PART III
Chapter One
At the top of the hill I saw a cluster of people standing outside Don Henley’s house. Though I didn’t know them, they waved to me, and I waved back. Inside, I recognized Glenn Frey at the buffet table. We hadn’t met, but what the heck.
“Hi, Glenn,” I said. “How’re ya doin’?”
He looked up, answered, “Great, how’re you?” and then went back to filling his plate with ribs, chicken, gravy, and mashed potatoes.
I walked toward the open glass doors leading to a deck on the ocean side of the house. The late fall breeze carried a touch of chill along with the sharp fragrance of the Pacific Ocean. Just inside the doors I saw Henley talking to a tall blond man.
“Hi, Don,” I said.
He said, “Hey,” gave me a hug, and introduced the blond man as Rick Evers. Don preempted the party question I wasn’t going to ask (“What do you do?”) by telling me about the sheepskin coats Rick was making for him, J.D., and Eagles manager Irving Azoff. The question “Why would someone living in Southern California need a sheepskin coat?” crossed my mind, but all I said was, “Hi, Rick. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” he said in a husky voice.
Don said, “Show her your coat.”
Rick went outside and came back in holding a light tan sheepskin coat. He put it on. Immediately I became more interested in both the coat and its maker. The coat was stitched with hand-cut leather thongs and decorated with beads, antler buttons, and other rustic artifacts. On Rick’s slightly undernourished six-foot-one frame, the coat looked bold, striking, and artistic. His long, shaggy blond hair seemed to flow seamlessly into the ragged edges of the wide collar. If a person were looking for attention, wearing such a coat would definitely attract it.
Don stayed with us a few more minutes, then left to mingle with other guests. Rick took off the coat and escorted me over to a couple of comfortable chairs in a corner. He helped me into one of them, draped the coat on the back of the other, and excused himself. A minute later he was back with a couple of glasses of water. He handed one to me and set his glass down on a side table, then we began a discussion of topics ranging from sheepskin coats to American Indian culture, music, politics, and things we didn’t like about L.A.
With blue eyes, a square jaw, and a wheat-colored mustache, Rick was ruggedly handsome. He was exciting, passionate, and not a celebrity. He didn’t care who was dating whom, or wearing what, or whether the Lakers had won or lost. I had assumed that he was staying at Don and J.D.’s house, but as the conversation progressed I learned that he was living in a red Chevy van with Rusty, his large yellow mixed-breed Labrador retriever. This revelation should have been a warning signal, but I chose to perceive the living arrangement as bold and adventurous.
When I told Rick about my dream of living closer to nature, he offered to drive my children and me around the mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Idaho.
“I’ve lived in all three states,” he said. “I know a lot of things you might find useful.”
I listened avidly to his stories about living in the mountains and asked him a lot of questions. He answered all of them with a calm confidence I found reassuring. And there was no mistaking the sparkle in his eyes. He was attracted to me, and I was attracted to him. We were sitting near an open window. I didn’t notice the chill that had begun to creep into my bones until I looked around and saw that we were among the last remaining guests. When Rick saw me shiver, he stood up, picked up the sheepskin coat, and wrapped it around me. That’s when I allowed pheromones to elbow common sense aside and invited him to spend the night at my house.
“What about Rusty?” he asked.
“Of course. Bring Rusty, too.”
Rick and Rusty would stay a lot longer than overnight.
In hindsight, I probably should have asked Rick these two questions: “Why are you living in a van?” and “Are you by any chance psychotic?” But he was so handsome and interesting, and he was going to lead me to people and places I would have never encountered without him. One such person was Roy Reynolds, an artist who lived in eastern Idaho with his wife, Mon’nette (Mo-NEET). Roy had previously been a cowboy and an alcoholic, but by the time I met him he had quit drinking and had bought an Appaloosa colt to celebrate his sobriety. He named the colt Whiskey and channeled his tendency toward addiction into training the colt and making art. Roy painted the canvases that would become the album art for Simple Things. In 1977, in an act of characteristic generosity, Roy gave Whiskey to me. Standing a little over sixteen hands, that horse had more charisma than most movie stars.
A few years later, as I traveled around the West, poems, songs, and stories written by cowboys about their horses would inspire me to write a song about my equine buddy.* Whiskey’s lifetime was just right for a horse, but too short for a friend. In a perfect heaven Whiskey is romping with Seabiscuit.
Early days with Rick were a natural high. He was so excited about our future that every day felt like an adventure. But adventure didn’t come cheap. It required gear. The first thing Rick and I bought together was an old Dodge Power Wagon, though technically it wasn’t “we” who bought it. Rick found the Power Wagon through an ad in the paper. Though its body was rusty in places, it could haul a large family and lots of camping gear. With four-wheel drive it could, in theory, go anywhere. We had it painted metallic brown to camouflage the rust.
In the seventies—oh dear, this is so embarrassing—hippies named their cars. The first car I owned (as opposed to leased) in California was a white Volkswagen station wagon. I thought of it as female and named her Carma. With its beefy body and muscular engine, we deemed the Power Wagon to be a male, named him Shepherd, and registered the vehicle in Idaho with personalized plates reading SHPRD. Between 1975 and 1977, Rick and I covered thousands of miles in Shepherd traveling back and forth between California, Utah, and Colorado with Levi and Molly in search of what Rick had now begun to refer to as “our” dream. On one trip to Colorado we visited Dan Fogelberg, who lived in Boulder. On Rick’s advice, and with Dan’s blessing, I began working with members of a band called Navarro that Dan sometimes played with. Their musicianship was inspired and full of energy, and I enjoyed their company. Navarro, Rick, and I traveled between Boulder and L.A. to write and play music together. Soon Navarro and their families and friends became my primary social circle.
Shepherd carried us to a number of magnificent places in Colorado, to any one of which I might have happily moved, but I wanted to explore other areas before making a final decision. In Utah, Rick, my Larkey children, and I clambered up and down glorious red desert rocks and, along with copious amounts of water, drank in spectacular views of changing colors as the sun moved across the sky. And when I saw a stream flowing uphill in the Wasatch Mountains, I would have been receptive to anything a Utahn told me. But from the moment we crossed the state line, Idaho’s landscape had me in its grip. I was enthralled by the wide-open spaces of the high volcanic desert in which cows and horses grazed peacefully in large pastures on spacious farms against a vast panoramic backdrop of majestic snowcapped mountain ranges. I was humbled by a sense of infinite space and natural beauty unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. My field of vision widened to capacity as I tried to take in a full view of all that land on which there appeared to be absolutely nothing.
Of course there wasn’t “nothing.” Tens of thousands of organisms thrived there, from wild plants and herbs and creatures large and small to birds and insects that coexisted in symbiotic harmony. But what I perceived then as “nothing” was the absence of any sign of human habitation for miles. After spending so much of my life walking on the streets of New York, driving on the parkways of New Jersey, or sitting in traffic on the freeways of Southern California, always within sight and earshot of teeming humanity and the rumbling vehicles that conveyed people from place to place, I was awestruck by the very idea of all that land with no visible indication of human beings on it.
When I did encounter human beings, I found Idahoans’ directness, simplicity of lifestyle, and readiness to help others refreshing. It wasn’t that New Yorkers and Angelenos weren’t kind or helpful, but in Idaho helping strangers seemed to be a way of life. Folks never hesitated to stop whatever they were doing to pull someone’s car out of a ditch or help a neighbor with a chore. I had the impression that people in Idaho had more spare time than city people. Of course, had I said that to a farmer or rancher, she or he probably would have said, “Yeah? And just how much spare time do ya think I have?” even as the man or woman was climbing off a tractor and spending whatever time it took to pull my car out of the ditch.
If L.A. was the fast lane in 1975, Idaho was the extremely slow lane. Idahoans took pride in saying, “Idaho is what America was.” One night Rick and I went to dinner with a couple who spent quite a bit of time trying to determine whether “Boy-see” or “Boy-zee” was the correct way to pronounce the name of Idaho’s City of Trees. The husband, originally from California, favored “Boy-zee.” The wife, as did most Idahoans, said “Boy-see.” I say “Boy-see” because that’s how Rick pronounced it. I couldn’t believe how much time was spent on a question that is always resolved in the same way: both are correct.
At another evening meal, this time at the home of a much larger family, all the adults sat around the supper table and debated for an hour whether a neighbor’s truck had thrown a piston or a rod. And on a third occasion the topic was whether Barb’s Toll House cookies tasted better with half a cup or a whole cup of chocolate chips. Was that even in question?
What wasn’t in question was that during the nine years I had lived in Southern California I had never stopped thinking of New York as my home, but after less than a week, Idaho was already vying for that position.