Chapter Fifteen
The morning of December 9, 1980, as usual, I was the first one up. The fire in the heat stove had died down to embers. I had gone from being cozy in flannel sheets to shivering in a frosty cabin where my every exhalation was visible. I opened the damper and the draft, fed the stove, and turned our battery-powered radio on at a barely audible level. In preparation for walking up to the outhouse, I put on my robe, hat, boots, and my right glove. As I was pulling on my left glove, I thought I heard the announcer say something about Lenin. I thought, Why is he talking about a deceased Bolshevik leader? I turned the radio up slightly and realized that the newscaster wasn’t talking about Vladimir Lenin. He was talking about John Lennon, and I thought I had just heard him say Lennon was… dead??
Horrified, I woke Rick up and we listened to the report together. I thought back to the evening I had spent with John and Yoko and how sad it was that Sean would grow up without a father. I thought about how unfair it was that just when John was hitting his stride as a happy, healthy man living with his family in productivity and peace, his life had been cut short by an appalling act of violence. I thought about the psycho who had singled John out for whatever reason and taken him away before his time.
For my generation, the murder of John Lennon was more than the loss of an icon. It was a loss of hope. We who had lived through the previous three decades had been catapulted into the eighties, which seemed a lot like the fifties except without the innocence. Politically, the rise of conservatism was a déjà vu some people didn’t want to see again. Musically, things were pretty cool. Rockabilly was back in style, and the girl groups of the fifties inspired the more independent women who came to prominence later in the eighties. The Bangles, the Go-Gos, the Wilson sisters (collectively known as Heart), and the Motels’ Martha Davis not only wrote their own songs and played their own instruments but in some cases also produced their own albums.
In the eighties we had Live Aid, Farm Aid, Band Aid, and “We Are the World.” A list of Quincy Jones’s accomplishments would have to include his shepherding all the “We Are the World” stars into one room and getting them to perform as an ensemble at full diva power while behaving reasonably well to one another. I would have wanted so much to be at that session, but I was too out of touch to hear about it until after the fact. I participated in more events later in the eighties, but most of my experience of the first couple of years of the decade was filtered through my self-imposed isolation in the backcountry. We did listen to the news enough that I was aware of people whose names became so ingrained in twentieth-century cultural history that the name alone evokes the memory of that person’s story. To wit: Tawana Brawley; Mikhail Gorbachev; Bernhard Goetz, known as the Subway Vigilante; Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt president of the Philippines, and his wife, Imelda, whose name would become a metaphor for a woman who owns too many pairs of shoes. I heard pronouncements from James Watt, President Reagan’s secretary of the interior, who set out so blatantly to reverse all efforts to preserve the environment that conservationists didn’t think there could ever be a worse secretary of the interior. And reading about Ayatollah Khomeini and Lech Walesa in newspapers brought in via ski-mail made me thankful that I had the radio as an alternate news source or I would never have known how to pronounce their names.
In 1982 Jane Fonda’s Workout brought fitness into the lives of women across America who wanted to look and feel more healthy. Aerobics classes and athletic clubs sprang up like daisies in a field. Women who had never stretched a leg wore dancewear to the grocery store and tried to look as if they had been practicing ballet for several hours when they suddenly remembered they needed a head of lettuce.
As women tried to break through the glass ceiling, massive shoulder pads came back in style along with rolled-up sleeves and oversized suit jackets. Perhaps we thought we might have more credibility if we were built like football players.
In the spring of 1981, my wardrobe consisted mostly of T-shirts, flannel, and denim flecked with hay.