I had been trying to learn how to run a ranch, enhance the operations of photosynthesis, and find true harmony with horses. The ranch thrived but the marriage came apart. There were serious problems—both mine and his—that we failed to iron out.
In May 1991, the night before I left for months of work outside the country—first to Nunavut, Canada, on assignment for Harper’s Magazine, then to London to write a poem cycle for a choreographer—I was served with divorce papers. I asked the lawyer for a continuance and traveled on.
A life can change so suddenly and completely, nothing about it is recognizable. In August of that year I was hit by lightning. During a break from rehearsals before opening night at London’s South Bank Centre, I’d returned to the ranch in Wyoming for a week’s respite. The second night I was there, I was hit by lightning.
A phone call from old friends, Sonia and Robert, saved my life. I had made my way back to the house after being unconscious for hours, but my throat and left side were paralyzed. I couldn’t talk and could make only a horrible squeal. They called 911 and after an hour or so, two first responders arrived. I was taken to a badly staffed rural hospital and released the next day: barefoot, with unwashed cuts all over my body, dazed. After several attempts to find good care at three regional hospitals, I retreated to the ranch and that night, alone and unable to stay conscious for long, I saw death: there were black figures in the corners of the room coming for me.
I made an unusual decision: to call my parents and ask for help. My father asked if I could get on a flight to California. I said I didn’t think so. He came for me in a friend’s plane and I was flown to the hospital in my childhood home, Santa Barbara. Back to square one, as Ray Hunt would say.
On the cardiac care unit, a nurse said, “You can relax now. We’re not going to let you die.” My cardiologist read all my books while I was in the hospital. “Now I know how to take care of you,” he said. When the electrochemical messages to my heart that told it to beat slowed and, at one point, stopped, I was revived and later, put on Norpace to keep my heart ticking, but staying conscious was difficult. “You can do anything you want,” my cardiologist said with a smile, “as long as you do it lying down, and that doesn’t include sex, alcohol, hot tubs, or anything that might require you to stand up too long.”
Ten days later I was released to my parents’ care. They were seventy-five and I couldn’t keep up with them. When my father walked me to the mailbox yards away, I clung to his arm and barely made it back. While I was resting, my mother stroked the top of my hand. I cried; I was their baby again and I needed them to survive.
The lightning had caused a brain stem injury, and my sympathetic nervous system was fried. I could barely process a thought. Deaths had occurred—not mine, but that of my cowboying life, my marriage, and deep friendships. They were wiped out, and I was back living in the town from which I’d been dispatched in order to “make something of myself.” I was forty-five years old. Enormous self-protective blanks installed themselves in my brain: the lightning blank, the ranch blank, the divorce blank.
An old friend found a house for me. It belonged to the painter Ken Noland. Spare and simple, it was built on stilts in the sand. Every wave at high tide shook the house. Every wave entered me, all timbre and tempo, telling my heart to beat. Evenings, I forced myself to watch the sun sink below the ocean’s horizon and made a pact with myself to never miss a sunset. In other words, I had to stay alive to see it. The cowboys in Wyoming always said at the end of the year, “Let’s hope we make it to green grass.” That was my motto too, but for a long time, I wasn’t sure I would.
My health improved, though more slowly than I’d thought possible. It took three years. The Spanish-speaking checkout women at my mother’s grocery store prayed for me, as did my parents’ housekeeper, Pauline. That was good enough for me. I sought out no physical therapy. Sammy, my dog, had been flown to me. A friend in the movie business organized a car service to pick him up at LAX and delivered him to me at the beach. Sam was my mirror, my only companion. He watched, curious, as I stood on my head, legs propped against the wall, to get blood and oxygen flowing to my brain; then we’d wander aimlessly on the beach as far and as often as we could. Sometimes a few yards. Later, miles.
I slept. The fatigue was bone-deep. I listened to my body: what to eat and how often to sleep and when to walk. My kelpie-heeler cross and I made beach friends: Hillary Hauser and her schipperkes, the Australians Kate and Clyde Packer and their German shepherds. Every Wednesday was barbecue night: one “barbie” was set up for the dogs and one for the humans. I was happy in my shambling life, too unwell to notice how I must have seemed. That was the good part: I didn’t know how decrepit I was, so I didn’t care.
The medication that instructed my heart to beat made it difficult to read. Instead, I listened avidly to chamber music, the string quartets of Beethoven, Bartók, Shostakovich, and Kevin Volans. I was convinced that its cerebral intimacy would repair my brain.
My parents were more concerned than I was about my invalidity. I’d faced death and won (with their help) and felt confident my body knew what it was doing. When the neurologist announced that brain cells don’t regenerate, I refused to believe him. How could that be possible when all the other cells in a body grow back? The true setbacks were emotional: the divorce was finalized; I lost the ranch and my investment in it. I asked for my equal share and didn’t get it. Instead, I received two horses and one dog. Two years later, my books and clothes were sent COD by truck to California.
One morning, in the third year of convalescence, I felt my ch’i rise, and sat up in bed laughing. Sammy put his paw on my arm and growled with delight. It was not so much that I wanted to live—I simply found myself fully alive. I called my cardiologist. The nurses in his office cheered: “Get down here, we want to take your vitals!”
For the first time, my lagging blood pressure was almost normal; I no longer felt as if a black sky was lowering down the middle of my forehead, or that I was going to faint if I stood. My ch’i kept announcing itself as the old vitality returned, so I set out, less strong and more vulnerable to fatigue, stress, and heat, yet quite jolly between agonizing bouts of ranch grief. I began to consider my decrepitude a blessing, an unexpected opening into a deepened life. My sister said I was “nicer.” A visiting monk from Japan said, “You know everything about being strong. Now you have to learn about being weak. Otherwise you will be out of balance.”
Nights, I longed for the Wyoming mountains where I could ride and walk in total privacy. Then I found out that our end-of-the-road ranch had been sold without my knowledge or consent, and there was nothing I could do about it. As the effects of the lightning eased off and things slipped away, other delights took hold. Like a volcano that destroys part of an island but makes new islands in the process, I was eager to investigate unexplored territory.
In those early months after being released from the hospital, Blaine, my cardiologist, said it would be best if I stayed in the area near good medical care. No one knew what the long-term effects of a lightning strike might be. He loaned me money for a down payment and I bought a hundred-acre parcel on the Hollister Ranch, where I had ridden when I was a teenager—the Hollisters were friends of my parents. There, I could have some semblance of a ranch life with dogs and horses.
The parcel came with an abandoned, half-built house and a habitable guesthouse perched on a hill, half a mile from the ocean. Bill, an eccentric surfer-contractor, finished the buildings. His motto: “Surf up, hammers down.” I had exactly $40,000 to spend. We scavenged wood from the beach, and after historic El Niño floods, Bill bargained for the goods from downtown stores that had flooded: bathtub, toilet, sinks, even a dishwasher. Quite exciting for someone who had lived in an uninsulated house in the mountains of Wyoming where kerosene lamps and melting snow on the wood cookstove for water were the norm.
Bill and his brother made a cement floor divided by pieces of driftwood. He set a bathtub down into the thousand-square-foot deck. The kitchen counter was a raw slab of unpolished Carrara marble he picked up for a few hundred dollars. Large driftwood logs that had rolled onto the beach were stuccoed into the drywall corners.
The house became a sanctuary of sorts from my sins of confusion. The solace I’d found in Wyoming after David’s death was no longer available to me, but I’d found a place near what the Chumash Indians call the Western Gate—the place where the dead go—with its wild nocturnal winds and miles of beach backed by chaparral-covered mountains and enough space to walk and ride where no one would bother me.