Chapter Four
I was able to tour and travel in 1989 and 1990 in part because Charlie willingly absorbed the day-to-day responsibilities for our two teenagers, and in part because two young friends from New York and L.A. moved to Idaho to help take care of my ranch. Elissa Kline and Erik Gillberg signed on for a year and stayed for seventeen, leaving only when the son they had raised at the ranch through early childhood began asking if he could live closer than four miles away from his nearest friends. While they were still at the ranch, when I was on tour, I was comforted to hear about Erik’s and Elissa’s discovery of their individual creativity as they and Ian explored the inner worlds that so often make themselves known when one lives at nature’s pace. They get it, I thought with mixed emotions, wishing I, too, could be there. I might have composed a song about how much I longed to be in a quiet place had I not already written one in 1973.
All I want is a quiet place to live
Where I can enjoy the fruits of my labor
Read the paper
And not have to cry out loud
In the years after I wrote “A Quiet Place to Live” I experienced times of peace and times of turmoil—which could describe anyone’s life. But in 1990, the year I turned forty-eight, my life was anything but quiet.
After Rick’s and my divorce became final in June 1990, I was eager to return home and again experience my ranch as a place of tranquility. But fate had something else in mind. First Disney asked me to film a video, paradoxically called Carole King: Going Home, that would include interviews and concert footage from the City Streets Tour.* Then in December I was cast as a teacher in an ABC After-School Special called “It’s Only Rock and Roll,” shot in Pine Bush, New York. There I became friends with John Gibbons, an actor who played one of my students. The math of me at forty-eight and him at twenty-seven added up to, at most, a brief encounter. That encounter lasted for six years during which we accumulated a wide range of adjectives that described our time together. “Quiet” was not one of them. Between John’s exponentially increasing collection of cassettes and, later, CDs, his sporting equipment spilling out of every closet, and the multitude of his frequent and lively visitors, the continual wind from the opening and closing of doors made me feel as if I were rooming with a tornado.
John and I made frequent trips to L.A. On one such trip in the fall of 1991, I went to write with Brian Wilson at his studio. Brian had two pianos. I sat at one and he at the other. Listening to him noodle around with familiar chord clusters, I was reminded not only of how much Brian had contributed to popular music but also of how much I had personally enjoyed his work. Even when Brian had had problems functioning in what most of us think of as “the real world,” he had always been a pure, perfect channel for the music of the gods.
That Saturday we worked for a little over an hour on a riff in E-flat that Brian had come up with. We experimented with chords and harmonies around the recurring phrase, “Rock, rock, rockin’ and a-rollin’,” until our collective span of attention ran out. As I began to gather my things I had an impulse to tell Brian that I thought the tune we had started sounded like a quintessential Brian Wilson song. But before I could say a word, he remarked that he thought our little ditty sounded exactly like a Carole King song.
We agreed to meet the following afternoon to finish the song, but I never made it.
The next morning I went for a hike alone. I didn’t realize that a trail leading down a steep cliff was a false trail until I lost my footing. I bumped and slid all the way down a sixty-foot cliff. The muscles of my left buttock took every bump with what felt like the force of a sledgehammer. After the first few bumps I lost count. Finally I landed on the beach below the cliff. My left foot hit first and took all the shock. My body crumpled onto the sand. Then I rolled onto my back. I had been fully conscious the whole way down, and as I lay there, panting, I was aware of my surroundings. I wiggled my toes, legs, arms, and fingers. Then I rolled my head from side to side. Every stimulus was followed by the response I was hoping for. Then, lying on my back with my left knee pointing skyward to form a triangle, I was just thinking how miraculous it was that I had survived the fall and avoided injuring my spine when a bolt of pain struck with what I imagined was the force of a meteor. It was the most excruciating pain I had ever known. On a scale of one to ten, I would have rated it at seventeen had I been able to speak. All I could do was moan. My awareness was reduced to a core of agonizing pain, at the periphery of which I sensed rather than saw people coming to help. A helicopter arrived to provide me with speedy transport to a hospital. It also brought EMTs who did their utmost to ease my pain and prevent further injury until they could get me to an emergency room. The medication they gave me brought the level of pain down to about fourteen, which allowed me to convey John’s phone number to one of the bystanders before I was evacuated.
In the emergency room, a doctor examined me, gave me a prescription for stronger pain medication, and released me into the care of John, who had come to take me home. Though he drove as slowly and carefully as he could, I felt every seam in the road. Every time we drove over anything rougher than polished asphalt I emitted a gut-wrenching cry. On the way home he stopped to fill the prescription and gave me a pill that we both hoped would take effect before he carried me up the stairs to where we were staying. Once he got me upstairs he laid me gently on the couch and helped me with basic needs through the night, but the muscles in my buttock had been so badly bruised that I couldn’t stop moaning. The next day John took me to a different hospital. At the first hospital’s emergency room I had been in so much pain from my banged-up buttock that no one, including me, noticed any other injury. When an orthopedist at the second hospital heard that I had landed on my left foot, he immediately ordered an X-ray. My foot had been broken in three places. I remained in the hospital for eleven days. It took six months after that for my bruised buttock and broken bones to heal enough for me to walk without assistance, and another six months of intense physical therapy to achieve normal functionality.
During the third night of my hospital stay, as I lay in bed waiting impatiently for the next painkiller, tears of self-pity began streaming down my cheeks. Why me? I asked. The answer came, not in words, but in the realization that I had been given an opportunity to expand my compassion and knowledge of human nature. I had experienced firsthand what it was like to live with mind-numbing physical pain so intense and so inescapable that drugs could relieve it only briefly, if at all. And in addition to the care and attention I received from John, I got to witness and simultaneously benefit from the competence and generosity of all the medical professionals I encountered, including physical therapists and practitioners of alternative medicine. The entire experience from injury to recovery convinced me that medical caregivers deserve a special wing in the Hotel Afterlife with extra helpings of caviar, champagne, and chocolate.
Five days into my stay I remembered my missed appointment with Brian Wilson. I felt terrible about having stood him up and called him as soon as I could. Brian was sympathetic and relieved.
“I was worried about you,” he said. “I’m sorry you got hurt.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too. I can’t wait to finish what we were working on.”
Brian said, “You work on getting better, and we’ll write again soon.”
“Soon” turned out to be fifteen years.*