After a decade, it seemed that Bernard and I had given up our souls for the growth of our company, that all we did now was work. Gone were the joys of discovering shared passions. The jokes, the dancing, the laughter, all faded. Pooh gathered dust on a shelf. Bernard had become The Road Runner, zipping along in manic overdrive, gripped by a compulsion, which I couldn’t fathom and no longer wanted much part of. I was Wile E. Coyote, panicked smile glued to my face, clinging to the crumbling cliff of our marriage with frantically scrabbling paws.
In the cartoon, Coyote plunges into the abyss, to be resurrected moments later battered and disheveled, but ready for another go. But this was real life, and I desperately didn’t want to fall. So I hung on, feeling ever more frayed, sometimes despairing, but always convinced that if I could just manage a bit longer, I’d be able to pull myself—pull us—over the precipice and back to safety.
Several more years passed before things finally fell into place and our company sold. With funds and freedom firmly in our grasp, it was time to blow the lid off our pent-up travel urges. We trekked to remote Kanchenjunga in the eastern Himalayas. We cantered on horseback through the African bush. I even squelched my fear of avalanches to ski in the Canadian wilderness. Before each of these trips, I steeled myself to the anticipated rigors with a stern talking-to, shoring up my timid side with a bracing reminder that lesser mortals than I were able to do this. Not so Bernard. If anything, the impression he gave me was that the trips were pleasant, but, well, rather tame. Another sign I should have read, but ignored.
In between all this coming and going, we moved to a cattle and hay ranch high in the Colorado mountains. Acquiring land, having space, was Bernard’s idea, but as usual I was happy to follow. Besides, I’d acquired a horse habit. This had started seven or eight years before, when I told Bernard, half in jest, that I wanted to be a well-rounded human being, one who, for instance, could handily saddle a horse and mount up should I be invited to Balmoral Castle by the Queen. For some reason, he didn’t need to ask me which part of that statement was the joke.
On my next birthday, Bernard led a handsome bay gelding across the field in front of our house. Behind him trudged my father, nearly buried under a western saddle so large and heavy I could barely heave it onto the upstairs railing in our home, where it stayed as a decorative element for many years. The next morning, Bernard and I spent half an hour trying to figure out how to get a halter over my new horse’s head. Things could only improve from there. I bought myself a lightweight English saddle, took riding lessons, and learned by personal experience how carefully one rises after falling off a fast-moving horse and how long it takes the purple to appear on ones butt when the bruise is bone-deep. We got a barn built and learned the difference between good and bad hay, as well as how much of the former a horse needs to eat. Terms like farrier, tack, and worming entered my consciousness. Bernard bought a horse, too. It was his only hope of ever seeing me again.
By the time the ranch came into view, I knew one thing for sure. I no longer wanted to be tied to home, throwing hay to horses each day. That the ranch came with eight additional horses was not a worry. There was so much pasture we could let the horses self-feed—locals called this ‘grazing’—and still have plenty left for a few spare equines. Besides, we both wanted a radical change of lifestyle. On a ranch we’d be outdoors. I’ve read all the Little House on the Prairie books, so I knew what that meant: fixing fences, checking cows, tracking water through ditches, cutting and selling hay, bringing hot covered casseroles to neighborhood potlucks, helping those neighbors with branding. That our ranch was eighty miles and two hours of winding mountain roads from the nearest shoe store or pharmacy was put in the category of “minor inconvenience.”
Though things didn’t go perfectly our first summer on the ranch, we were hooked by our new life. Instead of being slaves to product release schedules, we now followed the seasons. Our concerns shifted from errors in a Japanese translation to whether it would rain. I abandoned hard drives and learned to drive a tractor pulling a baler over a back meadow. The first summer on the ranch I helped put up a thousand tons of hay. In the golden light of a setting summer sun, I watched red-tail hawks wheeling low, on the mouse hunt, as my baler compressed sweet smelling grass into a tight seventy-pound package bound with orange twine.
As for enlarging our horse herd, I went to the federal penitentiary in Cañon City, home to the BLM’s wild horse adoption program, where I adopted a scrawny young mustang stallion newly culled from the wild herds that populate western Colorado and Utah. In my quest to become the ultimate horsewoman I rode alone over the ranch’s dry bluffs and marshy willow cars. My horse sniffed the recent scat of a large elk herd and spooked six feet sideways when equally surprised mallards took flight from a beaver pond. I attended clinics on natural horsemanship, practiced the tricks back home, and picked sagebrush out of my hair every time I got bucked off. Bernard had time to indulge his passion for big equipment, amassing a collection of trucks and tractors, each one necessary for some ranch task. It seemed to me I should learn to use them, too. That doing so was an essential part of being a ranch woman. But then there was my penchant for daydreaming, for spacing out at critical moments. Bernard couldn’t fathom how I never seemed able to remember how to turn any of them on, couldn’t understand how what had become so obvious to him remained so obscure to me. Impatience burgeoned between us, and I left the equipment side of ranching to him. I’m keeping the peace, I told myself. And anyway, why would I need to use them myself, when Bernard could drive, use, and fix them all?
After a summer of putting up hay and tending to ranch chores, the sparkling days of fall were pure pleasure. With no more snow melt to fill it, the river outside our door shrank, and beavers built their dams in inconvenient places, creating ponds deep enough for moose to swim across. Sixpoint bull elk jousted in the meadow, keeping us up at night with their clacking antlers and strident, ringing calls.
Bernard accumulated an assassin’s-worth of guns, one for every sort of bird or animal. Ever since his days as an artillery captain in the French army he’d been a crack shot, on friendly terms with the sort of precision rifles of which Carlos the Jackal would approve. He bought me a lightweight, century-old Winchester .22 repeating rifle. It had a long, slender barrel of some deeply tanned wood, black burnished steel fittings, and a manual scope. Recalling my childhood shooting a cap pistol around the backyard, terrorizing my sister as I chased her in my red cowboy hat while she fled screaming in her matching blue one, I was delirious to finally have the real thing. When my first shots came within inches of the bull’s eye, we both were stunned. Secretly, I put another notch in my pioneer woman belt. Then I bought a handgun.
On cold, misty mornings, Bernard rose at four o’clock to hunt. Though I refused to hunt, I was happy to share in the bounty, insisting only that if he took an animal’s life, we needed to make use of it. Cured elk skins carpeted the floor and beaver pelts covered the backs of chairs. With only an occasional glance at a cookbook, our diet changed from beef to elk. My culinary adventures began with a wild goose hung for so short a time that the roasted version was as tender as a basketball and as palatable as a rubber tire. The beaver tail I grilled made us grateful we weren’t nineteenth century trappers, dependent on its dense white fat to keep us alive. My beaver haunch pot roast drew fairly favorable reviews, though the leftovers remained in the freezer for a year.
One day Bernard took his Unimog, a monster-size vehicle that’s an adult equivalent of a Tonka truck, far into the mountains beyond our ranch. When he returned, hours late, he was covered with grime and flashing a smile as wide as the Mississippi. “I got stuck on a road in a really tight spot,” he explained, beaming. “So I figured I’d wrap my winch around a tree, to pull myself to a spot where I could turn around.” So far so good, I told myself. Nothing new here.
“Then, guess what? I heard a creaking, looked up, and,” he held his head in his hands, shaking it back and forth as if he himself couldn’t believe what he was about to say. “That tree was coming down on me. The winch pulled the tree over instead of pulling me up to it. I just barely managed to jump off the bed before it crashed down right over the hood of the Unimog. I can show you the dent . . . ” I was no longer so happy. The Unimog’s bed was eight feet high and I could too easily imagine Bernard breaking his leg in that unplanned leap.
“So there I was with a sixty-foot pine tree lying on my truck. Thank goodness I had my wood knife with me.” He dug into his back pocket and pulled out the Japanese serrated knife with the six-inch blade he’d bought at a hardware store some years ago. “It took me hours.” Eyes squeezed shut and head thrown back in utter joy at his escapade, he gasped and wheezed in the throes of a major laughing fit.
I offered a tentative chuckle of commiseration. I wanted to show him my appreciation for his accomplishment, but the truth was, what filled him with pleasure sent a surge of resentment through my gut. Bernard was euphoric with the ranching life, able finally to indulge his passion for the outdoors and all things mechanical. At that moment I knew that at heart I was a suburban girl. I was raised on HMS Pinafore and ski vacations. I had never gotten cozy with a wrench and had never thrilled to the delights of diesel engines.
Here I’d thought I had everything in balance. We were living in heaven, weren’t we? Now I realized Bernard had far outdistanced me. He was fully involved in keeping everything running. He understood our water rights, knew our ditches, and, with repair people hours away, fixed anything that broke. After two decades of marriage, we’d grown nonchalant about our togetherness. We needed a new project, something that would pull us off our separate paths and merge us into a team again. The Peking to Paris seemed just the ticket. There was no way to know that the eighteen months of preparations would nearly undo us.