Crossing The Great Divide

By Meredith Wadley

Dad slapped a stack of documents onto the breakfast table. “Deal of the century. Done.” He opened a map. With a mechanical pencil, he circled a sparsely developed area northeast of Colorado Springs. “Three hundred and thirty-seven acres. Ranch headquarters,” he said. Tapping a spot in the Rockies, he added, “A hundred twenty acres of alpine pastures surrounded by public lands.”
“We’re going to ranch?” my brother, Steve, said. My sister, Isabel leaned forward. 
We were a military family, so the logistics of Dad getting into ranching didn’t figure. Engineer, pilot, and instructor during that Denver stint in 1973, could he be ready to go civilian? Settle us in one place? Finally?
Mom, massaging a dishtowel, said, “I’m not setting another foot on the place.”
“Not asking you to,” Dad said. He addressed us kids: “A manager will do the ranching. We do the waiting.”
“A manager?” Steve asked.
“Doug Evers. He’s a champion bull rider.”
“A champion hustler,” Mom said, “who piddled away his own money and will now earn an income piddling away ours.”
“Are there horses?” Isabel asked.
I held my breath. My horse-crazy sister owned dozens of model horses and books on horses she wouldn’t let me, her younger sister, touch. “Do I want my models chipped or cracked?” she’d say. “Do I want the spines of my books split or the corners of their pages folded or covered in your fingernail gunk?”
Never mind how I’d gone through Black Beauty, Snowman, and My Friend Flicka on the sly, leaving zero trace.
Dad smiled. “Plenty of horses, darlin’.”
“Like, we now own horses?”
“Lock, stock, and barrel-ribbed horses—yeah.”
“Dusty, dilapidated, and dull-eyed cayuses, more like,” Mom quipped.
Like any parents, ours could face off. Mom usually held her own. Dad might have been military, but she was militaristic. That he’d done something she disapproved felt awesome.
Steve said, “What do we wait for?”
“Rezoning.” Dad tapped an area between the ranch and Colorado Springs. “It’s already happened here. Single-family dwellings on five acres.”
“We can ride the horses?” Isabel said.
“Some weekend, honey. Sure, why not?”
Displeased, she stepped back from the table and crossed her arms. My sister dedicated her weekends to gymnastics training and competitions.
“So,” back-on-track Steve said, “we sell five-acre parcels, cleaning up.”
“Nope.” Dad dropped the pencil into his shirt pocket. “We wait. For subdivision zoning.”
“Really clean up.”
Dad said, “Maybe build a hunting lodge in the mountains with the proceeds. Hire Evers to run it.”
Mom rolled her eyes. “Run it into the ground,” she said.
Dad ignored her. “Following the snowmelt, Evers and his men drive the livestock into the Rockies the old-fashioned way, in saddle leather. A few weeks from now, they’ll be driving them down again. We’ll go watch.”
My mind drifted into the ethers of imagination, fancying myself wearing gauchos and cowboy boots, galloping across grasslands, and rounding up stray doggies. I elbowed myself forward. “Can I join the cattle drive?”
“Of course not,” Steve said.
“I’m serious. I can help out. Why not?” My request might have been as unthinkable as it was naïve, but I wanted it given consideration.
My sister might’ve shared my vision and backed me up. She smirked instead. “They’re working men,” she said. “Not babysitters.”

*

Dad began wearing a weekend outfit that I couldn’t believe had survived Mom’s passion for Hefty Bags. A pair of worn-at-the heel cowboy boots had likely witnessed the gunfight at the OK Corral. The elbows of his pearl-snap shirt were as thin and downy as any tissue you’d find at the bottom of Mom’s purse. His straw cowboy hat couldn’t, for the life of it, recall its original shape, and he swore his ratty jeans required chaining to the bedpost. “Don’t want them running away to the hobos,” he joked. One evening, he brought home a battered Jeep Wagoneer. He called it the Blue Goose and took to talking to it as if it had a wet nose and wagging tail.
The transformation disgusted the others. Like Mom, Steve and Isabel showed no interest in the Gypsy Wagon. Dad’s reminder of going to watch the cattle drive went ignored. For my part, I didn’t want to go to something I’d been shut out of.
At Christmas, Mom and Dad announced Dad’s plan to retire from service. Still young enough to jump to a civilian career, he began searching for work. Local, at first, because Denver suited us. We weren’t too far from family in West Texas or too close; we liked our house, schools, and social lives; and there was the Gypsy Wagon’s future to consider.
But Denver wasn’t to be. By the end of our second summer in Colorado, we’d be packing again, heading to the Far Northwest.
Having lost none of my naivety and feeling desperate to experience the spring cattle drive, I applied the full hurrah of a childhood arsenal of pleading, begging, and pouting.
To no effect: the spring cattle drive came and went.

*

Days before our last weekend in Colorado, Dad offered to take me and Isabel camping in the Gypsy Wagon’s alpine pastures. Isabel, who’d qualified for the state championships, refused his offer. But I, too, had plans. I’d already competed at the state swimming championships. Several girlfriends and I planned to reward our successes with a trip to Elitch Gardens, to ride the rollercoasters, gorge on cotton candy, and flirt with any broad-shouldered boys willing to look our way. Mom had agreed to take us, but there she was, reminding Dad to be back by Tuesday.
“Seriously,” I said to her. “Elitch Gardens? My friends? Mom?”
“Back Monday evening,” Dad confirmed cheerfully. He wrapped me in a bear hug. “We’ll go riding, cowgirl.”
I got it. The camping trip was a consolation prize for never getting to go on a cattle drive. Dad infuriated me—but still, horses.
“Just you and me, kid. Last chance to see it.”
Dad had taken Steve up there in hunting season, and the pair had lugged home a deer. Most of the meat went into Christmas tamales, the deliciousness of which is still brought out from our family’s cabinet of lore to be lovingly remembered. Though not the Gypsy Wagon itself.
The morning of the camping trip arrived. I got up and found Dad and Steve sitting sat at the breakfast table, my brother dressed for baseball practice, and my dad—well, we all avoided looking at him on the weekends.
As soon as I joined them, Steve slipped down in his seat, his legs doubling in length and taking up any room for my legs. No one ever seemed to notice how he tortured me.
My brother grunted when Dad told him to mow the lawn while we were gone. I knew he’d be thinking, What’s the point? We’re leaving. Our Artful Dodger of church, chores, and commitments scooped up his glove. Three lanky strides later, he’d slammed shut the mudroom door.
“Packed?” Dad said to me cheerfully. “First stop, ranch HQ to pick up a key.”
I imagined a heavy wooden door, a cozy log cabin, a fire crackling in a stone fireplace, and the sounds of horses nickering for our attention.
I’d also imagined a Gypsy Wagon straight out of bluegrass country, a white house and matching barns in command of lush pastures, horses frolicking behind its white-rail fencing.
We crossed a cattleguard onto wreckage, instead: crooked fence posts, patched barbed wire, and stony, overgrazed land. We rolled up our windows to keep the dust out, but the corduroy road rattled them, and dust streamed from beneath our feet, where the foot mats were more substantial than the rust-pitted floors they covered, more and more dust. It reeked of cow shit and caked itself to my sweaty skin.
“Isn’t this great?” Dad shouted.
Things going my way. “Yee-haw,” I said, picturing my friends back in civilization, either screaming atop Mister Twister or walking alongside boys, entwined hands sticky with cotton candy. What a dope I was.
We reached a circle of cottonwoods whose trunks seemed to support several outbuildings and rusty piles of tractors, farm implements, and livestock trailers. In a lopsided corral, a pair of scrawny steers and ribbed horses with thick heads and sun-seared coats lipped at the base of an empty hayrack.
“I thought the horses and cows summered in the mountains,” I said.
“Not everything was fit to make the trip, I guess.”
Mom had called buying out a third-generation rancher, reducing him to Manager, and then to homelessness unethical and unkind. But Dad had argued that someone else would be turning the place into money if we didn’t. When she told him to leave the Evers family land to build on, he said, “They’d only slap a double-wide onto it.”
He and I stopped at a squat, weathered house à la The Wizard of Oz. The Jeep’s dust drifted across its sagging front porch. The only green grass around hugged an above-ground pool with buckled walls. Water splashed. Two towheads bobbed. I recalled Mom saying, “A double-wide would be better than what they’ve got.”
Doug Evers appeared in a white tank and creased Wranglers. I licked my lips, covering my tongue in grit. His silver buckle flashed sunlight as he slapped down the porch steps in flip-flops. Two blue heelers bolted past him to give Dad the sniff-down, their stubby butts wagging.
Doug had been to our house once, just after the snowmelt. I’d wanted to ask him directly about joining the spring cattle drive, but his handsomeness stopped me on the stairwell landing. I sat where I could observe him unnoticed. Serious crush material, like Clint Eastwood from early movies.
Cowboy hat in hand, he navigated our living room as if every object could crumble if touched. Mom gestured to the sofa, and he swiped his bottom as if to clean it but remained standing.
Mom left. Here was my moment. Yet I couldn’t move.
Dad, still in his khakis, greeted him. Uniformed men working under his command behaved with a snappish, self-respecting efficiency. Not Doug Evers. I’d never seen an adult act so fawning.
But on Gypsy Wagon land, Doug carried himself straighter. When Dad slapped him on the shoulder and offered him a cigarette, I couldn’t tell if the gesture was to express respect or reproach.
A dust devil twisted across the gravel drive, and water splashed. A rainbow beachball arched from one end of the pool to the other. I thought of my friends at Elitch Gardens.
Suddenly, the Jeep’s chassis rocked, Doug Evers poking his head through the driver’s window. The man's eyes were a faint blue, and he smelled like cigarettes with a hit of warm butter, sugar, and cinnamon—snickerdoodles.
I smiled.
“Why, you pretty little thing,” he said. “Aren’t you near growed up?”
I didn’t remember him talking so country at our house. He was teasing me, maybe. When I smiled, he winked.
The nape of my neck tingled in response as if this grown man had reached over and touched me. Although the tingling spread not unpleasantly throughout my body, I wanted to stop smiling. But my lips clung to my teeth.
Two of his fingers, one on each hand, had missing joints. Dad had told me their story. A pair of panicking horses had jerked on their lead lines, flicking off the ends of those fingers, and the dogs had snapped them from the air, swallowing them whole. Evers tapped the stumps and grinned. “About them horses,” he said. “They’re free-ranging, so to call ’em in, ya gotta rattle oats in a coffee can. An’ go for the gray, Glacier. Goosey at the start, but jus’ keep your plump little butt deep in the saddle, to ride ’im out.”
Goosey—plump—butt?
Something flew through the window, hitting the backseat. A bike horn. “Fer the bears. Huck’berries’s ripe ’round camp.”

*

As we retreated from the Gypsy Wagon, the idea that we were headed into bear country plagued my mind. I asked Dad if we had a shotgun.
“A shotgun?”
“Evers said—”
“Mr. Evers.”
I explained about the bears and the bike horn as Dad lit a cigarette. He said, “The man’s toying with us. Like we’re a pair of city slickers.”
We were city slickers.
“Nothing to worry about,” he said, pulling into a grocery store parking lot. He handed me a list of supplies Mr. Evers had asked us to take to the campsite. “The man’s all flavors of malarkey.”
“Like doing his shopping for him?”
“Oh, he’s in no position to outrank me, honeypot. And sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to flatter someone’s dignity.”
Tins of coffee, ravioli, and fruit cocktail filled the shopping cart. Bags of rice, beans, sugar, and flour, too. What we bought for ourselves went into our cooler. A carton of cigarettes went into the glove compartment.
Dad pointed out our destination on our map, the thinnest of lines squiggling up a valley. “Here we go!” he said. “Just the two of us.” He reached over and patted my knee, and I recalled the invasive feeling of Doug’s wink. I shifted in my seat, and the map crackled. The gestures, though both had felt condescending, were somehow worlds apart. The one I could protest; the other, I had to process.
At a row of mailboxes quickly approaching, I said, “I think this is our turn.”
“I think you’re right.”
The road turned from pavement to gravel, from a short, straight climb to stomach-churning switchbacks. We reached the top of the switchbacks, and Dad cut the motor. The radio clipped Joni Mitchell, paving paradise and putting in a parking lot.
I expected to hear windswept silence; instead, insects chirred and birds chirruped. A lizard scurried over a rock and slipped under dry, raspy leaves. Dad fetched a beer and a cream soda. Zick, zick, like drinking cotton candy.
At our feet, a forest dropped away, melting into the golden oceanic plains. Above us, a herd of white clouds drifted eastward.
“That’s is what you call a moment, darlin’,” Dad said, as he locked the Jeep’s four-wheel-drive hubs. Back in the cab, he grinned. “Here we go!” he said, patting my knee. Again.
“I don’t like that,” I said. “I’m not a kid.”
The Jeep’s engine clattered like fodder for mechanics. Dad shifted gears, the stick on the column. He must not have heard me.
Gravel gave way to tracks giving way to ruts. The Jeep’s chassis groaned and screeched. We followed a stream, which had gorged itself a deep channel in the turf. Despite an abundance of cowpats and road apples, we spotted no livestock.
The ruts ended in a sunless kettle occupied by a shabby lean-to, travel trailer, and outhouse. “Where’s the cabin?” I asked.
“What cabin?”
Black mildew streaked the trailer’s sides. Moss grew in its window frames. “We’re not sleeping in that, are we?”
“Or under the stars.”
I grabbed the bike horn from the backseat.
“There’re your huckleberries.” Dad indicated some bushes growling along a line of fir trees.
“So close to camp?”
“You can pick some for dinner.”
“I meant about the bears.”
Dad patted the Jeep’s dashboard. “The ol’ Blue Goose scared ’em off, don’t you worry. They won’t be back.”
The lean-to sheltered supplies, grimy tack, and a grimier gas range. It stank of bacon grease and horse sweat. Dad sorted the food supplies, and I ventured into the trailer. Gutted to accommodate bunk beds, it discharged a funk as opaque as the film covering the windows. A potbellied stove and metal bucket occupied its center. I hauled the lumpy, stained mattresses outside to air. Dad told me to fill the bucket with water at the pump. He knocked the woodstove pipe, loosening creosote, and built a fire to burn what remained.
We hiked to a viewpoint where I noticed black droppings the size of cocoa puffs. “Bear?” I asked.
Dad kicked the sharp toe of his boot into the ground. “Sheep,” he said. “Grass maggots.”
I didn’t know we had sheep.

*

How skilled a campfire cook Dad turned out to be, how tasty his steak and sausages, rice and beans! He sent me to pick huckleberries.
As I walked off, pan and bike horn in hand, he called, “You’ll smell one before you see it—if you’re downwind.” He laughed. “And if you startle one, don’t run my way!”
Hilarious. If he’d been a boy on my swim team, I’d have flipped him off. Instead, I honked the horn, wah, wah, wah.
Around the campfire, as darkness settled, cool against our backs, and the flames flicked heat in our faces, we talked about the recent resignation of President Nixon, a crook Dad detested. After the subject died away, he said, “They have better eyesight than people assume.”
“Republicans?”
“Bears. They have a great sense of smell, too.”
Cool air wisped across my exposed back. “Do they see well in the dark?”
“No idea.”
Sparks sputtered skyward.
“They’re not particularly skilled hunters. More foragers and scavengers. Springtime, they’ll prey on any fawn and elk calves they find lying around.”
Back when I was eight, and before doing a Vietnam tour, Dad had trained in jungle survival in Panama. He’d recount monkey hunting, slicing open their stomachs to identify what they’d eaten—what he, too, could eat—before skinning and roasting them over a fire. Maybe he was a brave man. He was a survivor, anyway. Unlike my best friend’s father, Dad returned from Vietnam. Never used his jungle survival skills. Taciturn and quick-tempered after the experience, he doubled the number of cigarettes he’d smoke in a day until Mom’s coolness sanded off the peaks of his mood swings.
When I crawled into bed, I reminded myself of the trailer’s thin walls—no thicker than a sardine tin, really. And we were little more than something for a bear to stumble across. The wood in the stove died, and the temperatures dropped. The night terrified me more than any Mr. Twister, and there was no way I’d ever fall asleep.

*

The clunk of an iron skillet on the campfire’s grill woke me. Daylight and bacon sizzling roused me. An urgent need to pee got me out of my sleeping bag.
“You snore,” Dad said as I brushed my teeth by the pump.
“I don’t snore.”
“Coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee, either. I’m fourteen, Dad.”
After we tidied, he said, “The saddles and bridles are filthy.” We cleaned them and tossed handfuls of oats into coffee cans. Dad had grown up with horses in West Texas. He walked me through the quick-release knot we’d use to tie the horses. “This move to Oregon will put Isabel in her own saddle,” he said. “She’ll let you ride her horse, I’m sure.”
“Like she lets me read her books?”
His puzzled frown led me to explain. “I want a horse, too, Dad.”
“Sure. Why not? Better to have two, anyway.”
We shook our tins, and like magic, horses appeared on the ridgetop, their ears pricked. In a shoulder-shoving pack, they swept down the slope, a fat gray trotting behind. Within seconds, massive heads swung around me like wrecking balls. Dust-raising, platter-sized hooves scrimmaged everywhere at once. Hopping like popcorn on a hot skillet to keep my feet from being crushed, I cried, “Dad!”
The coffee tin out of my hands, and the horses sprinted after it. “Okay?” Dad said. He handed me a greasy lead line attached to a great white head, brown eyes blinking dozily, and the next thing I knew, he was cooing, “Whoa-ho” at a prancing black mare. He placed a hand on her neck, which calmed her.
He took me through brushing, cleaning hooves, and tacking up.
“Tighten the cinch a second time before mounting,” he cautioned.
As soon as my fanny settled, I grinned, amazed to be in leather on a genuine horse. The ease of my glory was short-lived. Before getting the chance to even imagine myself as a western heroine, Dad leaning over and slapped Glacier’s loin.
The old gray’s floppy ears jerked. He bolted, snapping me back, locked his legs, stopping and pitching me forward, and then began to buck. Despite hanging on to the saddle horn with a bone-searing grip, I flopped around like a ragdoll.
Laughter echoed around the kettle’s rim, a complete surround-sound of my humiliation. Imagine if I’d been in the company of the Gypsy Wagon ranch hands.
Later, Dad swore the old plug’s feet never left the ground.
He took me to a lake where trout cruised sunlit shallows, their backs occasionally licking and burbling the surface. Stretching out his hands, touching his thumbs together, he framed a view of the water and said, “If I could get a lodge built right here, this place’ll stay pretty much the way it is.”
I sat up. “It’ll stay the way it is if you don’t build a lodge.”
Dad lowered his hands and pointed to a trample of sheep prints on the shoreline.
I murmured something about aching for a swim, and Dad said, “Go ahead.”
“Don’t have a Speedo on.” Didn’t even bring one.
“Go in your skivvies. No one’s here besides me.” He tied his mare to a sapling and stripped.
Recalling how his earlier touches to my knee had made me feel like a little girl, I waited for him to dive into the water before stripping myself. I had more womanly curves than he either saw or acknowledged.
The lake bottom shifted underfoot warm and silken smooth as I ran in. The water’s icy burn snatched my breath away. Dad tried racing me to the opposite shore, but where he splashed water, I sliced through it.
“Almost caught you,” he teased.
“I could have swum circles around you.” True. A couple more crossings, I would have lapped him.
“Nah, I let you win, darlin’.”
I ordered him to get out first and turn his back while I dressed. He didn’t fuss.
We sunned ourselves on logs like a pair of turtles. I didn’t have the bike horn with me, but with the horses half-asleep, I felt safe. Glacier’s bottom lip jutted out like a big empty drawer.
Back at camp, I unsaddled Glacier. Dad, still astride his mare, said something about “those infernal sheep.” His reins touched his mare’s neck, and she spun around. Bonanza-like, she leaped into a gallop and was off.
Glacier’s somnambular head popped up. He screamed to drown out a fighter jet and began jerking and pulling on his lead. I wasn’t going near his panic to lose any fingers. His quick-release knot tightened into a nut, and the hardware on his line snapped. Quicker than I would have thought he could move, he thundered away.
“Stop! Stay!” I shouted, but the old boy’s dust had already settled. Cursing, I grabbed the sweaty tack and headed for the lean-to.
At that time of day, a cool breeze came from the direction of the huckleberries. In it wafted a foul sweetness. It stopped me in my tracks. Foliage rustled, and the tack I held dropped from my hands. “Dad! Dad!” I screamed—or maybe it was “Bear! Bear!”
All the warnings about not running from a predatory animal? For any panicked fourteen-year-old, staying clear-headed in the face of danger was a joke. Like Glacier, I bolted.
In an instant, I, too, was in flight, halfway up the slope before my heartbeat caught up with me. Only when my leg muscles began to sear did I slow, my lungs gasping.
Expecting to hear roaring, I heard something sounding more like Miss! Miss! And when I couldn’t go another step, I swung around.
There, by the huckleberries, stood a sorrel horse. In the saddle sat a real Jeremiah Johnson, black hat, beard, and grin.
“Sorry, miss,” he said, a strong accent new to me. He held an arm across his midriff as if to protect it—injured, I assumed.
Slowly, I made my way to him, but only because my leg muscles had turned to jelly.
Maybe Dad’s jeans threatened to run off to the hobos; this man’s jeans would have sent the hobos running. His thighs shined as if polished. Coils of baling twine dangled from his belt loops. Strapped to one leg was a sheathed knife the length of my forearm. He held something in the crook of his arm. It squeaked and squirmed.
A puppy. I instinctively reach for it, but the sorrel’s head jerked, startling me, and the man grabbed up his reins.
A rumble of hooves and shouts were soon sweeping down the slope. Dad, shouting, was galloping his shiny black mare straight at us.
“Dad! Dad!” I yelled. “He’s got a puppy!” I stepped straight into his path. Luckily, the black mare was nimble enough to swerve.

*

The sun had set. Dad smoked his post-meal cigarette, his two-day whiskers glistering in campfire light. “Didn’t mean to scare you earlier,” he said. “I was just furious about those damn sheep and not being able to locate them—then seeing the herder in our camp?” His spent cigarette went into the fire.
I said, “We could have kept the puppy.”
“Too young to be away from its mom.”
Fluent in border Mexican, Dad had shouted at the stranger in a stream of sentences my classroom Spanish couldn’t follow. The herder seemed equally puzzled. In a clean Spanish, the man offered us the pup as an apology for trespassing. A storm had scattered his herd, he said. We found out he came from Basque originally, a region of the Pyrenees occupied by the Spanish and the French. They spoke Euskara there.
I had longed to see the Pyrenees ever since reading Robinson Crusoe. The final two chapters, three hundred wolves attacking Crusoe’s party of travelers and the villagers being terrorized by wolves and bears, had burned a fascination in my mind for those cruel mountains.
Dad scattered the coals so our fire would die quickly.
I rocked the bike horn in my lap and said, “I didn’t like being left at camp alone.”

*

I woke in the middle of the night to the gurgle of water, which sounded awfully close. Moonbeams lit the floor and woodstove. Dad hadn’t closed the trailer door, and only a flimsy screen separated us from the wilderness. In the odd moonlight, I sensed movement, and my heart began pounding in my throat. Where the hell was the bike horn? 
The bucket by the potbellied stove clattered. I screamed, and the bed banged the trailer wall. I screamed again.
“Hey, hey, it’s only me,” Dad said.
“The door’s open. Something’s out there.”
“I used the outhouse.” He stepped into the moonlight, and my lungs admitted an audible sigh.
“Need a bunkmate to feel safe?” he asked, and my body did an odd and treacherous thing: it tingled as if Doug Evers were speaking—not Dad.
“I’m not a kid anymore.”
“No, I guess not.”
In the morning, he waved me over to the Jeep. Pressed into the mud were large prints. “Mountain lion,” he whispered. “You were right.”
I could have punched him.

*

After decamping, we stopped to view the golden plains again. I asked Dad if we could drive straight home and mail the key to Mr. Evers. I didn’t want to see the man again.
“This’ll be the last chance to see the Gypsy Wagon in person before we move,” Dad said. I told him how uncomfortable the man had made me feel, and he said, “I’m afraid the world is full of Dougs.”
Crows had gathered in the tops of the cottonwoods around the ranch house. They made a terrible racket, flying off when Mrs. Evers appeared. Her macramé halter top barely covered her breasts, and her cutoffs were so short the stringy calico pockets showed. She took the key from Dad without much to say besides “Doug ain’t here” and retreated to the sagging house—in her back pocket, a slingshot.
I didn’t even think of the bike horn.
“Sure could use a civilized blast of hot water and a shave,” Dad said.
I agreed.
“Except for the shave,” he said.
“Dad. I’ve got legs.”
“Right. I guess you do.”

*

My friends didn’t go to Elitch Gardens. Instead, they waited for me, and Dad drove us to the park in the old Wagoneer. I rolled my eyes when they laughed at the rusted floor and called the rush of pavement visible beneath their feet “far out.”
At day’s end, our bellies full of cotton candy and our hearts disappointed that all the cute boys had been with girls, we waited outside the gates for Dad. He surprised us by driving up in a flashy new Jeep. We cheered. When I got in the front, he flicked open the glove compartment and said, “I couldn’t bear to leave it.”
The bike horn. I ignored his laughter.
The day we left for Oregon came. Steve drove the station wagon, Mom and Isabel riding with him. I rode in the new Jeep with Dad.
We stopped at Loveland Pass. Traffic roared and the stench of exhaust fouled the hard winds. Below the parking lot, the surface of a small body of water rippled.
Isabel shouted, “Freezing!” She dashed for the station wagon, Mom and Steve following her. Dad and I got out of the wind, too.
The Jeep’s engine started with factory-fresh ease, and as we pulled onto the highway, Dad said, “The Great Divide. From here on out, all rivers run in a new direction.” He began to reach over, as if to pat my knee, but stopped himself.
“Good,” I thought. I turned away and watched the horizon of peaks and valleys as we put Loveland Pass behind us and began the long descent into our new lives.

END

****

Meredith Wadley is an American-Swiss military brat who lives and works in a medieval micro town on the Rhine River. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find her long-form fiction in various publications, including CaféLit, Collateral, Fairlight Books, Line of Advance, Litbreak Magazine, Longleaf Review, New World Writing, and upstreet. Pieces from her series of international idioms reimagined as flash fiction have appeared in various publications, including Bandit Fiction, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, Gone Lawn, JMWW, Lammergeier, Lunate, and Orca Lit. Read more at www.meredithwadley.com. She tweets: @meredithwadley and occasionally haunts Instagram: #meredithkaisi.