He took pride in his student, seeing me thrive as
a nature guide, taking what details I had learned from him to cover the changing seasons
and teach a wide range of visitors inside the nature center or on the trail.
But when we were isolated in the wilderness, away from our social and science
circles at the natural history museum, differences in our personalities began to emerge.
46
Most tellingly, we had vastly different senses of humor. At the expense of others, Larry
was prone to dark sarcasm and negative laughs that often left me perplexed. We
resonated at different wave lengths, like turning a radio dial to a certain station and not
connecting—only finding static.
But sharing nature was different. In nature, we connected. As we continued our
hike, Larry pointed out worn slides on the creek banks where river otters had played,
tracks where raccoons had paused at the creek’s edge to wash their food, scats from foxes
with tufts of rabbit fur, holes in trees where an owl might roost.
On the Sanctuary, I learned to read for signs of wildlife. But I had ignored early
signs about my future spouse and how our marriage or our lives might be affected, like
when I first visited Larry’s parents in Iowa when we still lived in Kansas.
Their household was choked with tension. His father tried to be affable and could
be charming, but he was shrunken from years of alcoholism and shame. I was relieved
Larry didn’t drink. His mother’s tall, Nordic frame was slightly stooped, as if she were
bearing a heavy weight. Her sadness shadowed her blue eyes and deepened her wrinkles.
If she laughed, it had the bitter bite of sarcasm, so like Larry’s.
His father had chosen to work for the railroads as a telegraph operator, mine for
the airlines in flight operations. In comparison, Larry thought I was “born with a silver
spoon” in my mouth, and kept bringing that up in our marriage. But I thought it was more
about the home atmosphere, how alcoholism didn’t shadow my life growing up like it did
his.
I felt sorry for Larry, a misplaced kind of attraction. I couldn’t blame the son for
47
the father’s behavior—he was not his father. Larry had come so far from his volatile
beginnings. I could see the hurt little boy inside the man, and I believed love and time
would heal these kinds of wounds. I believed I could make a difference in his life. How
many women have felt this way?
Shouldn’t marriage harbor a kind of refuge? Doesn’t love become a sacred space
to support and nurture each other? A safe place to grow?
Only years later would I learn or start to understand how deeply life-altering
Larry’s upbringing had been. My husband spent much of his childhood escaping his
father’s abuse by fleeing into the woods. Or trying to protect his mother and sister by
stringing tin cans across the pathway to their front door that would clatter whenever his
father stumbled home drunk late at night, so they would be alerted to sleep in makeshift
tents in the back yard until he passed out. How does a child possibly survive all of that?
A loud sound like a gunshot reverberated through the woods. Larry signaled. We
were getting close.
A few steps more and there before us was a pond and a six-foot tipi of peeled,
chewed branches—a beaver lodge. On the edge of the pond, we could see where the
beavers had dammed the creek with mud and more branches. The gunshot sound we
heard was a beaver tail slapping the surface of the pond to alert his family that danger
was near and to warn us to keep away.
Out in the wild, away from her indoor zoo, we could see what Mrs. Richards
loved about the creatures. The lowering sun set fire to the shimmering pond and the
reflection of the budding pale-green poplar. As the beaver swam, the water rippled out to
48
the bank where we could see paths worn by deer, tracks of raccoons and other animals.
We listened to birds making their last calls for the evening and the frogs trilling, courting
their mates. Because of the beaver pond, many kinds of birds, mammals, fish,
amphibians, insects, and plants could flourish.
This scene was the gift Larry wanted to share with me, the turning point of the
trail, the transformation wrought by a mated pair of beavers. In that moment, I felt a
thrill—a deep, abiding kinship with the wild beaver and with Larry. He whispered and
gestured, describing how he would build a catwalk at this spot, so visitors could view the
beavers and the wildlife attracted to the pond.
I breathed in this moment. Surely, we had done with the nature center what the
beavers had with their lodge and dam. Their work attracted wildlife, and our work at the
nature center would attract visitors for years to come. Younger generations would revel in
their connection with nature and take up their role as Earthkeepers. Our future children
would grow up loving nature in this northern Eden.
It would take much, much more than a loud slap on the water to wake me up from
my beautiful dream.
49
CHAPTER VI
THE NATURE CENTER
May 1973
When Larry rolled back the huge barn doors to welcome our first guests, all the
months of preparation fused into excitement. Local papers and radio stations had
announced the grand opening of the nature center. Visitors were guided by the large
wooden road sign I had routered like those in a national park, the yellow grooved letters
announcing Beaversprite Nature Center against the dark wood. The brochures were
printed complete with map and program schedule. I ran back and forth between the house
and the center, putting finishing touches on some of the displays, but the floor was swept,
the exhibits dusted, and the guest book open, ready for signatures.
A parade of cars blew dust as they drove up our quiet, solitary road. Tires
crunched the gravel in the large parking lot. A mix of young and old, new friends and
strangers walked up the path: neighbors near the Sanctuary, villagers from Dolgeville,
Little Falls, Herkimer, and Gloversville. New York State conservation officers and a few
others came from as far away as Utica, New York City, and Philadelphia.
And of course, Mrs. Richards.
She scowled at Larry’s stuffed bats, bleached bear and fox skulls, the snakes and
amphibians floating in jars of formaldehyde. Larry had brought his own animal
specimens from his graduate years studying biology and ecology. Scores of items filled
the nature center to be used in teaching. Mrs. Richards had her own domain, and we had
50
ours.
As I recall, Mrs. Richards formally visited the nature center only a few times, at
this opening and as a featured speaker presenting her film strip about “My Forty Years
with Beavers.” A few years later, she was pleased about the life-size model of a beaver
lodge we built in the center of the barn exhibits. Children and parents crawled through the
floor-level entrance of its blue painted foundation, pretending to swim underwater to
climb into the dry, inner sanctum of the lodge that was “above water.” She would point
her cane at the tipi of beaver-chewed sticks and tell visitors they were donated by her
captive beavers.
At the opening, the old barn came alive with sound.
Visitors pressed the buttons of the wall exhibits and guessed the names or the
tracks of animals as they lit up. Parents and children peered into the tabletop exhibits and
pointed at porcupine quills, shed snake skins, and molds of animal tracks. Over the years,
we always kept adding to the exhibits. Later, they would gather at the glassed-in live bee
exhibit to look for the queen bee and scamper upstairs to a lookout station to watch for
birds. In a few years on the back side of the barn, children would climb up a ten-foot
spider web made of rope and leapfrog over a giant spider model.
As the time approached to start the program, the crowd eventually settled onto
rows of long rustic pews that could seat one hundred visitors. Larry welcomed everyone
and talked about the legacies of Florence Waring Erdman and Dorothy Richards, who
had made the Sanctuary and nature center possible. He introduced Mrs. Richards and our
boss, Mr. MacFarland, the Philadelphia banker who managed our budget from the
interest of the Erdman Trust, named in memory of her mother Florence Jones Reineman.
51
Larry recounted how Poke Johnson and his boys had pulled our moving van in the
middle of a snowstorm when we first arrived. He acknowledged Kenny and Clarence
Rasbach for being such loyal, enthusiastic teenage naturalists and helping out after
school. Larry introduced my parents and grandmother and thanked them for his wife, the
artist, who did the drawings, organized the programs, and kept him on task.
“We look forward to leading trail hikes and giving programs to schools and
visitors, so spread the word, everyone,” he said.
The cast of characters who frequented the nature center would become our
extended family and community. Lumberjack Poke Johnson brought his wife, Mary, as
plump and soft as he was thin and tough. The Johnson boys: Big Sonny drove the
bulldozer and big machines. Kenny, shorter than Sonny but strong, and handsome Eddie,
always thinking up a joke. Elsie, their sweet, shy sister, loved animals and kept the books
for their sawmill. One of our favorite neighbors, the Johnsons would come to nearly
every nature center program and help us many times over. Larry and the boys would
often go fishing together.
Our closest neighbors, the Rasbach boys, brought their father and two eldest
sisters, Susie and Donna. Thirteen-year-old Clarence often shadowed Larry after school
and on weekends. He was Larry’s devoted mascot with his grinning freckled face and his
environmental patch displayed with pride on his worn jean jacket. He and Kenny came
over so often, they were nearly part of our household.
The local fiddler, Hudson Tabor, lumbered over to introduce his son, Jimmy, who
was in his forties. Sweet Jimmy had Down Syndrome. He was as fascinated by all the
exhibits as the children. A frequent visitor, he once brought a bouquet of rare lady
52
slippers picked from his family’s marsh to support our Endangered Wildflower
presentation. He looked so proud and happy that I held my gasp of dismay. It takes seven
years for the flower to take root and bloom.
The mission of the nature center was to teach our neighbors, not be a tourist
attraction, so we took heart at seeing so many from the surrounding communities in
attendance. Education would help protect the Sanctuary, our Philadelphia benefactor
hoped.
The Philadelphia banker in charge of the Erdman trust, looked out of place in his
suit, but he grinned, amazed at what we had accomplished in just three months. We were
in frequent contact with him about our needs and expenditures as we purchased supplies
to build the exhibits, hired staff, requested guest speakers, printed the brochures, and
procured Jeeps, walkie-talkies, uniforms, and office equipment, such as a typewriter to
write letters and quarterly reports and a mimeograph machine to crank out extra copies of
the nature program schedule. Because we had to live on the Sanctuary for the job, the
Trust paid for our housing, electricity, gas, phone, uniforms, boots, vehicles, insurance,
and gave us a food allotment. The salary was only about $10,000 per year at first, but we
were rich in benefits.
Beyond Larry’s biology training, his handiness in carpentry and electrical wiring
was evident in the exhibits. The banker was just as impressed with Larry’s workshop
built on the bottom floor of the barn. Everything was precisely in place—Larry demanded
order and neatness from his staff.
Mason jars lined up in graduating sized nails, bolts, screws, and washers. They
hung above the counters with the lids nailed into the ceiling beam. Wire cutters, saws,
53
hammers, and pliers nestled in their places on the wall. Electrical equipment was stored
underneath the counter, the extension cords neatly rolled up. An old metal vise was
bolted to the center work island.
Larry proudly showed the banker my brochure drawings: the front cover with the
beaver constructing the name of Beaversprite Sanctuary and Nature Center, the back with
Mrs. Richards’s cottage and a note about her live beaver exhibit, the folding pages with
the nature center next to a map and list of programs, mammals and their tracks framing
the story of the Sanctuary. He pointed to the beaver image that adorned his navy twill
shirt and jacket as part of his uniform—a round embroidered shoulder patch.
I don’t recall the topic of the first program, but each spring through fall we hosted
a variety of weekend programs about local or endangered wildlife. Visitors learned about
the Adirondack ecosystem from Larry, visiting experts and scientists, slides, and films on
such topics as migrating birds, mushrooms, mammals, hibernation, local and endangered
wildflowers, amphibians and reptiles, birds of prey, and other animals not in the region
like whales and wolves.
“Wolves, Death of a Legend” was one of our most popular programs, with
standing room only. Our guest speaker, Wolfman John Harris, brought a live wolf named
Rocky, to promote wolves when they were endangered in the lower forty-eight states. For
centuries, they were killed for bounty and fur. Harris had taken another wolf, Jethro, to
Congress to promote the Endangered Species Act, which passed in 1973. At this time,
releasing wolves back into Yellowstone was being debated, because the overpopulation
of deer had devastated the ecosystem. The wolves were needed to keep them in check.
These predators proved more adept than human hunters at targeting only the lame, sick,
54
or young, leaving the healthy to reproduce. In this way, the wolves actually helped the
deer herd, whereas hunters often killed the healthiest deer in their prime.
The silver wolf was magnificent, skittish at first, but calmed by Harris, who led
him on a collar and strong chain in front of a hushed audience. Rocky looked out over the
audience with intense eyes as Harris sorted myth from fact. The audience leaned forward
in attention and respect. Rocky left a lasting impression of beauty and power, and a desire
to protect his kind.
With that first season in 1973, the nature center was now officially open May
through September, with daily afternoon visiting hours or by appointment, weekend
programs, and nature trail by guide and appointment. Instead of an occasional call, the
phone rang steadily as schools and groups eagerly reserved their visits or requested
lectures. School buses and cars would frequent our isolated road.
As we stood side by side shaking hands and talking with our visitors, Larry and I
must have looked like the ideal couple, the perfect combination of art and science, both
educators, both passionate about nature. We were the young face of Beaversprite, here to
protect the Sanctuary and preach the wildlife gospel to our neighbors and local
community about the science, beauty, and interconnectedness of nature.
***
I don’t know why the fighting began, but it quickly turned mean and physical.
Our first physical fight started one late afternoon in our living room. We were scheduled
55
to give an evening lecture to the local chapter of the Daughters of the American
Revolution, or was it the Johnstown Garden Club? These outside lectures were important
to promote the Sanctuary and nature center to a local radius of about thirty miles.
Whatever the fight was about, instead of giving in and complying, I stood my
ground and tried to negotiate. Couldn’t we ever have a compromise or conversation?
Larry just didn’t want to hear it. And I just wanted to be heard. A volatile mix. “Just do as
you’re told,” He’d say once too many times, like a parent talking to a child. Perhaps that
was the trigger. I must have been irritated by his commands, his need for unquestioning
obedience, his telling me to shut up when I wanted to talk and explain my feelings and
my side of the issue.
Larry towered over me, then grabbed my arms and shook me. I broke free, stalked
off to get away and cool down. He yelled something, and I turned to look at him. He
threw an unopened soda can at me, and it hit just below my eye. I clutched my face, not
so much from the pain of the welt as the shock of the action itself. I picked up the can,
tempted to throw it back, but I threw it away in disgust. I just couldn’t fathom it.
Whatever we fought about, it didn’t merit this.
The details of the fight elude me now, but I do remember when I ran to the
bathroom and looked in the mirror, I didn’t recognize the sad woman looking back at me,
her eyes swollen with tears of shame and confusion, her left eye turning purple and blue.
My hands shook while I tried to cover my welt with thick make-up.
The car filled with a loud silence on the drive to the lecture.
When we reached our destination and entered the place, I lost my nerve and asked
56
for a bathroom. Anything to disappear. I felt my chest heaving, my throat clutching a
scream, my eyes holding back a torrent of tears. No one was in the bathroom. At last, I
could burst out my tears, so I wouldn’t drown from within. But I didn’t want to wash
away my makeup. After several minutes of shaky deep breaths, wiping my runny nose,
and dabbing my eyes, I summoned my nerve to come out. I tiptoed in while the ladies
engaged Larry.
They greeted me warmly, and I shook hands looking down. I always looked
people in the eyes. I just couldn’t that night.
Larry’s lecture muffled into background noise as I sat there and took myself far
away in thought. A memory resurfaced of an incident that happened when we were still
dating in Kansas—something I had totally forgotten until this very moment. I had buried
it deep within me, hiding it as something that didn’t fit at the time.
But as he droned on, the memory popped out like a warning. A red flag I had
chosen to ignore.
I had spent the weekend with Larry, helping him with his renovation project. The
bed was empty in the morning—as usual, Larry was already up. I heard him in another
room, so I rolled off my side of the bed, but nearly stepped on shards of glass scattered
across the floor. It looked like a broken light bulb.
When I asked Larry about it, he said, “I smashed it.”
“Why?”
“Because you left the light on.”
“But I could have stepped on the glass with my bare feet.”
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“That will teach you not to leave the light on.”
Jolted to the core, I held my breath and my tongue. I retreated like a turtle in her
shell. I put on my shoes, swept up the glass—and dumped the entire incident from my
mind.
Until this moment.
When they applauded after his lecture, I came back to myself. They asked me
about the woman’s life on the Sanctuary.
Could they see the black eye?
I hesitated, then shifted to describing the beauty of the Sanctuary, the trail, my
drawings, the wild beaver, the wonderful programs we had planned.
“Be sure to come,” I smiled.
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CHAPTER VII
WILD ORPHANS
1973–1976
In those early years, I became a mother many times over, mostly because Mark
Putnam, a New York State conservation officer, brought us orphaned wildlife to
rehabilitate. In his late-forties or early-fifties, he had a salt-and-pepper buzz cut and clear
blue eyes. He had witnessed defenseless orphaned animals, illegal hunting, dead animals
on the road, and crazy human behavior towards wildlife, and his stories filled our home
with laughter. He and Larry often swapped and bested each other with tall stories. Larry
said he had a story better than his.
“As a boy, I had a really smart coyote or coydog I kept chained up as a pet outside
our house,” Larry said. “That coyote used to lunge after the chickens pecking the grass in
the yard, but he couldn’t get at them. Pretty soon the coyote learned to pretend his chain
was shorter than it actually was. I watched him lunge at the chickens while the chickens
came closer and closer. Until one day, wham, the feathers flew!” Larry clapped his hands
for emphasis. He laughed as he remembered, “That darn coyote also sat still in Ma’s
flower garden, holding his mouth wide open—then clamped it shut when a hummingbird
buzzed by.”
Was this real, I wondered, or something from Wile E. Coyote?
“Yes, that coyote was really something,” he laughed.
Mark and Larry often patrolled the Sanctuary together and stopped by for lunch,
or held late-night vigils for poachers. I was glad Larry had such a good friend. I looked
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forward to Mark’s visits and sensed he also watched over me like a daughter, sometimes
asking, “How did you get that bruise?”
I don’t think Mark bought my half-hearted, absurd answer of walking into doors.
Why is that a typical response battered women give? He didn’t press me, and I never
revealed the truth to him. Looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t tell him. Perhaps I felt
he was closer to Larry. Perhaps I wanted him to guess without choosing sides. Perhaps he
showed me he doubted my answers by often stopping by on his rounds. Perhaps this
helped more than I knew.
I do know his gifts of wild orphans gave me something to love, protect, nurture,
and set free. And in my darkest moments, that was the most precious gift of all.
Flora
Spring brought a series of orphaned fawns. One was born prematurely when a
driver hit a pregnant doe as she burst in front of his headlights. She died, but Mark
brought us the preemie, her tiny body wrapped in legs. Under the advice of Dr.
Wainwright, our veterinarian, I nursed her around the clock. We named her Flag like the
fawn in The Yearling. But with the trauma of her birth and without her mother’s first milk
(colostrum) full of antibodies in those first vital days, it was a sad, losing battle.
Next, a family brought a fawn they thought was an orphan. Had they seen a dead
doe? No. Then most likely, the mother was nearby, fleeing when they approached. In this
manner, the mother is doing the best for her fawn, not abandoning it. Fawns are protected
by having no scent during their first few weeks, so the doe makes her fawn stay in a
hiding place until she returns for feedings. The fawns are fully camouflaged from
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predators with their spots. As the fawns grow and get stronger, they can keep up with
their mothers. Well-intentioned people mistakenly pick up a fawn and cause great harm.
Even walking up to a fawn can draw a predator to it, as they follow the strong human
scent. So it’s best to stay away.
I asked one of the boys what they fed it, since they’d had it several days.
“Oh, she likes everything—especially cigarettes…” he boasted.
“Your baby brother might try to eat anything, too, if he were hungry,” I fumed,
“but you wouldn’t feed him cigarettes!”
We immediately put the fawn on a prescribed formula, but several days of
cigarettes must have fatally tipped the balance.
Then Mark brought us Flora. I wasn’t sure my heart could take another, but she
looked healthy. When I fed her from a bottle, her black wet nose eagerly thrust onto the
nipple as she braced her wobbly legs and twitched her tail. After she fed, I hid her like
her real mother would have done amid a bramble of blackberries that bloomed white like
her spots. I took a photo while she hid, so I could later draw her in pen and ink. Her spots
blended in perfectly with the flowers until I called her at feeding times, and this became
our routine.
But one day she didn’t come when I called. I poked in all the usual brambles, but
couldn’t find her. My voice quivered as I called and called her. Did someone pick her up?
Did a poacher get her? I was about to despair when something bumped me from behind.
I turned, and there she was tugging at the bottle in my back pocket.
As she grew and could eat plants, Flora no longer needed my bottle feedings and
remained wild, but we often worried she would lose her fear of humans because of us—
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even a split-second hesitation near hunters can mean death.
After she lost her spots, Larry and Mark tagged her ear so we could identify her
and perhaps give hunters pause. (It is illegal to shoot does, but that doesn’t stop some.)
Her territory grew. Some of our neighbors saw her eight miles away. She sometimes
followed us down the nature trail for a bit, then disappeared. She returned on our first
wedding anniversary, and we took a photo of us together. We saw her from time to time
for a year or so. I hope she had fawns of her own.
Shadow
In early summer, Mark brought us a black duckling. I could cup his midnight fluff
in my small hands and feel his rapid heartbeat. It didn’t take long for him to imprint on
me as his mother, following me everywhere and peeping as he waddled along. He nestled
under my chin when I rested and settled in my lap or on my feet as I drew my artwork.
I’d sing or hum “Me and My Shadow” as I worked, so it seemed like the perfect name for
him. He’d doze off, sometimes peeping in his sleep. I would not hear a happier sound
until my own children babbled themselves to sleep at nap times.
All summer long he shadowed me everywhere and cried so whenever we left him.
When I called him, he waddled as fast as he could, chatting all the way, only pausing to
listen to my voice until he found me. He looked up at me, making raspy, reed-like
remarks, then nestled on top of my feet. Sometimes he surprised himself with a loud
quack, like a teenager in the process of deepening his voice. He became my alarm clock
in the morning—either he quacked me awake, or Larry set him on me and I got up in a
hurry.
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As brown feathers replaced his black down, Shadow followed me to the barn to
give school lectures. He thrived outside during the program season as he transformed into
a handsome drake with fully developed wings, but he didn’t fly. He paraded everywhere
and blended into the tree-dappled shadows near the barn. He often swam in the stone silo
base next to the nature center. When the rain didn’t fill it up, we filled it for him. As
visitors watched, he groomed himself by dipping into the gland at the back of his neck
and distributing the oil over his feathers to keep them buoyant.
But suddenly in September, Shadow swaggered like he was drunk—his head
cocked to one side. Our veterinarian thought it was an inner ear infection. I needed to
give him scheduled, round-the-clock antibiotics. I set my alarm to feed him his doses of
medication, and he seemed to get better for a while. But he relapsed. His balance was
screwed up, and he didn’t know which end was up. This time he wasn’t eating well. The
veterinarian increased his dose, but he warned the infection might have gone to his brain
and didn’t give us much hope.
Such a little body with a huge presence in my life. Shadow died in my lap while I
sketched. We buried him near the silo base where he loved to swim. Somehow I had
failed him and I was struck with remorse. His disappearance left a tremendous void. For
weeks afterward, I thought I could feel him on my feet or lap or hear his chatter. I would
walk and stop as if he was still following me, giving him time to catch up—by now, such
an engrained habit. The Johnsons offered solace in a domesticated Muscovy duckling, but
it couldn’t replace a friend, and I refused. I slept longer than usual, curled up like a fetus.
My grief was only interrupted by other arrivals who needed my attention.
Woodruff
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One day Larry placed a tiny ball of brown fur in my hands. He’d found a baby
woodchuck half drowned in a water-filled rut after a heavy rain, but he couldn’t find her
mother. I had watched the woodchucks in the meadow nearby, the mother whistling to
her babies to follow. I would be a poor substitute, but I would try. Woodruff thrived on
the formula prescribed by the veterinarian, first from an eye dropper, then a baby bottle.
She would stay in the house until she got bigger. At first, she was small enough to sleep
in my shirt pocket. Later she would sleep in a box and scamper up my leg for feedings. I
called her by whistling to her, imitating the sound of the wild mothers.
I noticed my scarf, blouse, and some t-shirts were missing but that was not
unusual. I wasn’t as neat as Larry, and sometimes left clothes on a chair, on the floor of
the closet, or misplaced them. One day in the kitchen, I heard her scurrying under our
antique pantry cabinet, and out flung my scarf, blouse, and t-shirts into the middle of the
floor. She had used them to build her nest, and now she was cleaning up.
Woodruff grew fast as I took her out more and more to graze the clover in the
meadow, until finally she was out all day. She was fat, nearly a foot tall now when she
stretched, and fully grown. I showed her the empty woodchuck den near the silo base
next to the nature center. She crawled in and out, in and out, in and out, surfacing with
dirt on her nose and fur, as busy as a child in a sandbox. And one day, she just stayed. I
visited her every few weeks and left her a carrot. Whenever I whistled, she would come
out, smell me, bark little squeaks as she did when a baby, scamper over me, nibble my
chin, then dash back into her hole. A wave of joy flowed through me. She was fine and
doing well. Eventually I stopped coming—she was free and on her own now.
Shunta
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Larry and I never knew where the next young animal would come from or when.
But our next baby came from an unusual source. We teased our parents that we had some
special news, knowing they would expect the obvious. But to their shock, we told them
we were adopting a baby.... a mountain lion cub, to be exact. Just temporarily, we
reassured them.
Our neighbor, Frank Smith, had a roadside zoo up Highway 29, and he had a
mountain lion with two cubs a few months old and weaned. He was selling them all to a
larger zoo, but he said the zoo wanted them used to being handled by humans. It would
benefit the cubs, he said. The mother and cubs couldn’t be released in the Adirondacks.
According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the last
known wild mountain lion in New York was killed in 1894. They were extinct from this
area.
Raising an animal for captivity was the opposite of our work with wild orphans,
but we couldn’t resist the opportunity to get close to such a magnificent creature. So we
agreed to work with the little female cub.
Little? Shunta was a huge kitten with paws the size of those of a St. Bernard and
she was nearly as big as a full grown bobcat. Her brown spots would have camouflaged
her well in the wild. Her large ears were alert with curiosity, her white-and-black
butterfly mouth hissed or purred as loudly as ten cats, and her big eyes didn’t miss
anything. She loved to hide and pounce on anything that moved, including us, so we
carried toys to distract her.
Normally cubs stay with their mother for one or two years as they learn to hunt.
Their habitat ranges from North to South America, and mountain lions have adapted to
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living in mountains, forests, desert canyons, and jungles. In the United States, they now
live mostly in the western states, but a few live in Florida and solitary ones have been
sighted, shot, or hit on the road elsewhere. The mountain lion has more names than any
other mammal: cougar, puma, painter, panther, catamount, and ghost cat are but a few.
Shunta was indeed like a ghost cat, silent and stalking through the house, wild and
unpredictable, but like most domestic cats, always scratching her claws and pouncing.
She was playfully dangerous.
We moved her to the barn workshop because her midnight prowls while we slept
got too unnerving. I had just fed her raw beef with bone meal, so she was full. I sat on the
counter talking to the staff when she leapt up, walked over my legs, then suddenly turned
and crunched my knee with her fangs, bruising and puncturing the skin. I grabbed her by
the nape of her neck and pulled her off. She was just learning by being a playful cub, but
I couldn’t reciprocate in kind.
We decided that was enough handling and took her back to Frank. My doctor
dressed the teeth marks and bruises and just shook his head at me, “What a fool thing to
do.”
Our parents were relieved when we didn’t accept a orphaned bear cub.
Flower
When we lived in Lawrence, Kansas, my boss at the natural history museum
called me to help take care of a litter of orphaned skunks. I thought he was joking,
skunks? The mother had been run over by a car in front of his house, and he had
discovered her litter in one of his basement window wells. They were about six-weeks
old and were close to weaning. He decided the museum would keep two as living exhibits
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for the educational programs and set the others free. The museum had these two
descented. It would be important to handle them often, my boss said, to get them used to
human touch, so they could adjust well to the museum’s children and family programs.
I picked my charge and named her Flower for the skunk character in Bambi. She fit
in my hand, a miniature with a tail plumed in black and white. A thin white stripe blazed
down her pointed face. Her dark eyes shone but were extremely nearsighted, which is
why so many get killed on the road. She perhaps saw more with her blackberry nose that
was always sniffing me. She took to the bottle of special formula and soon I could
introduce her to grubs and berries. Skunks are omnivores and opportunistic foragers for a
variety of fare, such as berries, plants, larvae, insects, worms, reptiles, small birds and
mammals.
Flower bonded with me as I fed her. Larry and I grew closer as he helped me
build an eight-foot cage with a plank ladder and a nesting box for her in my apartment.
We took walks with her out in the prairie where she could forage and dig with her long
claws and eat insects, but she stayed close to us, right by our feet as we walked. Even
without her scent glands, she would display the warning motions of stamping her feet and
raising her tail. We would play together as I stamped my hands on the ground, and she
reacted in kind as her real mother had taught her. Whenever I read, she would curl up into
a ball in my lap or beside me. I had bonded to her as well.
So when it came time to move to the Adirondacks, I asked the museum for
permission to take her with us. She could still be of service at the nature center. When we
designed our wedding rings with three animals, I included the skunk along with the
beaver and the Canada goose. For me, the skunk symbolized how our relationship had
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grown while building her cage and conducting educational programs. I also liked the fact
that skunks don’t use their weapons unless in dire circumstances, they give warnings
instead.
In the Adirondack winter, my pet skunk would semi-hibernate in the cold, dirtfloor basement, curled up in her nesting box at the top of her cage. But in the other
seasons, Flower would come upstairs to play. She explored every nook and cranny in the
house. When I made scratching noises, she would scamper to me, smell my hands, climb
into my lap, and curl into a ball while I read. I loved to pet her and follow her white
crown and v-stripe down her shiny black coat. She enjoyed having her chin and tummy
scratched. This was not the kind of behavior I allowed myself for wild orphans, but
without her scent glands, she could never be released into the wild.
She became the main attraction when I spoke to school groups at the nature center
and gave lectures about the weasel family. The groups learned how weasels to wolverines
all have scent glands, but none has the ability to spray like skunks do. When startled, they
dance a warning, stamping their front paws, then raising their tails—and if really
alarmed—accurately shoot their scent like pepper spray as far as ten feet, causing
irritation and temporary blindness. Only owls are immune, since they don’t smell and
have protective transparent eyelids.
But having raised other orphans and successfully releasing them into their rightful
place in the wild made me sad for her. Over the years, I began to wish the museum hadn’t
descented her, taking away her natural protection and independence, even though I
enjoyed being close to her. I was wiser now—I lived among wildlife. And deep inside me
something else was shifting. As this awareness surfaced to my consciousness, it began to
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take the form of the question. How was I different from Mrs. Richards doting over her
captive beavers?
Tending to the needs of wild orphans to give them the opportunity for freedom
was like nurturing the wild part of myself bursting against the bounds of marital
convention and yearning for independence. Looking back at the early 1970s and the
culture of marriage, we women were on the cusp of breaking barriers, more of us getting
a college education, using birth control pills, having careers—and yet our role was often
still subservient to our husbands’ if they were so inclined.
I couldn’t articulate it then, but Flower was my alter ego, both of us trapped in a
false sense of freedom. Compared to the other orphans we raised and released, wasn’t
caging her a kind of abuse?
But using her as an occasional living exhibit no longer felt right.
Things couldn’t stay the same. I could see no other recourse. The time had come.
I was giving much less attention to Flower. We didn’t play as often. When we did,
I spoke to her with regret for keeping her in a cage away from her natural surroundings.
She was nearly five years old, an old lady by wild skunk standards. Her taste of freedom
were brief walks with us with stops for digging the earth and sniffing at plants. Woodruff
was no longer in her den, so I let Flower explore it. She waddled in with her tail dusting
the dirt. A few years earlier I would not have done this for fear she would feel the pull of
nature and disappear, and I’d lose her.
Now I wished she could know her rightful, wild place. I had stolen it from her. I
could no longer bear seeing her in a cage. I cried from the awful awareness and couldn’t
shake it. A thought crept in. Perhaps I could give Flower her freedom back, despite her
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lack of protection. Even if she had just a few weeks or months of freedom, wouldn’t that
be worth it? Now that she had lived past the average age of most wild skunks, couldn’t
she at last feel the wind, smell the earth, berries, and meadows, explore fallen logs,
capture insects, worms, and grubs? Perhaps even mate?
A whole, full life, not controlled or safe, but real. How was her cage a sanctuary?
I tried to convince myself. Didn’t I owe Flower her freedom?
I let her decide.
She didn’t know the consequences of an owl swooping silently in the night or a
car not stopping if she froze and stamped her feet in vain in the middle of the road. But I
understood. And with full consciousness of the terrible and the beautiful, towards sunset I
took her out into the meadow.
As she sniffed and shuffled about and dug amid the blackberry brambles, I slowly
withdrew. She was totally preoccupied and didn’t look at me. I stepped backwards and
watched for a long, long time. She was still busy exploring.
I backed up.
She kept digging.
I retreated a few more steps.
I waited a while longer. Often, she would scurry back to me at this point.
But not this time. It was if she had accepted my gift.
I finally turned away and took my time walking away, turning or looking over my
shoulder, just in case.
She didn’t follow.
I would never see her again.
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CHAPTER VIII
SHADY AND SHASTA
1973–1976
I was sure I was going to die the first time I rode a horse solo. I was just eight
years old. I had sometimes ridden behind my uncle, gripping his belt loops, as White Sox
cut cattle on his Missouri farm. My uncle always slacked the reins to give White Sox his
lead to guide the mavericks—he was a well-trained quarter horse like a smart sheepherding dog. But this was my first time alone in the saddle. With the stirrups hoisted high
for my short legs, I clenched the saddle horn. Imitating my uncle, I clicked my tongue,
gave a little kick, and said, “Giddy-up,” as if I were in full command. But I didn’t have a
strong grip on the reins. With no firm tug at his mouth, this was White Sox’s sign to take
the lead, and at first he trotted, cantered, then galloped across the pasture towards the
calves.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” I hollered as I flopped in the saddle. My uncle saw the
commotion, cupped his hands, and hollered “Whooaaaa!” White Sox skidded to a halt
with me trembling on his neck, my hands clenching his mane. Through no fault of his, I
became scared of riding horses even though I loved them.
Now, fifteen years later, I was somehow undaunted and fired up by the prospect
of becoming a horse owner. Larry and I thought it made sense to patrol the interior of the
Sanctuary by horse. We had completed our first season of nature center programs, so with
a new sense of purpose, I took charge of talking with horse owners, looking through sale
ads and notices of auctions, and educating myself on types of horses, feed, tack, and
grooming equipment.
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We looked at several horses advertised in the local pennysaver. I fell in love with
a gorgeous Appaloosa yearling, but he was too wild, his stall and the other horses badly
neglected. I could hardly hold his halter as he reared, kicked, and tried to bite me. A
silver Arabian mare with delicate features was a real beauty, but she was too expensive at
$3,000.
Shady was a three-year-old gelding, a grade, which is horse talk for mutt. He was
gentle and kids rode him. He had a coarse black mane and tail, dark stockings, and a
mottled gray body. He came right over to me in his corral and nickered at me.
I watched his ears, a great barometer of temperament—they were pointed up, not
flat back like he might bite. His velvet nose snuffed in my scent as I put out my hand first
and then patted him. His ears twisted towards me as I talked to him. I stood to the side of
his head so he could see me better, my grinning face mirrored in his big black eye.
His hooves and legs were in good shape. He was groomed and well cared for, and
so were their other horses. The stable and paddock were clean. His owner let me ride
him, and I was thrilled when he was slow and didn’t try to run. Shady became mine for
$225, including shots and delivery.
Shady arrived with the first snow flurries of November. Larry and I built the stall
and manger in the bottom of the nature center barn, bought fifty bales of hay, oat straw
for bedding, and a new bridle. Terry Brennan, our new staff member, helped us install an
electric fence. Dr. Wainwright, our local veterinarian, loaned me a saddle. The nature
center was closed until spring, so I had plenty of time to devote to Shady.
A horse! What Larry and I didn’t know about horses could fill a barn.
I soon learned that buying the horse was the easy part, like the difference between
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getting pregnant and bringing the baby home. Owning a horse means buying lots of tack:
bridle, saddle, saddle blanket, and a large horse blanket to cover Shady after a long or
brisk ride. We got a halter, lunging line, grooming brushes, picks to clean his hooves,
rubber buckets for carrying water and feed, and a watering tank. Larry put up extra wire
for fencing along the road. I bought all kinds of horse care and training books and read
long into the night.
I eased into riding him by visiting him often, talking, and grooming him, always
watching his ears, letting him smell me to get used to me. I practiced putting on the
saddle and tightening the girth and the stirrups. Sometimes Larry helped. I shook when I
put the saddle on, afraid he might kick me. But I patted his rump and talked to him like I
was confident when I passed behind him to the other side. Within a few days, I took my
first solo ride down the Jeep trail to an abandoned shack we called “Santa’s Workshop.”
I rode Shady as silently as the snowfall. Branches dumped more snow on us as the
wind blew. Shady was slow and steady as I brushed the snow off his neck and patted him.
His ears constantly twisted to the swaying of the tree branches and my voice as I talked to
him, perhaps to reassure myself but also to bond with him. I loved how he listened to me.
On his back, I could blend as one of the animals of the forest. I wondered if deer were
watching us on the other side of the snow-capped stone wall that bordered the Jeep trail.
The squeaking of the saddle seemed loud. I stopped clenching my teeth and
relaxed my shoulders and hands, but still held the reins firmly. Our puffs of breath
condensed in the cold air. I wondered how the animals made do in this cold and thought
about the other animals hibernating beneath us. Even my thoughts seemed loud and I
laughed, breaking the silence again, and Shady snorted back. Just Shady and me, calm
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and peaceful. When we returned, I both sighed with relief and thrilled at my minitriumph.
But the next day, Shady got loose out in the field. Clarence had left the electric
fence off. Larry and Terry chased after him, and Jane, Terry’s wife, and I followed their
tracks off the Sanctuary where we heard some hunters had just shot a buck. We were
worried Shady might have been mistaken for a deer as we trekked through the snow. Jane
and I didn’t know Larry already had Shady back in the barn within twenty minutes of his
escape. By the time Jane and I came tramping back an hour or so later, we were cold and
exhausted, but relieved to see Shady in his stall.
Larry patrolled the Sanctuary on Shady, and I would sometimes ride him to Mrs.
Richards’s house a half hour’s ride. Sometimes I had trouble remounting him in the slick
snow and worried I wouldn’t make it home. I saw fox tracks and snowshoe hare tracks
along the way. Larry and I occasionally rode double across the Sanctuary following deer
trails while a flurry of snow filled Shady’s tracks as fast as he made them.
In some ways, Shady brought Larry and me closer together by going to auctions
to buy tack, riding him, and taking care of him.
Working with Shady taught me self-confidence and courage. I loved grooming
him, mucking out his stall, giving him fresh bedding, and feeding him cut apples with a
flat hand. Thereafter, I pretty much smelled like hay and horse. Shady would nudge me
with his head to get my attention if my back was turned and I was talking to someone
else. When I walked into the barn, he would lift his head and whinny at me.
The local farrier, was a small, slim woman my size, but she hammered in his new
shoes with strong, deft strokes. I winced as she pounded in the nails, but she said he
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didn’t feel it. Indeed, he looked peaceful. She demonstrated how to pick his hooves,
backing in to him and grasping his hoof, bending his leg so it curled between her own
legs as she hunched over and flicked out any debris with the hoof pick. I marveled that he
didn’t kick—her face was just inches away from his upturned hoof.
I needed to learn how to do this, too. I took a deep breath to push down the fear,
backed in, and grasped his hoof between my legs, amazed at myself. Shady stayed still as
the farrier held his halter. She warned me to push back if he leaned on me. And indeed, as
I became Shady’s fourth leg, he leaned on me, and I nudged back his 900 pounds,
exhilarated and relieved he responded and shifted. This back-and-forth pattern became an
ongoing joke between us.
“Shady, stand on your own three legs,” I’d say in a tone that meant no nonsense.
“Good boy,” I’d coo when he shifted.
Shady became my confidant and source of comfort. When Larry and I fought, I
escaped to the sanctuary of his stall and groomed and talked to him. At least he listened
and allowed me to speak. I hugged his neck, buried my face, and wiped my tears in his
soft coat that was thickening with the cold weather. He smelled like hay.
“What am I doing wrong?” I sniffed. “I just want to talk things out, help him
understand my side. But he just gets mad and barks, ‘Don’t talk back to me,’ as if I’m a
child.”
Shady just nickered at me.
It was always bewildering why Larry and I couldn’t talk through our issues. I so
wanted to get through to him, find just the right word that would make myself clear and
make it better, but he would just tell me to shut up. It felt like a door slamming in my
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face. I never envisioned a husband who couldn’t be my friend, and friends talk, don’t
they?
Looking back, I realize my young, optimistic self was in deep denial about how
bad this situation was. I couldn’t fathom the erratic pattern of explosions over nothing
that became the new normal. I still thought I could fix it somehow and felt the burden
was on me to do so. I had no idea I was not helping myself. I had deluded myself in
thinking I was. Perhaps it was because the flare-ups were sporadic, not every day, but
months apart. Things would get better as if the bad had never happened.
But I was also the kind of person who was determined to be happy, who could
find joy in little things, who woke up each morning with an infuriatingly glad heart.
Strange now to think I never felt lonely in the silence and solitude of the
Sanctuary, but I was eternally surprised how the marriage could feel so lonely. It was if I
was sitting at a banquet, but starving. Was Larry starving, too? The love for our work,
nature, joint hobbies, and horses kept us together, and I grabbed the reins of this good
part as the mainstay of our marriage—until the negative part finally overwhelmed it.
The following spring, Larry bought a four-year-old mare, a real beauty, a spirited
sorrel quarter horse named Shasta with frosted mane and tail. Her coat caught the red fire
of the sun. We were told she had some thoroughbred lineage from the King Ranch in
Texas. As part of the $800 purchase, we promised to breed her with a stallion chosen by
the owner and give back the first filly. If a colt, we would keep him. She was gentle but
high strung—a copper cricket bit she spun with her tongue kept her pacified when Larry
rode her.
Watching how the horses ate their hay revealed their temperament that mirrored
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our own. Shady chomped away—peaceful, steady, and slow. Shasta ate with agitation.
She would take a bite, spin around the hay, take a bite, and spin around again. Shady
always finished first.
I couldn’t resist singing “Happy Trails” on our first ride together with both Shady
and Shasta. Shady twisted his ears back to listen to me as he followed Shasta nose to tail.
Shasta pranced ahead like she was bouncing on air. Shady’s gait was earthbound with
gravity. He often tossed his head at the annoying horse flies. I leaned over to brush them
off, so he could watch where he was going. Sometimes Shady stumbled over some loose
stones near an eroding stone wall. We could hear some bushes cracking a ways off,
probably deer bounding deeper into the woods. Suddenly, a ruffed grouse burst out of her
hiding place in front of Shady. Spooked, he jumped sideways. Somehow I hung on and
talked to him, patting his neck to soothe him and me.
Working around the horses, I learned old sayings were true. Sometimes Shasta
would get out of the fence to graze on grass that must have seemed greener to her. Once,
when we returned from an overnight trip, I walked to the meadow, put their halters on
and led them to their watering tank. They refused to drink. I tried again. They refused.
Again. They balked. I just laughed and shook my head.
But between Larry and me, things could sour quickly without warning—always it
seemed, without warning.
It was spring. I was in the house trying to stick the address labels and stamps on
the nature center brochures with the new season’s schedule before the postman drove up
to our mailbox opposite our house. I just had to get them out that day. I typically work
with dogged determination and deep focus until a job was done. I’m like a beaver in that
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regard. There have been studies in which a tape recording of rushing water inserted into
their dam would cause the beaver to drag branches and pack mud to cover up the sound
as if they had a leak to fix. I was deeply worried about the timing of the brochures—I had
cut it too close before the opening. I would just make it, I figured.
But Larry came bursting into the office yelling, “Shasta is loose—go fetch her.”
I tried to tell him what I was doing and suggested it would be better if he did it.
But he would hear none of it. While I clutched some brochures, he dragged me outside
into the yard, half way to the barn, kicking me. I was wearing jeans and an old turtleneck
frayed with some small holes at the neck. As I tried to pull away, he ripped my turtleneck
in the front, exposing my breasts. The staff saw the commotion and ran off to grab
Shasta, then Larry released me and I stumbled back to the house.
I don’t remember whether I made the mail that day or not. Perhaps nothing
seemed important after that. I do remember crawling under the bed to cry and hide in
humiliation. Shame shadowed me like a third person in our marriage.
If I could talk to my younger self, I would hug her and tell her she wasn’t to
blame. For I know she started to be confused, bewildered at what she was doing wrong to
be punished so. She had started to take the blame for her husband’s outbursts. As crazy as
this sounds now, it made perfect sense then. He was always so sure it was her fault, so
self-righteous in his anger, so entitled, that the sheer force of his blaming her made my
younger self own the guilt and responsibility for his actions. Somehow she thought she
could appease him and make it right.
Larry would never apologize, but somehow she still thought he would change.
Optimism, although a virtue, could be devastating in the wrong circumstances.
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I don’t know if she would have heard me. She was beyond reason or sense at this
point. False hope can breed misery. And there was always the Sanctuary, Shady, and the
work to pull her through. Isn’t it important to look for joy, she believed, even in our
darkest times? After all, the Sanctuary was the main reason she hung on. This temporary
ill wind will blow away, she thought, and a fair wind will take its place. Forever, she
turned her face waiting for the fair weather to sweep back in like it always did.
Work was our salvation, and in the spring we kept busy with school group visits
giving nature lectures and leading hikes. I had less time to ride, so all that summer, I
lunged Shady in circles to give him exercise and to train him to voice commands. We
learned steadily together. Shady was responsive to my voice and my tone, his ears alert
and attentive. He was so good at taking vocal commands that training him to pull a cart
seemed possible.
Larry and I looked for a two-wheeled sulky and an antique sleigh for the winter.
As luck would have it, we found our sleigh in beautiful condition on display in a
woman’s front yard. The cutter was a one-seater that held two people and the shaft was
attached. The ornate iron and wooden runners were in great shape. The woman also had a
sulky in the back yard, the wooden wheels about four feet tall. We scraped and painted
the sulky golden yellow trimmed with brown.
Larry bought a new harness, complete with reins, bridle, and blinders at a
livestock auction for half the catalogue price. Later we bid for and won a leather strap of
antique brass sleigh bells and a collar and hame with brass balls on the end. Poke Johnson
taught Larry how to mount the harness to the hame and around Shady, barking directions
in his raspy voice that sounded like it was full of sawdust.
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Shady and I practiced with the harness and reins first. He pulled me as I walked
behind him. He learned to turn right when I said, “Gee,” and left when I said, “Haw.” I
kept sugar cubes, sliced apples, and carrots as treats. Shady learned quickly as he listened
to my voice. We gradually added the sulky. My warm tone encouraged him. Shady was
steady and wasn’t skittish, shy, or stubborn as he pulled the empty sulky over the
meadow.
Finally the big day came.
Larry held Shady’s bridle as I climbed awkwardly up into the sulky, the wheels
moving a bit. I grabbed the reins, weaving them between my fingers for a firm grip. I
took a deep breath, slapped his rump, and clicked my tongue with a “Giddy-up.”
First Shady walked, then trotted. The autumn wind blew his black mane like a
flag. Behind Shady’s tail the sulky wheels spun as he clip-clopped down the lane. I
bounced in the seat as the sugar maple trees on either side of the road crowned our
triumph in full, blazing glory.
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CHAPTER IX
MY DAUGHTER ATHENA
1975
She was a wild, winged goddess, and for a short time she was my daughter. Her
home had been destroyed when a storm blew down her tree. A farmer had found her, the
lone survivor of her great-horned owl siblings. Athena was but a big fluff of feathers
when Mark and another New York State conservation officer brought her to us to
rehabilitate. She couldn’t even fly yet.
With gloved hands, the officer put her on the ground, wary of her talons. Her eyes
were yellow caution lights. She was small, but fierce. She gave a raucous screech and
hissed while snapping her beak, then spread out her wings and puffed out her downy
feathers to pretend she was bigger, that she was a force to be reckoned with, even though
she was only about five weeks old. Instead of perched high atop a tree with only the
horizon for a view, here she was on the ground, stuck with me. As I witnessed her
bravado, I wished I had more time to prepare. An overwhelming responsibility seized me.
If I did well, she could live for more than thirteen years. I had to give her a chance.
Mark brought some dead mice as a starter kit. I was relieved, yet struck by this
menu for my new role as a raptor mother. Feed her mice? As an eight-year-old, I’d had
white mice as pets. I loved fairy tales where all the animals spoke and even the mice
turned into coachmen. But in college working for the herpetology department at the
natural history museum, I had delivered white mice from the biology lab to feed the
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emerald tree boa constrictor. As we preached at the nature center, owls are at the top of
the food chain and play an important role in maintaining balance.
Predators are not villains.
Mark gave me his thick glove and handed me a dead mouse. Athena stopped
squawking and hunkered under my offering while she tilted her head back, flipping the
mouse head-first and swallowing it whole in three jerking gulps. The tail stuck out the
side of her beak.
I gulped, too. I could, I would do this—no matter how squeamish I felt. Athena
had a ravenous hunger, and so I had to become a relentless provider. I must get her to
adult size, nearly two-feet tall—the largest and most powerful of the owl tribe.
Owls eat a variety of fare: mice, rats, rabbits, squirrels, skunks, and birds. They
eat flesh, fur, feathers, bones and all. If the prey is small enough, they swallow it whole.
They later regurgitate and upchuck everything but the flesh in a packed pellet where they
roost. Scientists have studied the pellets to understand how beneficial owls are to ecology
and to humans in controlling pests. Owls invented the high protein, whole food, high
fiber diet.
Feeding was a constant schedule of work. Like a breast-feeding mother whose
baby has not yet given her a smile of recognition, I represented only food to my insatiable
charge. A young owlet can eat as many as fifteen mice a day compared to an adult’s four.
A mother will do what it takes to feed her child. I pleaded for help. I made
announcements at the nature center and happily accepted our visitors’ offerings, mostly
mice, which were plentiful in the Adirondack foothills. My husband trapped mice in the
house and rats near the barn. The conservation officers brought me weekly gifts of fresh
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road kill. Ecstatic, I filled the chest freezer with extra goodies, making it a frozen tomb.
Larry laughed at this change in attitude from his suburban-raised wife, and I earned a new
kind of respect for my raptor motherhood. When I reached into the freezer, I often had to
sift through Athena’s meal menagerie to find beef or chicken to cook for our dinner.
If her food was larger than a mouse, it was easier to cut up when half thawed.
Unflinchingly, I began to cut up a road-killed rabbit in the barn workshop. This rabbit
wasn’t too badly damaged. As I cut through the fur, inside I discovered dead, unborn
babies. Four dark pink, hairless bunnies, still in their embryonic sacks. I gasped, paused,
and took a deep breath. Sorry for their death, but grateful for their gift of life.
I researched in Larry’s books how life would have been with her owl family. As
they grew in size, the nest would get crowded, so at nearly six weeks, the owlets would
perch on branches as they observed the life of the forest and watched their parents hunt.
Around nine weeks, the fledglings would take their first attempts at short flights as they
mimicked their parents. Timing in the web of nature is so well designed that by the time
the owlets are old enough to practice hunting, their prey would have had their babies.
During the summer, they would remain close to their parents as they tested their
wings to hunt. Eventually, their parents would feed them less and less. Instinct and
hunger would take over. By fall, the young owls would venture out on their own to feed
themselves. The next year, they would find their lifelong mates.
That summer, we were in the process of enlarging and reconstructing our house to
nearly three times its size while we lived in a borrowed trailer. The roofless skeleton of a
new living room was Athena’s nursery with its hand-hewn beams, large window
openings, and bare staircase. She was never caged, but was free to explore as she grew.
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She adapted quickly. Athena nested in a coiled, orange electric cord when she slept. Her
light golden down blended with the plywood. She spent the days half-swooping off the
new stairs and practicing her pounce on wooden blocks over and over again like a game.
Everything had to be grasped or beaked.
Dark side-rings framed her eyes and a chevron came to a point between them,
looking like she had eyebrows and glasses. Her wing feathers had mottled markings like
the bark of a tree. She strutted like Groucho Marx in his long coat as she crossed the
floor, examining her new domain with keen curiosity. Her soft down fluttered in the
slightest breeze, tousling on top of her head like an overslept teenager.
I squelched the urge to pet her, because I didn’t want her to get used to human
touch. It was bad enough she had an adoptive human mother. Fear of people is a
necessary instinct for wild animals, and I worried that in the end I wasn’t helping her.
Adopted orphan animals released into the wild may hesitate in that life-preserving second
instead of fleeing. Or hang around people, who misinterpret the animal as having a
disease like rabies (which infects only mammals), because they are not acting natural.
A few weeks went by, and one day I couldn’t find Athena among the
construction. I frantically searched all the nooks and crannies, even the hand-hewn
ceiling beams. I finally spotted her outdoors, strutting about in the meadow that was our
back yard. We had expected this but were still surprised, like parents who suddenly
realize their child has entered a new phase.
Our high-fenced garden was near the house. As the summer released her bounty, I
picked pints of carrots, beets, snap peas, and green beans. Athena’s daily goal was trying
to fly to the garden fence posts. Finally triumphant, she perched on a post as she watched
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me pick vegetables. As mature, darker feathers replaced her down, Athena took more
brief flights, overshooting or sometimes bumping into things as she gained the grace of
her wings. Finally, she became adept at reaching the lower branches of the trees and
roosted there.
***
One day Mark and another conservation officer brought us a kestrel, a tiny falcon,
that couldn’t fly. We checked her wings and didn’t see any damage. Perhaps she was just
fatigued from a long flight or stunned by flying into a window or tree. We named her
Artemis and set her in the open construction of the house so she could rest and fly off
when she was ready. We didn’t see her after a few days, so she must have taken off. We
were happy she was free again.
I became concerned that Athena learn to hunt and eat live food, so I live-trapped
chipmunks and let them go in front of her. Athena stood on the ground while I lay flat—
we were face to face. As I released her potential meal, she turned her head to watch it
flee, but instead of pouncing on it, she snapped back to look at me, blinking her eyes like
a question.
One day, Larry found an owl pellet near our house. Like most owl pellets, it was
lumpy, grayish, and dried. We were excited to see evidence that Athena was hunting.
Curious what she ate, Larry took a knife and pulled it apart and examined it closely.
“It’s Artemis,” he said.
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***
Eventually, as she grew to nearly her adult size, I switched to feeding Athena only
at sunset. She roosted in the trees during the day as she eased into her natural nocturnal
schedule. In the beginning of this stage, she hung out in a tree near the nature center and
slept during the day. Visitors could get a peek at her like she was a living exhibit, and she
could be near us as we guided visitors down the trail and built the house.
Late one night through the open window, I heard a “hoo, hoo-hoo, hoooo,” the
sound of a more grown-up owl. I had to check, it sounded so close. I stepped outside
toward the sound that wafted from near the nature center. Athena was calling under a
harvest moon, while perched on Larry’s tomato-orange Case tractor.
I grabbed my sketch book, and captured her on her throne as she watched me. Her
breast had barred patterns now. Her tufted ears were beginning to stick up more, giving
her the look of horns that named her breed. She raised or flattened them according to her
mood. Tonight she had them raised, listening, curious. As the cool night air ruffled her
dark, stippled feathers, I savored this closeness, this communion—keenly aware the
moment was fleeting. The gawky teenager was transforming. She was on the threshold of
adult power.
Athena eventually roosted farther away during the daytime. I hated to admit I
wasn’t quite ready for her to go. A scolding and dive-bombing of blue jays and
mockingbirds mimicking her screech told me where she was. I found Athena deep in the
pine forest, her ear tufts down, so annoyed by the mobbing that she flew further off and
out of sight. Like a mother whose teenager backs out of the driveway to take her first solo
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drive, I prayed for her safety.
***
While Athena grew that summer, so did the house. The Johnson clan came over at
sunrise one morning to help us frame the roof, and by sunset it was done. Larry shared
chaws of Red Man chewing tobacco with them, something he had first started as a
teenager working on construction jobs, but dropped later among his scientist peers. It had
now became a habit. As they chewed, spit, hammered, and sawed, that whole day felt like
an Amish barn raising with everyone lending a hand. At the end of the day, they cut a
maple branch, and Poke proudly nailed it to the end peak of the roof to honor our work
and bless the house, as was their custom. We all clapped and cheered as Poke raised his
arms in triumph.
Together we covered the skeleton of the roof with a huge silo tarp to protect
Larry’s book collection and our boxed belongings. As more of the roof and walls were
completed over the summer, I kept shifting the boxes to keep them dry. By fall, I had
repacked so many boxes, relabeled, and restacked them, I sometimes lost track of where
things were.
At the close of the nature center season, the autumn mornings and evenings were
turning cold. One morning, Larry came in from outside, shivering, blowing on his hands
to keep them warm.
“Where are my long-johns?” he demanded.
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“They should be upstairs in the corner facing the nature center. The boxes should
be labeled,” I said.
Larry went upstairs, and I heard some thumping around.
“Show me where they are,” he hollered.
I stooped over the cardboard boxes, opening and sorting through the contents, but
I couldn’t find them. Larry became more and more agitated. He started kicking my rear
end and thighs as if that would help me remember. Pleading to stop was to no avail.
In that moment, I could only think how I had ordered his tan work boots with
steel-reinforced toes as a safety precaution for him.
We finally found the long-johns.
As the welts on my legs and buttocks stung, he thanked me and kissed the top of
my head with a reprimand to keep better order. When he took off his work clothes and
put on his long-johns, I shrunk back. I shook with anger and fear but swallowed them
deep inside me, shoving them down. I could feel my soul drowning, sinking into murky
waters as if chained to an anvil.
I was a fighter, a fighter for my dream. And I clung to this dream as tightly as the
anvil that dragged me down.
When we crawled into bed later that night, I lifted up my flannel nightgown and
showed him the purple bruises. They were still hot. I put his hand on them, thinking he
didn’t realize what he had done, “Do you see what you did? You really hurt me.”
“It’s your fault,” he said. “This wouldn’t happen if you just do what I say.”
***
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I learned that from wherever she was, I could call Athena to me at sunset to feed
her, holding out a rat or other temptation with my gloved hand. She would land and perch
on the glove, and eat the offering. I was but a guest mother in her wild world. I had to
finish what her parents would have done. So I started to call and feed her less and less so
she’d hunt for herself. Not feeding her was the hardest part of all. What a surprise. I
thought I would be relieved. Instead, I was anxious for her.
Athena and the other wild orphans taught me that life is about letting go. This was
the vital last step, to totally stop feeding her.
I reminded myself that owls are engineered to be efficient hunters. Their tawny
brown markings blend right into the forest. Their feathers are the softest of any raptor, so
they fly in silence. Their beak and talons are powerful and razor sharp. They can hear the
tiniest scurry at long distances and can see in the dark.
I gave a silent cheer when I saw her silhouette, fully grown now, in the marsh
across the dirt road from the house, illuminated by the pink dawn. A muskrat was in her
talons. Now, I told myself, most prey won’t know what hit them when the winged
goddess strikes.
But I wanted to make one last farewell call…Would she come?
The sun was a dying ember on the autumn horizon when I cupped my hands and
called, “Athena. Atheeeeena. Atheeeeeeeeeena!” This far-flung beckoning conjured the
wild part of myself—my soul—to come back to my body.
I waited, trembling with the cold air and the yearning. From the glowing sunset
came her faint answering screech. First a dark speck…a chevron…then a silent swoosh of
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power…eyes intense on their target…talons outstretched…a wing span of nearly five feet
swooped down on the offering in my gloved-hand…as she grabbed her prize…and flew
away.
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CHAPTER X
MUSIC IN THE MOUNTAINS
1974–1976
In mid-September we completed another season of nature programs. It seemed
appropriate to celebrate with a barn dance, and without much preparation, the event
flowed organically. We pushed back the benches, turned on the lights, and rolled the
nature center doors wide to welcome our guests. Old Hudson Tabor was at the heart of it
with his string band.
Back in the house, I was desperately trying to dry my thick hair with a plastic
bonnet dryer pulled over three-inch rollers. But as the starting hour loomed, it was only
half dry. Disaster. To control my curls and keep them straight, they had to be bone dry.
Hair spray didn’t help. I had to get to the barn, come what may. I gave up, pulled out the
rollers, brushed my hair as flat as I could—but it had a life of its own. My tresses started
to coil and spring from the middle of my back to my shoulders. Please don’t frizz. I
couldn’t think about it, but of course I did. In tears, I pulled it back, but for once I wanted
it to dance free, not be wound in a bun, woven in a braid, or clipped at the nape of my
neck. So I decided to keep it loose as I slipped on my long blue chambray dress laced up
at the white bodice, designed to look colonial. As my hair air-dried in the twilight, I could
feel the coarse curls expand in volume. But something else started to preoccupy my mind.
I was eager to hear Hudson play his fiddle. I debated whether to take my violin to
the dance—but I hadn’t played since high school—and a musician needs to be invited to
play. I was curious about Adirondack fiddling.
Larry was already at the barn dumping ice in the steel tubs. As I climbed up the
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backdoor fire escape, I could hear the bustle and murmurs of a gathering—a happy
weaving of greetings, offerings of apple cider and beer, and catching up on gossip. I
made out the McLaughlins from Long Island, summer vacationers intrigued by the locals.
Our neighbors on Belden Corners Road. The families of our staff. A few townspeople
from Dolgeville. Poke Johnson and his family. Off to one side, Hudson Tabor and his
band were taking out their fiddle, guitar, and banjo. Hudson’s fiddle case was a mere
shell of scuffed and stained wood, the clasps scratched and askew from opening and
closing at so many gatherings. His fiddle was as worn as the case.
Hudson flicked the fiddle onto his knee and plucked at the strings. The musicians
leaned in as they listened to each other. He took out his bow and twisted the end knob to
tighten the hairs. The bow, too, looked aged and tired, bent with a few loose hairs
dangling on the side. Hudson clubbed his large hand on the bow and scraped over the
strings while he turned the pegs on the fiddle. The twang was like sour grapes to the ear.
Relief finally came when the strings resonated in pitch. Hudson didn’t tuck the fiddle
under his sagging chin, but jutted it out from his chest, as if he wanted the sound to come
directly from his heart.
Hudson nodded to the guitarist and banjo player and announced a song, “In the
key of D now,” and off they flew in a toe-tapping tune that got people to gather round
and clap their hands in rhythm.
A bolt of bewilderment struck me, and my mouth flew wide in astonishment. How
on earth can they know they’re in the key of D without sheet music to show the two
sharps, F and C? I was classically trained, a term I switched to “paper-trained” after that
night—keenly aware of the double meaning. My training limited me to reading and
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interpreting printed music. It was as different as reading a story aloud to telling one.
Hudson and his band spun songs out of the night air.
Even after playing for fifteen years, I lacked the confidence to jump in, and I was
glad I had left my violin in the house. Moved by the joy of their playing, I hovered near
the band. Seeing my eager interest, Hudson offered me a turn, but I blushed and shook
my head like a small girl anticipating the portal in the twirl and beat of the jump rope, but
backing off in defeat.
Here was an invisible bond between the musicians and their audience, a sense of
lively play delivered anywhere without sheet music, stand, and conductor. Not like the
tradition of classical music, elevated and distant from the audience. These musicians and
their listeners were engaged co-creators.
What good was all this training if I couldn’t play music without paper? Printed
music suddenly seemed like another way of conforming, instead of the freedom of
expression. My brain caught on fire with anger at my limits, but my heart lit up with an
exciting new possibility. One day, I vowed, I would turn my violin into a fiddle.
I noticed Hudson grasped his bow in the middle, not at the end, so he was limited
to short bowings even during slower waltzes. He couldn’t capture long notes, so the voice
of his fiddle was always panting out of breath.
One thing my classical training did give me was a lyrical voice—I practiced to
make the violin sing with vibrato. When I became the first chair of my high school
orchestra, my father proudly took me to a German violin shop in downtown Kansas City
to purchase my own violin. No longer to play rented ones that grew in size as I matured.
The beauties hung in a row by the scroll of their fiddlehead. How to choose?
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“See which voice pleases you, liebchen,” said the white-haired shopkeeper, as he
offered me several in succession. I was embarrassed to play without any notes in front of
me, but finally one resonated with a strong, sweet voice that called to me.
I loved the ebony pegs, the mother-of-pearl circles embedded on the tips, the dark
pumpkin pine on the top and the glossy striped tiger maple on the back and sides. The
bow had an ebony frog with the same mother-of-pearl. It balanced in my hand, the
horsehair white and clean, soon to cake with resin. My father made monthly payments on
that violin, bow, and case for years. The case remained closed during my college years as
I pursued teaching, art, and drama. When my parents brought this prized possession back
to me on the Sanctuary, it was a comfort just to have it again.
Hudson’s short-bowing style worked well for playing chords over two or three
strings. His notes sounded like a bagpipe—fitting for the ancient tunes that emigrated
here from the Scottish highlands. Droning was totally new to me, another thing I couldn’t
do. During a break, I asked Hudson how he learned to fiddle.
“Girl, I reckon I listen so hard, I could jes’ play ‘em. I ain’t never learnt no music.
My daddy and uncles played, so I jes’ listen ’til the tunes was swirlin’ in my head and my
bones.”
We didn’t have a dance caller, so people jigged and stomped while working up a
thirst for another round of beers. Waltzes either got people paired or they wandered off to
the sides to talk. I noticed Larry was wrapped in discussion with one of the Johnson boys
when my neighbor tapped me for a slow dance. A good-looking man with long dark hair,
black eyes, and an unfashionable scrubby shadow on his face. As we shuffled across the
wooden floor, he smiled at me. The beer blew heavy on his breath as he leaned in and
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whispered in my ear. With the music and noise, I didn't think I heard him right and asked
him to repeat what he said.
“You really look like a witch.”
Blood and heat rushed to my face, and I hastened off the dance floor, smarting
from the remark, mortified at my wild curly hair.
He strode towards me, “What’s the matter? Why are you so upset?”
“You said I looked like a witch,” I blurted.
“I meant a witch, as in bewitching,” he said. “Your hair is beautiful. I’ve never
seen it this way.”
I was so flabbergasted, I didn’t know what to say. I could only blush.
Today, hairstyles are accepted according to natural types, curly or straight, with all
kinds of tools and products to optimize our looks. But in the early 1970s, untamed curls
were seen as rebellious. Conforming our curls using a clothes iron or large rollers (even
sleeping in them) was the norm. Straight was the goal, even if it was against its nature.
As I tried to conform myself in my marriage, my curly hair refused to be
completely subdued. My hair was irrepressible, resilient. It had a will of its own.
And I was shocked to learn it was beautiful.
* * *
For my twenty-fifth birthday, I begged for a piano. The idea of a piano brought
back memories of one of my musical theater auditions at the university. After I sang my
number at the piano, Larry both embarrassed and pleased me by applauding
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enthusiastically when nobody claps at auditions. His first gift to me was a record of
“Appalachian Spring,” one of my favorite pieces by Aaron Copland. I used to sing to him
the Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts,” which Copland orchestrated into “Appalachian
Spring.” We also selected the hymn to be played at our wedding as a prelude for our
future life on the Sanctuary.
“Sing that song for me,” Larry would say during our courtship. Besides “Simple
Gifts,” he often requested, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Recorded by Peter,
Paul, and Mary in the Sixties, Roberta Flack’s version made it the song of the year in
1972. I sang it acapella in the car or while we walked together in the woods on the
outskirts of Lawrence. Larry’s hands trembled as he gave me long, slow kisses.
A piano might harkened us back to our courtship. We found an antique upright
Schoenhut for $30 from a young couple who had inherited it from an elderly aunt.
Neither of them played. Larry gathered the Johnson boys, and they loaded it up in the
truck, secured it during the bumpy ride down our lane, and lugged it into our living
room—pushing it in place under the staircase. I chose this interior wall to protect the
soundboard from extreme temperatures.
I spun round and round on the piano stool to adjust the height, its three brass claws
grasping glass globes for the legs. Larry gave them a round of refreshments, and I
grabbed some sheet music and played a lively tune to thank the boys. They stomped and
cheered.
I rubbed my hands along the Schoenhut’s ornate mahogany wood, the curves of
the carved flowers and vines, the fluted legs. Someone had etched a peace symbol in the
keyboard cover. The soundboard, ebony and and ivory keys were in great shape—except
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for one sticky key—but it needed tuning. Her rich, resonant voice was full of the twang
of another century. Perfect for Scott Joplin rags. I had a leather satchel full of old sheet
music. The piano made the house come alive, like an old friend had come to stay.
Piano was my first musical love. I had played it ever since I climbed up on the
bench as a four-year-old, plunking out the sounds I heard my older sister and brother
make. I had already figured out the notes: Cat, Dog, Elephant, Frank, George, Apple,
Bobby, and Cat again. I wanted to take lessons, but mother said I had to wait until I
started school. Later, as long as I was practicing, I could get out of washing dishes.
When visiting Grandma and Grandpa’s farm, I coaxed their off-key upright into
reliving the past by playing their crumbling sheet music of quadrilles, waltzes, and World
War II love songs that admonished, “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but
me.” Framed, color-touched sepia photos of my parents in their early twenties and late
teens smiled down at me from top of their piano—Dad smart in his army uniform and
Mom alluring with her dark curly hair, large blue eyes, and blushing apple cheeks.
Banging out a rag tune in my own living room was cathartic after a fight to flow
out my anger and lift my spirits. Above the piano was a hole punched into the low ceiling
beneath the stairs. It was the size of a fist. My husband had threatened his anger at me,
then thrust it through the dry-wall ceiling instead. I can no longer remember the incident,
but it remained there like an ominous open wound.
At the keyboard I could try to forget. Music was another kind of solace. My
fingers released a confident sassiness in the cocky, syncopated rhythms even though my
small hands had to stretch to reach the chords. Sometimes I’d get the right hand going
only to lose the left hand. When I made mistakes, the next attempts were better.
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Practicing music taught me that persistence was the key. Hearing the transformation
when my two hands were finally in synch was worth the effort. Gliding over the keys in
legato for a waltz calmed and eased my heart. Singing ballads hundreds of years old
resonated my lament with melodies honed to their emotional essence and with lyrics
sadder than my own story.
Music was my constant companion. My sense of music was as natural as birds
singing about their territory and trying to attract a mate. The woods, the wind, the frogs,
the crickets, the meadow, the stream—their harmonies flowed all around and through me.
I so agreed with the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein that “All the sounds of the earth are like
music.”
My mountain dulcimer was crafted out of walnut in Old Forge, New York, and
was fashioned in an hour-glass shape with heart sound-holes. Perfect for accompanying
singing while playing on my lap, it has a sense of intimacy. The word dulcimer comes
from the word dulce, meaning sweet. Underneath the four strings, the long neck had frets
like a guitar. As I slid my left fingers across the long neck, my right hand strummed the
strings with a turkey feather. It droned like Hudson’s fiddle. My voice carried the
melody.
When we first dated, Larry loved to hear me sing acapella, especially the song
made popular by Peter, Paul, and Mary, “the First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”
I could pour all my yearning into the mountain dulcimer. It was a perfect match to
the melancholy love songs of the Appalachians, like “Come All You Fair and Tender
Ladies,” heeding them to “Take warning how you court young men. They’re like the stars
of a summer’s morning. They’ll first appear and then they are gone.” My voice filled the
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room as the words poured from my heart.
I played the dulcimer at my brother’s wedding. I sang the medieval riddle song
about eternal love where the lover gives four perplexing gifts: a cherry without a stone, a
chicken without a bone, a ring with no end, and baby who didn’t cry. How could this be?
They don’t exist. But all is revealed in the last verse: when the cherry is blooming, the
chicken is pipping, the ring is rolling, and the baby is sleeping. Perhaps I could figure out
the riddle of my marriage.
In the Adirondacks, it seemed fitting and timeless to reflect generations of love
and loss, and the shadow and light of my own marital relationship. Many love ballads
were written in a minor key that gave its mournful edge. Sometimes the rhythms were
quick, sometimes slow. Combined with the minor key, the quick rhythms reflected a kind
of hard-won joy that had its roots in sorrow. This made perfect sense to me.
In the 1960s and 1970s—even as “The Times They Are A-changin’ ”—we
experienced a wave of folk music revival. Pete Seeger led the way. Curiously, at the same
time my generation formed a social revolution, we also leaned back to times much earlier
than our grandparents’ through music. Many of Bob Dylan’s early melodies were
borrowed from old folk tunes.
Contra dancing was revived during this time. I attended such a dance at Caroga
Lake with the McLaughlin family. Larry wouldn’t go. The band featured a hammered
dulcimer. I had never heard such an instrument. So different from its simple mountain
cousin, it was shaped like a trapezoid, shorter at the top and wider at the bottom with
small metal tuning pegs on the side. There must have been nearly two dozen strings
crossing two bridges.
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The player struck his instrument with padded hammers that rang the notes,
sounding like somewhere between an old music box and a soft piano. The musician’s
hands flew over the strings. I marveled at how he could find the right notes and not
muddle them. I couldn’t imagine keeping all of them in tune.
This was my first contra dance. We had square-danced in elementary and middle
school. In the 1950s and 1960s, my parents socialized in a square-dance group, the
women wearing layers of stiff petticoats. But contra dancing is much older, with mixed
origins from England and Scotland, and the French court dances of the 1600s and 1700s.
Couples progress up and down lines with precision and timing, starting at the head and
ending at the foot.
A caller described the steps and we practiced beforehand. After a gallantry of
curtseying and bowing, it was a whirling game to end up in the proper place—some of
the steps mirrored backwards as the dance flowed up and down in sync as a communal
effort. For it to work, everyone had to be in their proper place at the right moment.
My hair curled with sweat as I twirled around my experienced partners and
neighbors, twisting and turning while they guided me to the correct position with a slight
nod, hand pressure, or eye glance. I laughed with the sheer joy of the dancing. All the
shadows of the Sanctuary fell away as we twirled with a feeling of grace—right out of
scene in a Jane Austen novel.
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CHAPTER XI
PARTNERSHIP AND BOUNDARIES
“Good eye, this is a first edition in good condition,” Larry said about a book I
picked up.
I had no idea there was a value to a first edition, that it might be collectible. Back
when we were courting in Lawrence, Kansas, Larry and I attended an antique market for
the first time together. He showed me the copyright page, pointing out the pages and dust
jacket were in fine condition, and a desirable book. Like any commodity, it depends on
the provenance, demand, and scarcity of the book to determine its value. I was intrigued.
As a graduate student, Larry started his own natural history book business, selling
duplicates to help purchase other books to resell. He used the profits to collect
antiquarian and rare natural history books. Most antiquarian book dealers got their start
that way. This was another world where Larry would guide and teach me.
After the nature center was well established, we extended our work partnership into
selling out-of-print natural history books. First, I just typed out the list of books on a
mimeograph stencil from index cards Larry had handwritten describing each book’s
condition and price. Then, I cranked off the copies and mailed them to our customers. I
sometimes drew on the stencil to illustrate the outside of the catalogue, such as an ermine
weasel making tracks out of its snowy den.
Next, I learned to describe the books accurately as to the correct edition and
condition. A book dealer’s reputation is based on how accurate the descriptions of
condition and edition are rendered. In secondhand books, any interior markings,
autographs, gift signatures, soiling, mold, spotting, bent pages, cracked hinges, book
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jacket wear must be noted. The condition classification (poor, fair, good, fine) must not
be overstated. The customer must be favorably surprised, not underwhelmed.
I graduated to pricing the books. Ultimately, I could help purchase whole libraries
and discern which titles we could sell, and what to add to Larry’s collection. We
subscribed to the bible of the antiquarian book industry, AB Bookman’s Weekly,
published for an international community of book dealers. We read the scholarly articles
about rare and out-of-print books and scanned the Books Wanted section for titles we
could quote and sell. No computers then, of course, only typewriters and our memory and
knowledge.
I had no idea then, this would someday lead to another career for me as the
associate publisher of AB Bookman’s Weekly.
Book hunting was always a fun outing for us as we discovered local book dealers.
One of our favorites was K. Dorn Books in Gloversville, New York. Kenny sold all types
of subjects from his home—gardening, science fiction, military history. You name it, he
had it. Once we became regular customers, he alerted us of his latest acquisitions of
natural history books.
Kenny puffed away on his cigar, smoothed his slicked-back hair, and regaled us
with local gossip or his latest book finds while we perused the tightly packed shelves—
thousands of books—built into every nook and cranny of his parlor and living room. His
wife helped notate our stacks and stacks of purchases.
As we beelined for the natural history books, we worked separately at different
ends. Often I would call out, “Larry, look what I found!” Perhaps it was a copy of Bats of
America, then recently out of print and in great demand, so valued more than $125, but
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Kenny marked it at $10. We had at least three customers who wanted it. We gave each
other a wide-eyed look of excitement. Or Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest
Thompson Seton with its 200 drawings.
“Good find. Put it in the pile.” Larry said.
We never knew for sure what we would find—it felt like a treasure hunt. After we
finished with the natural history books, we lingered over other topics of interest. These
out-of-print books taught us how to train horses, use old tools, roll small logs under
heavy, hand-hewn beams for the extension on our house, keep bees, and gather maple
sap.
I also started to collect women’s history with first-hand accounts of pioneer
women, as well as myths and legends I had loved as a child.
Even though long-distance calls were expensive then, we could expect calls from
collectors as soon as our catalogue hit their mailboxes. So I stuck close to the office at
that time, because answering machines had not yet been commercialized for personal use.
If you weren’t near a phone, you didn’t get the call. Repeat customers ordered from all
over the United States, Canada, and Central and South America. I loved talking to the
private collectors, libraries, and other book dealers. One dealer asked me to design a
cover for his catalogue. In 1974, he published my pen-and-ink drawing of Flora as a
fawn.
I can’t remember a time when we disagreed over the books. Larry liked teaching
me and welcomed my help, and I enjoyed learning and making discoveries. We built up
the business with a collaborative system for organizing, pricing, cataloguing, and
shipping the books to our customers.
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Antiquarian books became my passion as well as Larry’s.
***
I forget how we were introduced, but Larry and I met Paul Bransom, the dean of
American animal artists, at his summer home and studio on Canada Lake. Born in 1885,
he was a living legend for his body of work illustrating covers of Saturday Evening Post
and hundreds of stories in magazines, and more than forty books such as, Call of the
Wild, Argosy of Fables, Animals of American History, and Wind in the Willows. Over
dinner, Bransom told me when he was just seventeen years-old, he spent all his free time
at the Bronx Zoo sketching the animals, especially the big cats. He was a self-taught
artist. Eventually, the director of the zoo gave him a studio near the lion house.
“Such a privilege to have close access to sketch live animals,” Bransom said.
Paul thought the best wildlife illustrator was Charles Livingston Bull, whom he met
at the Bronx Zoo. Larry especially enjoyed seeing his book collection. Bransom showed
us a rare edition of his illustrated Wind in the Willows, and how the plates of his
illustrations for Call of the Wild got worn with all the reprintings.
At his studio on Canada Lake, he had an early photo of his beautiful wife Grace
Bond, about the time he first met her when she was an actress on Broadway in the early
1900s. He clearly stilled adored her even after death. He told me about the magic of New
York streets and Broadway theaters when they were first illuminated with Edison’s light
bulbs, instead of gas lanterns and candles. He remembered the “night’s shock of light, the
gasp of the crowds.” He told me about traveling across country out West, before there
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were roads. About the wonder of his life filled with love, adventure, art, and artists. He
had left home when he was thirteen with only an eighth-grade education.
When my brother and I went back for another visit, he was so kind to us young
artists, even though his eyes were beginning to fail. Paul offered us to pick one of his
charcoal drawings as a gift. Danny picked a rhinoceros. I picked a wolverine guarding her
cubs. He was surprised a young woman would pick a wolverine.
“Oh, I love her fierce courage, and how she is protecting her young ones,” I said.
He smiled and said, “Well then, that makes it a perfect choice. I hope you like it as
much as I enjoyed drawing it.”
***
Larry was a tracker and hunter—it’s another way he knew the forest and the
animals. As a child, he escaped his parents’ fighting and his father’s abuse by playing in
the woods with a makeshift set of bow and arrows, pretending to be his Choctaw
ancestors. To hunt well is to know the animals well.
The oldest cave paintings depict hunting with a spiritual reverence for the animals
and the life they gave to us humans. The hunt was hard won. With death came life. And
life wasn’t wasted—every part of the animal was used. The animal’s gift was celebrated
in gratitude as the sanctity of life passed from animals to humans. It wasn’t trophy
hunting, but survival. The paintings show a sense of reciprocity and compliance between
humans and animals in mutual benefit.
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That sense of respect seemed lost around the Sanctuary. During hunting season, we
watched a parade of weekend hunters from the city with their rifles poking through the
windows as they drove up the dusty roads, eager to shoot anything from the road. When
Larry patrolled the Sanctuary, he once found the remains of a gutted doe, a fawn fetus left
to rot. We learned some of the locals were selling venison to city restaurants. Larry and
Mark patrolled long into the night and caught one poacher on the Sanctuary, only to later
find evidence of more illegal hunting by the same poacher to help pay fines.
After the nature center was closed and hunting season started, Larry also took time
to go hunting off the Sanctuary. With the demise of natural predators, Larry preached at
the nature center that humans were needed to help keep the balance—especially with
deer. They can overpopulate and destroy their environment if not kept in balance.
The fall hunting season was not a safe time to be in the woods. Mark told us stories
about how he found carcasses of deer riddled with bullets, the meat inedible, or bucks
bound to the hood of a car with part of it blasted away. Both he and Larry were excellent
hunters and could kill a deer with one shot—not only because of their prowess with guns,
but because they took the time and effort to position themselves through knowing the
deer’s habits and territory, tracking, or building blinds.
I wasn’t against their kind of respectful hunting, and I wrapped, froze, and cooked
the venison for dinner. I learned to make venison stew with vegetables from our garden,
pan-fry venison steaks, and broil roasts. Larry had the hide tanned in Gloversville, and
sometimes I sewed the smooth, split leather into bags, lined with soft corduroy.
But one morning, Larry called over the walkie-talkie urging me to come quickly,
call the Johnsons, bring Sonny. When we got to the location, Larry stood over a felled
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buck—clearly within the confines of the Sanctuary. But it had not been poached by a
trespasser. Larry had shot it. I couldn’t fathom it. No, no, no—anywhere else, not here!
My shock numbed me, but the heat of betrayal raged through me.
“How could you, Larry?” I blurted out. “Who are you? We protect this Sanctuary!
Over my dead body you ever do this again.” His eyes mirrored my look of horror and
disgust. He swore he wouldn’t, and I decided to believe him. How could I live with him
otherwise?
Who was this man? Who was I? How could I bear yet another secret of shame?
There he was again—Shame—shaking his bony finger at me, stabbing it into my chest,
and jumping onto my back weighing me down. How could we face the nature center
congregation with a straight face and peaceful heart? We had eight months before
opening a new season of programs. Eight months to bury this guilt. Wasn’t I now a coconspirator? I was mated to the fox guarding the hen house, not the guardian. Where
were our boundaries? The boundaries on the Sanctuary that posted, “No Trespassing, No
Hunting.” The boundaries of arguing without hitting or kicking, of discussing differences
with dignity and respect. The lines were crossed yet again.
I had a kinship with that deer.
My younger self knew we weren’t quitters in our family. There weren’t any
divorces in our family, and she didn’t want to be the first. Failure was not an option.
Wasn’t marriage a commitment to “for better or for worse”? She was too ashamed to
admit she had been abused, so she couldn’t let her family know—perhaps they would
blame her. She began to believe when Larry said it was her fault. It usually would blow
over.
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Anyway, Larry was gone most of the time, working in the barn to build another
exhibit, fixing a vehicle, hiking the sanctuary, shoring up the trail, replacing planks in the
trail bridge or catwalk, exploring the Adirondacks with Mark, going fishing with the
Johnsons or the Rasbachs, getting supplies in town. Just gone. Sometimes I knew where,
but most of the time I didn’t.
Oddly, being separate most of the time most likely helped us stay together.
Sometimes, I’d be eager to hear his returning footsteps—other times, I would dread them.
One time when he took a flight out west on an outdoor hiking trip to teach natural history
to his college benefactor’s grandson, I fantasized he would die in a plane crash.
When Larry returned, he was exuberant about another possible trip.
“We met some guides out there who can track mountain lions. They invited us to
hunt them next time.”
I stared at him in disbelief.
“You preach at the nature center we shouldn’t hunt predators like wolves and
mountain lions. Who are you?”
“I don’t know sometimes,” he said.
“Do you really want to hunt them?”
“No, I guess I just got caught up in the moment.”
***
Surely Larry would change, I thought. Just like in the fairy tales, like in Beauty
and the Beast.
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My younger self never once saw herself as passive. In her family, she had always
been encouraged to speak up or ask questions. Her parents had never hit each other and
never beat her. As her mother would say about spanking her children, a typical discipline
in the 1950s: “Spank Danny, he’d cry. Spank Paula, she’d look confused. Spank Rebecca,
she’d get madder than hell.”
So where did that anger go? She swallowed it, walked it, sang it, harnessed that
energy to keep herself busy.
Sometimes she would walk into the forest near the stream and cry out her anger.
She’d lean her back on a tamarack or beech tree and feel it draw the despair out of her. Or
she’d curl up on the star moss and feel their soft caress as they wiped away her tears. The
Little Sprite Creek would murmur soothing words, reminding her to let go, let go, let go.
She imagined the water flowing through her body, washing away the toxins from her
anger turned inward. She’d breathe in the earthy richness of the woods and feel grounded
again, as if the earth had soaked up her heavy sorrow. At long last she would be able to
hear the flute notes of the wood thrush calling her to take joy, and she’d rise up and stand
in a shaft of light, feeling the warmth on her face and letting the light fill her heart.
***
Larry never did explain himself about killing the deer on the Sanctuary, and some
part of my dream died that day.
“Why don’t you just leave?” is a question raised by so many who want to help
their friends or family members in abusive relationships. I was Alice falling down the
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rabbit hole—clinging to her dream and excuses that would get more twisted as time wore
on.
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CHAPTER XII
SWEET PROMISE OF SPRING
We were wrapped in another deep Adirondack winter. Time suspended in white.
For endless months, strata of snow and ice had piled so high, we couldn’t see outside our
windows. Trees popped and snapped in the minus-28ºF air. The wind moaned with more
frozen cargo. The snow on the roof and the snowdrifts on the ground finally met,
smothering the house. We might as well have lived in an igloo on the Arctic Circle.
Spring was a foreign country.
The short walk from our house to the nature center took arduous preparation with
layers: silk long underwear, liner socks under thick woolen ones, high turtleneck and
flannel shirt, wool sweater and twill pants, perhaps a padded coverall, a hooded, goosedown jacket, felt-lined rubber boots, wool mittens or leather gloves, a cable-knit stocking
cap and a knit scarf covering our faces below our eyes. Larry and I shuffled outside like
mummies.
For trips to the nearest village, we had to snowplow our driveway and down
Belden Corners Road until we got to Highway 29 that snaked three miles to Dolgeville.
We shopped at Zipp’s Hardware and a small grocery whenever we came to town. In the
winter, we bought three-weeks’ worth of food at a dimly lit grocery, so like the store my
grandparents started in the 1920s and owned for fifty years.
I stepped back in time whenever I entered the dark store, letting my eyes adjust
before I stopped at the worn wooden counter. An ornate antique brass register reflected
the shaded light bulb, swinging like a pendulum whenever I creaked in. The smell of
fresh coffee beans, oranges, and grains mingled with decades of musty odors seeping out
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of the old building. Wooden shelves, crammed with canned and dry goods, climbed all
the way to the high ceiling like an interior skyscraper of food. My neck bent to my back
as I scanned upwards while the snow from my boots puddled on the plank floor.
The two elderly owners’ eyes lit up to see this young woman toting her long list.
They were generous with smiles although shy with words. I don’t recall their names now,
but the butcher was stocky and his belly strained his stained white linen coat. The
bespectacled grocer with a silver mustache was thin and wiry in his white-bibbed apron
that tied in front. He used a ten-foot pole like a long-limbed crab to pinch items on the
top shelves as I pointed out what I wanted, sometimes taking a few efforts—“No, sorry,
that one.” He had a deft way of flicking a box of cereal off the shelf, tumbling it down
into his wrinkled hands.
The butcher quickly cut and wrapped my orders with paper and string—stew beef,
thin-sliced liver, ground beef, Cornish game hens, whole chickens. They bagged my
groceries, donned their plaid winter coats, and helped me load up the Jeep, lingering until
my husband met me from the hardware store. We could have gone farther to a well-lit
chain grocery store in the Mohawk Valley, but at that time, it would have been out of step
with the rhythm of our lives.
Stocking my cabinets, refrigerator, and freezer with an abundance of food always
made me feel rich. Perhaps it was because I was born during apple-picking and harvest
season. Even in summer and fall, winter was ever-present with preparation by picking
and freezing vegetables from our garden and cutting firewood.
Our two antique wood stoves came alive in the cold months. The tall, Round Oak
parlor stove with chrome trim, metal acorns for hinges and embossed, ornate oak leaves
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commanded attention in our living room. When it was fired up, a sweet, smoky scent
infused our hair and clothing as our winter perfume. We adjusted the heat simply by how
close we sat to the stove.
The second stove became the heart of my slate-blue gingham kitchen, a five-footwide gray Glenwood with a bread-warmer shelf on top. An old copper tea kettle whistled
shrilly whenever it got steamed up. Antique hooks pried open the flat round lids and
pokers stoked the fire. We were always conscious of keeping the fire going. A copper
boiler full of pine kindling was at the ready with a stack of newspapers and matches.
I loved pounding the dough on my antique cherry table until the air bubbles
smoothed out. The yeasty aroma filled the kitchen as the covered dough rose in the
warming shelf and our mouths watered as it baked in the belly of the stove, the venison
stew infused with our summer vegetables and herbs simmering on the top burner.
You think these times will last forever, that they will never end. Those were my
bread-baking and soup-making days—days that would never come again, when time was
slow and the house smelled like a home.
***
Once a year or so the trustees came out for a day visit. One banker showed up
during the winter wearing a three-piece suit. To his surprise, Larry grabbed him some
jeans and a flannel shirt and sweater, and said, “Come on. We’re going snowshoeing.”
Larry taught him how to tie on a pair of leather-webbed snowshoes shaped in
wood like a fat fish with a short, single tail. I was never able to walk in these snowshoes,
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always clumsy, stepping on the other one and falling. Snowshoes help distribute the
weight, so you don’t sink into the snow. If you can master them, they help you glide over
the snow. I could only imagine what Larry had in store for the trustee, a newbie, and I
shook my head.
Hours later, they returned, unlaced the ties, knocked the snow off, and set the
snowshoes by the door.
The trustee was ruddy-faced and sweating, but exhilarated by the experience and
surely relieved it was done. Larry slapped him on the back in camaraderie. The trustee
had a survivor’s positive outlook and was self-effacing about his ability to showshoe
when I asked, “How was it?”
“Larry clearly wasn’t going to turn back until I got the hang of it,” he said as
Larry nodded and grinned. “So I had to connect my wits to my feet. But after several
pitfalls, somehow, I managed.”
Larry handed him a navy bandana to wipe away his sweat.
“It was a winter wonderland out there,” he continued. He appreciated Larry’s
guidance, spotting tracks of deer, raccoon, and fox. He was struck by the wild beauty and
Larry’s agility and expertise. “Larry can see the invisible. By myself, I never would have
seen the tracks or the tufts of fur on the branches. He’s amazing—I could hardly keep up
with him.”
I had Cornish game hen, green beans, and wild rice smothered in herbs and
mushroom-wine sauce waiting for them. They downed their meal, asking for seconds,
while the men swapped sightings I imagined would become the stuff of stories down in
Philadelphia.
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***
Our road during the coldest days of winter kept its layers of ice and snow even
though we topped off the latest snowstorm’s deposit with our own snowplow. Perfect
conditions for driving the antique sleigh. During the fall, we had painted the one-seater
cutter a slate blue with pale blue embellishments and runners. We had the seat
upholstered in black naugahyde in the Victorian tuck-and-button style. The dashboard’s
two iron eagle heads perched at each corner. A whip rack stood ready at the driver’s side,
and an ornate iron railing swooped into a fish tail on the open side to welcome a
passenger. The sleigh looked like she had sprung from a Currier and Ives antique print,
ready for a new life. Shady had done so well with the sulky, we knew the sleigh would be
easy and less noisy.
In winter, the farrier pounded in special shoes for Shady to help him grip the
snow. Larry harnessed Shady, backed him into the shafts, and hitched him to the sleigh. I
brought over the antique brass sleigh bells and fastened them around Shady’s middle.
They fit just fine. We had already introduced him to the sound earlier. Every time he
moved, Shady’s ears twisted to listen to their merry chime.
I put on my brother’s gift, the black Persian lamb coat he had brought me from
Afghanistan in 1968. The outside was a dark charcoal suede, embroidered with royal blue
paisley and exotic leaf designs. The inside black wool framed the outside suede and
lofted an inch thick—as curly as my hair when left in its natural state. The coat must have
weighed seven pounds and hugged me like a bear. I had put it away after Mrs. Richards’
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first admonishment, but today was a special day. I donned the furry black wool hat that
matched my antique bearskin lap robe and muff. I was ready.
Larry held onto Shady as I climbed in. I took the reins, clicked my tongue, and
slapped his rump, “Giddy-up, Shady.” He pranced as the snow fell on us, his shoes
digging in, the big flakes melting on his thick winter coat as the bells jingled and the
curved metal runners swooshed down the lane. The Rasbach children cheered us on as we
drove past, holding off their snowball fight. Larry scurried before us to take our picture.
My cheeks were rosy with the cold and excitement. I laughed as the snowflakes tickled
my nose and eyelashes. It could have been a scene right out of the movie, Dr. Zhivago.
***
Eventually, the frozen stiffness began to soften. Sunlight sparkled on the frostcurtained windows. The ice-packed road began to melt and within a week would turn to
slush. Glass-sheathed trees shimmered in the sunlight. The amazing light beckoned.
Could spring really be here at last?
Outside, coatless and without a hat, I was freed from my cocoon. The cheerful
warmth of the bright sun thawed my veins. My eyes squinted from the snow glare. The
brilliant blue sky was surreal in a white-and-black world. Sugar maples graced each side
of our road. Larry noticed a slight oozing out of the tree trunks, which meant the sap was
rising.
Maple sap gathering time had arrived!
Larry harnessed Shady to the antique sledge, a simple wooden platform with
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runners for hauling goods over the snow. Shady shook his black mane, stamped his front
hoof, and snorted in the brisk warmth. With a giddy-up click of my tongue and a firm
whoa, Shady started and stopped at every maple tree on both sides of the lane as we
drilled in the antique spigots and hung buckets to catch the sap.
Winter’s long silence had broken. Shady’s ears twitched at the timpani of sounds
behind us, a syncopated rhythm of drips. Each sap bucket sounded a different note as it
filled. The orchestration was startling—it was as if winter had frozen us deaf and the
thaw had made us hear again.
Using an antique yoke to balance two buckets, back and forth we toddled from the
trees to the sledge, where we poured the sap into large metal milk canisters. A cord of dry
wood was stacked against the sap house. Shady hauled the clanging canisters to the sap
house where a wood-burning stove was fired up and smoke spewed out the chimney.
All day we poured the golden liquid into a huge kettle and the sap sang as it
boiled. The Johnson boys played cards for hours while we watched it condense into
syrup. We breathed in the tacky steam. The elixir crystallized on the window and our
faces, clothes, and hair. The cards stuck to our fingers, and even our laughter felt sticky in
our throats.
After it thickened, we poured the molten sugar over the snow for a maple snow
cone. The dark amber treat was worth our sore, aching muscles.
We celebrated Larry’s birthday during this time of promise when the bitter cold
warmed, or was it false hope? For one week, we bottled the honeyed time, so precious
and fleeting—a brief interlude when the awakening earth revealed her inner sweetness.
Just when we had fooled ourselves spring had come, the cold blast returned. All
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thoughts of warmth vanished, lost in furious flurries for another six weeks. Until spring
fully emerged, we were wrapped in a silent, white world again.
Only the maple syrup poured a secret promise of spring on our morning pancakes.
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CHAPTER XIII
INDEPENDENCE
1976–1977
A trip to Cooperstown awakened a dormant desire. As we passed by the Fenimore
Art Museum, a sign displayed “Cooperstown Graduate Program in Folklore.” I’d always
wanted to go back to school. My mind lit up at the idea of getting my masters on such a
wonderful topic. Perhaps I could explore the folklore of animals. The topic of folklore fit
so well into the Adirondacks and could complement our work on the Sanctuary. At the
nature center programs, we often had to debunk the myths about animal behavior people
believed but weren’t true, like bats wanting to make a nest in your hair.
“Larry, what do you think? Isn’t this a wonderful opportunity?” I said, as I told
him about my idea.
“Are you crazy? It’s much too far, about forty miles away. I’ll just be pulling your
car out of the damn ditch during the winter. I won’t get anything else done. Forget it,
you’re not doing this.” Larry said.
It had never occurred to me Larry wouldn’t support this—after all he had his
masters and had nearly finished his doctorate. I had helped get the nature center
successfully started. I could help out in between studies. I still had lots of details to flesh
out. But going back to school ignited me. I just wanted to pursue the idea to see where it
led.
Larry had overruled me on interviewing for a job in Gloversville working with
Down Syndrome adults where the wife of one of our staff worked. I was all dressed
up for the interview, putting on my makeup in the bathroom, when he said, “You’re not
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going to work with those crazies. Just do what I say.”
He went on and on. His words blur in my mind, but not his tone that ran over me
like a truck. When he walked away, I looked in the mirror, took out my hair rollers, then
brushed and tamed my hair with angry strokes until it was smooth and straight with a
slight curl at the end, considering whether to still go. But I just took a hard look at myself
and dropped it from sheer emotional exhaustion. I called Jane and told her I wasn’t going.
I would save the fight for something I was more passionate about.
I sensed Larry didn’t want me to be too far away, out of his domain and control,
or have an independent job. But this time I was determined.
I called the school to find out what I needed to be accepted. I learned a graduate
record exam was needed. Oh, no, I had been out of school for five years. My heart
plummeted, but I didn’t want to be defeated before I even tried. I looked into places
where I could take the GRE. Albany was about eighty miles away, Utica about thirty-five
miles.
“I’ll make it so your Corvair won’t work,” Larry threatened. “Then you can’t go
anywhere.”
For one dollar, my parents had sold me the blue Corvair I drove as a high school
student to my vocal and violin recitals and competitions. It meant more to me than just
transportation.
I checked on buses to Boston. I could stay with my brother and take the test there.
I made the arrangements. A friend would take me to the bus station.
“I’ll break your violin if you go.” Larry said.
I took my violin with me.
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“Don’t defy me,” he said. We’re done. I’m divorcing you.”
I shook getting on the bus, but I had to do this for myself. Even if it didn’t make
sense, even if it meant divorce. I was tired of being made small, intimidated, or punished.
Looking back I don’t know how I mustered the courage to step onto that bus, but going
back to school was a huge pull I couldn’t refuse.
I changed buses in Albany, lugging my suitcase and violin with me. I hugged my
violin the entire way. When I arrived in Boston, I had no idea if I could ever go back to
the Sanctuary. My brother and his bride received me with such kindness. They offered to
let me stay with them until I figured it out or got a job.
I studied a week for the GRE, but between my emotional state and the years since
graduating from school, I had zero confidence. I couldn’t sleep. While studying in their
quiet Quincy neighborhood, every sound seemed amplified. The occasional street sounds
boomed, a door bell startled me. I had been so cocooned in winter silence at the
Sanctuary.
Taking the GRE was overwhelming. Disheartened and defeated after the test, I
knew I hadn’t done well. What had I been thinking? What do I do now? I had painted
myself into a corner with only enough will to get on that bus and take the test. I trudged
around their neighborhood, the bare trees as naked as my confidence, the clouds as gray
as my heart, trying to imagine a new life here with the trees budding, the flowers
blooming—but seeing nothing. My throat gasped for air between sobs.
When Larry called me later that day, I was surprised at his question, “When are
you coming home?”
“You said we were getting a divorce.”
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“I didn’t mean it. I miss you.”
I went back.
What I still wanted most from our marriage was children. I was twenty-seven
years old. In that time and region, I was considered an older mother, and we shouldn’t
push this to later. I reminded Larry about his wish of a golden, curly-haired boy. He
nodded, smiled, then hugged me. What a relief to choose something we both agreed on.
A boulder fell from my shoulders. And what woman hasn’t felt that a baby will somehow
bring her and her husband closer? Or will make their marriage better?
During that spring and summer, it was as if we were courting again. Larry gave
me a bouquet of meadow flowers. A new love and purpose rekindled between us. We
took slow walks down the trail. And it was as if the Sanctuary’s carpeting moss, rushing
creek, whispering trees, and slanting sunbeams rejoiced with us.
***
In 1976, the Mohawk Valley prepared for the bicentennial of the Declaration of
Independence. The Dolgeville bicentennial event planners came to our house to ask me to
write and direct a musical scene, because I had earlier produced a community variety
show at the high school. Larry protested my involvement then and again on this occasion,
but I said yes despite his objections—to help celebrate America’s Bicentennial would be
a delightful way to bring the community together. Inspired by the book, Drums Along the
Mohawk, a collection of American colonial songs, and a book of dances from the 1700s, I
created musical vignettes featuring farmers who had taken refuge in forts along the
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Mohawk River during the Revolutionary War.
I delved into my domain of music and theater as we rehearsed for weeks. I was in
my element and eagerly left the house to practice with the cast. Each time I got ready to
leave, Larry protested and tried to keep me from going—suggesting a task I hadn’t
completed, belittling me, or making fun of the whole enterprise. But he realized the
whole village would know if he barred me from it. By the time I left the house, I was
emotionally drained. I took heart planning and assigning musical numbers among the
talented Dolgeville high school students, teachers, families, church members, and
business owners.
When performance day came, the high school auditorium was filled—it seemed
the whole village had turned out. The cast and I were overjoyed as we readied for the
performance. I loved working with them. From four year-olds to seventy, we had had
such fun practicing the songs and dances. The lights dimmed as the emcee announced us.
The spotlights followed the cast as we approached the stage through the audience with
our few belongings, singing all the while. The curtains pulled back as we settled into new
quarters at the fort on the stage.
In his resonate pulpit voice, Reverend Miller told stories about John André,
Benedict Arnold, and the heroics of General Washington (no Tories in this group). Three
generations of Hungarian violinists, all named Lukas 14th, 15th, and 16th, played tunes
of the period and quadrilles as we danced on the stage. The cast sang popular colonial
ballads. The audience applauded the folklore, history, and the sacrifice made personal by
our music and dramatization.
I sang, “Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier,” a woman lamenting that her love has left
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her to be a soldier. For the love of him, she would sell her spinning wheel to buy him a
sword of steel. And as the song poured out to the audience where my parents,
grandmother, and Larry were sitting, I also sang to the child who was growing inside me.
A rabbit test at the hospital lab confirmed I was pregnant.
The cast marched out of the auditorium to the beat of a snare drum as the
audience sang a rousing “Yankee Doodle” with us, and we all cheered, “Huzzah, Huzzah,
Huzzah!”
***
The coming baby became my first priority. I would no longer be able to give the
horses the attention I once did, and I couldn’t imagine riding while the baby grew larger
inside me. My farrier was proud of my training skills and had some customers who
wanted me to train their horses to pull a sulky or sleigh, but I shook my head. Shasta also
would be sold back to her original owner.
As I groomed Shady, I promised I would find him a good home. I would miss his
nickering, his listening to me, our training together, our rides across the woods and drives
down the lane. Shady had taught me courage and confidence. We were a team. And once
more, I was letting go a part of me that would never come again.
A young, retired policeman who had been wounded in the leg wanted a gentle
horse who could pull a cart. He visited us several times. I liked his manner with Shady,
and Shady seemed to take to him. Finally, the day came for him to load Shady. I stroked
Shady’s neck, breathed into his nostrils, and thanked him.
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“Don’t forget me,” I murmured.
Shady nudged me and nickered.
I had to turn away. I could no longer see.
***
As my belly began to swell, Larry and I purchased 18-plus acres near the
Sanctuary in Oppenheim—less than two miles from our house. Larry convinced me this
purchase would be a great way to help pay for our children’s education by harvesting
select trees and selling firewood. We hiked often into the hardwood and pine forest where
we would one day build a cottage. We left tracks in the snow as we cut off dead tree
limbs with a chain saw, split and chopped the wood, loaded it into the truck, and stacked
it in cords in the barn. We sold extra firewood to others. Processing the wood warmed us
many times before we actually burned it. I felt strong and happy. The woods seemed to
share my joy in how we were preparing for the future benefit of our children.
With the pregnancy and weight gain, my fingers also swelled, and my wedding
ring no longer fit. I had to take off my wedding ring and put it away for safe keeping.
***
Sometime between the winter and spring of 1977, the trustees told us, as
stipulated by the estate, they were renaming the Sanctuary in honor of the benefactor’s
mother, Florence Jones Reineman. We realized Mrs. Richards would be upset, because
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we had signs everywhere as Beaversprite Sanctuary and Nature Center. Beaversprite
would henceforth be reserved solely for Mrs. Richards’ house and her live beaver exhibit.
I routered new signs and worked at designing a new logo. I was near the end of
my pregnancy and welcomed when a nature center visitor, a professional branding artist,
volunteered to donate a design. But it was too much like the ecology logo, so with a rush
of hormonal tears, I started from scratch. The trustees approved my new design: a black
silhouette of trail hikers under a green tree, a deer bounding toward them, and a chevron
of geese flying above in a blue sky. A band of yellow encircled the image with slanting
sun rays running diagonally across the scene.
As we had expected, this news did not sit well with Mrs. Richards, and her hard
feelings spilled over onto Larry and the nature center, creating a permanent rift. Larry and
the staff still helped maintain her captive beaver by chopping down poplar branches for
the beaver to eat. But when he returned to the nature center, he seemed so aggravated by
Mrs. Richards, he threatened to put a dead animal down her water well. It was all just big
talk, but the thought seemed to cheer him up.
That same year, unbeknownst to us, Mrs. Richards published a book,
Beaversprite: My Years Building an Animal Sanctuary. In the book, she mentioned
nothing about the Florence Jones Reineman Sanctuary and the agreement to preserve
beavers after her death, or the good work of the nature center. She made it seem like
nothing of her work would be left as a living legacy. That saddened and vexed me.
***
Rebuilding our house took nearly two years. Larry and the staff did all the work.
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We started in April 1975 and finished in March 1977. Our enlarged house covered in
cedar shakes seemed like a palace compared to the cramped gray house I had first seen.
After we built the roof and framed the new part (when Athena couldn’t yet fly), we had to
gut the old part, because they discovered the floor beams were rotting. We excavated a
worn bit of newspaper deciphered as possibly dating 1839 or 1889.
While they worked to insert beams and rebuild the floor, the guys climbed a
ladder from the dirt floor basement to answer phone calls from the kitchen wall. Inside,
our house had turned into a cavern. During this time, I had to wash dishes in the bathtub,
and we slept in a trailer parked near the house.
To make the walls straight, they had to build a new wall within the old crooked
wall, rather than tear the old house down. I ended up with two deep windows that held
three glass shelves to showcase my blooming Christmas cactus, spider plant, and other
houseplants. Especially the miniature African violets that came from the world-famous
Lyndon Lyon’s greenhouse in Dolgeville, one of my favorite places to treat myself with
ruffled colors of amethyst, aubergine, fuchsia, and periwinkle. Mr. Lyons had generously
donated hardy Canadian rose bushes to line our driveway. During the summer, their scent
wafted towards the house.
We added an office on the side, the closest entrance to the driveway that snaked to
the barn, and the outside door we used most. Next to the entrance, a louvered closet door
opened to coats and boots. In the 1970s, you didn’t paint the walls, you wallpapered
them. We papered the office walls with a chartreuse plaid and placed the glass-topped
desk behind a half wall with built-in bookshelves on the side walls. Here’s where I
scheduled and mailed programs, wrote quarterly reports, typed and labeled book
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catalogues, and wrapped books for shipping.
Our old living room became our kitchen. And what a spacious, glorious kitchen.
We wallpapered the kitchen with slate-blue gingham textured like cloth. We installed the
gray enameled Glenwood wood-burning cook stove on one side and a modern stove on
the other side behind a wall that formed the front entrance with space for ever-muddy or
snowy boots. Larry found an old door with beveled glass for windows for the front door.
I refinished the round antique cherry table with its spooled legs as our dining table. Larry
re-caned the seats of old cherry chairs with tiger maple backs. Placed in the kitchen
corner, here’s where we ate our meals, Larry usually keeping on his stocking cap despite
fussing and protests from our visiting mothers.
We installed modern, beech cabinets stained like cherry, including tall ones that
became a pantry, and gray linoleum flooring that imitated stones and pebbles. I put in
flowered splash tiles above the stainless sink and under my kitchen window garden. An
antique birds-eye maple rolling pin hung on the wall, a Christmas present from Larry.
Between the garden windows hung a round clock with birds in place of numbers, my gift
to Larry. The kitchen looked like a happy place.
A backroom to the side end of the kitchen became our laundry room with a
picture window looking out toward the maple sap house.
Facing the back meadow and woods and beyond the kitchen was all new space,
nearly twice as large as the old front part. Now we walked into an expansive living room
with ceilings lofting about eighteen feet and light streaming in from the uncurtained
windows. Hand-hewn beech beams from another barn supported the ceiling. A huge bowwindow looked west toward the meadow, forest, and sunsets. Six-foot windows gazed
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north toward the nature center. To the left of the entrance to the living room tucked my
piano under the stairs leading to the second floor.
To the right of the living room entrance was the Round Oak wood-burning parlor
stove. It had acorns for hinges and swirls of oak leaves, designed to throw off more heat.
I had laid some of the brick for the pallet and the backside. Larry chevroned old barnsiding in a herringbone pattern as paneling for the back wall adjacent to the kitchen.
Here, he decorated the wall with his collection of old tools. Surrounding the windows and
stairs, we wallpapered using a historical design with large pale flowers against a black
background. An antique Samuel Adams walking spinning-wheel stood in the right-hand
corner—the wheel about four- to five-feet tall.
This corner is where our ten-foot Christmas tree would stand, decorated with
miniature Steiff animal ornaments I bought from the Dyche Museum Gift Shop in
Kansas. Nearby, my grandma’s old rocking chair would soothe my children to sleep
while they nursed. Opposite in the left-hand corner was my antique oak secretary desk
with glass-covered book shelves. Here’s where I transformed my pen-and-ink sketch of
Flora hiding in the brambles into birth announcements, surrounded by the lovely light
from the windows. Such light—so different from our dark, gray house.
Two golden tweed, high-backed, seven-foot couches faced each other near the
parlor stove—long enough for Larry to stretch out comfortably. The pine tongue-andgroove floor cast a golden sheen on the room. A stained-glass window graced the back
door to a short deck.
Between the back door and the bottom of the stair case, you could walk into our
bedroom, papered with rust-colored tiny paisley and stripes. Here’s where we placed the
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crib my parents bought us. On the inner side was the louvered closet doors. The outer
side had built-in book shelves. One day, this room would become our children’s
playroom when we all moved upstairs to sleep.
The stairs walked up along the expansive ceiling and had one landing over the
piano. You stepped upstairs into a central library with dark green painted shelves and
tartan plaid wallpaper. Here was Larry’s finest collection of natural history books, his
Ernest Thompson Seton, his first editions. No windows would fade these books. To the
right at the end was a bathroom with tiny yellow flowers. To the adjacent right of the
library was a bedroom waiting for a child. It had a loft with a ladder for playing with
friends. We would wait to wallpaper this room until we knew the sex of our baby.
To the top left of the library was the bedroom over the living room. It had an
ethnic design print, ready for a guest. Down a few stairs from this bedroom and adjacent
to the library would eventually become our bedroom when we moved upstairs. Under the
eaves, closets and storage space ran parallel along either side of the house.
I was totally invested in designing and decorating the house. We finished all of
this when I was seven months pregnant. We would welcome our new baby into a
spacious, sunlit house. The old house had a new life, and so did we.
***
To prepare for the birth, Larry and I took Lamaze classes, although he wasn’t so
sure about the technique. “Huff and Puff,” he called it. Like most new mothers, I was
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confident I would ace the breathing and pushing when the time came. My skin stretched
until I thought I would burst. In those days, we didn’t know whether the baby was a girl
or a boy until it was born. Whenever the baby kicked, I called out, “Larry, feel this!” I
grabbed Larry’s hands, so he could feel the movement. Larry laughed and became more
tender and attentive, making sure I rested. He tied my shoes when I could no longer reach
them.
Spring warmth melted the snow and the lilacs in our front yard blossomed,
scenting the air. I mailed out the schedules for the next season of nature center programs.
I buzzed around the house with accelerated energy. The house was unusually spotless,
and I froze extra meals for Larry. I mailed the latest book catalogue and sent the current
Sanctuary quarterly report of projects and expenditures to the trustees. All my chores
were complete. I was already packed for the hospital. I probably would have mopped the
ceiling if I had thought of it or could reach it.
I stepped out into the sunny May afternoon, rubbed my belly, and whispered to
my baby, “I’m ready—are you? I can’t wait to hold you, to know who you are.”
I lay down for a late afternoon nap. When I awakened and stood up, my water
broke. Contractions started a little while later. Too soon we called our parents. Too soon
we drove to the Nathan Littauer Hospital in Gloversville. Ten hours later, I had only
dilated two centimeters.
All my Lamaze breathing went haywire. Larry was on point coaching me—I was
not. I puffed when I should have huffed. The contractions climbed up my back, and I
couldn’t concentrate. I wanted to get off my back or roll on some tennis balls or walk
about, but the nurses told me to just sleep between contractions, as if that was possible.
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Time stretched, endless. After twenty hours of labor pains, I was exhausted. The
baby’s heart monitor beeped an alarm. Suddenly they were wheeling me somewhere and
explaining I had to get an epidural, so they could operate. I wasn’t even sure what an
epidural was. Larry couldn’t come with me.
“Will the baby be okay?” I asked.
“Yes,” someone said.
“Then, what are we waiting for? Let’s do it!” I said.
When I finally heard a wailing sounding like it was coming from far away,
someone said, “You have a daughter.”
And from the first overwhelming moment of holding her, I would never be the
same.
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CHAPTER XIV
MOTHERHOOD
1977–1981
Jennifer was born in late May as hordes of school children visited the nature
center. My parents arrived by the time we came home from the hospital, and Mom took
time off from work to help me those first two weeks. I was still clotting and cramping
that first week, my caesarian stitches still healing, as I settled into a routine of breastfeeding, changing and laundering cloth diapers, snatching sleep, learning her different
cries, singing lullabies, and holding the wonder of my baby girl.
I didn’t realize Larry was beside himself as my attention drew away from him and
the nature center and I focused on our daughter—but I would soon learn. Our paradigm
had shifted.
He burst into the house, agitated, insisting I must lead one group down the trail,
because two groups had shown up, and I was shirking my duties. He was relentless
despite my explanations, and I didn’t want his anger to wake up Jennie. I told my mother
I was going down the trail and would be back soon—please watch Jennie.
My cramps pulsed as I slowly led the group of excited youngsters and their
teachers down the trail to the beaver lodge. In the meadow, I talked about the milkweed
the butterflies loved, the small yellow cinquefoil, purple self-heal, tiny wild strawberries,
and fern fiddleheads yet to unfurl. I was a bit unsteady as I bent down to point them out.
Coming back out of the woods, Larry passed me with his group and gave me a
nod of approval. But he never told me—as he told my mother—he was sorry for having
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forced me. Perhaps because my mother had witnessed his outburst, he felt shamed into
telling her.
A baby! How much I didn’t know and had to learn. Every day my tiny daughter
taught me about the power of routine, patience and adaptability, vigilance and
vulnerability, trial and error. Motherhood bonded a love and a sense of responsibility that
far surpassed anything I had ever known, even my wild orphans.
There’s nothing on Earth like holding your own child. And nothing exhausts you
more. The hours without sleep are torture as you stumble to figure out if the cries are for
food, wet or soiled diaper, colic, needing to burp, wanting to cuddle, or what? When my
mother left after two weeks, I felt bereft, and wondered if I could do this. She made it
look so easy.
My small breasts swelled from the size of oranges to melons and leaked milk
through my shirt if Jennie slept through her feeding time by a few minutes. When she
was about six weeks old, Jennie pulled away from my breast while one tiny hand grasped
my finger. Suddenly, she looked up at me and smiled for what seemed like a long time.
Then she rooted again for my breast and continued nursing. But a thrill charged through
me. I wasn’t just a milking machine after all. I was her mother, she saw me. She looked at
me and smiled! After I put her to sleep, I called my mother and ran to tell Larry, “Jennie
smiled at me, she smiled at me!”
Mom and Dad visited often, always bearing new clothes, books, more blankets
and cloth diapers—even a folding stroller and car seat, something fairly new at the time.
Dad hiked down the trail with Jennie in a backpack and composed a poem about their
walk. My brother visited and sketched a picture of her while she slept. Jennifer was
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adored—the first grandbaby in my family. As she grew, her fine blonde hair framed her
big blue eyes with loose curls. Her eyes penetrated with the deep look of a wise, old soul.
During her first year, I took Jennie down the trail with me in a corduroy Snugli as
she slept on my chest or in a backpack so she could look around. When the breeze
caressed her face, she caught her breath. Her index finger constantly pointed to flowers,
butterflies, and birds during that summer and fall. We attended the nature center
programs while she napped on my chest, sometimes nursing discretely with a scarf
draped over us. We visited our favorite tree, once Athena’s roosting tree until the
mockingbirds and blue jays drove her farther into the woods. I told her stories about
Athena, Flora, Shadow, Woodruff, and Flower, and introduced her to the red pine
plantation and the tamaracks by Little Sprite Creek.
Walking into the woods always felt like entering a temple, a sacred space, a place
of communion. Did Jennie feel it, too? The forest watched as Jennie made her first
discoveries and heard her first wood thrush aria. Did her nose pick up the orchestration of
smells? The low notes of the earth and moss, the high notes of the pine? Did she feel the
embrace of the trees and hear their conversations? As we swayed down the trail together,
her finger pointed and her eyes walked to where her infant legs couldn’t carry her. I so
hoped this green wildness would forever remain part of her. Even if she was too young
for such memories, would her heart remember?
***
My parents and Grandmother attended Jennifer’s first birthday. As Jennie sat in
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her high chair with a pointed birthday cap on her head, we sang to her, fed her some cake,
and helped open her presents. She rubbed her eyes as I rocked her and gave her a bottle.
When she fell asleep, I laid her down in her crib for a nap.
At some point, I finally showed my parents the bruises on my legs.
If there was a pattern in Larry’s behavior, I couldn’t quite grasp it—always this
confusing feeling of surprise and dread. Larry became second fiddle to Jennifer. He was
no longer the center of my attention. Perhaps that was it. With a new baby, certainly
there’s lack of sleep. Larry would shake me awake if I didn’t hear her in the middle of the
night. For the first few months, Jennie would sleep about four hours and was reluctant to
be parted for sleep. As soon as she felt the tilt of being placed in her crib, she would cry,
and we’d start over again. After I weaned her from the breast at six months, I gave up
asking him to take turns with a bottle, because he would lose patience and come get me
anyway. Singing lullabies, rocking, and breast feeding and later bottle feeding became a
comfort for both of us.
I can’t remember what these bruises were about, but for the first time, I finally
reached out to my parents. I wasn’t sure what I expected them to do. I just wanted Larry
to stop, and it might make a difference if my parents knew.
Mom’s reaction was immediate and decisive, “You’re coming with us. You have
to leave him. Throw Jennie’s and your things into trash bags, and let’s go—now!”
Dad was hesitant. He wanted to negotiate and talk with Larry about his behavior.
He tried to calm Mom down. “Now, now, Louise, let’s talk to Larry first.”
Mom ignored him and grabbed a box of trash bags and started to throw things into
them. Grandmother went into the room where Jennifer was sleeping, adjacent to the
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living room, to keep watch and shut her door.
Larry walked in from outside into the middle of this fray, saw the trash bags full
of stuff, and said, “What’s going on here?”
Everything seemed in slow motion after that.
As they stood between the piano and the parlor wood stove in the living room,
Dad told Larry they had seen my bruises. “There are better ways of settling differences
than hitting or kicking someone,” he said. “This isn’t right. Think how this affects Jennie,
too. This can’t continue.”
Larry looked indignant, but then his shoulders slumped as he realized he was
exposed and could no longer hide. He looked up to my Dad.
While Larry and Dad talked and talked and talked, I didn’t notice Mom and
Grandmother taking Jennie to their car. Apparently she had woken up. I later learned
Mom was poised to drive into town and get the sheriff, if there was one.
I don’t remember everything they said, but Larry vowed several times to change. I
had never heard him apologize or make a pledge before. “I’m sorry. I promise, I will
never hit your daughter again.”
Larry begged me, “Don’t go.” He seemed sincere.
Dad nodded, seemed satisfied, and looked at me.
I agreed to stay if Larry changed. And I would keep my parents informed.
I felt a deep ache when they left, my mother madder than hell at my Dad, my
beloved Grandmother and her son quiet.
The secret was finally out, and I wasn’t sure if I was relieved.
I carried Jennie into her room and rocked her, singing softly “Tomorrow,” from
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the Broadway musical Annie. It had become an anthem of sorts. Tomorrow, Larry would
curb his anger. Tomorrow, Larry would never hit or kick me again. Tomorrow, things
would get better.
But would they? Doubt gnawed at my sense of hope. My mother would never
forgive my father for this breached intervention.
***
Things were better for a while, but Larry’s old control patterns crept back, so I
sought help at a counseling center. I asked Larry to go with me, reminding him of his
promise to my father. He dragged himself with me, complaining the whole way. As we
discussed our grievances back and forth with the therapist, Larry snapped, stood up,
towering over the petite woman, and said, “This is horse shit. I don’t want any part of
this.”
She replied, “Do you see how threatening you can seem?” Larry scoffed at her
and stomped out.
She turned to me and said, “You can’t change others—you can only change
yourself. But you are part of this relationship dance. By staying, you are giving license to
his behavior.”
I was thunderstruck. I had never thought about my contribution to this two-step. I
thought I was giving love while standing up for myself—that things would evolve. Even
though clearly that wasn’t happening. Indeed, we were caught in a maelstrom, a
repetitive, tumultuous cycle that wouldn’t stop until someone changed. Clearly, Larry
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was unwilling. So I had to change.
But transformation didn’t happen overnight.
If and when I became ready to leave the marriage, I had yet to relinquish the
Sanctuary.
And there was something more yet unfinished.
I didn’t want my daughter to be an only child. I wanted her to have someone she
could turn to and love. And I wanted my second child to have Jennifer as a sister. I loved
my brother and sister and couldn’t imagine growing up without them. I shared all of this
with my mother.
“I just want you to be safe,” she said. “It’s harder to raise two children than one.”
But Mom reluctantly understood the importance of a sibling. This may not make any
sense, but my younger self was so sure of herself. And even now, even if I could have
chosen differently, I would still have done the same.
I proposed a second child to Larry. He wanted a son, so he agreed. Again, Larry
became tender toward me during pregnancy. I took it as a hopeful sign he was trying to
mend our marriage and calm his anger and sense of control.
As I grew larger over the summer, fall, and winter, I got my hair cut shoulder
length, then chin length, then even shorter to my ears by the end of the pregnancy. It felt
freeing and was certainly easier to manage with motherhood.
Jennie and I greeted visitors at the nature center, walked down the trail, and
played with puppets and dolls, or hide and seek. I developed my own children’s book
business and catalogue. When I worked on both book businesses in the office, she played
sitting at her small desk next to mine with her rubber stamps, stickers, and crayons. We
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sometimes dressed in the same colors. Inside the house, our favorite times together were
singing and reading. Music was a joy we shared, and the stories we read aloud had their
own musical rhythm. Jennie could read when she was three. In first grade, she would be
tested to have the vocabulary of a seventeen year-old.
My doctor told me I had to have a second cesarean, because of the first one for
Jennifer. So, the second child’s birth was scheduled for March 1, just three days before
Larry’s birthday. When the anesthetist visited me the night before in my hospital room,
he asked me what names we had planned for a girl or a boy.
How different this time around with no hours and hours of labor. Just a quick
prepping, and off they took me to surgery. I kept trying to see the birth reflected in the
chrome hood of the lamp, because they placed a curtain as a screen in front of my face.
At 8:00 a.m., I heard a loud cry and realized it came from my baby.
The anesthetist said, “Adam has arrived.”
Adam was born in 1979 during maple sap gathering time, nearly three months
before Jennifer’s second birthday. And just like the warming earth, his birth held a
promise of new life for all of us. Larry and his father were proud to have a son to carry on
their family name. We now had the perfect duo, a daughter and a son.
While I was in the hospital for several days, I missed Jennifer so much. We talked
on the phone several times each day, but Mom said she was confused and kept asking for
Momma. During those days, they didn’t let siblings visit in the hospital rooms. But I
asked Larry to bring her to the waiting room, so she would know I hadn’t abandoned her.
I’ll never forget the look on Jennifer’s face when she got off that elevator and saw me—
as if I had vanished but suddenly reappeared. I hugged her close. She smelled like baby
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shampoo. While I was away, Mom had kept up her daily baths before putting her to bed.
Mom had come to help out even though she struggled to recover from surgery
after a broken ankle. She was determined to be there. She became Jennifer’s best friend
as they rolled through the house on her wheelchair together and scooted up and down the
stairs with Jennifer on her lap. Larry could never decipher Jennifer’s toddler talk, so
Mom became her interpreter.
Whenever I breast-fed Adam, Jennifer nursed her doll. She tried once with Adam,
but he was a whole lot noisier than her doll. As Adam grew, his eyes followed Jennifer
everywhere. He clearly adored her, dropping things from his high chair for her to
retrieve, both of them squealing with laughter. She played peek-a-boo with him using her
Sesame Street and animal puppets. If I didn’t hear him wake up from his nap, Jennifer
crawled into his crib, patted his head, and talked to him. Together we walked down the
trail with Adam on my back and her favorite doll in her small backpack.
Our sixth, seventh, and eighth nature center seasons came and went.
Larry led most of the trail hikes, but I helped whenever Susan, the oldest Rasbach
girl, watched the kids, or I took one child with me. Sometimes, Larry walked into the
kitchen and ran his fingers on top of the refrigerator, showing me the dust. It’s like he had
to find something wrong. If not this, it would have been something else. It was degrading,
like I was more servant than wife. I paid Susan to help me with housecleaning, too.
Jennifer started taking Suzuki violin lessons—a great ear-training method—when
she was three years-old. Music was also our way to socialize outside the nature center.
She started with a cereal box taped to a flat stick, tucking it under her chin, while using a
pencil to bow rhythmically while she sang. She then graduated to a small violin and bow,
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playing real notes. On her fourth birthday, we hosted a concert at the nature center for her
teacher and fellow students. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” would echo inside the old
barn as the audience clapped—none more than Adam for his big sister.
But sometimes Jennie wasn’t so sure about having a little brother. Perhaps she
was tired of everyone patting Adam’s golden curls and saying how he looked like an
angel. One day, she decided to cut off some of his curls. Adam thought it was fun. We
saved some locks in an envelope, and his hair eventually grew out again.
We had a few play dates with preschool mates who lived in the valley. One
playtime was hard to end. When it came time to leave, Jennie kept running away from me
laughing, so I couldn’t catch her. I got a bit weary of this. Her little friend chased her and
sat on her, so I could put on her boots. But as little as he was, Adam wasn’t going to let
anyone hurt his sister. He toddled over and pulled her friend off, saying “No, no, no.”
Outside of the nature programs, Jennie, Adam, and I took our own time to pick
meadow flowers, chase after butterflies, pick berries, wade in the creek looking for
tadpoles, jump in the fall leaves, find deer tracks in the snow, swish snow angels, sled
down a hill, and discover the first spring flowers peeking through the melting crust of ice.
Sometimes, Larry came with us.
I helped teach nursery school in Dolgeville while Jennifer attended there. When
he was two, Adam was sometimes a guest in his sister’s class. When he poked his tongue
in the side of his cheek, he was either shy or thinking up something impish. On one visit,
after the class sang a few verses of “The Wheels on the Bus,” the school director turned
to Adam and invited him to suggest the next verse for us to sing. We had already sung
about the wheels, doors, and windows. Adam thought a minute, swirled his tongue in his
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cheek, and beamed.
“Cows!” he blurted. They were always his favorite.
The whole class cracked up with laughter as they all sang about the cows on the
bus.
Meanwhile, as I assisted with nursery school, Peggy Bergeron, the director,
became a dear, close friend. Her family had performed in the Bicentennial, and I knew
them well. When I confessed about Larry’s behavior, she recommended her minister as a
therapist who had counseled her through difficult times. The minister had been an oratorstoryteller in the Bicentennial production, so I knew him, too, even though Larry and I
never attended his church. Nature was our church.
Reverend Miller listened deeply with kindness as I told him about Larry’s
controlling temper and abuse, but also how it was always directed at me, never at the
children. He recommended some books about psychology and relationships. I read that
perhaps because Larry felt powerless as a child, he always had to be in control as an
adult. Vulnerability and trust is such an important part of intimacy and love, but Larry
was never going to allow himself that aspect of a relationship. I wondered whether Larry
wasn’t actually pushing me to leave, because he never had a good role model for a father
and was afraid of what he’d do.
I also read books on divorce, and those books scared me. What would this do to
the kids? If I left Larry, I had to divorce the Sanctuary, too. It’s not like I could tell Larry
to leave if he didn’t change his behavior. The house came with the job. How many
women never leave, because they would have to move to a new, unknown life?
The minister also talked with Larry separately and was moved by his stories of
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childhood abuse—some stories he had never told anyone. When Larry’s father died a
final slow alcoholic suicide of liver failure, Larry resented his father so much that he
refused to attend the funeral and went to a local gun show instead.
“But your mother needs your support now,” I said, and persuaded him to take a
flight to Iowa after the funeral.
My final, big understanding didn’t come from therapy but from a surprising
source—Larry’s mother, Ethel. We had a cordial, though not close, relationship. On one
of her visits, she told me more of their family history. She described how Larry’s
grandfather, an alcoholic like Larry’s father, had pulled a knife on her. Ethel was telling
me this story, because she believed I didn’t have it so bad compared to her.
To his credit, she said, Larry didn’t drink. She confided that Larry had begged and
begged her as a child to leave her abusive husband, his father. But she never left, and she
was proud of it. Something clicked in my mind when she said that. By staying, she had
demonstrated to her daughter it was okay for her husband to mistreat her, and she taught
her son it was okay to hurt his wife.
A message telegraphed to my head and heart: Not Adam—not my son. Not
Jennifer—not my daughter. This abuse stops here. It stops with me. I’m leaving.
I could leave for my children’s sake. The timing would be the final thing to figure
out.
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CHAPTER XV
TWO GOODBYES
1982
Looking back, I see my younger self struggling so hard to keep her dreams—to
raise her children, partner with a loving husband, and make a lifelong difference in how
people connected with nature. I wish I could reassure her that even though reality forced
her to leave the Sanctuary, she would carry it with her. That the whole of the experience
would dwell within her and transform as she aged. I would like to tell her a seed had
already been planted, one she would nourish over time, ultimately growing into a sense of
sanctuary within herself. This foretelling might have been a comfort to her, for the final
letting go was so, so difficult.
How to pull skin, pulse, and breath from such a bond without feeling the rip?
How to leave the Little Sprite Creek bursting through the ice after the silence of
winter? The wood thrush singing out her heart in the deep woods? The chevron of
Canada geese heralding the coming of spring? The industry of the beavers mending their
dam? The soothing trill of courting frogs? The scent of evergreen mingling with damp
moss? The meadow enticing with blackberries? The shafts of light filtering through the
forest? The resonant winter silence holding the communion of nature at its essence?
Bit by bit I separated myself from the Sanctuary. I started to say slow goodbyes to
the neon orange newts near the creek, the milkweed silk dancing in the breeze, the
woodpeckers tapping on the nature center. I was shifting away from being part of the web
of the woods to being a mere visitor.
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I discovered a special way to say a final good-bye—by giving back. For my final
nature center program, I created a summer six-week nature workshop for four- through
eight-year-olds and their parents. I hired an assistant and plotted out the course. This
program would be good for Adam and Jennie, too. Shortly after the program ended in
August, Adam, Jennie, and I would leave for my parents’ home in New Jersey.
For I could no longer see past August on the Sanctuary.
Jennie would start kindergarten in September, and it wouldn’t be in an elementary
school with a mere closet for a library. Jennie and Adam would attend better schools in
New Jersey. I made arrangements with my parents, and they pledged to help us. When I
told Larry, he agreed—was resigned to it—and didn’t give me any cause for alarm.
Perhaps, after all, he was pushing me away and felt it was for the best. He couldn’t get
his mother to leave his father, but I could be set free, at long last.
We told Jennie we had something important to tell her. She looked wide-eyed and
somber as I told her that she, Adam, and I would be living with Grandma and Grandpa,
no longer with Daddy.
“We’re getting a divorce,” Larry said. “But I love you and Adam. I’m still your
Daddy.” He promised to visit—we would just be a little more than three hours away.
Preparing for this workshop and conducting the group of about twenty children
filled our last weeks with purpose. The parents were as engaged as their children. A
photo album shows their joy of discovery. Each family brought siblings or friends and the
older children helped the younger ones. Jennifer became the group leader, and Adam the
mascot. As Jennie helped lead the children down the trail, the older kids carried Adam
piggy-back.
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We seined the creek for fish, crawdads, salamanders, and frogs. We hiked down
the trail looking at sunlit meadow flowers and butterflies, and into the dark forest feeling
the lichen, moss, fern, and bark. I pointed at mushrooms and Jack-in-the-pulpits as we
searched for deer and raccoon tracks, listened to the wood thrush and the beaver slapping
its tail on the surface of the pond. They created artwork of what they learned.
On the last day, I gave each child a notebook with all their cumulative artwork, so
they could share and remember. Later, I would receive an outpouring of thankful letters
when the families relived their experiences through their notebooks.
These children are grown up, most likely with children of their own. Perhaps they
remember. Perhaps they now take their children on nature hikes.
***
One morning during a break in our summer session, I was cooking breakfast when
it happened.
Jennie and Adam were sitting at the kitchen table. We’d just been giggling when
Larry walked in. He was disgruntled about something. He started to pick a fight, but I
ignored him, trying to remain calm. I held my breath and tensed up, the hairs on the back
of my neck erect like they always did when he burst in and his footsteps had an ominous
pace of anger.
When I didn’t answer him, he smacked me hard across the face. The blood gushed
down my nose. I smeared the snot, tears, and blood with my hand, and shouted, “We’re
done. Get away from me.”
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At times in my marriage, I had felt like a beaver building her life, a rabbit or an
opossum freezing in fear, a turtle withdrawing inside her hard shell, a deer scenting the
air for trouble. Bransom’s drawing hung on the wall, reminding me who I was.
Larry looked at the kids, their stricken faces, and stalked out. I tried to comfort
them, but I couldn’t erase their memory. They would never forget that day. Two years
later, Adam’s kindergarten teacher would call me on Valentine’s Day to tell me in class
that day they had talked about what love meant. Adam had blurted out in class, “Love
means not hitting,” and told the class this story. Adam started to cry, and everyone
gathered around to comfort him.
***
At long last, today was the day. The trunk was full and the car was packed—we
were ready to go. I shut the door on our life here. I took a deep breath and looked at
Larry’s slumped figure, no longer a threat. For months, I had been saying good-bye to my
marriage, for weeks farewell to the Sanctuary as I gave back in gratitude. It was the best
way, the only way, I knew how to leave.
Larry and I had already said our good-byes several weeks ago.
“You’ll never find a job. You’ve been too long out of the market,” he said.
“I applied for a New Jersey teaching license,” I countered.
“I don’t know what I’ll do when you leave,” he said, changing tactics, his blue
eyes turning gray.
I didn’t want him to go there, the vague threat he might hurt himself. He had used
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that possibility before and it made me sad for him, kept me tethered to him. This time I
wasn’t buying it while praying it wouldn’t happen.
“Well, you’ll have to tolerate your own cooking,” I tried to make light of it. “Do
your own cleaning and laundry.”
Larry rolled his eyes.
“We’ll always have the nature center as a testament to the good part of our
marriage.”
He nodded. “And our kids,” he added.
Larry and I had decided to use the same lawyer licensed for both New Jersey and
New York, a friend of my mother’s neighbor. We had agreed to the divorce
arrangements: we shared our eighteen-acre property. He got the antiques. I had custody
of the kids, and he had generous visitation rights along with the support payments of
$180 per month to cover both children. I was just relieved to have custody of the kids,
and they would still have access to the Sanctuary and nature center on visits. Because of
our accord, the divorce would be processed quickly in six weeks—neither of us had to
appear in court. After we left at the end of August, our divorce would become final by the
first week in October, in time for Larry’s first visit. Strange how the marriage-struggle
took so long, but the final ending did not.
I felt a sense of completion even though I had let go of so many parts of myself—
the wild orphans, the horses, the house, the nature center, the forest, the Sanctuary. I was
peeled down to my essence now—my children. They were what mattered most.
The final letting go was to my old self. Shame was no longer my shadow.
Tomorrow no longer seemed dim and unchanging, but bright and new. There would be
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time to add new layers of experience to reinvent myself and to rebuild our lives. Perhaps
rebirth could only happen after the old dreams died.
Halfway to New Jersey my bittersweet musings transmuted to hope, and this
thought was as freeing as Athena swooping toward her prize. I would grasp it with all the
love, learning, and persistence I had given my marriage and the Sanctuary. A jolt of
confidence swept through me. I smiled thinking about the vista of possibilities before me
and my children.
What new dreams would we reach for now?
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EPILOGUE
2017
My balcony in Atlanta faces the woods—the tallest tree I’ve named Sylvia. She
oversees the gathering of trees I greet every day. They are a guardian of grandmothers
watching over me. Instead of a 1,300-acre Sanctuary, my balcony is but twelve feet by
six feet. Instead of the Little Sprite Creek, water gushes out of a copper fountain shaped
into cascading calla lilies. The sound pleases me. I’ve often seen wrens and chickadees,
even a robin, bathing there, cupped in the topmost lily as it fills with bubbling water. The
birds flutter the water over their bodies again and again, hop on the balcony railing, fluff
out their feathers, and groom them with their beak. I dance inside myself.
With a southern exposure, I catch the first rays of the sun on my left toward the
east, and on my right, the rising moon from the west. When the moon is full, she casts a
shadow over my plants. I even sleep on the balcony at times, so I can enjoy the moon or
the few stars that manage to radiate through the ambient suburban light. Sometimes I feel
star starved and wish I could see again the sweep of stars over the Saharan desert in
Morocco, the seashore along South Africa, the Sacred Valley in Peru, the Perdernales
River in Texas, or the mountains in North Carolina. Sometimes I pretend I’m sleeping on
a cushion of moss in the Sanctuary woods. Rarely do I hear an owl as I close my eyes.
On one side of my balcony, a tangerine lantana shaped into a small tree attracts
bees and butterflies. I smile thinking how this plant connects my many travels. Lantana
grows near the forests of India, western and southern Africa, Costa Rica, and along the
Amazon. Here, they’re relegated to a common house or garden plant or landscape
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decoration, but I’ve seen their wild spirit.
In lantana’s lower branches I’ve balanced a twig full of colorful ties that wave
prayers of gratitude in the breeze. I am grateful my children are doing well. Their own
loving nature mirrors their spouses’, and they are embraced by in-laws who raised their
children in marriages filled with kindness. My daughter is the chair of the music
department of a private school. My granddaughter and grandson are thriving with
creativity and curiosity under the guidance of their parents, who have known each other
since high school. When I see my son holding hands with his wife, and being gentle and
respectful even in disagreement, I am thrilled. When his pregnant wife tells me, “I hope
our son has Adam’s heart,” my eyes grow moist.
My laughter has changed over the years. Instead of skipping like a stone across
water, it rises from the earth deep in my belly, loud and long, resonating with a hard-won
joy.
In the southeast corner of my balcony, I have placed stones in a clockwise fashion
to build a cairn, or apacheta. At the base it’s about two-feet wide and peaks with a wedge
of amazonite from a friend’s apacheta near Mt. Shasta.
Nestled in this community of stones are three of Grandmother’s rocks from trips
we’ve collected together in Kenya, Israel, and Switzerland. The world meets here. The
last decade of my life could be told by these rocks. A pocked, red stone from Sierra
Leone, West Africa where I worked for the Ebola response. A gray stone from a river bed
in India where an elephant charged. A layered rock from Blyde River Canyon in South
Africa where I heard the landscape sing. A rock with mica from a campfire gathering in
North Carolina. All the stones have prayers blown into them. The apacheta is graced with
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flowers of appreciation for the abundance in my life.
In my writing room off the balcony is an altar that includes gifts from my two
daughters: one of Athena’s feathers and Jennifer’s small, round box designed with an owl
from her Grecian honeymoon. I lift the lid off goddess Athena’s box. Inside is my
wedding ring with the beaver, Canada goose, and skunk embossed on it. Through the
slanting sun, the grass-green translucent jade lights up in remembrance, forgiveness, and
gratitude.
Once, after returning from a long trip, I discovered my balcony view was covered
with a giant spider’s web. Drops of morning dew or light rain shimmered on it like a
constellation of stars. Spellbound, I thought of Arachne, how spiders are named after the
Greek Goddess who was an artistic weaver. And of Anansi, the African spider storyteller.
I breathed in this glittering gift, thinking about my passion for weaving stories. About
how we are all connected by the air we breathe, and the stories we share. Perhaps this
was a reminder. I ran to my neighbor friend to share it, but by the time she got off the
phone, part of the web had blown in the wind, the diamonds had dried.
She said, “I guess it was meant for only you.”
The white blossoms on my gardenia bush scent the air with sweetness. A friendship
scarf presented to me on an Indian tea plantation in the foothills of the Himalayas sways
around a Chinese bamboo chime that tinkles softly. A Maine mermaid fashioned out of
turquoise, cobalt, and green sea glass twirls from a prism that flashes a scattering of
rainbows in the afternoon sun. When the weather beckons, I often write on my balcony at
my small round French cafe table and chair, ornate with grapes and twisting vines, while
indigo salvia blossoms and scarlet trumpet vines attract bees and hummingbirds.
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One morning, I stepped out onto the balcony wishing I could see a hummingbird
before I left for work. As if I was overheard, he manifested around my salvia. I froze. My
whole body vibrated with joy. He sipped some nectar.
As I held my breath, he darted toward me and hovered in front of my face, cocking
his head this way and that, looking into each of my eyes. A buzzing heartbeat of ruby and
emerald. He then darted to the left side of my head, then my right, checking out my curly
auburn tendrils with his long beak. I could feel the hum in my hair as if a whisper in my
ears. Then back to my face. He hovered there, just inches away, for what seemed an
eternity...then zipped off. I felt as if a thousand hummingbirds had burst from my heart.
To the Q’ero in Peru, the descendants of the Incans, the hummingbird is a
messenger from the upper world. I felt summoned. Summoned to pay attention to this
sunlit Earth full of shadows. Summoned to connect, summoned to remember and give
back in reciprocity what I had been so generously given. This Sanctuary. This sanctuary
that dwells in the heart.
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APPENDIX
PHOTOS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
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