Back to the ‘seventies:
Stony and I were living with a half dozen of our friends in a communal arrangement in Boulder, Colorado. Our house was an old wood frame place, two stories high, that was apparently built a room or two at a time and added onto. We had a corner room downstairs, the northeast corner, just off the living room.
Mister Coon, my raccoon, took up residence under the bed. Stony’s dog Smoky and my dog Angel went around stiff-legged and snarling all the time, at each other and our housemate’s Rhodesian ridgeback. One enduring memory of the time was watching two of the men of the household trying to break up a dogfight. Each dog had his teeth sunk into the face of the other dog, and as the men tried to pull them apart, the skin of the dogs’ faces stretched. *shudder* It was not a pretty sight. I intervened, splashing a glass of water on the tableau. The men let go, and so did the dogs. I started carrying a plastic water pistol for breaking up dogfights.
Stony had made a bunch of friends during the month or so that I was in jail there. We were invited to parties in town, and we often went with our housemates to social gatherings outside Boulder. One of my favorite places was a house in Ward where the Dancing Bears lived. Many of us, our generation, were experimenting with communal lifestyles then, and the back-to-the-land movement was hot. We all read Mother Earth News and the Whole Earth Catalog to learn how to live the natural life and to find the necessary tools for it. Most of us were clueless city kids devoid of survival skills.
After one of our drives up Boulder Canyon to visit the Dancing Bears, we stopped on the way back at a bar in Nederland where I ran into one of the women of the STP Family who had been in jail with me. She had a crumpled brown paper bag of dried peyote buttons. She gave me a dozen of them. I had never had any and no one I talked to was clear on what was a good effective dose. I ate some, don’t recall how many.
Our ride took us back to Boulder, but not all the way home, I guess. I don’t know where Stony or the others were. I remember walking alone from the downtown area toward our house on the east side of town. This was when the nausea hit me. As I leaned against a “post” along the sidewalk and puked, I realized I was very high. After my stomach was empty, I took a look at the post. It was a fake saguaro cactus, made of concrete or plaster. Its green paint was faded and chipped, and the spines were painted on. This amused me. Then I heard laughter behind me, and looked over my shoulder to see a small brown man in sombrero and serape hopping from foot to foot, pointing at me, laughing his head off. I got on my way again, and when I described the laughing Mexican to some friends, I was told he was Mescalito, the Peyote Spirit.
Stony, you may recall, was a heavy drinker as well as a “garbage head” who would take any kind of drug he was offered. During my time in jail fighting extradition on the parole violation, he had been eating wild mushrooms he found in the forest. While we had been camped in the park in Oklahoma during his recovery from the motorbike accident, I’d gathered mushrooms, those I recognized as safe, to supplement the fish I caught and other things I foraged. He wasn’t as selective, and he spent some days or weeks (he was not clear on how long it was) out of his mind on mushrooms. When I first saw him after I got out of jail, he looked even more toxic than usual, with a bright flush in his cheeks and glittery eyes. He had sworn off ‘shrooms.
He was still drinking, and his arm was in a cast from some injury he’d received somehow. I was never clear on how it happened because he wasn’t so clear on it either. One of the first parties we went to after I was pardoned and freed was a pool party at a big apartment complex. He started out splashing happily despite doctor’s orders to keep the cast dry. After a while, when he had drunk enough more that he had become obnoxious and other people were complaining about his aggressive splashing and dunking of them, I suggested it was time for us to leave.
He turned on me furiously, as he often did when he was very drunk and I did something to thwart him. He hit me with his arm–the one encased in the cast. He got in one blow before I grabbed the cast in both my hands and started hitting him in the face and head with it. He backed off and went to the car. The others at the party gave me a round of applause.
When the doctor at the jail had confirmed my pregnancy, I was offered the option of an abortion. I refused. At the time, abortion was unthinkable for me. I felt the absence of my other children with great regret and emotional pain. I considered myself an abject failure for not having held onto them. At this time in Boulder, my autoimmune syndrome was in remission and I felt healthy and hopeful about having another child. This one, I vowed, I would rear myself and no one would take him away from me.
The love I felt for Stony wasn’t the unconditional sort I now practice, but it felt real to me. It was a hunger, an emotional need for finding validation in a man’s eyes. If he could “love” me, then I was an okay person, I felt. There was more, of course, to our bond than the emotional need. There was sex, lots and lots of splendid sex. Having found a fellow sex addict who was always willing and able, at first I was overjoyed. After a few months with him, I actually found myself sometimes not in the mood for sex. Odd… I don’t know how it happened, hardly recall how that felt, but for a while there my libido did take a break occasionally.
As summer ended, our little communal household dispersed. Two of our housemates hit the road east for home and college. One couple found their own little house and he bought a piano and started giving music lessons. The rest of us heard that there was plentiful work to be had in Breckenridge, where a new ski area had opened, another was under construction, and condos were going up to accomodate the expected influx of skiers. To make the place even more attractive, just a few miles from Breckenridge was Tiger, a ghost town with habitable buildings where we could squat.
At a gas station in nearby Frisco, we saw an old school bus parked in back. It didn’t run. The gas station owner had taken it in satisfaction of a debt. Stony wangled a deal on it and we found someone with a powerful enough truck to tow it to Tiger. We lived in the bus there until the BLM ran us all out of that protected historical site. Besides the story about Mr. Coon that I told previously, I have a few other enduring memories of Tiger. UFO sightings were common; nearly every night we saw lights streaking and dancing in the sky. And the ghost town had its share of “haunts”. What I saw there fits the category of psychic imprint, like a tape loop of a long-ago event. They were notable simply for what they were, but not nearly as memorable as one I saw in the town of Breckenridge itself.
That old Rocky Mountain mining town had a colorful history that included having seceded from the U.S. and never having re-established statehood. A historical fact, it apparently had no effect on residents’ voting rights, legal obligations, etc. It was treated as just a peculiar historical oddity.
Many of the town’s buildings dated from the nineteenth century when it had been a boomtown. One of these old buildings was the Gold Pan Saloon, a bar and cafe where the hippies hung out, in preference to the more upscale places associated with the ski area and catering to flatlander turkeys (the affectionate term locals used for tourists).
One night I sat across the street in a car, waiting for Stony who was in the bar looking for a friend. In the light spilling out the door, I watched a fight between two men I at first thought were really there. Their clothes were a bit archaic in appearance, but that wasn’t too odd in our crowd. Not until I saw someone come out of the bar and walk through the apparition did I realize what it was. Until then I had been watching in horrified fascination as those two men slashed at each other with knives. I learned later that others had seen the same thing at various times over a span of many years.
We all found work quickly in Breckenridge. At first, all of us were working for a subcontractor who was doing interior finish work at a condo complex called Quadrangle. Some of the others were hanging drywall and laying carpet. My job was setting ceramic tile. I spent my days sitting in empty bathtubs with my transistor radio playing rock and roll, sticking little ceramic squares to the wall, spacing them precisely the width of a paper match apart, and then grouting the joints. **Spare me the joint jokes, please, Robin.**
That gig ended when the subcontractor took off, absconded with some tools, a truck, and money that belonged to other people. Stony and I lost about a week’s worth of our pay, but it was worse for three young women who had been living in Tiger with the group. The man had befriended and bamboozled them, convincing them to let him hold onto the bulk of their money for safekeeping.
When we were run out of Tiger, we got a friend to tow the bus up to the top of Hoosier Pass between Breckenridge and Alma. Our friend John lived there in what had once been the lodge at the first commercial ski area in Colorado. I worked for a while cleaning condos between time-share occupants. One of the benefits of that job was the stuff they left behind, mostly food and booze, but also some clothing and other things. In Boulder, much of our communal food had come from dumpsters, and we occasionally made dumpster runs into the city from Breckenridge. My biggest dumpster score ever came that winter on a run into Boulder.
Behind Safeway, we found one entire dumpster and part of another full of eggs–case upon case of eggs with that day’s freshness date on them. We loaded the trunk and back seat of the car with over 300 dozen eggs, took them back and distributed them in Breckenridge. By this time it was winter, and Mother Nature’s big outdoor freezer was functioning. Suddenly, there was a great demand for interesting egg recipes.
Stony and I bought a used chainsaw, borrowed an axe from a friend, and went into the firewood business with a friend who had a pickup truck. We got $50.00 a cord for fireplace lengths, split, delivered and stacked on the balconies of the condos around the ski areas. The three of us could earn more that way than at construction work, and it was more fun. We could be our own bosses, work when we chose, and we had an immense supply of wood already cut into eight-foot logs, lying alongside the roads, from land cleared for condos and ski lodges.
Our partners and helpers in the wood business came and went. One of the ones who came along was Bruce. We had worked with him at Quadrangle, and he stepped in and offered the use of his truck when our first partner left. One night at the Gold Pan, he invited us home to meet his girlfriend Celeste. Hearing the name, I immediately recalled the young woman I met in the Boulder jail, but I thought, “Naah, it cant be.”
It was. The princess herself would sit and watch unperturbed as her guy and mine, and I (pregnant and by then quite hugely so) would split and stack wood. One time, Bruce asked her to help, pointing out my condition, as incentive or to shame her, I suppose. Her response was to look down at her hands, turn them this way and that with a thoughtful look, and say, “Noo, I can’t do that. I’m a princess.”
As the weather got colder, Stony and I left our little school bus and moved into the building beside which it was parked. It was a one-room log cabin about 10′x12′, which had once held the machinery for Colorado’s first commercial rope-tow ski lift. The elevation there was just over 13,000 feet and winter brought deep snow and deep cold. Those walls were made of solid logs, about ten inches thick, and it was cozy and warm.
There was no furniture, so we moved the propane cook stove from our bus and scrounged up some crates and boxes for storage and seating. To raise our bed off the cold, drafty floor, we put the mattress from our bus on a plywood platform and hung it by ropes from eyebolts in the roof. A swinging bed has its good points, once one gets used to it. The challenge, for a massive cowlike pregnant woman, was to get it to hold still when I wanted to get in it.
As it is with most women, I got bigger and bigger with each succeeding pregnancy. During my last one, 22 years ago, our Lamaze instructor said our abdomens are like a girdle that gets stretched out and loses elasticity. Yeah, that’s how it was. I was a cow.
Stony would still have sex with me, but at some point during the pregnancy his determination to be my true blue man evaporated and he started fooling around with a succession of girls. I suppose that, biologically, they were women, but they were barely adults, and I was almost as appalled at the way he used and discarded them as I was distressed that he was “cheating” on me to do it. His assurances that none of them meant anything to him didn’t reassure me.
I planned to do a home birth. I had never had a difficult delivery. I have a condition the medical community calls, “precipitate delivery.” My uterus would get itself all toned up with weeks of “false labor” Braxton-Hicks contractions before the event. Then it would push the baby out in practically no time. Obstetricians and nurses have always treated this as a dire and threatening condition. I viewed it as a blessing. My times of labor have ranged from thirty minutes to three hours, for the live births.
Another little peculiarity of my reproductive system always made it hard for me to estimate my expected delivery date. I have always had at least one period and sometimes more, at the beginning of each pregnancy. It hadn’t been much of a problem when I was getting prenatal care, but that time I didn’t have a doctor or midwife. I was on my own. I just kept getting bigger and bigger and was getting very tired of being pregnant. It seemed like forever. Nothing was new or different about that. In pregnancy, each day is longer than the one before, and toward the end minutes stretch on into infinity.
But when my water broke and the Braxton-Hicks contractions turned into real hard labor, no baby came. Hours passed, then a couple of days. Finally, on the third day, Christmas Eve, we went to the hospital in Alma. There was no money to pay for it, no insurance, but they recognized the nature of the emergency and admitted me.
My son Paul David S., was delivered with much difficulty by a harried young country doctor. It was a shoulder presentation and he had to turn him so that the body came out butt-first: breech. I was fully conscious so that I could help by holding or pushing on command. The doctor, two nurses and I were in there about eight hours. Then the doctor flopped the lifeless body of my son onto my flabby belly while he stitched up my torn flesh.
Someone handed me a clipboard with a form for me to sign, releasing the body to a mortuary, and I was wheeled to a room where I slept through the night. On Christmas morning, the doc released me after explaining that I had probably been pregnant at least ten months, that the placenta had become calcified, and the fetus had been dead for two to three weeks at time of delivery.
This story continues, from here on….
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