“Beauty from the burn,” I said.
“It gives the thing some character, doesn’t it?” he said.
Horses had been a constant presence in their lives for two decades. Jennifer described how Ella had spent every day with her and the animals, in the barns and the pasture, from the time she was a baby. “Even as a little girl she had an eye for horses,” Jennifer said. “She could ride anything. As soon as she would get on a horse’s back, the horse would settle. She had a calmness about her that animals responded to.”
Years earlier they had gone to Tucson to have a look at a Dutch mare they were warned was a spirited creature. They watched from the edge of a ring while the horse leapt and snorted and tossed her head like a diva, prancing and dancing and showing off. She was seventeen hands tall, beautiful, and totally unrideable. They knew immediately they had to have her. They took her home, named her Gracie, and after a year of training she became Ella’s horse. The girl and the horse fell in love. They rode together almost every day, galloping across the landscape around their farm.
The care and training of horses gave the family a shared experience rooted in the physicality of animate flesh, and as artists Jennifer and Brian encouraged conversation on matters of creativity and intellectual ambition. But it came as a revelation for them to confront Ella’s hidden inner life in the journals she left behind. Many times she wrote of an urgency she felt to create, and an apprehension of time slipping away. As a child I spent most of my free time riding horses, she wrote, less than a month before her death. The summers were endless. Now summers are so short. It’s strange [that] time seemed so slow when I was young, but now, now things seem to be going too fast for me to ever catch up. Every year goes by faster. Every year brings me closer to an end I know deep inside me is there but which I cannot see. I feel like every day my time is running out and I’m powerless to do anything… I’m realizing that those things that are temporary are the most beautiful… I don’t know, life is a strangely beautiful devastating thing.
On the day Ella died, as a favor of the sort friends do in such moments, a woman named Tammy looked in on the family’s horses to make sure they were fed and watered. She found Gracie out of her mind in a full white lather, whinnying so loud it sounded like screaming. “Tammy tried to calm her down but nothing worked,” Jennifer said. “Gracie was rearing and running in circles, just a total basketcase. Somehow she knew Ella was gone.”
After Ella’s death, Jennifer adopted Gracie as her own, and the horse barn became both her sanctuary and her hell, a place so thick with meaning and memory, so dense with presence and absence, she could barely stand it. Gracie offered her a tangible connection to Ella. Sometimes they would be out on the landscape, riding like any other day, and all of a sudden something would shift, and a calmness would flow through them like water. “It was as if time would stop, or if not stop at least cease to matter, you know what I mean? We were in some other place without time. I knew Gracie could feel it too. She would float almost like she wasn’t even touching the ground—and in that moment I knew Ella was with us.”
Two weeks before my visit, Gracie had fallen ill with a bad case of colic, and Jennifer had taken her to the veterinarian. The vet treated her for a blockage in her intestine and told Jennifer to keep a close eye on her. Gracie had always had colic problems, but this time was worse. She couldn’t seem to recover, and her nights became terrible as she thrashed about in pain. Jennifer took her to the vet a second time and had her suspicion confirmed. Gracie was not going to get better, not this time. Jennifer had long ago made a promise to Ella that she would never allow Gracie to suffer, and although it meant losing her major private connection to her daughter, she gave the vet the go-ahead to put Gracie down.
“Normally I would have been there for it,” Jennifer said. “I just couldn’t do it this time. I could feel the moment of her death, though. A sense of peace came over me. A sense of calm and gratitude. Gracie by her nature demanded attention from me every day for three years. She’s probably the reason I survived.”
Years of experience with animals—Jennifer and her horses and sheep, Raven and her chickens—had taught the family just how deep cross-species communication could go. Unlike some farmers, they never treated their livestock with a heavy hand. The animals were allowed personalities, allowed to show love and fear. “And man, do they show love if you let them,” Jennifer said. “Our stallions were crazy about Gracie, and how could you blame them? She was so flamboyant. They would prance and squeal for her, and when our lambs got out, they would go eat in the stall with her. She was so gentle with them, almost like a mother. We have two lambs named Frick and Frack, and they liked to sleep with Gracie. It was so sweet to watch them together.”
To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, Wendell Berry wrote, and along the banks of the Mimbres the family planned to continue an experiment in the cultivation of courtesy. Several rare or endangered species occupied the property, from Chihuahuan chubs and Chiricauhua leopard frogs to willow flycatchers, yellow-billed cuckoos, and common black hawks. Many private property owners would stay mum about such creatures—or drive them off, fearful of government interference in their livelihood. Not here.
“We view it as a blessing and an opportunity,” Jennifer said. “We want to keep migratory routes open, so animals can move through the property, and we plan buffer zones around the livestock impacts.” They would fence off the river bottom to keep the sheep and horses from damaging the riparian area. They would aim to live and work in such a way as to preserve and even encourage the biotic richness and diversity of their land. They would not measure its value in dollars alone but in how many of their fellow creatures thrived alongside them. They imagined the place evolving over time into a multi-use education center with workshops on green building methods, conservation biology, nature writing—ways of sharing what they learned with others, building community, celebrating connectivity among humans and creatures alike.
“We’ve suffered the hardest lesson you can learn in impermanence and ephemerality,” Jennifer said. “It truly shattered us.” But they had managed to put the pieces back together—and they were going to do their utmost to nurture the life that was here before them and would remain, if they had any say in the matter, long after they were gone.
I MARKED THE TRANSITION of seasons with a week at the Swede’s old haunt, once again reacquainting myself with its healing waters: the hot spring seeps and soaking tubs, the cool, clear stream. Cottonwoods along the banks were turning yellow, one last flaring before shedding their leaves; summer was giving way to autumn and the light had turned, the midday shadows longer and softer at the edges.
After ten years in the Gila region, the Swede had decided it was time to move on to a new phase of life, so I had the place to myself with the blessing of Frank’s youngest son, Aari, maker of the perfect martini. Last I saw the Swede he told me he had booked a flight to Hawaii to spend time with his daughter and her family on the beach at Kailua, play chess with his grandchildren, help build a little guesthouse on their property. “I’m going to buy myself a snow-white suit made of hemp and a good pair of sandals,” he said, “and sit on the beach nursing a cocktail with a little pink umbrella in it, and I’m going to caress my illusions and cultivate my eccentricities. I’m too old to be fixing leaky water lines with Mormon rawhide and baling wire. But I trust you’ll look in there from time to time. And I hope you’ll say hi to Frank on the mesa for me.” He said this very intently, with a tone of supplication normally foreign to his being.
On my last night there, I did as he asked. Seated next to Frank’s grave, the river below me glowing like a phosphorescent snake in the moonlight, I drank a glass of bourbon, smoked a cigar, and thought of Michael Mahl and his father’s description of him at his brother’s graduation party, glass of whisky in one hand, cigar in the other, “owning it like a boss.” What a way to be remembered. What pain and pride I had heard in the voice that said those w
ords.
I poured a little out on Frank’s grave and told him the Swede sent his regards. Through the Swede’s stories I had come to know Frank a little. I discovered more when, with the blessing of Frank’s sons, I looked through a box of his papers left behind at the ranch after his death. Its contents offered a hint of why a man with a glamorous life in San Francisco in the Age of Aquarius might choose one day, at the height of his success, to give it all up and retreat to the wilds of New Mexico.
In a document titled “Life History,” Frank wrote:
I was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1929. When Hitler came to power in 1933, my father and mother and I were living in Essen, Germany. My father had been an international trade executive, traveling across Europe on trading and banking missions. My father took my mother and me and walked across the frontier to Holland to escape Nazi retribution since he had been actively involved in anti-Hitler activities and was a prime target. The only possession he took along was his camera which became his new source of employment. By 1935 we had settled in Antwerp, Belgium, where my mother died. This was a great shock to my father, and I have been told by their friends that if it had not been for his son, he might have killed himself.
Father and son were forced to flee again when the Nazis overran the lowlands on May 10, 1940. Of this chaotic time Frank remembered crowded refugee trains, bombing by the Luftwaffe, and finally being overrun by the German armies somewhere in France. After being shuttled from camp to camp in cattle cars, we wound up in St. Cyprien, a concentration camp previously built to house Spanish loyalists. Through extremely fortunate circumstances, we were able to escape just prior to being shipped to the extermination camps of Germany. With the help of friends and my father’s sister in New York, we eventually arrived in New York City, via Marseilles, Africa, and Martinique.
I once asked the Swede what “extremely fortunate circumstances” may have allowed for that escape from St. Cyprien, and he told me he had no idea. In their decades of friendship, Frank had uttered not a word about his childhood.
In America, Frank and his father lived an itinerant existence until Frank joined the Navy in 1948. He received an honorable discharge the following year, and after this there came about a year of drifting. This was pre-Jack Kerouac but it was “on the road” through Texas. In Dallas, police picked him and a buddy up on a vagrancy charge, held them in jail three days, and ran them out of town with instructions never to return.
Frank made his way to San Francisco by late 1950. After an early career as a photographer like his father, he became the publicist for the Purple Onion and Hungry i nightclubs. He produced a long-running play with Charles Schulz based on Schulz’s “Peanuts” comic, opened a restaurant and record-production company, launched the Kingston Trio to superstardom, and mingled with Woody Allen, Allen Ginsberg, and Alan Watts. His first wife ran off with Lenny Bruce, a frequent performer at the Purple Onion. He gave a then-unknown aspiring comic named Robin Williams a job as a busboy in his famous Sausolito hot spot, the Trident. When Frank was busted with those six sea bags full of weed at his plush pad on De Silva Island in 1968, the San Francisco Chronicle went with a double-decker, banner headline on its front page: Fantastic Dope Case: The Swinging Tycoon—Showman Seized in Huge Pot Raid. Among those who testified at trial on his behalf were a pastor, a rabbi, and the comedian Tommy Smothers, who admitted that smoking grass with Frank helped him “untwist the knots.”
“I’ve seen the world and had my share of good times,” the Swede once told me, “but sitting in Alan Watts’s houseboat on Richardson Bay, smoking a doobie with him and Frank while they talked philosophy—it never got better than that.”
Watts, who wrote numerous popular books on Eastern philosophy, as well as the ever topical The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, died when he was just fifty-nine years old, in 1973, after a grueling lecture tour. The death of his good friend shook Frank to his core. Around that time he began to question what he wanted from the rest of his days on Earth. I wondered whether it wasn’t just his friend’s death but his friend’s words that inspired a reexamination of values. In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts wrote: Our age is one of frustration, agitation, and addiction to dope. Somehow we must grab what we can, while we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This “dope” we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction—a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time.
Whatever the prod, Frank began his search for a retreat from the world he had made for himself, a world of real-estate investments, record deals, and nonstop parties. What he wanted, it turned out, was the one thing he had been denied in his formative years as a young Jewish boy on the run for his life across Europe: a home he could call his own. The one he found was completely defensible, with the same road in as out, and a number of neighbors within three miles he could count on the fingers of one hand. A place where the ancient secrets still murmured in the meeting of stone and water.
I failed to see how he could have done better and I told him so, there on the mesa amid the moonglow on the river flow, a half-drunk man babbling to the dead—a habit some judged disreputable.
To me it felt more natural all the time.
IN THE MORNING I drained the tubs and tidied the bunkhouse and drove off for one more visit to a friend.
Patrice Mutchnick met me at the door of her home in Gila Hot Springs and invited me in. I had brought us each a cup of ice cream from Doc Campbell’s Post just up the road, and we sat on the porch and visited awhile, catching up on our summer doings.
It had taken me a long time to approach her after the crash, too long by any reasonable standard of condolence—two years, it turned out, although one year of that could be blamed on my odyssey through temporary physical ruin. I had mostly wanted to tell her that her daughter inspired me. What had been so difficult about that? I suppose I feared articulating my feeling of responsibility to Ella Jaz’s work in defense of the river because I knew I lacked her poise and clarity on the issue. By uttering aloud my admiration of her activism to the woman who loved her most, I would be bound to honor a promise I had made in the privacy of my own mind, a promise to amplify Ella Jaz’s voice in whatever small way I could. I suppose I feared, as well, being burned by drawing too near the heat of a mother’s grief. I had watched my own mother grieve for a lost son, saw how elusive words of solace could be. That didn’t mean the words would come easier for me. I knew too well the futility of words in the face of such loss.
Despite my fears, Patrice had welcomed me when I first went to see her. She immediately suggested we go to the river, to swim in a place where she had often gone with Ella Jaz. When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers, the poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote, but the inverse was true too: sometimes returning to the banks of certain rivers makes it hurt. It hurt to swim as two when we ought to have been swimming as three. It hurt for me to tell her that her daughter had inspired me, and it hurt far worse for her to hear it, because I couldn’t use the present tense in telling her so. But something about swimming in the river, reveling in the reek of it, that plump, green-brown stink of all that grows and rots near moving water, also made the hurt hurt less.
It was always there, but she had struggled against it by honoring her daughter’s passions in every way she could. She brought together various musician friends to record an album of Ella Jaz’s songs. She partnered with a filmmaker to shoot a documentary that celebrated Ella, Michael, and Ella Jaz’s lives even as it looked unflinchingly at their deaths. She led a project to remove non-native tamarisk from a forty-mile stretch of the river from Gila Hot Springs through the Wilderness and out the other side. She hunted for rare plants in the forest, tagged monarch butterflies for the sake of learning more about their migra
tion pattern.
There in the river we began a conversation we resumed off and on for more than a year. We spoke of death and memory, the lines tragedy carves on a life, the imperative to find beauty amid ruin, how certain songs with deep associations both wound and soothe, how sunny days can feel an insult, human laughter a taunt. She always received me graciously, and I tried to make sure she knew I wasn’t some bloodless documentarian conducting a close study of other people’s suffering. The truth was, I liked her. I came to admire her, just as I had admired her daughter, though for different reasons. Certain people insinuated that I ought to keep my distance because she had gone a little crazy in her grief. I would have been alarmed if she hadn’t—not only for the fact of losing an only daughter and best friend, but for suffering such a loss in the fish bowl of a small town, with no place to hide and everyone staring at you with garish and distorted faces. To judge her disapprovingly seemed to my mind a kind of feint, an excuse for not taking seriously her demand for a full accounting of the events that led to her daughter’s death—as if she were supposed to crawl in a hole and stay there mute until she too went to the other side.
That was not her style. She had a tenacity about her that people praise in men but find threatening in women. She had applied that tenacity to the push for a full investigation of the facts of the crash, an investigation that some in the community judged a vengeful attempt to extract a pound of flesh because it involved, in the end, a legal reckoning. She didn’t care. It wasn’t about her. It was about the memory of her daughter and the education of the children who would pass through the doors of that school in the years to come.
A Song for the River Page 17
