Drinking from the Trough Read online

  Tom flew in to be with Bapa and say goodbye to Nana. I remember him waiting in the sanctuary of the funeral chapel when we arrived for the service. He stood beside Mom and said quietly, “They’re closing it up now.” I knew he meant the casket. They ushered us into the adjoining family waiting room; even though we weren’t children any more—Margo was nineteen years old, I was fifteen, and Natalie, four-teen—they didn’t want us to see Nana’s body.

  That April, Bapa arranged a trip for us to visit Margo, who was a sophomore at the University of Arizona in Tucson, as well as Tom in Colorado.

  Arizona was an amazing and alien world to Nat and me. We’d never been beyond the lush, tree-filled green of Chicago’s North Shore. Home was beautiful, we never doubted that, but Tucson was a hot world of sand, brilliant blue sky, and vivid green cacti. It had road-runners, whose odd-looking antics made us laugh. It had skittering lizards, rattlesnakes, and dust storms. It had exotic dishes—we’d never heard of Mexican food, let alone lollipops with scorpions embedded in them.

  We drove to Phoenix, where Mom and Bapa tried to find the house they had lived in when Tom was so ill. We didn’t find it, but we did find a riding stable, and Natalie and I got to ride horses with a guide.

  We both loved horses, but Natalie was the one who’d taken lessons. Mom had been willing to shell out eight hundred dollars every summer for several years for Nat’s English riding lessons, in the hope that riding would keep her off the streets and out of trouble. I longed for lessons too, but I knew the financial strain of Nat’s lessons; I didn’t think it was right to demand that Mom spend more money on lessons for me, so I never even asked.

  Natalie was clearly an experienced rider—even though she had learned on an English saddle, not the western saddles we were using—but I got up to speed quickly, and I loved it.

  After Tucson, we flew to Denver in a new Boeing 737. Tom picked us up from the airport, and we headed north to Fort Collins.

  Tom had long since established his Precision Radio shop, offering both repairs and parts sales in the converted garage. He’d also built half a house—a bedroom, bathroom, and living room—set well back from Mountain Avenue. No kitchen as yet; he still used the one he’d built in the garage.

  Tom was a great tour guide. He knew the best scenic spots to visit, showing us the grand landscapes of northern Colorado and southern Wyoming. He drove us up to the guest ranch where he had worked and, while Mom and Bapa relaxed in chairs on a broad wooden porch, Tom saddled up horses for Natalie, himself, and me and led us on our first-ever mountain trail ride. The wondrous mountain beauty (and the seven-thousand-foot altitude) took my breath away. I was fascinated with all of it: the scenery, the wildlife—we even found old bones and a cattle skull! Quite an adventure for a fifteen-year-old suburban girl.

  I loved the wide-open spaces of the West, and I was intrigued by Fort Collins and Colorado State University. Until this trip, I hadn’t known CSU existed. College was still three years away, and I was just beginning to think about where I wanted to go. All I knew for certain was that I didn’t want to stay in Illinois. CSU was now high on my list of possibilities.

  The next summer, Natalie and I visited Tom together—by then, he’d finished building the other half of his house—and the summers after that, we took turns, first one visiting, then the other. It was our first time traveling solo. For a week or two, I had Tom all to myself.

  During my visit, we went sightseeing, horseback riding, and swimming. We flew in his little two-seater 1959 Cessna 150. We did plenty of eating too—Tom was a great cook and loved to barbecue.

  Most nights, I slept on his wonderfully comfortable couch. It wasn’t a sleeper sofa, but with a set of sheets on it, it was as comfortable as any bed. I still have that couch; it’s been reupholstered twice in fifty years. It may not be the most fashionable piece of furniture, but its comfort still makes up for its lack of style.

  The nights I wasn’t at Tom’s house, I was at the ranch. That was amazing.

  Tom loved to ride, and he fostered our love of horses. Every time we visited him, he took us up to the ranch for a day or more of riding. The first summer, when Natalie and I were there together, he let us stay overnight at the ranch, the closest we’d ever been to sleepover camp. The summer before I began college at CSU, I stayed with him during the freshman preview event. As a special treat afterward, he let me spend the night by myself at the ranch. I had my own cabin room. It was my first time being on my own; I didn’t know anyone there other than Tom’s friends. For supper, I shared a divine meal of roast bison and mashed potatoes, served family style, with the other guests. I felt quite grown up.

  As an undergraduate at CSU, I lived in the dorms, but it was nice to have a relative nearby, and Tom and I visited often. I’d walk the mile and a half to his house, cutting through City Park, and borrow his AMC Javelin each week to run errands and enjoy a little more freedom than my bicycle allowed. When I returned, he’d either cook dinner or take me out to a local restaurant.

  Tom would call me on the occasional Sunday morning to see if I wanted to go flying with him. He was an excellent pilot and a Civil Air Patrol (CAP) officer, flying missions to find planes lost in the Rocky Mountains.

  Sometimes, the Sunday flight meant flitting over to Boulder and back to practice touch-and-go landings. Sometimes, if it was Christmas break and the weather was nice, it meant flying me to the Denver airport, where I’d board my commercial flight home for winter break. Sometimes it meant a two-hour jaunt to visit his friends, Cliff and Dorothy, in Glendo, Wyoming, often after a brief detour to circle over Fort Laramie.

  Fort Laramie is a National Historic Site. What I remember most from our flyovers is how isolated it was. The barracks and other buildings enclosed by the fort were stark white, surrounded by a seemingly endless expanse of empty rangeland.

  Glendo, a tiny town roughly a hundred miles north of Cheyenne and about forty miles from Fort Laramie, was a bustling metropolis by comparison. Technically speaking, it did have an airport, but it was only for daytime use by small private aircraft. Pronghorn occasionally wandered onto the unpaved runway. There weren’t any regular on-site employees or nearby ground transportation, so we’d circle Glendo from the air. Someone would spot us and figure the circling plane was going to land, and one of the townspeople would drive their pickup truck to collect the passengers, whether or not they knew who they were. We’d get a lift into town and have lunch with Cliff and Dorothy at a greasy spoon that had outstanding grub. I’d never heard of chicken-fried steak before coming out West; every bite at that little hole-in-the-wall diner was delicious.

  Tom had a ’63 Rambler Classic in addition to his Javelin. One day, he announced that it was time I learned how to drive a stick shift; after all, the Javelin might not always be available.

  He drove us half a block to one of the little-used streets in City Park. I sat in the driver’s seat; he sat in the passenger’s seat, holding a paper bag of peanuts. In between instructions on how the shift stick, clutch, and accelerator worked, he shelled and munched on the peanuts.

  I eased up on the clutch and down on the accelerator. The Rambler jerked and bumped erratically. It stalled. I started over. It stalled again. It lurched. Peanut shells flew everywhere. I tried again. The gears ground together with a frightening scrunch, and the engine died again.

  After more tries than I could count, I’d managed to move us forward by maybe ten inches.

  I looked at Tom with a hangdog expression. I felt like a complete and utter failure.

  Tom looked down at the bag of peanuts he’d been clutching tightly to his chest. He set the sack carefully on the dashboard and wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans.

  “You know, Mary,” he said, carefully avoiding eye contact, “I can make sure the Javelin is always available, whenever you need it.”

  After graduating from CSU with a physical education degree, I returned home to Highland Park and, with my brand-new Illinois teaching certificate in hand,
began looking for work. Teaching jobs were hard to find; it felt as if every baby boomer had graduated on the same day, and we were all vying for the same handful of jobs.

  I finally lucked out and landed a half-time job teaching physical education at the end of October. The salary was pretty small, so I taught gymnastics in three park districts and occasionally worked at Art and Evelyn Wienecke’s hardware store, where my mother worked and where I’d worked in the summers during my college days.

  The following spring, Tom was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx.

  He wasn’t a smoker, but asthma alone does slightly increase the risk of lung cancer. I have always wondered if his asthma inhalers contributed to his developing laryngeal cancer.

  Tom had surgery to remove part of his larynx. I flew to Colorado to visit him as soon as school was out and before I started summer quarter at Northwestern University, where I was enrolled to begin my master’s degree. The surgeons had managed to save his voice, although its timbre sounded a little different. I think he was relieved that he didn’t have to use an electrolarynx, one of those battery-powered wands you hold against the throat to buzz out words.

  He seemed fine; he was back to living his life, cooking large meals for himself to regain the weight he’d lost. He even took me flying again—this time, rolling the plane so we were sideways, one wing up and the other down, sky on one side, ground on the other. Then he’d roll to the other side. Terrifying, but definitely cool.

  But the cancer wasn’t gone. I got the news spring quarter while at grad school: it had metastasized to both lungs. Surgery wouldn’t help; the only treatment options were chemotherapy and radiation.

  Fort Collins was too small back then to have its own oncology center. Tom’s friends drove him the 130-mile round trip to Denver for those treatments. Mom traveled back and forth to Colorado several times to help care for him. At the same time, she tried to shield Bapa, who was in his eighties, from the worst of the details about Tom’s illness. Bapa knew more than Mom wanted him to know, I’m sure; after every phone call with Tom, Bapa wept.

  Somehow, when Mom left our Illinois home for that final visit, she knew it would be the last one. Before she left, she showed me the dress she wanted me to bring to Fort Collins, the dress she wanted to wear at the funeral. In retrospect, I wonder if she deliberately left the dress behind, hoping in some strange way that if she didn’t take it with her, Tom would survive a little longer after all.

  Tom was admitted to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins on October 5. When visiting hours ended that evening, Mom went back to his house, where she was staying. The next morning, when she returned to the hospital, a nurse met her at the door to Tom’s room; Tom had died moments before.

  It had been nineteen months since his initial diagnosis.

  I flew to Colorado the next day to help Mom with final arrangements. She didn’t want to stay at Tom’s house when I arrived—it was clear that she needed a break from the place where Tom had suffered so much—so we checked into a local hotel for the week.

  Tom’s wishes included clear instructions regarding Mitts, the black-and-white cat he’d adopted as a kitten and brought home from the ranch so many years ago.

  Mitts was fifteen and in failing health. She had been Tom’s constant companion and was as much a member of our family as Tom was. Tom had asked that after he died, Mitts be put to sleep and placed in his casket, so that the two of them would be cremated together. He’d had a friend photograph the two of them to show exactly how he wanted Mitts to be laid to rest; they would be in a perpetual hug. One of Tom’s friends, who was a pilot and Tom’s ownership partner in a newer airplane, had agreed to scatter their ashes over the Rockies.

  Mom and I waited at the house for the funeral director, who took Mitts to the veterinarian for euthanasia. Knowing that it was the right thing to do didn’t make it any easier, and we both cried for a long time after they left.

  Mom scheduled the funeral for the Sunday following Tom’s death to allow enough travel time for his out-of-town friends to attend. That Sunday happened to be my birthday. She apologized to me about the timing, but we both knew that Sunday was the only day Tom’s far-flung friends could gather together.

  Tom’s friends filled the funeral home chapel. As Mom entered, they all stood up, in complete silence. During the service, the pastor read the poem I’d requested, “High Flight.”

  High Flight

  Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,

  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

  Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

  Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things

  You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung

  High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there

  I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

  My eager craft through footless halls of air.

  Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

  I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

  Where never lark or even eagle flew—

  And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

  The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

  Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

  John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

  After the service, we went to Tom’s house to visit and remember. Thelma, one of Tom’s best friends, knew that it was my birthday and understood how hard it was to say goodbye to my uncle, so she had baked a double-chocolate birthday cake for me and hidden it from the guests.

  Long after everyone had left, I settled into a quiet corner with a piece of birthday cake. I thought about the profound impact Tom had had on my life and the lives of my sisters, how he had encouraged our love of all things that involved adventure, horses, and playfulness. I imagined him giggling up in Heaven with all the other angels, probably telling silly jokes. I was sure Mitts would be curled up in his lap too.

  I hope he knows that all of his nieces became horse owners. I hope he knows that by opening my eyes—and my life—to the wonders of Wyoming and Colorado, he set me on the path that would lead me to Earl, veterinary medicine, and this remarkable life I’ve had.

  3

  No Chrome

  Earl was so excited that I could barely understand what he was saying. Finally, he calmed down enough to make sense: he had been up to Larry Greene’s ranch near Sheep Mountain in the windy, high-altitude short-grass prairie west of Laramie, Wyoming, to visit family friends and get some good grub. He’d been enthralled by the horses he’d seen at the Greenes’ ranch, especially a little three-year-old filly—a young female horse. All he could talk about was the gorgeous little sorrel quarter horse, who, he said, had “no chrome.”

  Earl and I had been good friends for five years, and he had taught me a lot about horses, but I honestly had no idea what “no chrome” meant. It happens that no chrome indicates that the horse is totally solid in color with no white markings anywhere. White coloring is the chrome. Sorrel is one of the red colors of quarter horses, so the filly was red—sorrel—with no white markings—no chrome.

  Now that Earl was back from his year away after veterinary school graduation and living in the family farmhouse across the street from his grandparents, he was busy setting up his new practice in Fort Collins.

  He already had two horses in the corral: his childhood nag, Chico—a cranky eighteen-year-old bay gelding—and an elderly retired barrel racing horse named Pappy, which he kept for Larry Greene. That tall horse, Pappy (registered name Little Levis but called Pappy because he was the color of paprika), had won the National Little Britches barrel race when he was eighteen years old. He was a huge horse, but he had a lot of kindness in his immense body. I adored him, and I rode him quite a bit.

  The year before, we had taken both horses up to the Albany County Fairgrounds in Laramie so we could ride during graduation weekend. Earl was graduating from vet school at Colorado State University in Fort Collins on the same weeke
nd his sister was graduating in nursing at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, where their father was president.

  After the Wyoming graduation ceremony, we saddled up the horses and rode to the quarter horse track, part of the regular oval racetrack that had an extension at the start. Quarter horses are called quarter horses because of the track—they run at top speed on a straight track for a quarter of a mile.

  Earl started out on Chico to get a lead, leaving me on twenty-three-year-old Pappy, who was prancing to go. He was disciplined, thanks to all his training and experience, and didn’t run away with me. All I did was let up on the reins, and off we went at warp speed.

  Whew! What a ride! I have never ridden so fast in my whole life! Pappy ran straight as an arrow, never wavering side to side at all. I am small enough to be a jockey, but this was my introduction to the adrenaline rush of racing, and I was hooked.

  Dr. Larry Greene was a Laramie surgeon and team doctor for the University of Wyoming Cowboys, as well as a long-time rancher. The little sorrel’s registered name was Tee Barwood, but Larry called her Franny after his wife Fran, who had died not long after Franny’s arrival. He offered to sell Franny to Earl for nine hundred dollars. As an added bonus, or because he was trying to reduce his stock, he’d include another horse, Marcie (Liberty Sunshine), for only one hundred dollars more. Marcie was a beautiful palomino paint filly with white mane and tail and one blue eye and one brown eye. Earl said yes to both, and from that moment on, we always referred to Marcie as our hundred-dollar horse. I didn’t know it then, but Marcie would turn out to be the horse of my life.

  It had been two years since Uncle Tom had died of cancer. My mom was his heir and had inherited his house and other property he owned, including a Craftsman-style bungalow formerly owned by United States Supreme Court Justice Byron “Whizzer” White, both in Fort Collins.