As many of you know, Heather Catto Kohout, whose idea Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing, Art, and the Environment was, died on October 17, 2014, nearly three years after her initial diagnosis with metastatic cancer. Her obituary gives only a faint idea of the breadth and depth of her intellect and engagement, so it seems appropriate to devote this edition of “Free Range” to her memory, specifically to the words her beloved children Elizabeth, Tito, and Thea offered up at her memorial service at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Austin on October 23.

Thea (excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”):

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if there ever was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it.
And ceas’d the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself.
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)

Tito:

Good morning. On behalf of our family, thank you for coming.

Some of my first memories of my mother are of strength and power. More specifically, of being picked up and carried on a long hike in Colorado because I couldn’t keep up with her leisurely thirty-mile-an-hour pace. She could spend an afternoon nipping cedar under a remorseless August sun as easily as she could drive a Suburban full of screaming middle-schoolers from Austin to Mexico for a church trip. But as I got older, I saw her strength manifest itself in less obvious ways. She gave of herself freely and completely to good and just causes, from immigration to environment, and insisted that her children do the same. And I now understand better the strength and compassion she showed throughout both of her parents’ passing. She was the world’s strongest woman.

She wasn’t just strong, though. Her boundless intellect was just as amazing. It took me a long time to understand that not everybody’s mom analyzed Eckhardt Tolle and Anne Lamott. That not everybody’s mom read to them, and discussed the moral and metaphysical implications of talking cats or feudal society with them. That not everybody’s mom would cock her head, furrow her brow, and skewer anyone she met with a genuine and limitless curiosity. But she wasn’t grudging with her knowledge. Rather, she produced more information than she took in, and not just in her beautiful poetry and lyrical prose. Her entire life was a dialogue with the world, whether the world knew it or not. She never met a person she couldn’t teach and couldn’t learn from. Priests, artists, hotel maids, professors, state meat inspectors: she never met anyone who didn’t feel, after an hour’s worth of conversation, that they hadn’t known her and loved her for decades. I recall my panic as a child when she would fix her attention on one of my friends, or my teacher, or the plumber who came to fix the dripping bathroom sink, and ask them to tell her about themselves. And they would tell her, trusting that she would hear them and carry their struggles herself, just because she could.

Despite the strength of her body and her mind, though, she never tried to overpower anyone, to bludgeon them into doing her will. Instead, she treated every person she encountered with respect and dignity, regardless of the circumstances in which they met. She was equally capable of chatting with illegal immigrants as with former presidents of the United States. As a kid, the mixture of embarrassment and pride I felt at seeing her ask the gas station attendant how his wife’s surgery had gone was too much for me to understand. Now that I’m older, the pride remains, but it’s mixed with astonishment that she could remember everyone she met, remember their stories and their worries and their hopes, and offer support and comfort and advice as needed. That she was always available to family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. That she was never rude or dismissive or unkind to anyone.

Trying to understand her is a process, and the process hasn’t ended. It won’t ever end. The longer I remember her, the more things come bubbling up from where the past hid them to surprise me with delayed insight into her strength, her intellect, and her grace. She’s no longer here, but this is not the end. She will remain with us, reflecting and refracting and magnifying herself into our lives to inspire, awe, and delight us, as she always has. And although it may not seem like much, it will, like her, be sufficient and abundant for us.

Elizabeth:

I’ve never noticed fireflies here in October, but I’ve been seeing them at dusk since around the time my mother began hospice. When I initially noticed them, on a run around my neighborhood, the first thought that popped into my head was that the fireflies were bits and sparks of my mother’s soul as it began the difficult work of disentangling itself from her body. I know that’s not scientific, not reasonable, and doesn’t make sense. I know there’s a more logical explanation for these fireflies out there, that maybe they’ve always been here this time of year, but I know my mother was someone who was at home with contradictions and poetry and big ideas, so I can’t quite let go of the notion that these brief and brilliant flashes of light are somehow a part my brilliant mother.

I love that Mom chose Whitman for this service. I can’t think of a poet better suited for a celebration of life, and Thea chose a perfect passage. There’s another part of Leaves of Grass that’s been rattling around in my head, though, and that’s the bit where Whitman asks, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” In putting together these thoughts about my mother, I’ve found myself tugged in contradictory directions: Do I talk about her love of being in motion and of the outdoors, or her love for stillness and meditation? Her strengths as a conversationalist or as a listener? Should I mention how she danced to Prince and Michael Jackson in the kitchen, or how she sang to Joni Mitchell and Emmylou Harris in the car? Her endless patience with children and friends, or her quick exasperation with lazy thinking, discrimination, or, perhaps worst of all, filling out forms? Her sense of humor or her serious intellect? Her deep commitment to the environment or her deep love for the Suburban she drove in the ’90s? The more I try to contain her within a narrative arc, the more deftly she slips away. Really, it’s not so different from chasing a firefly and losing it in the dark once the light stops flashing.

In some ways, I wonder if this isn’t Mom pranking me—daring me to figure her out, then darting away at the last second. She had a strong mischievous streak. In high school, she and I drove back from Colorado to Texas together. We spent a night in Taos and, on a whim, adopted a tiny, bright white, fearless kitten we saw through the window of a carpenter’s workshop when we were walking back from dinner. The kitten wasn’t even up for adoption, but Mom decided she belonged with us and sweet-talked the carpenter, and the next thing I knew we were speeding through the desert with Minnie the kitten cavorting across the dashboard. We did not tell my father about it until we returned home, where she pretended to be deeply sorry for bringing yet another cat into the family, but we all knew she didn’t mean it when she burst out laughing at the kitten’s antics in the middle of her apology.

And that laugh—my mom had one of the world’s great laughs. I think anyone who’s ever eaten dinner with my family knows that laugh and the lengths we went to in order to hear it. I don’t remember exactly when or how this tradition began, but for the past several years we’ve read a David Sedaris essay about Easter in France out loud over Easter dinner. It’s a fantastic essay on its own, but we don’t read it strictly for literary merit. Rather, we read it because every year without fail it made my mother first shake, then howl, and eventually weep with laughter, until the rest of us were helpless with laughter too. These are some of my most treasured memories.

In the last few months, as my mother’s health deteriorated, I found myself becoming more and more grateful for her laughter, for that bright flash of light that seemed to shine all the more brightly as everything around it got darker. In the last long conversation I had with her, I asked for her thoughts about marriage and raising a family and, while language was already starting to slip away from her, she still got her main points across. Mostly what she talked about was how much fun she’d had. Life with a husband and children had been exasperating, exhausting, confusing, and much harder work than she’d expected, she said, but it had also been infinitely more fun. That’s what she kept repeating: I had the best time, we had the best time, it was the best time.

And so it was. Of all the best times we had, the one I can’t get out of my head is of an early summer evening. I was about ten. We were walking the dog together and the night was warm, but the heat from the day was gone. We got to the open field around the corner from our house and the three of us kids took off through the grass and trees, shrieking, the dog and my dad running alongside us. As the sun set, I noticed that the fireflies had arrived for the summer. When I turned around to check for my mom, she was about twenty-five yards behind us, illuminated by a street lamp, with flashes from the fireflies all around her. “This is happiness,” I thought.

What I’m reading:
Jane Austen, Persuasion

Photo by Thea Kohout.

Two Saturdays ago some twenty former residents and members of our Advisory Board gathered at our house in Austin for what we hope will be the first of many annual “Resident Reunions.” We envisioned this gathering as a chance for them to get acquainted with each other (and each other’s work), and also an opportunity for us to thank them for being willing to take a chance on what is still, after all, a fairly new and ad hoc residency program. (We’re in our fourth year of accepting residents.)

The gathering was also a reminder of how many things have changed since we first came up with the idea for a residency program at Madroño Ranch. Our naïve original vision involved hosting eight residents at a time, gathering around the table every night to eat, talk, and listen—to receive and offer nourishment, both literal and conversational.

That vision, we realized fairly quickly, was not practical, for a number of reasons (have you ever been asked to be witty and brilliant every single night for two weeks in a row?), so we scaled back; now we usually have one or two residents at a time, and we don’t require them to report for dinner and be witty and fascinating. Communal connection cannot be forced, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

Hence the idea of a residents’ reunion. We’ve had forty-three residents so far, from a range of disciplines, including poetry, fiction, painting, journalism, paleontology, film, music, photography, forest history, oceanography, drama, book arts, and environmental law. In the future, we hope to have even more: theology, architecture, choreography, who knows?

At the gathering at our house, five former residents—visual artists Mary Baxter, Stacy Sakoulas, Bill Montgomery, and Margie Crisp, and environmental writer David Todd—volunteered to do brief presentations on their work and what a Madroño residency meant to them. (Many thanks to Margie, who’s also a member of our Advisory Board, for putting the slide show together!) Three other former residents—writer Spike Gillespie, paleontologist Julia Clarke, and science writer Juli Berwald—got up and talked briefly about their work without visual aids. (Juli ended with a limerick of her own composition about jellyfish.) Wonderful food (from caterer Brandy Gibbs of Austin’s Fine Home Dining), beer, and wine were consumed, stories were told, and connections were made.

Photo by Thea Kohout.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what poet Sasha West had to say:

What a wonderful and inspiring evening! Everyone I talked with was so interesting—and doing such worthwhile work in the world. Worthwhile and beautiful…. Madroño has been a catalyst for so many people at this point. And as their (our) work goes out into the world, hopefully it will be a catalyst for many more.

And here’s what Margie said:

I had the chance to meet writers whose work I’ve admired for years, chat up old friends (and, yeah, get a little gossiping in too), meet my hero [and fellow Advisory Board member] Tom Mason, and yak with other visual artists. So much fun.

“Good food, good wine, good conversation, and great, great work coming out of the residency” was the assessment of Advisory Board member Shannon Davies, the Louise Lindsey Merrick Editor for the Natural Environment at Texas A&M University Press. David put it even more pithily: “tasty food and drink, fun company, and great show and tell.”

It was everything we had hoped it would be, and more. Because while part of the point of a residency program like ours is to offer an opportunity for reflection to creative people who need it, and while we may need time and space away from the demands of the quotidian to brainstorm, reflect, and create, we are also social animals, and we need other people to talk and listen to. We need to hear ourselves articulate our own arguments; as Oliver Sacks put it, “We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.” We need to bounce ideas off others so we can hear what they sound like and assess their effect. I believe that community is or should be as much a part of creativity as is individual inspiration; the most brilliant idea in the world is useless if it is not brought forth and shared. That’s why our mission statement mentions “solitude and communion” (emphasis added).

It was a pleasure and a privilege for us to host the first annual residents’ reunion—these are the coolest people we know!—and we hope that at future gatherings even more of these fascinating, thoughtful, creative folks will come to meet and share their work with their peers. It was one of the most enjoyable parties we’ve attended in years, and we can’t wait for the next one.

What we’re reading
Heather: Brian Doyle, Mink River
Martin: Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

“… most ranchers and farmers in the West care as much for the health of their land, air, and water as any member of the Sierra Club.” (Mark Dowie)

This was the second September in a row in which we decamped for two weeks to Point Reyes Station, California. The town, with a population of about 350, is in western Marin County, an hour north of San Francisco; it lies at the foot of Tomales Bay, which separates the Point Reyes peninsula from the mainland, and is a gateway to the Point Reyes National Seashore, some 70,000 acres of pristine beaches, rocky cliffs, historic dairy farms, redwood and eucalyptus trees, and tule elk. It is one of the most beautiful parts of a beautiful state, popular with hikers, kayakers, campers, horseback riders, and mountain bikers.

Point Reyes Station is also a foodie mecca, even by the rarefied standards of northern California. The nationally renowned Cowgirl Creamery is based here; the Saturday morning farmers’ market at Toby’s Feed Barn bears witness to the stunning variety and fertility of the surrounding farms and ranches; and the town features several fine restaurants, including Osteria Stellina, and a variety of enticing nearby dining options, including Saltwater, in nearby Inverness, and the renowned Hog Island Oysters, a few miles up Highway 1 on the eastern shore of the bay.

Natural beauty and agricultural plenty, plus a temperate climate: Point Reyes has it all. Even though Tomales Bay actually rests atop the dreaded San Andreas Fault, which means that there’s an excellent chance that it’s ground zero for the Next Big One, this may well be as close as we can get to an earthly paradise. All of which is by way of trying to put the controversy surrounding the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, which harvests more than a third of the state’s oysters, in some kind of context.

People have been harvesting oysters commercially in the waters of Drakes Estero, an estuary on the southern edge of the Point Reyes peninsula, for more than a century; President Kennedy signed the bill creating the Point Reyes National Seashore in 1962, and ten years later the government paid the Johnson Oyster Company nearly $80,000 for the property for inclusion in the park, offering the company a forty-year nonrenewable permit to continue operating.

In 1976, Congress passed a law designating the 2,500 acres of tidelands and submerged land of Drakes Estero as a marine wilderness effective upon the termination of that permit. In 2004, the Johnsons sold out to the Lunny family, longtime local cattle ranchers, who continued operating as the Drakes Bay Oyster Company; apparently the Lunnys assumed that the government would let them continue harvesting oysters in the estuary past 2012, even though the government told them that “no new permit will be issued.”

In November 2012, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar formally announced that he was allowing the permit to expire, though various court orders allowed the company to keep operating. Last week, however, a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. District Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the federal government was within its authority in terminating the permit. The next step is uncertain, though the company will probably seek a hearing before the full court.

The case has become something of a cause célèbre in normally mellow Marin. While the Interior Department tries to do what’s right from a national perspective, fulfilling a Congressional directive and following the letter of the law, Point Reyes Station and the surrounding rural areas are thick with hand-painted blue-and-white signs begging “Save Our Drakes Bay Oyster Farm”—hardly surprising, I suppose, given the fact that the Lunny family has been here for a century, and the general antipathy toward Big Government among small farmers and ranchers. Supporters of the company have even started a Website, SaveOurShellfish.com, which is full of populist fervor, arguing that the feds “are illegally denying Californians their rights to shellfish cultivation in Drake’s [sic] Estero” and urging people to “Join us in standing up for the People’s right to this remarkable food source!”

The company’s own Website makes much of the Lunnys’ commitment to environmentally sound practices. Its mission statement reads, in part, “All of our growing, post harvest and delivery practices are built around sound and sustainable agricultural practices with ecological responsibility and a long-standing attitude of stewardship for the land and sea that we farm.” A number of local restaurants and farm bureaus have weighed in on the company’s side. The legendary Alice Waters of Chez Panisse noted the importance of “a community of scores of local farmers and ranchers, such as the Lunnys, whose dedication to sustainable aquaculture and agriculture assures the restaurant a steady supply of fresh and pure ingredients.”

Meanwhile, critics of the Lunnys argue that they have not always lived up to their lofty claims. The California Coastal Commission charged the company with “illegal coastal development, violation of harbor seal protection measures, and failure to control significant amounts of its plastic pollution.” Various environmental groups have arrayed themselves on the government’s side. Neal Desai of the National Parks Conservation Association said that the decision “affirms that our national parks will be safe from privatization schemes, and that special places like Drakes Estero will rise above attempts to hijack America’s wilderness.” A Huffington Post story noted that the Washington nonprofit providing the company with pro bono legal representation had ties to the arch-conservative Koch brothers and was a front for the nationwide effort to open public lands to private exploitation.

It is impossible for an outsider like me to know what to make of all this; the controversy quickly becomes a morass of he said, she said charges and countercharges. Without knowing the details of the situation or the principals involved it is impossible to tell where the objective truth lies, if there is such a thing—which is, I grant you, a pretty big if. It seems, however, that each side has come to believe the worst about the other.

When I was a kid growing up in Mill Valley, Marin County was a byword for a laid-back lifestyle. Beads, patchouli, incense, peacock feathers, and—I admit it—large quantities of high-quality dope were part of the equation, as was one of the highest per-capita incomes in the country, and while it has always been easy to make fun of “Mellow Marin” (see Cyra McFadden’s The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County, for example), many people here seem genuinely committed to living in gentle harmony with each other and with Mother Nature.

Mark Dowie is an environmental journalist who lives on the western shore of Tomales Bay. In the latest issue of the West Marin Review, he writes: “I remain an environmentalist. I believe we all are at heart. But I’m a hybrid, a fence-sitter, observed with caution by ranchers and Greens alike. I’ve lost a few friends on both sides of that fence.”

He adds, “The science of land stewardship is still unfolding and it’s hard to know what’s right. But it seems clear that one right thing is communication. Close, patient, and honest dialogue between ranchers and enviros will make great strides toward right-stewardship and toward consensus in the land disputes that plague the West. Those conversations are often best had around kitchen tables.”

Given the apparent intransigence, suspicion, and bitterness on both sides, the opponents in this controversy aren’t close to sitting down at the kitchen table together; hell, they’re not even in the same building, figuratively. (Literally, it’s a different story: a block from the house we rented is a 114-year-old former livery stable with one of those blue-and-white “Save Our Drakes Bay Oyster Farm” signs on the wall facing Third Street, and in that building is the office of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, which supports the decision to close the company down.)

Perhaps I’m being childish, but I can’t help wishing, with Dowie, that the locavores and the environmentalists could find common ground. This is a special and beautiful place, and it shouldn’t be that hard to agree on the need to keep it that way. But right now “Mellow Marin” seems a little less mellow, a little more like the rest of the world, and that’s a shame.

What we’re reading
Heather: Andrea Barrett, Servants of the Map
Martin: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Okay, show of hands. How many of you knew that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (better known as the Mormons) played a prominent role in the settlement of the Texas Hill Country?

Don’t feel bad; I had no idea, either, until I was assigned to write the entries on Gillespie County for the New Handbook of Texas almost thirty years ago. In fact, for more than a decade in the middle of the nineteenth century, a breakaway group of Mormons founded and then abandoned an astonishing number of settlements in Central Texas.

The Mormons are now well established in Utah, but that wasn’t always the case; their early history was, to put it mildly, peripatetic. Joseph Smith founded the movement in New York State in the 1820s, but he and his followers attracted violent opposition almost immediately. They moved to Ohio in 1831, intending eventually to settle in Independence, Missouri, but after bloody clashes with locals in both states, they moved again, to Illinois, where they founded the town of Nauvoo in 1840. A year later, Smith and the Nauvoo city council angered non-Mormons by destroying a printing press that had been used to print an exposé critical of Smith and the practice of polygamy; Smith was imprisoned in Carthage, Illinois, and died in a riot when a mob stormed the jailhouse.

Before his death, having concluded that Illinois was no more hospitable to the embryonic faith than New York, Ohio, or Missouri, Smith sent an envoy to negotiate with Sam Houston for the establishment of a Mormon settlement in the Republic of Texas. Lyman Wight, one of Smith’s favorites—he was ordained the first high priest of the church in 1831—had received Smith’s permission to lead a group to Texas, but Smith’s successor Brigham Young decided that Utah would be a more propitious site. While most of the Mormons followed Young to the Great Salt Lake Valley, about 150 to 200 dissenters (accounts vary) followed the renegade Wight, who felt compelled to honor Smith’s wishes, to Texas.

Wight seems to have had an incorrigible case of happy feet, even by Mormon standards, and a profound stubborn streak—hence the colorful nickname, “the Wild Ram of the Mountains,” bestowed on him by the New York Sun. (That’s John James Audubon’s ca. 1845 lithograph of Rocky Mountain sheep at the top of the page, by the way.) Wight was born in upstate New York in 1796 and subsequently lived in Canada, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin; he also refused to acknowledge Young as Smith’s legitimate successor.

Wight and his followers spent the winter of 1845–46 at an abandoned fort near Preston, in Grayson County, and arrived in Austin in June 1846. They settled in what is now Webberville, where they met the pioneer blacksmith and memoirist Noah Smithwick, in September 1846, and built a gristmill on the Colorado River which was destroyed by a flood.

By this time the Mormons must have been wondering if they would ever find a place to call home. In 1847, Wight asked John O. Meusebach for permission to found a colony on the Pedernales River; no doubt he hoped that the Germans, with their tradition of religious tolerance, would look more kindly on Mormon polygamy than had their Anglo neighbors. (Apparently the Germans considered the Mormons “lawless of religious practices,” but pragmatically figured the newcomers could teach them American agricultural and milling techniques.)

Wight and his followers founded the settlement of Zodiac, four miles southeast of Fredericksburg, in 1847. There they built a sawmill (the first in Gillespie County), a gristmill, a store, a school, and the first Mormon temple west of the Mississippi River; they became the principal suppliers of seed, flour, and lumber to their German fellow settlers, and also helped build Fort Martin Scott, established in 1848 on what was then the western frontier of settlement in Texas.

Wight himself refused several invitations from Young to come to Utah and was excommunicated by the Mormon church in 1849. In 1850 he lost the election for chief justice of Gillespie County to the German immigrant Johann Klingelhoefer, but was awarded the office after pointing out that Klingelhoefer was not an American citizen. By the following summer, however, Wight could apparently no longer be bothered to show up for court, so the county commissioners declared the office vacant and awarded it to Klingelhoefer, who had since become a citizen. (One historian has suggested that Wight was addicted to alcohol and opium, which may have contributed to his erratic behavior.)

Perhaps Wight had already sensed another move in the offing. In September 1851, after more devastating floods, he and his followers left Zodiac and moved to Burnet County, where they established a colony called Mormon Mill on Hamilton Creek—those Mormons were serious millers, weren’t they?—but in December 1853 Wight and his followers sold the property to their old friend Smithwick and moved on to Bandera, where they built a furniture factory. In the fall of 1856, however, they moved again, this time to a site on the Medina River below Bandera which came to be known as Mountain Valley or Mormon Camp. (The site is now covered by Medina Lake.)

If folks thought that Wight would settle down at last, they were sadly mistaken. In 1858, he had a premonition of the Civil War and decided to lead his followers—one can only imagine what they thought when he told them to pack up yet again—back to Missouri.

Apparently this was one move too many even for the indefatigable Wild Ram of the Mountains; he died on the second day of the journey, when the group was about eight miles from San Antonio, and was buried in his ceremonial temple robes in the Mormon cemetery at Zodiac, which no longer exists.

And what of his followers? Some remained in Texas, while others moved on to Iowa, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), or Utah. As of 2012, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints claimed 315,895 members in Texas, or about 5 percent of the national total of 6,321,416. Only four states—Utah (of course), California, Idaho, and Arizona—had more. I wonder how many of today’s Mormon Texans are descendants of Wight’s followers, followers who were secretly relieved not to have to uproot themselves yet again at the whim of the Wild Ram of the Mountains?

What we’re reading
Heather: Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Martin: Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey

As some of you know, Heather and I have spent the last two weeks in a rented cottage in Point Reyes Station, about an hour north of San Francisco. This is, I think, the longest vacation the two of us have taken together since our honeymoon, and it’s been a little unsettling to be away from home for such a stretch. But the beauty of western Marin County—the wild coastline of Point Reyes National Seashore, the placid expanse of Tomales Bay, the rolling hills, the towering eucalyptus and Monterey cypress trees—is utterly overwhelming, and we have found ourselves entranced.

It is impossible, however, to be in this part of the world and not have a sense, no matter how deeply buried in the unconscious, of impermanence. Tomales Bay, after all, is a visible marker of the San Andreas Fault, and the Next Big One could hit at any time. It’s always there, that nagging knowledge that this landscape, this place, is every bit as temporary as we are; eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may be at the bottom of the ocean, or buried under rubble. I think that sublimated dread adds a poignant savor to all aspects of life, including the food, for what is more temporary than a meal? Growing and harvesting and preparing the animals and plants we eat can take years; and yet, once they appear on our plates, they are gone in a matter of minutes.

And make no mistake: for foodies, the Bay Area, and Marin County in particular, is truly the Promised Land. This is a region ferociously dedicated to the idea of local, sustainable, organic food; in fact, we have concluded that any area restaurant that does not display a “Marin Organic” sign is probably doomed to failure. The dairy farms in West Marin are legendary; the fruits and vegetables are astonishingly various and beautiful (we saw gorgeous tomatoes and carrots, squash and beets, all on offer at the same time at the Point Reyes Farmers Market); and the bread—well, this is the homeland of San Francisco sourdough, after all. ’Nuff said.

Seafood, too, is available in mind-boggling abundance. I have probably eaten more raw oysters in the last two weeks than I had in my entire previous life: at Ferry Plaza Seafood in the San Francisco Ferry Building; at the Farm House Restaurant in Olema, a couple of miles down Highway 1; at the Station House Café, in Point Reyes Station; at Saltwater, on the west shore of Tomales Bay in Inverness. And we haven’t even been to what is probably my favorite restaurant in the whole world, Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco.

But the apotheosis of oysters is the legendary Hog Island Oyster Co. in Marshall, about ten miles up Highway 1 on the eastern shore of Tomales Bay. Last week, coincidentally, our pal Jesse Griffiths of Austin’s Dai Due Butcher Shop and Supper Club was in the Bay Area, staying with friends in Oakland. Jesse has just published his first book, a beautiful volume called Afield: A Chef’s Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish, chock-full of charming stories, delicious recipes, step-by-step instructions, and stunning photographs (including some of Madroño Ranch!) by Jody Horton, and last Tuesday made an in-store appearance (which we attended, of course) at the Tyler Florence Shop in Mill Valley to promote the book.

Jesse had last Friday free, and agreed to drive up for lunch with us. We agreed to meet at Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes Station to load up on picnic supplies and then head up to Hog Island.

At Cowgirl, of course, Jesse immediately recognized the young woman behind the counter as a former co-worker at Austin’s Vespaio (“she was always into cheese,” he recalled, which must be an understatement). We picked up a dark, crusty Brickmaiden baguette, a round of Cowgirl’s new seasonal Chimney Rock cheese, a salame al tartufo from Creminelli, a bottle of white wine, and an Earl Grey panna cotta for Heather and hit the road for Marshall.

At Hog Island you can order your fresh shellfish, claim a picnic table overlooking Tomales Bay, and smugly ponder those unfortunate souls who have to live anywhere else in the world. Because Heather wasn’t really into the whole raw oyster thing, we ordered only a couple of dozen—one each of Kumamotos and extra-small sweetwaters—and claimed one end of a picnic table out back. (The friendly couple at the other end of the table looked enviously at our wine and bread and cheese and complimented us on our foresight.) It was a typical West Marin day; the morning had been foggy, but now the sun was out, the temperature was in the upper 70s, and a gentle breeze was blowing in off the sparkling light blue bay.

The oysters appeared atop a bed of rock salt on a plastic tray, with an oyster knife attached by a chain and a rubber glove for shucking purposes. Jesse took charge of the shucking, I poured the wine (we appropriated three styrofoam cups from the bar) and sliced the salame and cheese (using Jesse’s own oyster knife; he never leaves home without one), and we sat in the sun for an hour or so, elbows propped on the rough wood of the picnic table, eating and drinking and dropping empty oyster shells into the wire basket at our feet—not, perhaps, the most elegant meal we’ve ever consumed, but surely one of the most enjoyable. All around us people busily slurped their own shellfish, drank beer, grilled eggplant and chicken, and patted their dogs.

Raw oysters are, I grant you, an acquired taste. Some people never get the hang of it—the trick is to open the throat and let the little bugger just slide on down—but these were delicious. We ate them unadorned, with no mignonette or barbecue sauce or horseradish or Tabasco, and they were perfect: briny, sweet, smooth, plump. The wine was cool and crisp, the bread perfect (dark crust, with a firm hand), the cheese (from Jersey cow milk, washed in wine, and covered with dried organic mushrooms, savory, and black pepper) was soft and delicious, the conversation far ranging and lively, and the setting, of course, almost impossibly beautiful.

For me, at least, the combination of being back in the part of the world in which I grew up, with my beloved Heather and our good friend Jesse, felt like a stitching together of my life. It was integrative, if I may lapse into Marinspeak, in the best way, even though I knew it couldn’t last. Our two weeks out here have been utterly amazing, but on Sunday we fly back to Austin, back to our real lives, and it will be good to be home again. These last few months have brought more than their share of challenges, and more challenges doubtless lie ahead. But on this day, sitting in the sun sharing a delicious meal with dear companions, in this most beautiful of settings, was enough. More than enough.

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Roach (ed.), The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011
Martin: Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

Let’s face it: we are not culturally conditioned to look kindly upon constraints. Every day bombards us with messages urging us to maximize our enjoyments, super-size our servings, and prolong our erections. Limitations, we’re told, are for losers.

I, on the other hand, believe firmly that sometimes, under certain circumstances, constraints can actually foster, rather than curtail, creativity; ingenuity can flourish in unexpected ways, in all sorts of compromised settings. I absorbed this lesson during my time as a “county writer” for the Texas State Historical Association’s New Handbook of Texas, beginning in the mid-1980s, during which I suspect I learned at least as much about the craft of writing as I did as an undergraduate English major or in grad school.

As a county writer, my job entailed researching and writing all the entries associated with a given county for a massive revision of the original Handbook of Texas, a historical encyclopedia/biographical dictionary originally published in two volumes in 1952 under the aegis of Walter Prescott Webb, with a supplemental third volume appearing in 1976. The greatly expanded New Handbook, published in six volumes in 1996, required a veritable army of contributors—more than 3,000 in all—some volunteers and some, like me, paid staff, to crank out the roughly 24,000 entries. (Since going online in 1999, the Handbook has grown to more than 25,000 entries.)

On the face of it, few jobs could have less to do with creative writing. Yet trying to shape an occasionally jumbled pile of historical data, hearsay, and legend into a coherent, even compelling, and above all brief (sometimes just two or three sentences) narrative was an irresistible and, I believe, inherently creative challenge, even if I didn’t always succeed; many of the entries I had to write, such as those on small watercourses or hills or towns that had dried up and blown away, were simply too short and/or uninteresting. Here, for example, in its entirety, is my entry on a stream called Town Creek:

Town Creek rises a mile north of Fredericksburg in central Gillespie County (at 30°19′ N, 98°52′ W). Intermittent in its upper reaches, the stream follows a southerly course for 3½ miles to its mouth on Barons Creek in Fredericksburg (at 30°16′ N, 98°52′ W). Rising in the hills of the Edwards Plateau, Town Creek crosses flat to rolling terrain surfaced by shallow loamy and clayey soils; vegetation consists primarily of open stands of live oak, Ashe juniper, and mesquite, and grasses.

Doesn’t exactly set the heart racing, does it? Yet every so often I would find some nugget of information that could add a little color to a highly compressed and otherwise drab recitation of facts, and I took an inordinate pride in trying to craft the most apparently unpromising entry into something that would reward the careful reader with a graceful turn of phrase or an unexpectedly poignant or amusing incident. Here are just a few, drawn from various biographical entries I wrote: After the jazz pianist Peck Kelley quit the music business due to deteriorating eyesight, “he reportedly spent hours practicing at home on a stringless, silent piano so as not to disturb his neighbors.” German immigrant Johann Klingelhoefer “was elected chief justice of Gillespie County in 1850 but had to give up the office when his opponent, Mormon leader Lyman Wight, pointed out that Klingelhoefer was not yet an American citizen.” The West Texas rancher and congressman Claude Hudspeth, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, once referred to the president of our neighbor to the south as “that spineless cactus of Mexico.”

If I had to pick one favorite among the hundreds of entries I wrote, though, it might be the one on actor Tom Mix. Mix probably didn’t belong in the Handbook of Texas at all; despite his claims to have been born on a ranch on the Rio Grande and to have served as a Texas Ranger and with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the battle of San Juan Hill, he was in fact an army deserter from Pennsylvania. He was the most celebrated Western silent-movie star in early Hollywood, but he was virtually forgotten with the advent of talkies. After almost a thousand words, my entry on him ends as follows:

Mix died on October 12, 1940, when his Cord automobile overturned on a highway near Florence, Arizona; he was driving to California to discuss a return to the movies. His principal baggage reportedly consisted of three snow-white Stetson hats.

I couldn’t say with certainty that the story of the white Stetsons was true, but it was simply too good to pass up, and it provided a perfect way to punctuate the downward trajectory of Mix’s life. In this entry, and in many others, I was merely following the advice of the newspaper editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”), though I tried always to leave myself a little wiggle room—hence the use of “reportedly” in the excerpt above. (I was also a big fan of “apparently,” “presumably,” “allegedly,” and similar conditional constructions.)

This is all a pretty high-falutin’ way of talking about what was on some level hackwork, but I think that even the humblest piece of writing can benefit from, and manifest, a careful devotion to craft. As George Orwell, a particular literary hero for the simplicity and clarity of his writing, once said, “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.” (That would have made a pretty good motto for us county writers, right down to the emphasis on the surface of the earth; we probably had to write more entries on physical features—creeks and mountains and such—than any other type.)

We’re never more creative or more fully human than when we acknowledge and work within our limitations, be they imposed externally or internally. Our aspirations can be infinite, but actual achievement usually requires a pragmatic acceptance of the finite. And, of course, a judicious use of conditionals.

What we’re reading
Heather: Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Martin: Vincent Virga, Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations

For all of my whingeing about the difficulties of adjusting to life in Texas, even after thirty years here, I know I’ve had it pretty easy, especially compared to the nineteenth-century settlers who endured almost unimaginable hardships while trying to claw a tenuous living out of the deceptively thin Hill Country topsoil. For one thing, I speak the same language (more or less) as the natives. For another thing, those natives aren’t actively trying to kill me—well, with the exception of the occasional jackass in a pickup speeding down MoPac. Finally, and arguably most important of all, I live here after the invention of air conditioning.

Many of those Hill Country settlers were German immigrants, and they and their descendants have played a prominent role in the region’s history over the last century and a half. I learned something about them when I started working at the Texas State Historical Association back in the mid-1980s, as my initial assignment was writing entries on Gillespie County for the Handbook of Texas.

I knew little to nothing of Texas history at the time, but I had always enjoyed our occasional day trips to the charming little town of Fredericksburg—people actually spoke German in the shops and restaurants!—and leaped at the opportunity to learn more about it. Perhaps inevitably, the more I learned, the more fascinated I became.

Here’s the one-paragraph version: In the mid-1840s, the Adelsverein, an organization founded by a group of German nobles to promote colonization in Texas, shipped over more than 7,000 settlers, most of them peasants. The first Europeans in what is now Gillespie County arrived in 1846, when a group of 120 German settlers led by John O. Meusebach established Fredericksburg on Barons Creek and Town Creek, near the Pedernales River. The little community thrived and became the county seat when the legislature created Gillespie County in 1848. Two years later, the population of the town had grown to almost a thousand; in that same year, three-quarters of the 1,235 whites in Gillespie County were of foreign extraction, almost all of them German.

Though little remembered today, surely one of the most remarkable was Christian Althaus, one of the first doctors in Fredericksburg. (The first was Wilhelm Keidel.) While I myself didn’t write the Handbook entry on Althaus—that honor fell to the Barbara Donalson Althaus, who obviously had a more personal connection with her subject—I’m cribbing from it shamelessly in this post.

Johann Christian Althaus was born in Erndtebrück, Westphalia, and served as a medic in the Prussian army before emigrating to Texas. He sailed from Antwerp, Belgium, on the York, arriving in Indianola in 1846 and making his way to Fredericksburg by the time town lots were distributed the following year. Also in 1847, he married a fellow immigrant, Anna Maria Elisabetha (Elizabeth) Behrens; they eventually had seven children. Initially, doctoring seems to have been at best a part-time occupation for Althaus; he also worked as a saddle-maker and as an Indian agent at Fort Martin Scott, two miles east of town, though in the 1850 census he was listed as a carpenter.

Althaus seems, like many of his fellow German settlers, to have cultivated a friendly relationship with the local Indians. He was one of the signers of the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty, which virtually eliminated fears of Indian attacks, and he eventually learned several Indian dialects. He treated Indians as well as whites in his medical practice, following the advice of an Indian friend who advised him to “be friendly and never pull a gun.” (This still strikes me as good advice in most circumstances.)

After ten years in Fredericksburg, Althaus determined to try his hand at ranching. He and the family moved to Cave Creek, several miles northeast of town, where he built a two-room stone house on top of a spring in which he kept his medicines cool. (The house, still standing in modified form on Koennecke-Eckhardt Road, off Ranch Road 1631, is now part of the Historic American Buildings Survey of the Library of Congress.) Althaus, like many of his fellow Germans, opposed the “peculiar institution” of slavery and secession—an unpopular stance with many of their fellow Texans, and contributed to the legendary insularity of the Hill Country Germans—but helped organize the home guard and served as a county commissioner during the Civil War.

And all this time he was practicing medicine, too, as Barbara Donalson Althaus wrote in her Handbook entry:

He served as a community doctor until the 1880s, and his practice of medicine was carried on under many difficulties. Medical instruments were scarce; before Althaus amputated a crushed arm, he had to have the operating instrument (now at Pioneer Museum, Fredericksburg) made by a local blacksmith. He used locally grown herbs, roots, and bark to make his own medicines. When the government sent him to Bandera to treat diphtheria patients, he used medicine he made from honey, almond juice, and the bark of the blackjack tree. Thirty-four out of thirty-five people survived. Elizabeth Althaus not only raised seven children but also ran a makeshift hospital, orphanage, and shelter for wayfarers in their home. In addition she tended the farm during her husband’s trips, which sometimes lasted for weeks.

Althaus farmed and ranched and operated a dairy on the Cave Creek property until the 1880s, when he moved a few miles east. In 1883 he was among the founders of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Cave Creek, which calls itself “the oldest rural church in Gillespie County,” and volunteered to help haul the lumber used to build the church from Austin, seventy-five miles away. (At this time he was in his sixties, remember.) He died in 1915, at the age of ninety-four, and was buried beside the church he helped establish.

All in all, a life worthy of remembrance and even celebration, I’m sure you’ll agree. And a life that puts my own in useful perspective. The high in Austin today will be in the mid-90s, but I’m typing this while sitting in a comfortable chair in our well-cooled house; when I sweat, it’s usually because I choose to, either by walking Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound up and down the surrounding hills in the morning, or by going to a nearby gym. The food we eat is plentiful and healthful, almost exclusively grown by local farmers; Heather is fixing a breakfast of home-made polenta (made with cornmeal from Boggy Creek Farm) topped by a poached egg from our happy Madroño Ranch hens. I’m getting over a summer cold, after several days of pounding decongestants and expectorants.

Do I wish I were living in nineteenth-century Texas? No and hell no. But I do wish that I had had the opportunity to meet people like Christian (and Elizabeth) Althaus in person. I know I could learn much from their courage and perseverance and goodness.

What we’re reading
Heather: Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds
Martin: Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (still!)

Last Monday was Memorial Day, which Heather and I acknowledged by visiting the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg on our way out for a quick visit to Madroño Ranch.

If you haven’t been there yet, I can tell you that the museum is an amazing place, crammed full of artifacts and information; we had no idea! (Those of you wondering why a museum commemorating the Pacific war is in landlocked Fredericksburg should know that it is the home town of Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet during World War II.) We were wandering through, overwhelmed by the number and detail of the exhibits, when we came upon a photograph (above) of Heather’s grandmother, Oveta Culp Hobby, who was the head of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II.

Mamaw, as she was known in the family, was a formidable woman. Born in Killeen in 1905, she was a proto-feminist (though I suspect she would be horrified to be described as such), both genteel and steely. Family legend holds that she displayed a strong sense of integrity, not to say stubbornness, at an early age. Her son (and Heather’s uncle), former lieutenant governor Bill Hobby, wrote of her in the Handbook of Texas:

She was only five or six when a temperance campaign swept Killeen, and at Sunday school all the small children were invited to sign the pledge and receive a Woman’s Christian Temperance Union white ribbon to wear. Oveta thought it over and refused. She had no particular desire to drink liquor, she granted, but she might wish to when she grew up and thought it best not to give her word unless she was sure she was prepared to keep it.

She inherited a firm belief in the importance of public service from her father, a state legislator, and evinced an early interest in the law. She attended both Baylor Female College (now the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor) and the South Texas College of Law, though she graduated from neither. At the tender age of twenty, she became the parliamentarian of the Texas House of Representatives, beginning a long career of public service, though her lone stab at electoral politics was a failure, as Uncle Bill notes:

At twenty-five she was persuaded to run for the state legislature from Houston, but was beaten by a candidate who whispered darkly that she was “a parliamentarian and a Unitarian.”

In 1931 she became the second wife of former Texas governor William P. Hobby, the president of the Houston Post and a good friend of her father’s; she was twenty-six and he was fifty-three. For the next decade, her life revolved around the newspaper business (she was successively the book editor, assistant editor, and executive vice president of the Post during the 1930s), community affairs (she was president of the League of Women Voters of Texas and served on the boards of various civic organizations), and her two children.

In 1942, she was appointed the first head of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), which later became the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). She became the first woman accorded the rank of colonel in the United States Army and worked tirelessly, in the face of deeply entrenched skepticism and prejudice, to establish the WAC as a legitimate branch of the service. (In 1945, in recognition of her efforts, she became the first woman to receive the Distinguished Service Medal.) Uncle Bill again:

The job she undertook was hard, often exasperating, frequently amusing, and sometimes heartbreaking. The new director had to travel constantly, speaking to large groups of men and women on the radical subject of enlisting volunteer women into the army. She traveled with an electric fan and iron, so that at each overnight stop she could wash, dry, and iron her khaki uniform—the only WAAC uniform in existence at the time.

After the war, she was active in the Democrats for Eisenhower movement, and in 1953 Ike appointed her the first secretary of the brand-new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services); she thus became only the second female Cabinet member in United States history. She resigned in 1955 to spend more time with her ailing husband (he died in 1964), and spent the next four decades overseeing the family communications business, which grew to include radio and television stations, and solidifying her standing as the first lady of Houston society. She died in 1995.

My own memories of her begin in the summer of 1981, when Heather and I, having just graduated from Williams College, embarked on an epic cross-country drive from Massachusetts to California and back to San Antonio.

En route to the West Coast, we passed through New Orleans, where we spent several days, and Houston, where we arranged to visit Mamaw. (Heather had made it clear that Mamaw was most definitely not the sort of grandmother one dropped in on unannounced for milk and cookies, so we called her secretary and made an appointment.)

On the night before our departure from the Crescent City, someone broke into our car and made off with all our worldly possessions (admittedly a modest pile), including Heather’s Williams College diploma and (this really hurt) our cooler full of beer. We were left, quite literally, with the clothes on our backs—in my case, a pair of cut-off jeans and a T-shirt bearing, in large letters across the chest, the slogan of the oyster bar in Boston’s Faneuil Hall (“EAT IT RAW”). We waited several hours, in vain, for the New Orleans police to show up before Heather announced that we had to leave; we simply could not afford to be late for our appointment with Mamaw.

We fairly flew over I-10 to Houston, pulling up at Mamaw’s house just in time. We were shown into a beautifully appointed sitting room and offered tea. The tea arrived, served in lovely bone china; I accepted a cup, and balanced it on my knee while we awaited Mamaw’s entrance.

Just before she entered the room, I looked down at the delicate cup and saucer resting on my bare, hairy knee, and suddenly realized that this meeting was not going to go well.

Sure enough, the temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees when Mamaw entered and caught her first glimpse of me in my cut-offs and vulgar T-shirt, with my bushy beard and gold earring. What had I been thinking? Granted, we’d been in a hurry to reach Houston, but why hadn’t we stopped for even five minutes at a Dollar General Store and at least bought me a plain white T-shirt?

I escaped that awkward meeting alive, somehow, but for the next few years, whenever Mamaw called Heather and I happened to pick up the phone, I could feel the chill coming over the long-distance lines and through the receiver. “Hello?” I would say. (This was long before caller ID, of course.) “Is Heather there,” came the icy response—never “Hello, Martin,” or “How are you?”

Finally, after we married, Mamaw began, very gradually, to warm up to me. She became much friendlier on the phone, even asking me questions about myself and my work before asking to speak to Heather. We took our kids to visit her in Houston, having first threatened them with torture and dismemberment if they misbehaved; she seemed to enjoy them, though she never got used to the idea that she had a great-grandson named Tito. (“And how is little, er, Toto?” she would ask.)

She was also a little dubious about my ethnicity. The story goes that when one of Heather’s cousins announced that she was marrying a young man of Greek descent, Mamaw sniffed, “Well, we already have a Kohout in the family. I suppose we might as well have a Papadopoulos.”

I had of course always admired and respected her, and toward the end of her life I grew to love her as well. She was ferociously intelligent, determined, and opinionated, and yet she was also gracious and charming, and extremely funny—all qualities, by the way, she passed on to her daughter and granddaughters (and, so far as we can tell, to her great-granddaughters as well). I was fortunate indeed to know her, despite the somewhat, er, awkward beginning of our relationship.

Mamaw, I salute you. I hope that, wherever you are, you can see that I’ve cut my hair, trimmed the beard, and given up the earring. And that EAT IT RAW T-shirt disappeared years ago.

What we’re reading
Heather: W. S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems
Martin: Jerome Charyn, The Seventh Babe

The Chisos Basin, the bowl in which the lodge sits, is more than a mile above sea level. The only break in the surrounding ring of volcanic mountains is the Window, a triangular notch through which one can see the Chihuahuan desert thousands of feet below, and, on clear nights, the lights of Study Butte and Terlingua, some fifteen miles away. (That’s it in the photo above.) It’s no accident that the dining room at the lodge, and many of the guest rooms, look out over the Window; it is mesmerizing.

We spent the cool, sunny mornings hiking the Lost Mine and Laguna Meadows trails, which begin in the basin. On Friday afternoon we drove down to the Hot Springs Historic District and Rio Grande Village, and on Saturday afternoon we drove down to Terlingua and then on to Lajitas. We saw various flycatchers, Western and summer tanagers, Mexican jays, canyon towhees, a Say’s phoebe, a blue grosbeak, a Western kingbird, a black-footed ferret, and several rabbits, in addition to a disgruntled-looking coyote padding along the road in Rio Grande Village; we saw centuries-old pictographs and petroglyphs at Hot Springs. We ate dinner at the truly surreal Lajitas Golf Resort and Spa, at which an episode of the reality TV show Ammo and Attitude was being filmed. (No, we’d never heard of it either.)

All of this felt like pure gift to Heather and me, given the events of the last six months, which as most of you know have been hard ones for us. At the beginning of December Heather learned that the source of the pain in her left hip that had been bothering her for a couple of months was in fact a stage 4 cancer that had already metastasized to the bones in her pelvis and spine. Then her father, whose own health had been declining since the death of her mother two years ago, died a week before Christmas.

Heather’s cancer is still officially of unknown origin, though molecular analysis indicated a 90 percent probability that it was breast cancer—despite the fact that years of mammograms and, more recently, a battery of tests and scans had found no tumor.

In January, she began a regimen of four chemotherapy infusions, one every three weeks, combined with monthly infusions of Zometa, a bone strengthener developed to treat osteoporosis. At times we wondered if the treatments were worse than the disease; the chemo affected her palate to such an extent that few if any foods tasted good, and the Zometa brought on agonizing flu-like symptoms: aches, joint pain, fatigue.

Heather lost about twenty-five pounds, much of it muscle; she had always been an athlete, and the ensuing weakness, which affected her posture and her gait, was in some ways much harder to take than the loss of her beautiful hair, much as she hated that obvious and public signifier of illness. (After her hair had started to fall out, she had me shave her head, which I must say was not a duty I had ever imagined performing on my wife; after I finished the job, we joked that if she just got a few tattoos and piercings, she’d be indistinguishable from much of the rest of the population of Austin.)

Perhaps the most tiresome thing about Heather’s illness—aside from the physical effects, of course—was how boring it was. We found ourselves utterly unable to focus on anything except her illness. Events in the world outside us passed virtually unnoticed; we found ourselves unable to concentrate on anything—writing, reading, you name it—beyond the reality of illness and treatment. We were locked in the dark house of her cancer, and we couldn’t even imagine the world outside.

After her fourth chemo infusion in March, she got a break of five weeks before returning to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for testing and evaluation. At Anderson she had a PET scan which failed to find even a single lesion; she was, unbelievably, completely cancer free.

It was as if all the doors and windows of the house in which we’d been shut suddenly flew open, and we could see the sky and trees and streets and people outside. Our trip to Big Bend marked our first tentative steps back into the beautiful, messed-up, complicated world.

The Window is mesmerizing. Like any gap in any wall, any break in any symmetrical pattern, it naturally drew our eyes; we always want to see beyond our immediate surroundings, to see behind the curtain. For us, emerging from the claustrophobia of Heather’s illness, the view from the Window was a symbol of the vastness, the wholeness, that we had been unable to imagine during these last six months. But of course it was there all along, waiting patiently for us to lift our heads and look.

What we’re reading
Heather: Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil
Martin: Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Yesterday was the solstice, the shortest day of the year; Heather’s father died last Sunday; and we’ve received various other pieces of bad news over the last few weeks. It would be easy, under the circumstances, to give way to fear and sorrow and the belief that we are surrounded by darkness. But I want instead, on the eve of Christmas Eve, and in the wake of Heather’s last post, to talk about light, in particular the light and joy and comfort of love, in particular our love.

Heather and I were classmates and fellow English majors at Williams College. We started dating during the spring of our senior year, which means, for those of you keeping score at home, that we’ve been together for thirty years now, though we didn’t bother to get married until 1985. But I first noticed her during our sophomore year, when we were both taking a course called “Religion and Literature,” taught by a formidable scholar named Barbara Nadel.

Now, neither of us had any business being in this course; we knew very little about literature, despite having declared ourselves English majors, and even less about religion. The course was one of those three-hour seminars that met one afternoon a week, while the syllabus included inscrutable writers like Paul Tillich, Bernard Meland, and Wallace Stevens, which meant that at the end of each class I knew even less than I had at the beginning. The upside was that, since I never had the slightest idea what was going on, I had lots of time to stare at girls, and Heather—glamorous, sophisticated, obviously way out of my league—immediately caught my eye.

She clinched the deal, unwittingly, on the last day of the semester. Babs Nadel, as we irreverently referred to her, had assigned us a final paper, and Heather, as she admitted later, had put it off until she was forced to stay up all the previous night writing it. Moreover, she had come down with a severe cold, which left her severely congested. The combination of lack of sleep and a head full of cotton wool meant that when she came to class that afternoon she sought out the largest individual in class and sat behind him, hoping to avoid catching Babs’s eye. (Babs, terrifyingly, would call on people at random to answer the incomprehensible questions she posed.)

Somehow, Heather had gone that entire semester without once being called on, but of course her number came up on the last day of class. Babs asked some particularly knotty question—I don’t remember what it was; probably something about Stevens—and called on Heather, who had by now slipped into something approaching a comatose state.

Heather later described the awful sensation of gradually coming to consciousness to realize that everyone in the room was staring at her expectantly, apparently awaiting her response to a question she hadn’t even heard. She completely whiffed, of course, and it was at that moment that I said to myself, “THAT’s the girl for me—she’ll never know what hit her!” It took me another two years to wear down her resistance—today I’d probably be arrested as a stalker—but when she finally crumbled, just a few months before we graduated, she quite literally made me the happiest young man in the world.

(Warning to our kids: you probably shouldn’t read this paragraph.) When we first started dating, of course, we were completely in lust with each other, in that embarrassingly hormonal way of young lovers. (When recalling our younger selves, I always think of the Austin Lounge Lizards song “The Golden Triangle,” which contains the lyric “two bodies were thinking with only one gland.”)

Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, that intense youthful passion settled into a steadier, more consistent condition, something like, well, love. We’ve certainly had our ups and downs since then, but the former have vastly outnumbered the latter. We’re still happily married (to each other, I mean); we have three beautiful, thoughtful, and compassionate children; in Madroño Ranch we’ve found a fulfilling, challenging, and just-plain-fun project on which to collaborate now that our nest has emptied. Life, in short, is pretty damn good.

Except, of course, when it isn’t. This is traditionally the season of giving, but this year it has been even more disjointed and chaotic than usual, and we haven’t been feeling terribly festive. I finally decided, just yesterday morning, that the best and most meaningful gift I could give Heather was an attempt to tell her how much I love her, and how much she’s meant to me.

Heather has given me gifts all year round, for thirty years now. The greatest gift of all, however, is one that I have not yet fully unwrapped. I’ve always been of a somewhat gloomy disposition, inclined to see the downside of most situations. (“Expect the worst and you’re seldom disappointed” has been my motto.) Heather, on the other hand, always projects optimism, always expects things to turn out better rather than worse. When I was younger, and for an embarrassingly long time, I tended to think that such a stance was an indication of shallowness and/or naïveté, but slowly, over our years together, I’ve come to realize that it is exactly the opposite. It is, in fact, a conscious and deliberate choice, a rigorous and gallant determination not to give in to darkness and inactivity, but to bestow grace and hope by stubbornly shining light on everyone and everything around you.

I know that my pessimism has often frustrated and disappointed her, and I’m not sure I’ve ever told her how much I admire her patience, her forgiveness, her determination, her spirit, her steadfastness, her depth. I have learned so much from her; I still have so much to learn. Sometimes it can seem that darkness is all there is, but now I know better. Now I know that where there is love, there is always light.

What we’re reading
Heather: Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
Martin: Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life