In June 1958 I let go of my anxieties and my fear of commitment. Peter drove down to Denver, and we told our families about the baby. The panic I had been feeling evaporated as soon as we discussed it. Suddenly I felt for the first time that I knew where I belonged. Peter and I moved to the mountains, looking for a place to live and work. What we found was paradise.
We were offered the job of running Fern Lake Lodge in Rocky Mountain National Park by Jim Bishop, the owner of both Fern Lake and Bear Lake Lodge. The only real requirements for the job were that Peter should be able to chop wood and make sure that the water kept flowing through the outdoor pipes that trapped it from the higher elevations, and that I should be able to bake bread and pies in a woodstove. There was no electricity, and part of my job would be to serve lunch to the hikers pausing in their nine-mile hike from Bear Lake Lodge to the moraine on the other side of the national park. In the traditional manner of mountain hospitality, we would, Jim said, serve up homemade lunches, and Peter and I said we could do all of that and more. No problem!
On our eager promises, Jim hired us and put us up the first week at Bear Lake Lodge, at the foot of the mountain trail, while we waited for the snow to melt. Fern Lake Lodge had not been open for a couple of years, since no one wanted to be up there, miles from anywhere, without electricity. We knew it would be just the thing for us. We couldn’t wait.
Over grilled buffalo steaks by a roaring fire that first night at Bear Lake, Jim told us the history of Fern Lake. For over fifty years, he said, the lodge, with its twelve surrounding cabins, three wood-burning stoves, featherbeds, and stores of knives and forks and plates for a hundred, had been hosting guests winter and summer. Pack horses brought visitors in with their steamer trunks, snowshoes, skis, and skates. They glided the frozen lake and used crampons and picks to climb the Little Matterhorn, the peak that towered twelve thousand feet above. Flames burned high in the huge fireplaces. In summer there were wildflower hikes and treks to the tundra from the lodge. Some years three chefs manned the stoves.
Over time, the lodge had acquired a certain mystique. Anyone whose name meant something in the lore of the Rocky Mountains had passed through it: the Earl of Dunraven, who hunted in what had previously been the wilderness of Rocky Mountain National Park; F. O. Stanley, who brought his Stanley Steamers into Colorado; Frederick Chapin, who wrote Mountaineering in Colorado; and Isabella Bird, who wrote A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. Even Enos Mills, one of the founders of the park, who had explored the wilderness for Theodore Roosevelt, came for winter and summer holidays, roughing it in the Rockies.
Fern Lake Lodge had a colorful, deep Colorado history, and we were going to be running this special place.
While we waited for the trails to be clear of snow, the chef at Bear Lake Lodge taught me how to use a woodstove. For those few precious days and nights Peter and I drank the owner’s Jim Beam and made love with abandon under the eaves of our bedroom on the top floor of the lodge.
At the end of that week, on July 4, the snow had melted on the trails enough so that we loaded our gear into our backpacks, each carrying nearly fifty pounds, and set out. We hiked the five miles to the top of the grade, where Fern Lake Lodge sat at the edge of a dark blue mountain lake, sparkling and freezing cold. We settled into our cabin, unpacked food and clothes, and made ready for the daytime visitors who would be surprised and pleased to find us there in the mountains. We welcomed them with homemade cherry pies and fresh-baked bread.
I began cooking on this ancient relic of a stove, learning quickly how to manage temperatures. I would bake rolls rather than loaves, and find ways to prepare even exotic Mexican meals with our weekly supply of hamburger and our favorite tortillas. My mother said I must be nauseated by having to cook and bake when I was pregnant, but it never for a minute bothered me.
Peter constructed a “Girl Scout cooler” under the pine trees outside the kitchen, hooking up a pipe to bring freezing spring water from the upper mountain. We bathed in a big tub on the floor of our kitchen, with water pouring from another tub filled with holes and hanging from the ceiling on metal hooks. Water moved into that tub through pipes in a radiator strapped to the back of the living room fireplace and flowing to the kitchen. The evening fires with their flames licking the radiator kept us in hot water every night.
Friends came up the mountain to visit, bringing us fresh avocados and fruit, and sometimes mail. We sang old English and Scots rounds with them in front of the big fireplace in the living room. My family trekked the nine miles of wilderness, my father carrying one end of a pine branch with my mother hanging on to the other end—a fitting metaphor for their marriage. Inside the lodge, Daddy reached down to run his fingers over the rounds of pine on the floor.
“Puncheon,” he said, “this is a puncheon floor!” No one else had known, all the others who could see so well.
The scent of pine in the fresh morning air filled my head, and the sound of the axe smacking into the chopping block promised a fire to bake bread and provide warmth. To the sound of night birds, Peter and I made love in the old cabin down by the lake. The comfort of this easy, intelligent man in bed next to me meant I was safe; the sex was sizzling and the days were filled with wood fire and heart’s fire; the baby was growing and I was blossoming in some way that I couldn’t even fathom. My heart relaxed, perhaps for the first time ever.
There were no tense moments between my parents. My anxieties about performing and practicing and being up to the mark, pleasing both Brico and my father, were banished to the wilderness, relieved by the pleasure I took in my guitar and in my life with my husband, the man I had now loved for many years.
It would be ages before I would again feel as safe and calm and comforted as I did that summer. The real comfort was still far off, and there would be rivers of tears and oceans of booze to travel before I found it. Perhaps I had a glimpse of the future, of the plan that was being worked out for me.
By now I was several months pregnant, and my belly jutted against my steel-faced Guild guitar as I sang to the guests, my voice ringing out across the lake. I ran through all the folk songs I had learned by then—“The Lavender Cowboy,” “Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle,” “Maid of Constant Sorrow,” and “The Gypsy Rover”—before people headed back down to Bear Lake Lodge at the other end of the trail.
It was romantic in every way.
Peter and I made $300 for the entire summer, and it was just about all we had to our names. After Labor Day we stowed our gear and headed down to Bear Lake and Estes Park again, each carrying a heavy pack, my guitar and our luggage slung across the flanks of the packhorse, winding our way back from our mountain Eden. We left talking excitedly about ways to buy or lease the lodge and make this our life. I felt wholly complete.
But we never lived out our dream. Both Fern Lake Lodge and Bear Lake Lodge would be dismantled from the inside out the following year as part of a government mandate to remove commercial enterprises from the national parks. The old photographs of hikers and skiers in furs and sealskins, the wood-burning stoves from the cabins around the lake, the Coleman lanterns, the quilts and stores and knives and cooking implements and pipes for the mountain spring-fed water supply—every bit of it would be either pillaged or legally hauled down the mountain on pack mules.
My family and I continued to hike up the Fern Lake trail for reunions even after my father died, when there was little left of the lodges but the puncheon floors. I have a photograph someone took of the lodge, deep in snow, some Colorado winter.
It was a dream place and a dream job. If I had been able to find a way to make a life in the mountains doing what I was doing that summer, I would probably still be there.
It still feels to me like paradise lost.
Chapter Six
So Early in the Spring
So early, early in the spring
I shipped on board to serve my king
I left my dearest dear behind
She of times swore her heart was
mine.
—Traditional, “So Early, Early in the Spring”
ON the eighth of January 1959, in the bitter cold of a Colorado winter after twenty-eight hours of labor in the Seventh-Day Adventist Hospital in Boulder, my son, Clark, was born, a perfect, beautiful boy, my little shining light. He had blue eyes and soft red hair and the temperament of an angel.
Peter and I were just starting out in our life together, a young couple content to spend the cold winter huddled in front of our electric heater, happily watching our son grow. We were barely squeaking by financially. I had a job filing papers at the University of Colorado there in Boulder, and Peter was studying at night, delivering newspapers at four in the morning before going off to the university, where he was working on his bachelor’s degree in English literature.
I came up with ingenious ways to live within our meager budget. I remember one month spent making steak and kidney pie and freezing it; we had steak and kidney pie for six weeks. I had also started combining sugar and mash into a very fine homebrew as an alternative for the 3.2 horse piss that called itself domestic beer. It was potent stuff, if it got the chance to age; more than one bottle exploded in the closet of our tiny apartment.
At six o’clock on a freezing winter morning in March 1959, I was still huddled down among the covers, luxuriating in those last moments of sleep before I had to feed the baby and get the day started. Peter had returned from delivering his papers and was stomping the snow off his boots and making my morning coffee.
“I just had a thought,” Peter said, handing me a big mug of steaming coffee. I sipped it and looked at him gratefully. Coffee was already my second drug of choice.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Why don’t you get a job doing something you know how to do? Like singing?”
The suggestion excited and energized me. I called my dad in Denver and through Al Fike, an entertainer he knew, I was able to get an audition at Michael’s Pub.
There were three clubs in Boulder at that time—Tulagi’s, a relatively unremarkable place to hang out over a few beers; the Sink, a reeking, seedy spot mostly for students who just wanted to get drunk; and Michael’s, a pub that served pitchers of 3.2 percent beer and “real Italian pizza.” Sometimes you could hear music—an accordion player or maybe a barbershop quartet or some ragtime piano at Michael’s. But none of the three clubs had ever featured—or had even thought of featuring—folk music.
The night of the audition I fed Clark his dinner and put him in his father’s arms. With the folk songs I had collected and polished ringing in my head, and dressed like a troubadour, with my tight black pants and red silk top that came to my knees, my old roughed-up Guild guitar in its case, I drove down to Michael’s Pub in the cold. My hair was in a pixie cut just below my ears, a cut my husband Peter had given me by putting a bowl on my head and me praying as he slid the scissors around my head, that he wouldn’t cut off my ears.
The owner, Mike Bisesi, quieted the college kids in the big, smoky room and announced me.
“Surprise! A folksinger will now entertain everyone with her”—he looked over at me with a wink—“folk songs!”
I could hear people ordering more beer or going on with their conversations as I stepped up onto the stage and into the spotlight, my guitar tuned and my heart in my mouth. I waited. And waited a while longer, until the talking quieted down. I suppose they figured they’d better quiet down or I’d never go away, and that after I had sung, they could get back to the business of enjoying a night out.
The smell of beer and pizza filled my nostrils, and the cigarette smoke hovered over the entire room. The sound system was good, and as I started to sing and to play the guitar, the eyes of sixty or so college students began to focus on me, listening to the songs. The crowd would sing along on the choruses of songs they knew, such as “The Gypsy Rover,” but otherwise the room was silent except for my voice and guitar. When I finished, thunderous applause filled Michael’s. I had to go back for an encore, now no longer nervous but pleased and happy. Mike took my elbow as I came off the stage after the second encore and I was smiling at my apparent success.
There was still loud clapping in the room, and many people were getting up from their tables, coming over to tell me how much they had enjoyed the music. Mike pulled me toward the kitchen in the back.
“First I have to tell you that I absolutely hate folk music!” he said. My face fell. But Mike was not finished.
“You are hired. Five nights a week, three shows a night, a hundred dollars a week. You start tomorrow.” He smiled at me, this time with real pleasure.
I was thrilled! I had a job. I would be able to support my family and do what I loved. I felt like the luckiest woman in the world!
I practiced and learned more new songs, listened to recordings, and sought out other people who were doing the same. I had no illusions about my singing or my voice. I knew I could sing well enough when playing the guitar or the piano, but I thought of myself mainly as an interpreter, a teller of stories.
Mike kept hiring me, week after week. He put signs in the windows and ads in the Boulder paper, and the people came to see me. The girl in the tights had broken the barrier. Boulder, Colorado, had a folk music club.
I was, officially, a folksinger.
And I would never have to audition for a job again!
Chapter Seven
The Gilded Garter, the Exodus, and the Excess
’Twas a balmy summer evening
And a goodly crowd was there
That well nigh filled Joe’s barroom
At the corner of the square.
—HUGH ANTOINE D’ARCY,
“The Face on the Barroom Floor”
AFTER the Michael’s Pub run in Boulder, I was hired for my second job at the Gilded Garter in Central City, Colorado, on Clear Creek Canyon, just up the hill from the then tiny town of Blackhawk. We packed our few belongings (I think everything we owned fit into two or three suitcases) and my big homebrew clay jug and moved deeper into the mountains for the summer. Peter and I found an apartment in Blackhawk, across the road from a barn with a huge Bull Durham sign. I always thought that bull was peering into our apartment with a smile on his hairy face: It is smart, fashionable, correct, upon all occasions to “roll your own” cigarettes with “Bull” Durham tobacco … It’s the smoke of the service in barracks, camp and field, the smoke of clean-cut man-hood the world over!
Grabbing for purchase on the rocky terrain of the foothills, Central City had been a silver-mining center in the 1860s, and tourists could still explore a number of abandoned mines, riding on the backs of long-eared mules who were used to the dark, scary-looking tunnels. Before my show, we might walk up with Clark in his backpack for drinks and maybe a dinner of roast chicken and fries at the Glory Hole, a bar that livened up the town’s three dusty streets. Central City had a crowd of talented kids around my age waiting on tables, washing dishes, ushering at the Opera House. Clark was learning to crawl and we began having friends over for dinners on the deck, spending our free evenings spinning rock-and-roll records on our precious turntable, twirling under the stars, listening to Pete Seeger and Buddy Holly.
In the summer of 1959, you could hear a lot of rock and roll on the radio, and the war was becoming even more of a worry to all of us. More “advisers” were being sent to Vietnam, and there was an active antiwar movement gaining traction at the University of Colorado. Popular music had begun to shift and expand, infused with new elements of folk and country and R&B. Elvis was about to get out of the army and marry Priscilla. Meanwhile, we still listened to Frank Sinatra (“It’s a quarter to three, there’s no one in the place except you and me”), Johnny Cash, and the Kingston Trio. One of our favorite albums, played over and over on our treasured 33⅓ rpm record player, was The Genius of Ray Charles. We listened to a pianist named Don Shirley, and to a recording of The Moldau by Smetana and Respighi’s The Pines of Rome and The Fountains of Rome, which we played at earsplitti
ng volume.
We read James Michener’s new book, Hawaii, and Doctor Zhivago, and of course Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had finally been made available in the United States that year. We kept up with the world through newspapers and by listening to the radio. We knew that both Alaska and Hawaii became states, that the Chinese invaded Tibet, and that the Dalai Lama, head of the Buddhist movement in Tibet, escaped to India.
Buddy Holly, born Charles Hardin in Lubbock, Texas, in September 1936, was known as the single most important force in rock and roll. He had died on February 3, 1959, a little under a month before the start of my singing career at Michael’s Pub. His death was still being talked about and written about that summer as “the day the music died.” His small chartered plane had gone down in a snowstorm in Iowa, killing everyone on board, including his band and the pilot.
Buddy was three years older than I and had been singing with the Crickets, his band, since 1957. I had first heard him on The Arthur Murray Party singing “Peggy Sue” when I was home from MacMurray that year. “That’ll Be the Day” had been a big hit and put him on The Ed Sullivan Show, and in 1958 I heard him sing “Oh Boy,” again on Sullivan. He was good-looking and slim, with a voice that cut through on the radio, a sexy man in his horn-rimmed glasses.
I have often thought of Buddy and his band on that cold night when I have had to charter planes to get in and out of the cities I play in. This was a terrible piece of news for anyone who was a fan of Holly’s, and for anyone at all who had a heart. It hit me very hard; I felt nauseated and frightened when I heard the news.
In Central City, I held down two jobs—waiting tables during the day at the Tollgate Hotel and Bar in town and singing at the Gilded Garter at night. Peter had a job at a gas station until he got into a fight with the guy who owned the place and got fired. We didn’t watch television; in fact, we didn’t have the money to buy a TV. Gas cost 25 cents a gallon and a loaf of bread was about 20 cents, although I was still baking most of our bread. Nylons were a buck a pair, but I mostly wore tights in the winter and went bare legged in the summer. I had yet to burn my bra, but that was coming. You could get a radio for fifteen dollars, and it cost 4 cents to send my folks a letter from Blackhawk to Denver.
Judy Collins Page 5