by Heather Ross
Mick kept a shotgun under the bed, and always had, though he never used it except on an annual duck-hunting trip with his family and to scare away the errant pest. He had never done much cooking up at the clearing before I moved in, but now the smell of food was everywhere, and the only thing standing in between this four-hundred-pound black bear and her two cubs and our odiferous, not-quite-cold-enough fully stocked fridge, was our bed. That summer was also the summer that we had two small kittens. They had been found, eyes still closed, in the stud cavity of an old barn that Mick had taken down for its lumber. Their mother had moved the rest of the litter but had become too frightened of Mick and his crew and had not come back for these two, so I took them and fed them with tiny bottles and raised them myself. They slept in a box at the foot of my bed, between us and the doorway, with a hot water bottle, which was where they were the first night the bear came.
When I woke up, I could see her shape on our front step with the moonlight behind her, outlining her two round ears. She watched us, probably wondering why we didn’t have a front door. She was not more than four feet away from the foot of our bed, and from the kittens, who probably smelled like warm milk to her, a small hot snack. I sat up slowly, and she backed away just a half step. I crawled, holding my breath, on my hands and knees toward her, my long flannel nightgown dragging underneath my knees and slowing me down, until I reached the end of the bed. I reached down and pulled the tiny sleeping kittens out of their box and clutched them to my chest as I jumped back toward my pillow, and screamed as hard as I could, “BEAR!” The bear turned and trotted away, not as quickly as I would have liked. Mick was awake now and mumbling to me. “We need to get a dog,” he said.
“We need to get a FUCKING DOOR,” I said, still upright in bed, staring into the darkness where the bear had been, clutching the kittens. Mick turned away and went back to sleep.
A day or two later, the kittens (whom I took with me everywhere after the bear began to appear) and I returned to the cabin after dark, following a rare night out (I hated getting home after dark to a cold, dark cabin because seeing it from the outside depressed me). There I found the heavy fridge turned on its side, its contents strewn along the floor of the cabin and on the bed, the plastic bread bags and empty containers and butcher paper spread out in front of the cabin, all licked clean and crushed by big clawed paws, turned from groceries into garbage. A cast-iron pot that had been sitting on the top of the fridge was cracked into two pieces, and broken glass was everywhere. I threatened now to buy a cheap door at the hardware store, but Mick assured me that even if he could allow me to do this, it would not work because the frame that he had built was a custom, not standard, size. Instead, I gathered large, pointy rocks and made a pile of them next to my bed, the way I had been taught to do when camping in bear country, and more or less stopped sleeping at night. Mick began to keep his shotgun, loaded, under his side of the bed. When the bear came back the next time, he pulled it out and charged the bear, firing two shots into the middle of the clearing. I stood in the doorway and watched him, standing naked in the grass, surrounded by the pile of wood that had rotted because there still wasn’t a shed, the outhouse that still did not have walls, the warped table that stood next to our fire pit that we had stopped using as a dining table, the lumber that had sat, untouched, exposed, nearly ruined, that was supposed to become our house, and I realized that I couldn’t even imagine a building in that clearing anymore, much less a lifetime.
To hang your food out of the reach of bears while camping or living without a door, first put it into a sleeping bag, stuff sack, or other waterproof sack or bag. Choose a branch from which to hang your food. It should be at least as thick as your upper arm and not dead or dying (look for green leaves or leaf buds on its tips) and it should be at least 10' (3 m) off the ground. Tie one end of a long (at least 30' [10 m]) rope around a rock or other heavy item. Make sure the rock is secure. Stand directly under the branch where you want to hang your food, then take 10 steps backward. Throw the rock over the branch, leaving a loose pile of rope in front of you. This may take a few attempts. When you have succeeded and the rope is over the branch and the rock is safely on the ground again, remove the rock from the rope’s end and replace it with your stuff sack, tying it securely with a slipknot. Using the other end of the rope, hoist your stuff sack so that it is about 5' (1.5 m) below your branch, then secure your rope to the tree’s trunk, knotting it in a way that can be undone easily.
Mick came back to bed. “How much longer do you see us living here, in this cabin?” I asked, in the dark. “Because if we want to have kids”—which he did, very much—“I think we need to start making some changes.”
And he, still cold next to me beneath the blankets, having just chased a black bear out of our house, said, “I think we could get by here for another ten years, until the kids are bigger and need more space.”
“What about the door?” I asked. “Can you make the door?”
“Yes,” he said, “I’ll get to it this weekend.” But, as I was coming to realize, he always said that.
I found a small house for rent in town and moved us into it, just short of three years since I had arrived. Mick wanted me to promise that we would spend at least a few nights a week at the cabin, but I was done. We lived in mostly silence together for a few months, him constantly criticizing everything about our new, electrified, suburban existence, refusing to partake in general household duties, which seemed mundane and modern to him, insulting his principles. One day, when I arrived unannounced at his shop, I found him engaged in a clearly romantic conversation with a woman he had known for decades. She had professed her longstanding love and admiration for him, and his earnest ways, and within the year she would leave her husband and her home for Mick and his plans to build them a house, in the clearing, on seventy-five acres, where they would live off the land and eventually raise a family together—after a short time in their temporary home, which was a small cabin that lacked a front door, but that, he had assured her, was a simple thing to fix. He would get to it next weekend.
HOW TO
start a children’s
clothing company
THE ABSOLUTE BEST TIME TO START a business is when you have nothing to lose. Luckily for me, that was a long and protracted period of my life, from about nine until about thirty-five, when I was neither a mother nor a wife nor shared, in any real way, in the responsibility of maintaining a home or managing the expectations or happiness of anyone but myself. My family expected so little of me from the beginning that I was not burdened with the fear of disappointing them, and they had invested so little in me and in my care and education that they were not in a position to question what I did with my life. I don’t think either of my parents knew, when I left college the spring of my senior year, that I had made the decision not to graduate or what my degree would have been in.
My mother had not been in a position to help me financially after I left her house, but every once in a while she made it clear to me that she wanted to. Once, at the beginning of my last year at school, she had brought me a garbage bag of pot, thinking that I could sell it to pay my rent. A friend of hers, a hunter, had been out in the woods on his large property preparing for deer season when he had stumbled across a big, uninvited patch of it and, wanting it off his land, had picked it and brought it to her, thinking that my uncle, a professional of sorts in this field, might be able to sell it. My mother was jealous of her brother for other, older reasons and didn’t see why he should benefit from this situation, so she brought it to me, explaining that this was her way of helping. Not wanting to become a drug dealer myself (for obvious reasons, including the fact that the hours seemed ridiculous), I brought it to the one person I knew who openly sold pot in our college town. He told me it was worth next to nothing because it was picked prematurely and offered to take it off my hands, which was by then all I wanted, but I learned later that he had done a brisk business selling it.
My
father, on the other hand, had not contributed to my education in any way, even though he had built a successful business in high tech in California. When I moved there from Vermont, he seemed wary of my motives and that I would be asking him for money. He was married for the third time, to a smart but obsessive and high-strung woman who had little patience for his previous wives and their children. I visited him occasionally, usually en route to or from visiting my sister, who had moved back to Santa Cruz, but I never stayed long because his household seemed tense; whether that was because I was there or not, I never knew. My half-brother Cameron was born a year after I arrived in California. I drove south to see him, but when I called my father’s house to tell them I was coming, his wife, Michelle, told me that the doctor had told her that nobody but immediate family should come into contact with the baby for at least two weeks. But if I wanted to come over and stand outside, in front of the picture window that faced their driveway, they would hold him up for me to see. I declined.
I was still working at the Environmental Education Center in Mendocino during the spring and fall, having been hired on after my internship, and also as a wilderness guide during the summers and on and off at a horse barn leading rides on the beach and through the foothills of the Mendocino coast. I lived first in a cabin that was included in my job and then in a tiny cottage in Caspar, where I could see the sea from a tiny window by the pillow in my loft bed.
I worked seasonally and had plenty of time for travel and classes, so I enrolled at the local community college, where a renowned textile designer named Lolli Jacobsen happened to be teaching. I took classes in silk-painting and screen-printing from Lolli, plus some printmaking classes from another teacher, and soon had a stack of scarves, T-shirts, and prints on paper, and nothing to do with them. A woman in my screen-printing class had reserved a booth at a local craft fair but didn’t have enough money to pay for it, so I shared the cost with her. I arrived an hour before the fair started and spread out a white tablecloth and my shirts and my scarves and my paper prints and everything I had made during my two semesters at College of the Redwoods. The fair started at nine o’clock, and by eleven I had nothing left. I had in my hands a stack of cash, just over a thousand dollars. I was twenty-three years old and could count on one hand the number of times that I’d had this much money to my name. It occurred to me that I should stay in art school forever, but I already had student loans that I could barely manage. Instead, I went to Mexico, back to San Miguel, for the winter, the one place I knew I could live as an artist on $1,100, where a winter’s worth of art classes would cost me just $150.
I studied textiles, which was what interested me the most, and learned about dyes and printing, looms and weaving. I learned, finally, about the relationships between colors. I supported myself in Mexico as an artist’s model at the National Art School, which meant spending long hours standing, reclining, and sitting naked in a cold room in an old stone hacienda for artists from every country including mine. Our teacher was Antonio Lopez Vega, perhaps one of the best-known living artists working in Mexico at that time. I could never tell, because my Spanish was so bad, if he liked me too much or not at all, and when I left the city he owed me more money than he wanted to give me, so he paid me in part with two paintings, both of me. “Someday,” he told me, “when you have children who have children, you will look at these and you will remember when you were young and poor and took your clothes off for food.” I think he meant this differently than it sounded—I was not doing that kind of work—but I accepted them and rolled them up into a tube and sent them home to my sister. Upon opening them, she drove straight to the bank without even taking a minute to put on her shoes and deposited money into my account. I returned to California in the spring certain that it was possible to make a living as an artist but not having any idea how.
I was still on the periphery of my father’s life, not at all a part of its daily routine, and not at all liked or accepted by his wife, but he had started to take a genuine interest in what I was up to and offered to help me in some small but significant ways. He sent me two hundred dollars while I was in Mexico to help pay for the silver that I needed for a jewelry class, and then helped me buy a car when the one I had purchased for eight hundred dollars finally died, asking me not to tell his wife that he had given me any money. He was worried, as my sister was, when I left Mendocino and moved in with Mick in Arcata and started talking about “living off the land.” He called me from his crackly cell phone one morning, just after I told him what I was planning to do. “The thing about that lifestyle, Heather, is that it’s very unfair to the women who enter into it. You won’t be making any money of your own, and you’ll be working hard just to feed yourself and to stay alive, and it’s hard, physical work. You are talented and smart, and you should be doing something creative. I think you could get work designing websites. I’m sending you a computer and a tablet and I want you to learn how to use Photoshop.” It didn’t occur to either of us at the time that I wouldn’t have any place to plug the devices in.
The computer was the reason, the final justification that I needed while living with Mick, to rent a desk in a small office in town and set myself up with a telephone. The Internet was literally brand new, and e-mail was only just becoming a normal way to communicate, much less to do business. My father found me a potential freelance job that required Photoshop, so I stayed up all night and burned through two headlamp batteries reading Photoshop for Dummies and spent the next day trying to do the work expected of me, but I didn’t have any training in graphic design or page layout and wasn’t able to produce anything that looked right or appealed to the client.
When things with Mick fell apart, I realized that I needed to find a way to support myself. I had believed, when I moved in with him, that I had discovered a shortcut by teaming up with a man who was happy to support me, who already owned land and had an established career, and that this meant I wouldn’t need to find my own career path. But by the time we had broken up, I knew that I never wanted to depend on someone like that again.
It was around then that I stumbled upon a catalog from the Dutch company Oilily. The images were beautiful, full of red-cheeked children with tousled hair, wearing clothing in beautifully printed fabrics with rich embroidery and other tiny, exquisite details. I must have looked at every page close to a hundred times, and I reached the decision that I would start a children’s clothing company. I knew I needed help and asked my sister and my father to get involved. We visited a consultant in San Francisco who gave us a basic description of how the apparel industry worked: We needed a brand, and a line, and then we needed to bring that line to a trade show and get orders from retailers, which we would then need to fill. At the time there were still manufacturers in California who were willing to sew what we knew would be small amounts of clothing for us, but there were signs that the situation was changing. We ignored those signs.
Then I began to design my own prints. I went to a local art store and picked out eight colors from their assortment of high-quality art markers. There was a buttery yellow, a warm orange, a grass green, a hot, hot pink, a deep reddish brown, a sky blue, a peachy pink, and a pale, pale aqua. Using only these colors and a stack of thick drawing paper, I designed five prints. One of them was a simple design of small white clouds in a white sky, based on a batik T-shirt that my mother had owned, a gift from my aunt in Brooklyn. Another was a simple design of pink tulips, taken from the coveted Laura Ashley wallpaper design that hung in the bedroom of Jill Higgins, the richest girl I had ever known. A third was of geese, straight from the Jemima Puddle-Duck illustration on the page in Kerry Canfield’s Beatrix Potter address book that held my long list of crossed-out addresses. Another was of tiny little girls, inspired by a vintage print that I had found in an old quilt. My favorite was a print of tiny little apples, in green, just like the ones that had grown on the tree in front of the schoolhouse. Then, using a San Francisco phone book, I called every screen printer in th
e Bay Area until I found one who was willing to make a set of screens for me and another who would print my fabric. The latter was a woman in San Francisco who had a very keen sense of color, which was much more important than I could have imagined at that moment.
I had promised the man who was going to make the screens that I would provide him with Photoshop files, so I used the old Wacom tablet and Mac that my father had given me to redraw my print designs and send the files via e-mail. It would be weeks before I would have sample fabric, so I started working on some very basic dresses, using plain cotton and muslin. I made a simple tie-top dress, based entirely on the one that my mother had brought me back from France, tucked into a box of cigarettes; a pair of pants; a dress; a blouse inspired by the perfectly proportioned pieces in the Oilily catalog; and a few other simple little things. When my fabric came back, I had a friend who had worked in fashion in Los Angeles help me make the patterns, and then another friend, a seasoned seamstress, make some samples. I had my very first collection. I knew that I wanted to introduce my line in New York, at the biggest kid’s clothing trade show, but a booth would cost me just over four thousand dollars. My father had given me another car, a hand-me-down Ford Explorer, which was still worth about ten thousand dollars. I took the title to a local economic development corporation and borrowed money against it, and I bought a booth space and round-trip airline tickets and booked a hotel. I hired a photographer to take some pictures of little girls wearing my clothes, including a little girl in a sundress made from my apple print, sitting on a giant red beanbag, with tousled blond hair and rosy cheeks. I had blowups of these made, three feet square and mounted on foam core, and I punched holes in the corners so that I could hang them on the walls of my simple booth. I made up a name—Munki Munki—over lunch at a Chinese restaurant, where I had been accidentally given two paper placemats with the Chinese astrological signs on them. Where they overlapped, I could see two monkeys next to each other and thought the name sounded sweet in repeat. I changed the spelling to something that sounded remotely Dutch, in honor of Oilily.