Settling In

On Day 2, I wanted to go home. Home to Point Richmond, to our little house on the hill overlooking the Standard Oil storage tanks, which frequently caught fire. Home to the bed built into the dining nook and the blackberry vines obscuring the entrance. Home to my consciousness raising group and our endless, bottomless bottles of Almaden rose.

I was bewildered by the mountain folk. They didn't talk much (unless they were women, which most of them were not) They didn't smile or joke. They had luxuriant facial hair and they all smelled like wood smoke. Before too long, I found out they had all known each other as undergraduates at UCBoulder, which is why they had come to Ward when they dropped out of college, but I did not know that on those first miserable days. I felt inadequate and dismissed and when that happens to me, I fold.

On Day 1 we had discovered that Ward was a dry town. Not that you couldn't drink alcohol there, but you had to find it first. Hazel was a Christian Scientist and she had decided, back in the days when there were only six people living within the town limits and five of them were women and she was mayor, that alcohol lead to bad behavior and was therefore not to be offered for sale in Ward. Hazel was no longer the mayor but that law was still on the Ward books. Nederland, 10 miles away, was where the bar was. Boulder was where supplies, including alcohol, were.

Boulder was about 25 miles away, downhill. When we needed to save gas, we coasted with the motor off until the last quarter mile before the first gas station. That was tricky on icy roads. The BF enjoyed it.

He enjoyed a lot of things about Ward. The first winter he changed his long underwear twice. He did participate with our once a week shower, but then he put the same longjohns back on. Mostly, he liked driving up into the forest to use the chain saw on standing deadwood and popping cool ones with the lads, after work on that building of Hazel's in the middle of town that became our community center, just in time for Thanksgiving.

I didn't go home, after all. I wrote passionately unhappy letters to my California support group for a month or so. They wrote back and sent little gifts, but they had drifted apart. All of a sudden, the Ward postmaster (she was really a post mistress but we didn't have that term in the USPS) was leaving her job and it was up for grabs and I, with my one month of Xmas service to the PO in 1967, was a shoo-in, so I became the primary earner.