45.

ONE LAST LOOK

My father’s ears were tuned for frogs as we left the restaurant. It was a hot summer evening and we had just finished dinner at the Blue Hill at Stone Barns Restaurant in Pocantico Hills, New York. When I was a child, its stone and brick buildings housed my grandfather’s milk cows. I still remember the sweet smells of clover and milk on their bovine breath as their sandpaper tongues licked my face. The field just north of the barns was once grazed by cows. In the spring their milk tasted of onion grass. Now it is lined with vegetables like a Tuscany landscape. Chickens and sheep occupy other fields. Meat and vegetables are brought with reverence to the restaurant kitchen where every morsel is given special attention in both preparation and presentation. A single baked onion is served on a plate. After cooking slowly for twenty-four hours, even this humble vegetable is given center stage. Humble turns out to be the theme of the evening.

After many tastes of food bursting with flavor and freshness, my dad and I walk into the night to his car. Our stomachs are happily sated but not too full. Sounds fill the night air in much the same way. My father is listening.

“Are those frogs I hear?” he asks, hopefully. At ninety-five his ears are less certain of sounds than in his youth, but his curiosity is as sharp as ever.

“I think it’s just crickets and katydids,” I say as I listen for the deep wallop of bullfrogs or the persistently high-pitched chereep, chereep of green frogs. We are both disappointed. But my dad does not give up.

“Let’s go to the back porch when we get home and see if we hear them,” he says. For years frogs sought mates in a tiny pond at the base of the hill behind our house. Their songs of seduction filled our dreams at night. We cling to our hopes as we arrive home and find our way in the dark, past the familiar layout of cushioned furniture framed by colonial columns. The porch faces west over an expansive lawn dipping down the hill where memories of childhood sledding come to rest at the foot of a three-hundred-year-old white oak. Beyond it are fields filled with cattle, walking trails, and finally the Hudson River. The Palisades rise from the other side of the river to receive the setting sun in its transition from day to night.

Dad rests his cane against the sofa and eases himself down. I sit next to him. We listen. Crickets and katydids are audible to the right and straight ahead. We turn our heads to the left, expecting more variety down the hill at the frog pond. But we cannot turn up the volume or variety of sounds.

“I used to hear so many frogs,” Dad laments. “About ten years ago we dredged the pond. They said it had to be done for some reason. After that the peepers never came back. I wish I knew what happened to them.” Grim reality sinks like a stone to the floor of our stomachs.

For a man who spent his career with the Chase Manhattan Bank, bringing home more heads of state than I can remember, this is a humble moment. Not a single peeper is heard. Their absence focuses his attention on the little things that share the right to live. If dredging can eradicate whole species from a pond, how much more destruction will it take before they are gone everywhere? I wonder if my grandchildren will ever know the frogs that my dad longs to hear again. Listening is the first step to preserving the world for the next generation.

If my dad listens to the world beyond himself, my uncle Laurance felt guided internally, through Spirit. Their initials, carved into the inner ring of the Playhouse’s ceiling, have come to represent for me the yin and yang of their generation.

In 2001, three years before he died, Uncle Laurance made a decision that initially sent seismic tremors through our extended family. I did not make peace with it until Paul and I visited the property in October 2011.

Some places hook your heart and never let go. For me, the JY Ranch in Moose, Wyoming, is one of them. I owe everything to my Grandfather Rockefeller, who first visited the Tetons in 1927. He was so moved by the inspiring views of jagged peaks and sagebrush valleys that when he saw the beginnings of sprawl in the Snake River valley, he vowed to protect the area and quietly bought thirty-five thousand acres. By 1950, he had contributed thirty-two thousand acres to the United States government for the Grand Teton National Park. He kept the remaining land, including a dude ranch called the JY, and made it into a family retreat.

From the 1930s until 2003, six generations of his family unpacked their bags in the rustic log cabins and relaxed before the same views, one and a half miles across Phelps Lake to the craggy mountains rising beyond. We came as Grandfather’s guests until 1960, when he passed the ownership of the JY on to his third son, Laurance. Uncle Laurance continued the generous tradition of inviting family to stay at his ranch, free of charge. My family and I visited many times over the years, finding balance between service and solitude, city and wilderness, opulence and simplicity. We drank in the dry, pine-scented air, the fields painted red and yellow with wildflowers, and the smell of pinesap oozing from the logs in our cabins.

The JY Ranch was a place where all six branches descending from our grandfather ran wild. We canoed across the lake at night, jumped off a thirty-foot-tall boulder into the glacial water by day, stalked elk and moose, rode bareback, and played capture the flag on horseback. We helped wrangle the horses before sunrise, caught trout in the lake and ate them for breakfast, and hiked for miles among alpine wildflowers and leftover winter snow. My parents’ idea of the perfect vacation was to exhaust ourselves physically and find rejuvenation in natural beauty.

Red Mathews was the manager of the ranch for many years, through the fourth generation of family guests. He stirred up the dust with laughter and practical jokes, a healthy relief from my adult family members’ sense of duty and service. Red was the only person who could swear in front of my grandfather and get away with it. He had red hair and an irresistible laugh. He inspired us to short sheet beds, put elk turds in the olive bowls, and dare to ride faster and hike farther than we ever dreamed.

Romances flourished at the JY and braided together different strands of family. My mother’s parents honeymooned there when it was still a dude ranch before Grandfather bought it. My uncle Laurance and aunt Mary honeymooned there, and my mother became legendary for shooting a bear while on her matrimonial pack trip with my father and Red. The first time I took Paul there, he proposed to me. We continued visiting the JY with our sons, Paul’s and my parents and friends, my brothers and sisters, and their children.

At night we occasionally shined a flashlight on a curious bear just outside our cabin. One time, I visited with Paul during the rutting season for elk. We listened to their high-pitched bugling from opposite hillsides across the lake.

There were quiet moments, too. We sat on the porch of the main lodge, reading a book or watching fish rise in the lake before dinner. I liked to read my cousins’ and their children’s entries in the guest books, recounting the horses they rode, the number of moose they counted at the salt lick by the cabin across the bridge, or the miles they had covered, hiking and riding among the Grand Tetons. The JY Ranch was the only place that was home to every member of my Rockefeller family.

Everything changed in February 2001. Uncle Laurance made a decision to give the ranch and its surrounding acreage to the Grand Teton National Park. He didn’t tell his plan to anyone in the family until he completed the deal. I believe he felt a spiritual calling to give it back to the public. He also wanted to avoid conflict. His wife, Mary, had predeceased him, and I suspect he felt he must make this decision on his own.

He sent a letter to his children and the rest of the family telling them that they could no longer come to the JY, as he would be dismantling all the buildings and restoring the ranch to nature for the public to enjoy.

The family was stunned. How could he do this to us? We had never meant to take his generosity for granted, but the ranch had come to feel like a permanent fixture. Had we not shown him how deeply grateful we were? Of course, he had the right to do with his land as he wished, but why hadn’t he prepared us? His children and many of my other cousins, and my brothers and sisters were dismayed. Uncle Laurance became the target for the anger he had so wanted to avoid. E-mails and phone calls shot back and forth among his children and their cousins. Several of his children confronted him in person. My cousin Ann Roberts, Uncle Nelson’s eldest daughter, wrote him a letter that finally opened his heart. With her permission I include it here:

So dear Uncle Laurance, I am standing here in my grief and sorrow, feeling how deeply this family is rooted in the JY, how much love and memory is there, how sacred that place is to us, how torn open your children must be—and surely there is more meaning, memory, and feeling there for you than any of us can know . . . and I am asking how I can be with you to find . . . a way . . . forward . . . that honors all that you believe in as a conservationist and all you have so eloquently spoken to regarding family values, traditions, the meaning of sacred place, and the importance of the family harmony we have strived for, for so long. There is, I deeply believe, a way for this to happen that honors all that is good—it is never too late for that.

I will never know just how Uncle Laurance felt in receiving this letter, but after much deliberation he consented to giving the entire family three more years in which to say good-bye. The family breathed a collective sigh of relief.

By early fall of 2003, the last guests had packed their bags and the buildings started coming down. My cousin Larry, Uncle Laurance’s only son, found several family members who shared his desire to keep the buildings. They bought some land in the valley and had all the cabins reinstalled with the same furniture, paintings, books, Navajo baskets, and rugs put back in exactly the same places.

My uncle died the following summer, on July 11, 2004. His job was complete.

I did not visit the ranch again until Paul and I went to the Environmental Grantmakers Association retreat at the Jackson Lake Lodge in October 2011. We asked Larry if we could spend one night at his ranch before the meetings started. I was ambivalent about the visit. I wanted to see the familiar cabins, but I was nervous about going back to Phelps Lake, the site where they had stood for over seventy years on family land.

We arrived at Larry’s ranch late at night. The sky was brilliant, and coyotes yipped and howled in the distance. We were shown to the main lodge, where we had stayed many times. Everything looked the same. I had a flash of delusion. Perhaps this was all just a dream. I would wake up the next morning and hear the splash of a moose stomping along the edge of the lake.

We woke at dawn to the sound of horses whinnying outside our window. There was no Tetons, no moose, no lake, just horses grazing in a vast, windblown field. This was the morning for our pilgrimage back to Phelps Lake.

We drove to the beautiful visitor center of the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve, within the Grand Teton National Park. It was located at the start of the trail leading to the site of our family’s former ranch.

Paul and I walked in silence. The dirt roads, which I remembered driving on to get to the ranch, were no longer in evidence. Trees had been planted and gravel removed. The cold morning air chilled my fingers and I felt a ponderous weight in my heart. It beat loudly with the ascent to over six thousand feet.

I wanted to dream the past, to see the ranch house by the corral and cross the stream over a brown, wooden bridge to find a moose and calf at the salt lick. I was sure we would pass the boathouse, or at least see a canoe tied up along the dock, and then we would be there. The recreation hall (or “rec hall,” as we all had called it) would be first to greet us. I couldn’t wait to see the bronze sculpture again, called Appeal to the Great Spirit, by Cyrus Dallin, of an American Indian bareback on a horse—his arms outstretched, with chest lifted to the sky—in surrender pose. I was not quite ready to surrender my dream.

I could almost smell lunch being made in the dining room, just past all the cabins. I listened for the triangle bell. It would still be there, hanging from an iron arm on the landing outside the dining-room doors. I was sure it would, because the air smelled the same as always, of trout, pine sap, and a hint of sage.

Somewhere along the trail, I became disoriented.

We arrived at the lake. The people we passed en route had gone the other way and we were blessedly alone.

I recognized the two rocks a few hundred yards out, used as perches for ducks, and the boulder we had jumped from was still visible, far along the right edge of the lake. I looked down at the water, still and clear as a looking glass. It reflected the mountains I’ve known all my life.

Paul reached for my hand and wove his fingers through mine. My sense of geography was somewhere between knowing and missing. Paul pointed to Static Peak, the mountain ridge where we became engaged thirty-one years ago. Nothing in the view had changed. Everything in the human landscape, where the buildings once stood, was changed forever.

Paul and I turned to walk along the path that used to pass between the cabins, and my eye lit on something shiny embedded in a tree ten feet from the water. I moved closer and saw it was a hook. Its companion was lodged in a tree five feet away, like old friends that once held each end of a hammock. Something of our human past had remained, after all. The trees refused to give them up.

We walked to where the main lodge should have been, where the bedroom we had slept in the night before was no longer. We stood on the site of the wooden terrace and hugged. I was too numb to cry. I walked a few feet to the tree we had posed under many times as a couple and a family. It was slightly thicker but still there. Paul and I said a prayer of gratitude for the tree, the lake, the mountains, and our memories. We sat on different rocks to meditate and acclimate ourselves to this new chapter of the former JY Ranch. Not a soul was heard. I appealed to the Great Spirit to accept this change. My heart opened and I felt a presence of Grandfather and Uncle Laurance.

Uncle Laurance seemed suspended between spirit and shadow. He had chosen his spiritual vision over family and tried to avoid their reaction. Grandfather’s hand was on his shoulder, half comforting, half sharing the dilemma.

I reflected on the one time Uncle Laurance and I had dinner together, how his blue eyes looked up from his slightly lowered head. I asked him whether he ever felt shy.

“Well. You are very perceptive.” I can still hear his voice. I told him I was shy, too. In fact, sometimes I felt so shy I couldn’t even look at my own eyes in the mirror. We laughed like schoolchildren caught in the act, and the bond between us deepened.

The air was as still as my body. I felt a clearing inside, like the water in front of me. My sorrow over Uncle Laurance’s decision was starting to fade. Perhaps he, too, had appealed to the Great Spirit. I believe that together with Grandfather, Uncle Laurance realized that this land we all have loved and held so dear for three quarters of a century was not really ours to hold.

Beauty cannot be contained because it is the twin of spirit. We can no more own beauty than we can own a star. We look and we feel inspired, moved, overjoyed, or grateful, but it doesn’t come with us when we die. I believe Uncle Laurance saw this in the magnitude of the gifts he had been given by his grandfather and father, which each of us in my family have received in one form or another.

I looked up from under the family tree where each of us had stood, wanting our picture taken with the glory and the beauty beyond us. We can own a photograph, or the land that forms its backdrop, but ultimately beauty owns us. It is us, in all our shapes and colors, in our various moods, in every season of our lives. We are beauty, and each of us belongs.