BIG SKY, NO STARS, NO edge. The drama of a crossroads where two country routes meet at perfect right angles, and the quiet, a quiet that feels different than it does in the East—windblown, ringing through the telephone lines. The Dutch Country Inn, the Tequila Grill, the Hard Luck Cafe, and the Amish bakery. House, job, church, kids. Happy wife, happy life. This is Washington County, Iowa, a square thirty miles southwest of Iowa City.
No edge here, literally—the road is flat and flows right up against the parking lot of the gravel plant without any shoulder. Few people walk from one destination to another here, except kids in the middle of empty roads, two miles from where the bus drops them off.
Vicki Durian wanted to walk. She was born in 1953 to farmers—eighty acres of corn and beans and hogs for one hundred and twenty-five dollars a head; timber in the summer. Eight kids, Vicki the second and the oldest girl. The boys worked the fields and the hogs with dad; the girls worked the house with mom—cooking, cleaning, and doing dishes. When it was time for the boys to come in for lunch, it was Vicki who called them. “She could really whistle,” says her younger brother, John Durian.
For a long time, Vicki was good—good girl, good citizen. Her parents were often in the Kalona News for hosting luncheons at the Catholic church, bearing palls, and chairing committees. Vicki curled her hair, kept “trim,” joined Future Homemakers of America, had many friends at school and lots of cousins who slept over in tents in the Durian backyard on the weekends. Saved the sixteen candles from the cake the girls gave her at lunch, taping them into her scrapbook.
She had a horse for a while, had dogs and cats, loved animals. All the kids ran around the property. Camping, fishing, playing in the swimming hole behind the Durian farmhouse. “Right in the English River,” says John, “which I wouldn’t do now.”
Vicki loved school, Mid Prairie Middle then Mid Prairie High—“Homecoming 1970, we love you hawks!” Football games, basketball games, the winter dance—“I am a Mid-Prairie Golden Hawk Booster.” Made invitations for suppers—“Bring the latest gossip!” Made clothes—“Vicki, Thanks so much for making that dress for me! I just love it and I know I’ll get a lot of good out of it!” Did she do well in school? “A lot better than you boys!” says dad Howard. Critical, it seems, but only of herself: “Not the greatest play—but I even had a part,” she wrote in her scrapbook.
She knew how to have fun. She dressed brothers John, Mike, and Tom as little princesses and walked them around to meet the neighbors, which people still talk about. When Vicki and her cousins slept in those tents, she would sneak off on foot and walk down to the river and then cross it to the Wassonville Cemetery and the bridge, a wooded area far from the gravestones that was the party spot then and is still the party spot now. Her best guy friend was a boy from school who drove a noisy motorcycle. Howard didn’t like it when the boy parked at the farmhouse and would tell him to get lost. “I heard it all the way to his home.”
Vicki liked the dark, was fascinated with vampires and a show called Dark Shadows. She liked television in general, images beamed in from far away. At fifteen she watched the hippies gather for Woodstock, and the picture stuck—she wanted to go, but she was too young, born too late. She bought her first album: a greatest-hits record by the Grass Roots. She lay on her floor and listened.
In 1971, seventeen now, Vicki went to see the movie Love Story—catchphrase “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”—escorted by a boy named Robert and pasted the ticket stub in her scrapbook. Soon Vicki was receiving Christmas cards addressed to her and Robert. Robert came over for Christmas dinner and gave her a blouse and a pair of electric scissors.
The world was beginning to change. The farming business was faltering. Howard took a job working the third shift at a refrigeration factory near Cedar Rapids. Vicki’s mother, Clarabelle, who had been working as a lunch lady at Mid Prairie, took a second job at the Pull’r Inn cleaning rooms. Robert saw other girls. “This is the last year I’ll have an obligation to Mid-Prairie,” Vicki wrote in her scrapbook under her senior year class schedule.
One day her cousin DeAnn, whose family visited often from Colorado, heard the back door slam and voices—Vicki and Robert—arguing down by the river. Vicki came back in and told her parents she was pregnant. Howard and Clarabelle said, it’s your choice—go to Colorado and have the baby and come back when you’re better, or stay here and marry him. Robert and Vicki went to prom together in June 1972, he in a light blue tux, she in a yellow dress with ruffles around the throat and wrists, but there is no joy in these photos.
Throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s, nearly 80 percent of babies born to white women without legal spouses were relinquished for adoption. “The right thing to do to protect your parents was to get out of town, go into a home,” wrote Joni Mitchell, who gave up a child to adoption at the exact start of this boom—1965. “The homes were full.…Movies were getting sexier. It was very confusing to be a young woman then.”
By the mid-1970s, as sex outside marriage, contraception, abortion, and single parenting became more common and less socially shameful, this rate would plummet to 12 percent; by 1983 it would be just 4 percent. The Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide came down in 1973, a year after Vicki got pregnant, but in 1972 Iowa, no one felt it coming.
Vicki arrived at her cousins’ house in suburban Colorado in the summer of 1972, freshly graduated from high school and five months pregnant. The Catholic adoption agency got her a job so she wouldn’t be idle, and she watched movies and sewed with DeAnn and the rest of the family. She bore it all cheerfully. “That was Vicki,” DeAnn says. She had the baby in November, on the same day as her own birthday, or very near. She held her son, and then a nurse came and took him.
One day afterward, DeAnn leaned against Vicki’s bedroom door while Vicki lay in bed and asked if Vicki ever regretted her choice, if she ever cried for her baby. “I cry for him every day,” Vicki replied.
“She loved that baby,” DeAnn says now. “I think some counseling would have been a good idea. She never got any.”
Back in Iowa, Robert came over for Christmas again. He was enraged. He wanted the baby. He was still seeing other girls. The Durians could hear him shouting through every wall. Vicki told him to get out and not to come back. In Vicki’s scrapbook from 1972 there is a page with an inscription in Vicki’s blue swooping writing: “The last note this year from Robert.” Only a discolored square exists where this note once sat.
Most days, Vicki picked up her sister Mary and their brothers from school, then went to work at Shenk’s Nursing Home. There she would be, driving her dad’s big stick-shift pickup truck with her tanned arm lolling out the window. “Get in,” she would say, laughing and gesturing to the truck bed, then flooring the gas.
Vicki began to talk about going to San Francisco, about going to see the Grateful Dead. She cut her hair, stopped wearing makeup, started wearing flowing dresses and baggy pants. She had always gotten excited for Earth Day, but now she became “a real hippie.” On a family trip to Lake Geode, when her brothers threw their soda cans out the window, she lectured them on how long it takes for aluminum to biodegrade—five hundred years. She became a vegetarian, started making her own granola, started using chopsticks instead of a knife and fork, stopped touching the mounds of meat Clarabelle asked her to prepare for dinner, placing big bountiful salads on the family table instead. “We eat meat around here,” Howard said one night, and Vicki got up from the table and ran up the stairs. Her brother John heard her lifting the needle and playing her Grass Roots record over and over again, and he knew: Vicki would leave, and he would inherit that record.
She moved to Iowa City for a little while, living in a big communal house near what is today the Prairie Lights bookstore. She tried Davenport, near Moline, so she could go to the nursing school there. Her aunt and grandmother had been nurses, and she figured she might as well try for her degree.
But Vicki wanted to go farther, go faster—she just wanted to go. She wanted California, she wanted ocean, but she had no money for all that. She started hitchhiking.
Nancy Santomero had never hitchhiked outside of Long Island before. Her father, Joe, had traveled through the West when he was in his teens, but he came back. He met Nancy’s mother, Jeanne, an “independent woman” with a good job as a bank secretary, playing tennis on a Brooklyn court. It was Joe’s friend who asked Jeanne for her number, but Joe prevailed on the friend to sell it to him for thirty-five cents. Jeanne and Joe married at a small Catholic church in 1955 and set up their home in Levittown, that first gleaming and mass-produced suburb, designed to house soldiers returning from the Second World War and their families. Once just potato and onion fields, the town was built assembly-line style; at the peak of construction, a house was said to be completed every sixteen minutes. Jeanne had a good eye and was a snappy dresser whose garden was always the most elegant one on the street. She was the product of a happy marriage and a doting father. “I thought all fathers were like that,” she says. “I expected my husband to be the same kind of man. But he was not.”
Joe’s job as a Wise potato chip salesman kept him mostly on the road, driving his truck all over Long Island, and Jeanne stayed home to raise the kids—five of them born in quick succession, one almost every year. Joe wanted a boy, but Jeanne gave birth to girl after girl after girl after girl. The last one was Nancy. Patricia was just a year older than Nancy, but because Patricia was a shy child with a speech impediment, their mother decided to hold her back, and the two ended up in the same grade. “That way she could be with Nancy,” Jeanne says. “Nancy would protect her.” Nancy and Patricia had all the same friends and were sometimes mistaken for twins.
Levittown remained a completely white suburb into the 1960s because of a policy that explicitly banned people of color, and Jeanne worried about her kids growing up in such a place. She went back to work at the hospital as a ward clerk, and many of the people who came in for treatment lived in nicer neighborhoods in the Long Island towns to the east—farther from the city, closer to the Long Island Sound. The houses in these towns had more space between them; the crowds who played in the parks were more diverse. Joe drove his potato chip truck through these towns too and smelled their cleaner air. The couple crunched the numbers and decided they could afford the leap.
In August 1969, when Nancy and Patricia were going into the fourth grade, the Santomero family moved into a two-story house on a quiet cul de sac in the new development of Huntington. The kids could walk to school and downtown to Main Street, where there were restaurants and a small bookstore. They walked to the Walt Whitman mall, to the big H shopping center where there was a Sears, to the Woolworth counter, and the movie theater.
The theme of Nancy’s childhood was variety—shifting, trying on many different outfits to see if they fit. She wasn’t very concerned with her clothing, though, favoring jeans and peasant shirts. She was friends with everyone—the potheads, the disco people, the lacrosse players, the hippies. She was into art—painting and sculpture mostly, though for a time she talked about becoming a professional photographer—and liked everything from Joni Mitchell to Ayn Rand.
But she was an athlete too—a top-notch basketball player who played center. “I would throw the ball to her right away, and she would take it to the hoop,” remembers Patricia. Nancy liked being outside, a preference she got from her mother. “I had never been to the ocean until Nancy’s mother took us,” says Jo-Ann Orelli, Nancy’s best friend from that time.
The sisters shared one room and one bed. “We’d face [one] way and scratch each other’s backs,” says Nancy’s sister Jeanne, the second oldest, “and then we’d roll over and scratch [the sister on the other side].”
Nancy’s father was “traditional Italian,” he was “macho,” he believed “the man was the head of the household,” says Catherine Shea, who grew up on the same street as the Santomeros. Joe worked long hours and wanted dinner on the table when he came home. Nancy’s sisters and her brother, Peter, the youngest of all the kids (Joe got his boy after all), mostly deferred to Joe’s wishes.
“Nancy was stubborn,” says Patricia. “She was just like my dad—they were so similar. And the rest of us had to live with them.”
If there was a party too far away to walk to, the sisters and their friends sometimes hitchhiked along the local roads, a common practice at that time. “Everybody did it,” Orelli says. “We used to hitchhike with eight people, get picked up and jam into a car. If there were seatbelts, nobody wore them.”
Nancy wasn’t the one riding shotgun, but she went, squished into the backseat. The parties sprawled like the towns; they spread from kitchen to living room, living room to yard, yard to woods, woods to the shore, and then right on out to the Sound.
She liked to drink, says Orelli, but not more than anyone else. “We’d get a beer and all share it, passing it around and getting buzzed off the bubbles.” She had crushes, most notably on the brother of a friend of one of her sisters, and dated a boy for a while, but unlike Patricia, who met her husband in high school, Nancy’s relationships never got serious. Patricia went to the prom, but Nancy didn’t; going to the prom stag was not a thing at that time, Orelli says, nor was girls asking guys out. Neither was caring much about school or grades. Nancy was an “average student” at best.
“In high school, no one asked me if I was going to go to college,” says Kathy. “It’s nothing like now. I think we were just on the edge of change.”
After high school, Nancy rolled upstate to SUNY Buffalo. But it was brutally cold there, and she didn’t like her roommate. She got an apartment off campus right away, which she paid for herself—Joe and Jeanne couldn’t afford to help.
It is tempting to call Nancy “tough,” but Orelli says it wasn’t so. She was loving; she wasn’t hard. “She was a strong person.…What she did, I could never do—when she went to school in Buffalo…she was kind of on her own.…She was independent. She just had more guts [than the rest of us].”
Nancy did not hide it when she suffered. “My nerves are acting up,” Nancy wrote to Orelli. “Can’t eat, can’t sleep. I always thought myself to be a calm person. Tricked again!”
After her freshman year, she dropped out of school. “I really feel that I will find a more suitable place elsewhere,” Nancy wrote to her sister Jeanne in the fall of 1979. “Exactly where is unknown, but I am going to search for it.”
She spent that summer going downtown with her high school friends to the bars around Huntington. No one had any money, so the friends would buy six-ounce cans of Miller High Life called “splits,” which cost about ten cents.
The drinking age was eighteen then, and that wasn’t the only difference. “It was easier back then to get ahead,” says Orelli. “Now to live someplace like [where we grew up]…it costs a lot of money.”
Nancy told her friends that she had dreams, things to do, but she didn’t know what they were exactly or where. She thought she might like to become a forester or a park ranger, so she could work outside or close to animals. She had two cats named Thunder and Lightning.
Her moods seemed changeable that summer, recalls her sister Jeanne. “She would have very highs and lows. She would be really happy and then really sad.”
“Primarily she was happy,” Patricia says. “If she was sad, it was because she felt lost. When you don’t know what you’re doing, what your life is, it torments you.”
A school friend of the Santomero sisters, who was studying at the University of Arizona in Tucson, was also back home in Huntington for the summer. It’s warm there, she told Nancy over a split. By the fall, Nancy and her cats were there.
“I’m sure Iowa has been in its peak autumn colors by now. I miss that,” Vicki wrote home to her sister Mary in October 1978. “There is a definite season change here also but only slight.…There will be five planets lining up in Scorpio in a few weeks and I feel the earth will go through some drastic changes. Me too!”
She was in California. She had found that when she smiled, people stopped their cars. Someone called her Bright Star because of that smile, and soon it was her name.
Where some searchers are essentially one—all movement, all desire, all muscle and hair—Vicki was two, both street cat and house cat. There was the dream, sure, there was the need to be free, but also, somewhere that was always with her, there was the farm in Iowa, the bills that were due, the father and the mother, and the seven siblings who stayed. Vicki knew she had busted the set, disturbed the order by leaving.
When Mary got married, Vicki caught a ride home and stood dutifully with the other bridesmaids in the ceremonial half moon. She had forgotten how to wear makeup so completely that one of Mary’s friends had to do it for her. The dress—a floor-length gown of “tyrol red fashioned with empire waist, front opening with stand-up collar, long puffed sleeves with cuffs accented with white pearl buttons”—felt odd against her skin, but she wore it.
By 1980, Vicki had moved to Tucson and found work as a home health aide, a job she liked because it was flexible enough that she could be gone for weeks at a time. She scrimped, but she got by. She had a big vet bill to pay off for her dog, Jake, and a truck that wasn’t running. “I don’t feel boggled and down with any of it,” she wrote home to Mary and Mary’s new husband, “and feel light and happy that everything is working out just fine.”
In Tucson, Nancy lived with her sister’s friend for a while and worked at a thrift store. But when she was off, she explored downtown. Down Fourth Avenue, where the buildings are low and tall cacti poke over fences into alleyways like trees, sat Food Conspiracy, Tucson’s organic food cooperative. The building was red brick with a front window, and Nancy liked to sit there. One day, a woman came out of the store and stopped. It was Vicki.
Soon they were walking together along the avenue and talking. They were both Scorpios. Vicki arranged for Nancy to move into a group house she knew. “I live in a nice large house with ten other humans,” Nancy’s letters from this time show. “Four men, three women, three children. Crazy crew.”
Vicki and Nancy may have gone on other adventures during this time. “Traveling with a beautiful lady named Bright Star,” Nancy wrote to her friend Orelli, “learning an awful lot from her.” Nancy also had plans to travel with another friend and possibly to leave Tucson altogether for California, Oregon, or Washington.
“She has invited me to join her in her travels. So I’m off…to explore the unknown. In search of exactly what I don’t know—when I find it I’ll fill you in,” Nancy wrote her sister Jeanne.
Ultimately, she changed her mind about moving West, but she remained restless. She wanted to leave her job, which she hated.
“I’m finding Tucson to be a bit of a drag. It’s really a nice place, but not the place for me,” Nancy wrote to Jeanne. Then to her whole family, “I plan on selling everything I own and traveling with a backpack and my cats of course. Thunder…is just growing up. He has a lot of battle marks on his body. He is learning the art of survival.”
When another friend of Vicki’s named Liz called from the outlaw commune and asked Vicki if she wanted to leave Arizona for a few weeks and go to the Rainbow Gathering in July 1980, Vicki was down. But she wanted to bring Nancy along—Nancy could use the experience. The trio made plans to meet up at Vicki’s parents’ farmhouse in Iowa and then hitchhike to West Virginia together from there. Vicki’s sister had a new baby, and her brother was graduating from high school.
For several days, Vicki, Nancy, and Liz slept in Vicki’s childhood bedroom. They went to Mary’s baby shower. Vicki held her new nephew, and a camera flashed, capturing the moment. Was Vicki remembering her own baby then? She didn’t say, and no one asked. “It wasn’t a secret,” says her brother John. “We just didn’t talk about it.” Her father, Howard, didn’t think much of “all this Rainbow business” and told the three women so. Her mother, Clarabelle, wanted Vicki to stop all the wandering and come home and settle down. Vicki said it would probably be her last big trip. Of the coming-home part, she said she would think about it.
It was time to go. “The visit here with y’all has been delightfully wonderful. Thank you for sharing your space & food and love with us, it is gratefully appreciated indeed,” reads a note signed just from Vicki and Nancy. “As we travel the east coast of the country we will remember all of you Durians with prayerful thought. May you be blessed abundantly with all you need.”
Vicki’s brother Tom was working at Amishland Sausage in Kalona, so they left him a note. “I hope all in your life is terrific, please be careful,” Nancy wrote to him. “I hope you are feeling good now,” Vicki wrote, with a happy-face sign. “Love and take care of yourself. See ya.”
Vicki’s mother didn’t want to drive them the half hour to the closest interstate ramp, but she did. After Clarabelle had cried and cried and then driven away, Vicki remarked to Liz and Nancy that this was the first leave-taking that had made her mother cry.