A Natural Woman

by Carole King

  At that moment I made the decision I should have made the first time he hit me.

  Not knowing how soon Rick would return, I woke all three children. Levi and Molly, still sleepy, dressed themselves while Sherry and I hastily packed a few bags, and we all left the house. We drove to Louise’s to let her know why we were leaving and make the necessary arrangements from her phone. Though Louise was living on her own and didn’t interact much with Rick, I made sure she knew that she was not to go to our house under any circumstances until further notice.

  My impulse was to get as far away from Los Angeles as possible, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to go to Welcome Home. I saw my options as either New York or Maui. I have no idea why Maui came to mind, though warm weather and sandy beaches may have been factors. Probably I thought that a faraway island would be the safest place to go to figure out what to do next. A few hours later, Sherry, Molly, Levi, and I were on a plane to Hawaii. I didn’t have more than a few days of figuring before a definitive decision was made for me. Using the phone in our rented condo, Sherry called a friend of hers who also knew Rick. After listening in silence for what seemed like an unusually long time, she handed the phone to me with a horror-struck expression on her face and uttered one word.

  “Mom?”

  Rick had been found dead of an overdose of cocaine in a location believed to have been the shooting gallery where he’d been buying and injecting the drug. That’s what my husband had been doing while I was recording Welcome Home.

  Richard Edward Evers had been born on January 6, 1947. He died on March 21, 1978, nearly three months after his thirty-first birthday. He was less than two years shy of the age of demise he’d predicted for himself.

  I could no more describe my jumbled emotions that night than I could describe the colors in the exquisite Maui sunset. That particular sunset was so spectacular that I wondered if Rick had sent it from wherever he was. I was filled with a deep sense of loss, not for the man Rick was when he died, but for the man with whom I had fallen in love. Before I had seen his dark side, I would have described Rick Evers as full of joy. How could that man have a dark side? How could he take himself out of this world? Had my saying no driven him to drug abuse? Was it because my work had taken us away from his beloved Idaho? Of course I wasn’t to blame for Rick’s death, but when we lose someone unexpectedly, we often ask what we had done that might have contributed to the death of our loved one, or what we didn’t do that might have saved him or her. Usually the answer is, “Nothing.” But still we ask.

  The next day I flew back to Los Angeles with my kids. One question had already been answered: Idaho was our home, and Idaho was where I wanted to be. However, Idaho was not where Sherry wanted to be. When she asked if she could stay in L.A., I assented. It took several weeks to deal with the aftermath of Rick’s death and find someone to stay in the house on Appian Way. After that, Molly, Levi, and I flew back to Boise. As the plane took off and I watched L.A. recede from view, suddenly, silently, I began to cry. I had just lost someone close to me, and all the complicated parts of the story fell away. At thirty-six, I was a widow.

  At Welcome Home, with spring unfolding and its abundance of life renewing, I was comforted and inspired by nature’s optimistic outlook. While Molly attended school in Idaho City, Levi played with friends at home. I did my utmost to keep happier times with Rick foremost in my memory and those of the children. Rick’s friends helped me take care of Welcome Home, and I continued to support them financially. I worked in my garden, rode and cared for the horses, hiked up and down Ashton Creek, and did mundane, necessary tasks such as washing dishes, doing laundry, and taking out the garbage. After everything my kids had been through, they seemed to be flourishing, as were the horses and garden. Rusty was the lone exception. You could see the question in his eyes and in everything he did: Where is he? At first Rusty stayed with us, then he moved in with another Welcome Home family, then another. He belonged to all of us, and yet to none of us.

  Throughout the spring and summer I allowed myself to feel grief and, yes, anger. But I also worked diligently to replace such feelings with positive memories. It had been Rick who had provided me with the extra motivation I needed to get out of L.A. He had introduced me to the mountains, the beauty of the land, and the simple decency of so many people in my adopted state. And though I would rather not have lived with an abusive person, doing so had given me compassion for people in similar situations and helped me reaffirm that if I exercised the will and determination with which I believe every one of us is born, nothing would keep me down.

  It was a crisp morning toward the end of August when I walked up the hill with Molly and Levi to meet Molly’s school bus. The blue jacket on one of her classmates reminded me of the clear blue sky reflected in Rick’s eyes our first morning at Welcome Home. I remember him sitting on the front porch steps with a steaming cup of coffee cradled in his hands, watching the sunlight creeping down his beloved Idaho mountains.

  That vivid image set off a series of recollections. As I made my way back down the hill with Levi, memory snapshots were flipping through my mind.

  Me standing on a big rock on the bank of a creek in the summer of 1977. I’m wearing a tank top and cutoffs and feeling the shock of icy-cold creek water splashing over me while Rick, his golden hair backlit by the sun, plunges his naked body into a swimming hole. Emerging dripping wet, Rick raises his arms to the heavens in a triumphant V.

  Rick carrying a chain saw down Ashton Creek after cutting wood with his friends who live above us on the property. First smelling, then seeing his favorite person in the world, Rusty begins to bark ecstatically.

  My young son and daughter being scooped up by Rick. He swings them around, then embraces them both in a bear hug. As he laughs with delight at their obvious enjoyment of his impromptu display of affection, he looks over at me to see if I’m watching. (I was.)

  Rick strumming the guitar in one of his unorthodox tunings, seemingly oblivious to everything except the pure pleasure of making music.

  We were approaching the double-wide. Tucking away my memory snapshots, I opened the door, took off my jacket, and got Levi settled with a bowl of cereal. As I sat in the kitchen with my son, my youngest child, the Benjamin of the family, I experienced one of those rare moments of peace during which I wasn’t thinking or doing anything. I was just being. It didn’t last long. Gently returning to the world, I recalled the tenderness that Rick had always shown to the elderly, animals, and very young children. Then I thought about the peace that he had experienced so rarely in life, and I hoped with all my heart that he had finally found it.

  Chapter Ten

  Not Bergdorf Goodman

  With Rick gone, the financial arrangement at Welcome Home caused some of the more responsible members of the community to announce their plans to move elsewhere. I, too, thought about moving elsewhere, but I didn’t know where. All I knew was that I wanted to stay in Idaho and I didn’t want to live in a city. I considered the idea of a place even farther from civilization that would be small enough for me to handle on my own, but inertia kept me from taking action.

  During my time in Idaho I’d come to believe that it was mandatory for everyone to drive an old pickup and own a Labrador retriever. Toward the end of August, when a friend of one of the women living at Welcome Home drove down for a visit, her arrival in a pickup with a black Lab in the passenger seat did nothing to disprove that theory. On her way out, the visitor, whose name was Joyce, stopped by the double-wide and invited me to come up and visit her the following weekend.

  Seeing Levi and Molly, she said, “Bring the kids. They’ll love it.”

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “Burgdorf,” she replied. “About thirty miles northeast of McCall.”

  “Bergdorf?” I repeated, mentally visualizing the name the way a woman from New York would spell it. “There’s a Bergdorf Goodman near McCall, Idaho?”

  Joyce burst out laughing.


  “No, Carole. It’s not a store. It’s a little town with cabins around a hot spring. Come on up. You’ll see.”

  Joyce was still chuckling as she climbed into her truck and drove up the hill.

  Burgdorf was an unincorporated little town where a community had been established in the latter half of the nineteenth century around a natural hot spring in a magnificent mountain meadow. In 1978 the town comprised roughly twelve cabins of varying sizes and shapes. The cabins had seen better days, and the largest building, once a hotel, had fallen into disrepair. The town was owned by a brother and sister who lived, respectively, in McCall and Boise. Scott and Gretchen Harris allowed members of the public to stay in the cabins for a minimal charge. They didn’t need to advertise. Word of mouth brought campers, hikers, and families in the summer, hunters in the fall, and cross-country skiers and snowmobilers in the winter. Virtually no one came in the spring because Warren Wagon Road was too bare in some places to snowmobile or ski, and too deeply covered with snowdrifts in other places to drive.

  Over the years the Harrises had hired serial caretakers to live on the premises year-round and collect rent for the cabins on behalf of the owners. The price of an overnight stay that year ranged from five to ten dollars, depending on a cabin’s size and condition. There was no maid service, room service, electricity, telephone, or plumbing in any of the cabins. If you wanted drinking water you could either bring your own or haul it from a seasonal spigot in a nearby Forest Service campground. An unheated outhouse up the hill from each cabin served as a toilet. Heat was provided by a cast iron heat stove and a cookstove in each cabin fueled by wood from a well-stocked woodshed. There was no bedding. You slept in your own sleeping bag either on a pad on the floor or on top of a bare mattress covered with mouse droppings that you’d have to brush off before you put your pad on the bed. Some of the cabins had a loft accessible by a removable ladder.

  Molly, Levi, and I drove up the Friday of Labor Day weekend. Joyce, who was that year’s caretaker, showed us to our cabin. Molly and Levi would sleep in the loft. I would spend the night on a bed that I zealously cleared of mouse droppings before I unrolled my pad and put my sleeping bag on it. It surely was not Bergdorf Goodman.

  Hot water was abundant on the property. Natural hot springs underground fed two small pools under a roof supported by four poles and three walls. At approximately 130°F, the water in the covered pools was too hot for human beings, but the effluent from those pools fed a much larger pool under the open sky. At 115 degrees, that pool was the main attraction for visitors. At first contact the large pool felt too hot. Everyone made the same series of sounds upon entering. First they said, “Ooh! Oh! Ow!” Then came the inevitable “Ahhhhhhh” as the person relaxed into the heat of the water. Everything that had seemed so important a few seconds earlier had just moved to a back burner. Such was the magic of Burgdorf.

  It wasn’t like Baden-Baden, a spa town where rich Europeans went to “take the waters” in Germany’s Black Forest and enjoy fine wine, excellent cuisine, and luxury hotels. Burgdorf was rustic, simple, and wonderful. For a mere five dollars, which I gave to Joyce over her protests, my kids and I got to spend the night in a warm cabin and enjoy a soak in a large natural hot springs pool under the stars, which, as I recall, were spectacularly clear and brilliant in a moonless sky that weekend.

  Chapter Eleven

  Teepee Rick

  When I look back at my relationships with men, I see a pattern. As a child my strong will was juxtaposed with wanting to please my father. As a teenager I knew I wanted to write songs and earn the respect of people I hoped would someday be my peers, and though I took some important steps on my own along that path, my ambitions were powered in part by the pride I knew my dad would take in my accomplishments. Though my mother, too, took tremendous pride in my achievements, I took her approval for granted. By the time I was a grown woman, seeking the approval of a man had become a firmly established element of my psychological framework. And because my father had been so effective in solving problems and making things happen, I grew to believe that it was easier to take strong, steady action toward a goal with a man to help me get there.

  Gerry Goffin’s determination to succeed in the early sixties had driven me harder than I might have driven myself. Not only did we write more songs in service of the pressure he felt to provide for his family, but we wrote better songs because of his insistence on excellence. In the late sixties I had become a recording artist with the consistent encouragement of Charlie Larkey, Danny Kortchmar, and Lou Adler. And in 1970 I became a performing artist after James Taylor pushed me forward. Though I was never romantically involved with Danny, Lou, or James, all were mightily influential in my development.

  Given this pattern, it’s not difficult to see why I believed I needed Rick Evers to help me move my family to a slower-paced, natural environment.

  That September weekend in 1978, I wasn’t looking for anyone to teach my children and me how to live more fully and richly on the land in the wild and woolly western state I now called home. But if I had been looking for such a person, could anyone have been more suitable than someone called Teepee Rick?

  Saturday morning dawned brisk and sunny. Molly, Levi, and I enjoyed a delightful 115-degree soak in the pool. We walked to the campground to refill our water jugs, then set out to explore the little town. We were curious to see what was inside the structures that hadn’t been rented out. It was the second of September. The fall colors were already beginning to promise October splendor. Patches of leaves among the groves of aspens were quaking orange and gold against the evergreen forest of mostly lodgepole pines. Burgdorf Meadow held a variety of glorious tall grasses and the last wildflowers of the summer season. The leaves on the low-lying bushes on the hillsides above the meadow had already turned red. White clouds punctuated the crystal blue sky with Rorschach-like images ranging from double exclamation points to white bunnies in love.

  Molly, almost seven, had been a voracious reader since she was four. As if by magnetic attraction, it was she who first poked her head into what Joyce had called “the library cabin.” All three of us were immediately drawn in by the accumulation of books left by visitors over the years. The library cabin policy was simple: anyone was free to take a book or leave one. Burgdorf’s readers had left so many books that we found selecting a single book as difficult as eating just one potato chip. When we emerged from the library cabin an hour later with our selections, we saw Joyce waving to us from the porch of her cabin just above us.

  “Come on up and have a cup of tea with us,” she called.

  Us? I thought as we scrambled up the hill.

  The children had no interest in entering a dark cabin on such a beautiful day. Molly wanted to stay on the porch and read, while Levi was more interested in the paints that Joyce had set on a table outside. After getting the kids settled on the porch I followed Joyce in. At first I couldn’t see anything. Then my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw two men in the cabin. One was sitting on the edge of Joyce’s bed, which doubled as a couch. Joyce introduced him as “Che” (as in Guevara). The other man was sitting on a worn brown vinyl beanbag chair with his long legs crossed in front of him. He was industriously tamping a pipe.

  “Carole,” Joyce said. The long-legged man looked up. “This is Teepee Rick.”

  Rick Sorensen was relaxed and comfortable as he smoked his pipe. He was an entertaining storyteller whose dry humor added to listeners’ interest in what was already a good story. From the banter between him and Che I gleaned that Rick had a girlfriend with whom he lived in a teepee that he moved seasonally. In the late spring and summer they lived in McCall, where Rick worked as a carpenter and his girlfriend as a nurse. During the summer they boarded their horses in McCall or Cascade. Together they earned enough to pay for their own food, the horses’ board, and winter supplies for them, their dog, and the horses. In the late fall, just before the first big snow closed backcountry roads for the winter, Rick
trailered the horses and hauled the teepee to his mining claim on the South Fork of the Salmon River. Hence the nickname Teepee Rick. He performed the required mining activities to keep his claim active, but the Mining Law of 1872 didn’t allow permanent structures on such claims. Hence the teepee.

  Rick and Che had come to Burgdorf to hunt. Many Idahoans depended on the skill of their family’s hunters to bring home an elk or a couple of deer during the legal season, the dates of which varied from year to year but usually began after the males had rutted and the females were carrying next season’s young. Idaho Fish and Game monitored the populations of various species of wildlife and adjusted the regulations each year. Normally only male elk and deer were taken unless Fish and Game determined that there was an excess of females that year. Prior to living in Idaho I had not been a fan of guns or hunting, but I was beginning to learn that there was a natural order between animal herds and my Idaho neighbors. Responsible humans were part of the ecosystem. Hunting was a way of keeping populations of wild animals in balance while providing human families with a source of protein. I didn’t hunt, but I did eat. I was mostly vegetarian and ate almost no meat, but I didn’t condemn those who did eat meat. I could only hope that those who hunted would do it in a respectful manner.