For countless nights, Carol lay in bed, sleepless as the creek that ran through her ranch. Finally, she decided that Mike was never going to settle down, that their ranch would always be the hippie ranch.
They had met in college, she was from San Francisco, he was from the remote Oregon/California/Nevada border, where his family owned a small cattle ranch. He was handsome and friendly, with a great sense of humor.
I never understood what made Carol commit to him and to that life. In those parts, he was known as the hippie rancher, for his long hair and skill at rolling a joint while riding a horse in a windstorm. She was straight, started a day care center in the tiny town nearby. She didn’t ride a horse or seem to like any of the ranch work except gardening and churning butter from the milk cow’s cream. She got the San Francisco Chronicle in the mail every day and read it.
Mike was the third generation in his family to run that ranch, a natural-born horseman, loose-limbed, agile. He could lightly hold the saddle horn and effortlessly swing into the saddle without using the stirrups.
He had boundless energy, could party half the night and still get up at dawn to move cattle on his own ranch or work for another rancher doing whatever skilled cowboy thing the rancher needed doing badly enough to pay for it.
With Mike at the helm, the ranch took in a lot of free spirits, including my friend Gwen and me. We had come from Massachusetts, which locals thought of as “east of the Rockies.” We didn’t want to be hippies, we wanted to be ranch hands or buckaroos, which was probably never going to happen.
Mike’s terms were free room and board in exchange for doing daily chores. His 2-bedroom bunkhouse with running water and an outhouse was ours and we ate our meals with Carol, him and their two young kids. The chores consisted of milking the cow, collecting eggs, feeding the pig, picking fruit from the garden trees in season and riding with Mike when he needed help moving cattle and branding.
What finally got to Carol was that the number of people at the dinner table was always some multiple of her nuclear family.
One day, I was surprised to see her backing up her battered El Camino (a hybrid between a station wagon and a pickup), with the two kids sitting next to her and the pickup bed stuffed with their belongings. Headed for Seattle, never to return.