Desiree Permian’s vision blurred with tears when she found the page. Encircled in red pencil was Introduction to Veterinary Science. How could it have been eighteen years since that Junior College class launched her plan to be a veterinarian? She had been sure her love of critters and straight-As in high school would sail her through the biology and chemistry courses. But another kind of chemistry had diverted her—six-feet-two inches of it by the name of Will Permian. She hadn’t been in the course three weeks when he proposed and Desiree dropped her books to pick up pitchforks, crescent wrenches and eventually a seven-pound wriggler christened JoAnn Mae Permian.
She had no regrets about the life she had made with Will and the girls here in the Valley. It said right in the Good Book, though, there’s a time for all things under the sun. So she had announced her time had come to begin driving the 21 miles to the J.C. to resume her veterinary classes. Ellie and JoAnn said, “Cool, Mom.“ Will had offered no opinion until this morning when her hands were full of a mare’s forefoot and a hoof-rasp. “I had to let the hired hand go. Found him passed out in the haystack cuddling a whiskey bottle. Need you to drive barley truck.” Will’s voice was husky with genuine regret. “Sorry it shuts the gate on your college thing.”
“I’m already through the gate, Will.”
Will stared at his dusty boots. “Every available man or woman within fifty miles is on the harvest. Maybe next year.”
Desiree gently put down the mare’s foreleg and was out of the barn before Will could gather himself to trot after her.
She paused on the screened-in porch, Sampsonite suitcase in hand. She kissed Will, lay a finger across his questioning mouth. “I’ll be back in a few days.” He shuffled into her upraised palm. “I will be back. Please get the girls to town so they can buy their wardrobes for school.”
“I’m no good at that girl stuff,” he pouted.
Desiree restrained a giggle. “They‘ll teach you.”
The old Ford growled up the rocky road above the ranch. In the side mirror Desiree watched Will’s tall figure remain rigid with disbelief. Not once in all their years had she walked away from him. She held back tears, but never eased up on the gas pedal. Where exactly was she going? She had enough mad money to buy the distance needed to sort things out. She could catch the vomit comet out of the county air park and drift over to Denver. From there–where? Vegas? San Francisco? A bungalow up in the Canadian Rockies?
She slowed for the cattleguard, scanned a track dogging the fence line to the high pastures. Desiree wheeled onto the road. Just can’t leave, right Dezi? She could imagine Will’s gently teasing eyes. Not so, but she needed one clear view of what she was leaving.
She parked the Ford on Cain Mountain’s shoulder and walked through a stand of aspen tinged gold. From this perch most of Lansome Valley lay revealed: Resolute rectangles of alfalfa and barley fields flanked the creek and its ruffles of cottonwoods and willows. Far up-valley the Herm Ranch was a scatter of children’s blocks. She had been born in one of those blocks and her parents still lived there. A thousand feet directly below were glimmers of barn, machine shop, calving sheds, and her own house. Inside, Will and the girls probably huddled around the big oak table to decipher the mystery of the absent wife and mother.
Desiree turned her gaze to the mountain itself, to its sun-cured grasses and splashes of summer’s last wildflowers. “You’re all so very beautiful!” Heart-shaped aspen leaves rattled as if to confirm her praise. Her gaze returned to the valley and to a memory: A third-grade class project to make a paper mache relief map of the United States. The Rocky Mountains were globs prodded into toothy shapes. The teacher helped them daub on bright blue creeks and green fields. All the children placed a gold star on the map to stand for their birthplace and their connection to the greater, geographic scheme of things. Mrs. Stevens then said, “Sad to say, children, most of you will leave the protection of your little gold star to make your lives elsewhere between the shining seas.”
Desiree now whispered, “Not me, Mrs. Stevens. I haven’t left my gold star!” Her entire life was bounded by these mountains, these pointy dollops on the map of the nation, which lay beyond her experience. She lay back until the grasses curled around her like a lacy shawl.
She awoke shivering in the mountain’s shadow. The airport was an hour’s drive. She leapt up, squinted down at the shadow line which had crawled to the house. A rectangle glowed in the upper North bedroom–the girls’ room. Desiree had stood in that same tall rectangle with her fingers stretched over her belly the night before JoAnn was born. She had watched the sun disappear beyond the mountain named for her great-great grandparents. Their log homestead, impossibly small, still stood in rumpled dignity two miles up the valley. Likely, Grandma Cain had watched her own spot on the mountain crest and uttered prayers to the evening stars for the health of her child soon to breathe the sweet air of Lansome Valley.
The airport could wait. Desiree retrieved a bedroll and emergency kit from the Ford. The stars came on thick as frost crystals. She gathered dry branches from the aspen grove and kindled a small fire away from the precipice and the gaze of anyone in the valley who might glance this way. Reflection of flames gilded aspen under-leaves and she felt like some storybook princess in an enchanted forest. A Great Horned owl hooted thrice from the higher darkness. As if to answer, coyotes yipped from their lair across the valley. Crickets ratcheted up love songs and a breeze brought delicious fragrances of pine and spruce trees.
Desiree left the fire and sat near the cliff‘s edge, staring tenderly at lights strewn along the valley floor like a strand of pearls. These were the pearls of her life, her history. An outsider might proclaim Desiree’s life hopelessly hobbled. Desiree sometimes felt it too, especially when Will assumed demands of ranch-life always took precedence over her needs. It could be claustrophobic living under a tiny golden star. But it afforded something rare and good.
Hers was a life of rich connections. She was embroidered right into a quilt panel of bee hum and wild roses. Morning sun that warmed her shoulders in the garden had fallen upon shoulders of five generations of Cains, Herms and Permians. Generations of crickets had played their tunes for her ancestors under a starlit canopy that was an enduring roof–no matter what challenges life brought. Hers was a gift of continuity in a world bent on transforming itself every seven seconds. She recalled the old saw about not being able to appreciate one’s home until one left. Well, a thousand feet of altitude had done it.
She no longer needed to fly away, but she did need this place on the durable mountain’s shoulder to prospect for gratitude in a life whose value could get buried in the strata of endlessly busy days. How wonderful it would be to open an animal biology textbook up here on the mountain and read sentence after sentence without a teen-ager lobbying for maternal attention or a husband insisting that fence posts could not be properly tamped unless she were there to hold them. When she drove back down into the valley tomorrow she would carry within a new spaciousness to stand resolutely for her right to embark upon the greatest journey of all–her formal education.
Desiree stared into the campfire. Sparks rose to dosey-do with the stars. Anybody could run toward a new horizon. But if you hunker down in a place you know and love, it is the world that moves toward you. In a few hours the good earth would tip its forested crown to the flaming orb that touches all. Desiree gave up a coyote yowl of greeting to that unseen but steadily approaching light.
Terril says of his life: “My life has been spent in rural areas of Montana, Wyoming, and Arizona. It has been blessed with experiences as a rancher, subsistence farmer, agricultural journalist, teacher, and as photographer and writer. My work has appeared in Range Magazine, Montana Mouthful, Projected Letters, The MacGuffin, QU Literary Journal, Cargo Literary Magazine, bioStories, and Green Teacher Magazine. “
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