Rotating the AM dial just after midnight, finding only static, I looked over to Cheryl, her face tranquil as she drifted off. This late on a Saturday night, US 395 south of Mono Lake looked empty, no red tail-lights or faded yellow headlamps in sight. I flicked the Dodge Charger’s own lights off, and craned my neck towards the cloudless sky, countless stars illuminating the highway on this moonless night.
Turning the lights back on, I reflected on our 36-hour getaway from LA, a night and a day in the house we’d rented for the 1976-77 ski season at Mammoth Mountain. I’d joined a group of Ob-Gyn resident physicians at LA County Hospital in the project, hoping to schuss the slopes there the weekends I wasn’t on call. If Cheryl’s schedule allowed, she’d be joining me. We felt like landed gentry, with a place at the beach and a second home in the mountains.
The previous winter, she’d enthusiastically followed me to Snowmass, where I spent my vacation month of February making up for the time I’d lost the year before, when my assigned slot was August. Great for hiking and camping in the Elk Mountains, but probably the only time of year no skiable snow can be found anywhere in the high Rockies.
Fall is often dry in California, so we thought little of it when November came and went with no rain in LA, no snow in the Sierras. Thanksgiving arrived, full of turkeys, but no opening for any ski area anywhere in the western US. December remained warm and sunny, great for walks along with beach with our dogs. Rumors of rain appeared in the news, along with a new term, “El Niño”. As the month ebbed towards the new year, Cheryl and I planned a scouting trip to the group rental, snowless slopes and idle lifts be damned. Coming off call on Saturday at 8 AM, Christmas morning, we spent the day at her parents’ house in Brentwood, then scooted up the San Diego Freeway.
We arrived to a ghost town. What should have been gridlocked streets and sidewalks full of revelers dressed in puffy parkas and furry boots, with snow piled at street corners and windows frosted with ice, was instead lifeless, devoid of even locals. We found the A-frame on a gentle slope up the hill from town, in a Ponderosa pine forest. Newly built that summer, the inside smelled fresh and woodsy. A cast-iron stove filled one corner, its black pipe chimney rising two stories past a loft. I built a fire while Cheryl tried out the kitchen’s sparkling new appliances. In bed that night, stomachs full and cheeks rosy from the flames, soft sheets tucked around a virgin mattress lulled us quickly to sleep.
Sunday, the day after Christmas, should have been the busiest day of the season on the slopes. Bright sun filtered through the pines as we ambled towards the village, needle duff rustling softly underfoot instead of crunchy snow.
“Got any bright ideas, Jean-Claude?” Cheryl asked.
“There must be something open here,” I ventured.
A few shops remained in business, racks stuffed with parkas, boots and skis hopefully ordered in September at the annual Las Vegas industry gathering. Kiosks still carried posters from summer concerts, along with several “Canceled – no snow” announcements. An open bookstore beckoned. We entered, imagining the bustle that might have been.
“Are you sure you want to go in there?” Cheryl asked.
To me, a bookstore is like the corner bar to an alcoholic. Once I enter, I invariably gather an overflowing armload of books I must read. Cheryl followed close behind, gently removing each selection I picked up.
“Where are you going to put these, buddy?” she whispered. “You haven’t read half the ones piled up back home.”
I grabbed another from the shelf, its cover featuring a wild-eyed driver in an open convertible, cigarette holder dangling from his lower lip. In the rear seat sat a massive passenger, eyes obscured by over-sized opaque sunglasses.
“You already read that, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t have the book – I just read it in Rolling Stone when it first came out,” I said as I firmly tucked Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas under my arm, secure from her grasp. Immediately I turned and grabbed Gravity’s Rainbow and sped towards the cash register before she could snatch that one from me.
“I hear this guy’s a trip – the story bounces from World War Two to LA in the late ‘60s. There’s a scene on the Santa Monica Freeway I’ve heard about…” I mumbled, pulling out my wallet and paying before Cheryl could catch up. “Besides, what else are we going to do today and tomorrow?”
Hoping to keep Hunter Thompson’s tale of cops and druggies in the Nevada desert in pristine condition, I cracked open the 740 page paperback by Thomas Pynchon. Four hours of eye-straining work brought me no closer to understanding why Tyrone Slothrop, Pig Bodine, and all the others had anything to do with V-2 rockets and the marijuana trade. But Pynchon’s prose, filled with paragraph-long lists, crazed descriptions warped by endless diversions and interruptions, kept me occupied past sunset.
Cheryl spent the afternoon bustling in the kitchen nook, discovering enough materials to bake a cake.
“From scratch,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. There was flour on the shelf, an unopened can of icing, some food coloring, sugar, and other stuff.”
“But don’t you need…” I started.
“Hey, you were so absorbed in that book, you didn’t even notice me go out again? To get eggs, milk, and all that?” She wiped her hands on a blue-striped apron featuring Betty Boop in a chef’s hat, cartoon bubble emanating from her over-sized head reading, “If Momma’s not happy, ain’t nobody happy.”
“What kind?”
“Your favorite. Boston Crème.”
We ate the whole thing that evening. Engorged by cake, warmed by the fire, we dreamily lay against each other, wrapped together as one. I murmured, “Crazy on you…”
“Mmm, Heart. Annie Wilson.” Cheryl responded. “Remember when we saw them at the Universal Amphitheater last summer? She’s the best…” Her eyes fluttered towards sleep.
I nudged her, saying, “But Fleetwood Mac. They’d been signed to that small concert series, and then their record came out, the one with all the hits, and everybody wanted to see them, everyone in LA, and WE had tickets? Right?”
“Right. Stevie Nicks, all those flowing scarves she wore.”
“I liked Christine McVie. More serious, reserved. British. But her songs…Over My Head, it’s like listening to, what I feel when I’m skiing in a foot of powder. Soft, no resistance.”
We scrunched closer, the fire’s shimmering orange glow through the half-open grate the only light. For a brief quarter-hour, we forgot the pull of 7 AM on Monday, another day’s work at the endless obstetric assembly line that was Women’s Hospital.
Squirming free, I announced, “OK, we gotta get out of this place. We’ll get home by 2, that ought to be enough sleep.”
“You sure?”
We were twenty-seven that winter, inured to late hours, little sleep. Our lives ricocheted between work and fun, a binary existence of laboring patients, fraught with fear of death and failure, followed by wild release at the beach in Venice. Life had never been, never would be more immediate, each of us discovering the power and mystery of managing on our own, together.
I snorted, “It’s not like I’m all tired from skiing, is it?”
Driving down the eastern Sierra escarpment into the Owen valley, I fiddled with the Charger’s AM radio dial. Squawks and squeaks, interspersed with static, frustrated my attempts at finding music to help me focus on the road. Rolling through from 530 to 1710 a second time, I heard a faint fluttering human voice, fighting to get through. “…now…eetwood Ma…their ne…just… midnight…irst time anywhe..”
Cheryl stirred. “Turn it off, we can’t get anything out here,” she snapped.
“Shh, wait! I think this is Fleetwood Mac’s new song. They’re supposed to come out with a album this February. Listen…”
I strained to pick up words, the guitar riff, a beat, anything to lock onto, to capture what this mega-group was bringing back to us. I remembered 14 years earlier, a lonely high school freshman, surfing the miracle of late night radio waves bringing New York’s Cousin Brucie from WABC faintly to my bedroom as I stealthily held a tiny transistor radio to my ears, feeling as if I’d found a secret only I could hear. Or years later, driving with my college girlfriend through Kansas in the dark, picking up midwestern magic from Oklahoma City on KOMA. Each time the static, fuzzy sounds of distant rock glimmered as a portal, through which I left a younger boy behind.
Passing Mono Lake, its water stolen years ago to feed LA’s endless thirst, I found myself once again feeling new. This time, though, I saw no mystery ahead, no anxious worry about what I might become. I looked over at Cheryl, her eyes half-closed, trying with me to hear the words, the music, first loud, then faint, but always insisting we could finally, together, Go Our Own Way.