The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning Read Free Page B

I run across any news stories on the Ogallala, I could send them to you.”
    A flash must have passed from my eyes, because his eyes signaled back, one quick flash.
    He found a pen and piece of paper in his truck and wrote down my address. I extended my hand, and he held it for an extra beat. “Say hello to your son for me. Was it . . . Jake?”
    This took me aback. “Good memory.”
    “He must be a teenager now.”
    “Yes.” Did reading my book give him the right to ask about Jake? I wasn’t sure. “He’s sixteen.”
    He walked with me to the bank. “Let me give you a hand.”
    “It’s not steep here.” Unsteadily I slalomed down into the creek bed I’d climbed out of on my hands and knees. I could feel his eyes following me as I walked away. He had truly unusual eyes. Kaleidoscopic, as if filled with sunlit green stones.

2
    I N L ARAMIE, J AKE AND I LIVED IN A BIG OLD HOUSE THAT I ’D BOUGHT THE WEEK OF MY JOB INTERVIEW IN THE EARLY NINETIES. With only a few days in town, I asked the hiring committee at the university to let me know their decision right away. There hadn’t been many houses on the market at the time, but driving around on the last day, I found an old two-story on the west side that I couldn’t believe the real estate agent hadn’t bothered to show me. It had everything I wanted—a wide front porch facing the Snowy Range Mountains, varnished woodwork, high ceilings.
    Back in Iowa that summer, I could barely wait to move. I’d just completed a graduate writing program, and through all the years I’d been studying, I dreamed of living in the West again. Having returned to school in my late thirties, I’d been what they called a nontraditional student. And now I was eager to settle down with my nontraditional family of two in a home that had at least the trappings of tradition. More important, there would be mountains nearby. Jake would learn to love the wilderness as much as I did. And instead of driving eight hundred miles from Iowa to Kansas to see my parents, we could now make the trip in a half day.
    When I pulled up to the curb in the Ryder truck two months later, I had to put on my best mommy face. Had I really poured the student loan money I’d managed to save into this brown-and-yellow fixer-upper? The exterior was so badly chapped I would have to sand every board before I could replace the ugly colors. Inside, now that no furniture or curtains hid damage, I saw that the varnished woodwork was scarred. Every room needed new carpeting and paint. But with its graceful turn-of-the-century detail, my house had incredible potential. I knew that I could make it beautiful again. “I’m going to live in this house for the rest of my life,” I told my parents when they drove up for a visit.
    “Oh, you’ll get out of here,” Dad said.
    I hadn’t really expected him to like my house. After all, here wasthe man who’d moved us out of the grand house that my grandfather Carlson had built on the farm—with high ceilings and varnished-pine woodwork and bay windows and beveled glass in French doors—and built instead a nondescript ranch style in town. I understood what had motivated him. After my grandmother Carlson passed away, my parents traded their share of her land for land closer to my father’s other holdings. Although there was an old house on the new land, Dad didn’t think that one suitable for Mom. He’d been raised in a sod house and hated remembering his mother bringing up seven children in that “rat hole.”
Dirt falling off the ceiling
, he often recalled.
Christ!
His father had been successful too and could have built Grandma Bair the big stucco house that I loved romping through on holiday visits much sooner than he had.
    Sometimes Mom regretted leaving the house she’d grown up in, but Dad didn’t seem to know what they’d sacrificed. In my Laramie house, I saw a classy, historic home that would give Jake some of the solidity I’d had in my childhood. Dad