“Isn’t that something?” Karin said. “Animals bring out the best in everybody.”
When we finally sat down to eat, it was the first time we were all awake together and not focused on the road—and that’s when I discovered what I was in for. Linda gave me the first hint when our food came. When I reached for a fork, she grabbed my hand. “That can wait,” she said. She and Karin joined hands and bowed their heads. “Thanks, but this isn’t something I believe in,” I began, but the Ladies kept their eyes closed, waiting me out. All right, be polite, I told myself. They are your hosts. And we are in a Cracker Barrel.
After that opening shot, it was game on. Fate had conspired to take the reddest and bluest of America and lock it in a steel capsule for thirty straight hours. We drove out of Indiana and on toward Kansas, talking about everything and agreeing on absolutely nothing. We faced off on Confederate flags, school prayer, and Black Lives Matter, and when I argued in favor of stricter gun laws, Karin told me about the pistol strapped to her leg. The closest we came to common ground was after we heard on the radio that Trump had bad-mouthed the parents of a soldier who’d been killed in action. “Republicans screwed up,” Karin agreed. “They could’ve had Sarah Palin.”
We skirmished across the prairies, at the same time sharing the Ladies’ sandwiches and making sure the blankets hadn’t slipped off whoever was sleeping that shift in the backseat. It was weird, the way the three of us saw things so differently yet liked one another so much. Karin and Linda charmed their way across the Midwest, finding new Marilyns everywhere we stopped and inviting kids to come pet the donkeys’ noses. Karin mocked my taste for Doritos, yet made sure to pick up a fresh bag whenever we gassed up. When Linda saw my reading glasses, she demanded I hand them over. “Looks like you dipped them in bacon grease,” she said, cleaning them thoroughly with a tissue. As the sun was going down over Kansas, Linda wondered why we hadn’t spotted a single cow anywhere in the state. “It’s the Rapture!” she declared, cracking herself up. “The Lord took the most innocent amongst us.”
It was just past our second midnight when we crossed into Colorado, and that’s when the tone inside the truck got serious. Snowcapped mountains reared up in front of us, smack on our path to Fairplay, and thick fog was rolling down the slopes and blanketing the road. “Fun’s over,” Karin said. The asphalt was crunchy with frost, and visibility was so poor that we couldn’t see approaching vehicles until their headlights suddenly blasted out of the dark and into our eyes. We climbed the mountains at a crawl, creeping through the icy gloom at forty miles per hour…thirty…twenty….
At four in the morning, our cell phones lost reception and the navigator couldn’t locate the Earthship’s address. “Maybe that’s it?” I asked, pointing to a dirt road in the middle of a lonely mesa. “Better be,” Karin said. “Once we go in, there’s no turning this thing around.” One flickering bar appeared on my phone, so I quickly left Mika a Hail Mary message, telling her we were wandering in the dark and this was my only chance to call, so if she happened to wake up, please come out and flash a light.
We rumbled along, spellbound by the star show stretching to the horizon but wishing for any sign of human life, anywhere. Suddenly Karin pulled over. “I got a hunch,” she said, which didn’t sound good until she told me to swap seats and get behind the wheel. “If I’m right,” she explained, “you can show your lady your stuff.” I had a pretty good hunch of my own—that this sorry excuse for a road was only leading us deeper and deeper into trouble, but I went along with Karin, took the driver’s seat, and shifted the truck into low gear. Moments later, Mika burst into the headlights, waving her arms and running through the dark, welcoming us in from the road.
25
“Fear that thing. Do that thing.”
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
—Gnostic Gospel of St. Thomas
“Any sign of the Ladies?” I asked when I crawled out of bed around ten that morning, still so groggy I could barely open both eyes.
“They left,” Mika said. “They came in around eight, had coffee with Zeke, then took off in the truck.”
“Jesus. Where to?”
“All they told me was, ‘Wherever we end up is where we’re headed.’ ”
The Ladies’ stamina was absolutely freakish. After driving nonstop from sundown Sunday until nearly sunup Tuesday, we’d then worked for an hour in the freezing dark, making sure the donkeys were okay after the long trip and then turning them out in the meadow with plenty of hay, fresh water, and electrolyte mash. After that, the Ladies had to clear away and stow their gear so they could get to the king-sized mattress in the sleeping loft in the front of the trailer. Three hours later, they were back on their feet and antsy for adventure.
Made it! Sherman wakes up to his first morning in Colorado.
“How about the donkeys? Anyone check on them yet?” I asked.
“Yup, Zeke is there now,” Mika said. “He couldn’t wait to see Sherman.”
I looked around, taking in my first good view of planet Earthship. When we arrived last night, I was so fried that I barely noticed a thing before falling into bed. We were actually staying in the Earthship’s satellite cabin, Mika told me. It was a beautiful straw-bale home, cozy and sun-drenched, crafted from bales of straw coated with a thick layer of adobe mud. Something about the thickness of the walls and the smoothness of the sanded adobe made the whole place feel indestructible and incredibly comfortable at the same time, like a cave remodeled by the Queer Eye quintet. Through the front window, I could see the nearby Earthship: a long, low building nestled against a gentle slope, so perfectly contoured against the man-made hill that Martha Stewart herself couldn’t have designed a snazzier end-time bunker.
Sherm checking out his Colorado digs
Mika and I decided to go see how the donkeys were settling in. As soon as we stepped outside and began heading down the long dirt drive, we spotted the Ladies approaching—
On horseback.
“Sleeping Beauty!” Linda hooted. “Princess finally got his butt out of bed.”
“We been up so long, we had time to steal these beauties,” Karin chimed in. “Hurry and open the trailer so we can hide ’em before the cops come.”
The Ladies waited for me to answer, then realized from my slack jaw and completely befuddled stare that yeah, as far as I knew they were perfectly capable of recreational livestock rustling. “Nah, we borrowed them,” Karin said. They’d set off on a drive that morning to get the lay of the land, and as usual, it wasn’t long before they’d befriended another Marilyn. When they spotted two fine-looking horses standing idle in a meadow near a house, the Ladies knocked on the door and asked if they could take them out for a few hours. For whatever reason, the owner allowed two complete strangers to saddle up his horses and ride off down the lane.
The Ladies: Karin (left) and Linda saved the day, then “stole” some horses.
“We just came back for our beer,” Linda said.
“And my gold pan,” Karin added. Before leaving Virginia, she’d packed a prospecting pan in case they spotted any promising creeks. Because who wouldn’t? The Ladies slid off their horses, disappeared into the trailer, and popped back out a few moments later with Karin’s pan and an insulated saddlebag full of beer and sandwiches. “If we don’t come back,” Linda said as she swung back into the saddle, “we were never here.” The Ladies clinked their beers, spurred their horses, and were gone.
Naturally, the sight of two mounted outlaws cracking brews in their driveway at ten a.m. was enough to draw the attention of Kristin and Kip Otteson, owners and builders of the Earthship, who came out to see what was going on. I was glad to meet them, because it gave me an opportunity to ask a question that had been on my mi
nd for some time: What the hell is an Earthship? Basically, Kip explained as we all walked together to the pasture, it’s a passive-solar home that uses massive windows and natural insulation to be self-heating and -cooling.
“Even here?” It was still cold in July, so I could only imagine how bitter it must be in winter.
“Best home I’ve ever had,” said Kip, and that meant something. Kip was originally a Southern California surfer who moved north—briefly, he thought—to attend college in Tacoma, Washington. There he met Kristin, and after graduation they set off together to teach school in a tiny village in Arctic Alaska that was reachable only by bush plane. “Two hundred people lived there, and one hundred of them were kids,” Kristin said. “Everything revolved around the school. I loved it.” Life in the tundra was so wild and woolly that whenever Kip took the cross-country team out for a run, he had to strap a .357 Magnum to his chest. “Year before we got there, a guy walking down the street with his girlfriend was jumped by a bear,” Kip said. “She ran for help and was back in seventeen minutes. By then, he was already half-eaten.”
Kip and Kristin arrived as outsiders but never had a chance to feel that way, because the tight-knit community immediately embraced them. They had such a wonderful time that after three years in Alaska, they had to wrench themselves away to set off for their next adventure in Thailand. In both Asia and the Arctic Circle, they soon came to realize, there was a spirit of togetherness that seemed to be dying out in mainland America. “It’s so rare these days for an American family to have four generations living close to each other,” Kristin said. So when her brother-in-law proposed his crazy dream for a pioneer settlement, they jumped on it. Kristin’s sister had married Jon Jandai, a Thai eco-visionary who taught green warriors how to build homes out of earth-friendly materials. During a trip to Colorado to visit Kristin’s parents in Loveland, Jon Jandai got so excited when he found these forty desolate acres for sale, he nearly burst into flames.
“We can pen up elk, then kill them as needed by running them into a pit-fall!” he told Kip.
“Yeah,” Kip replied. “You realize all that’s completely illegal, right?”
But once they adjusted Jon Jondai’s dial to twenty-first-century American fish and game laws, he inspired Kristin’s entire clan to pitch in. They all bought the property together, and then, under Jon Jondai’s guidance, a family community began to rise from this mesa in the middle of nowhere. “He’s an incredible worker,” Kip said. “He’d put a yoke over his shoulders and carry buckets from the pond for our adobe bricks. He pushed us to do stuff we never thought we could.” Kip and Kristin and their two kids were still splitting their time between Thailand and Colorado, but now that they’d completed two of the homes, they were ready to settle in full-time and start work on the third house, for Kristin’s brother.
“Now I see what we really need,” Kip said. “Donkeys. They look so cool out there.” We’d reached the pasture, where Zeke was sprawled on the grass in his boot, soaking up the sun and hanging out with Sherman. Rather than boarding our gang miles away with the sheriff’s deputy, Kip had arranged with his neighbor across the road to let us keep them in his meadow. Kip was right; posed against that great prairie skyline, with their winter shag gone and their muscles rippling beneath their gleaming coats, the donkeys really did look magnificent—although a little bewildered.
“Sherman has been glued to me,” Zeke said with a laugh. “He’s like, ‘Thank God! One point of reference in this strange new universe that my brain can process!’ ” Zeke was processing a point of his own; despite his stubborn insistence back home in Lancaster that he still might be able to race, the throbbing in his leg after the past few days of travel was finally convincing him that it just wasn’t possible. He was handling his disappointment like a champ, though; I was touched by the way Zeke had transitioned himself from Sherman’s teammate into his support crew. Personally, I’d have been absolutely unbearable if I were in his boot, grumbling and moping around in everybody’s way, but Zeke seemed genuinely jazzed about his new role as the only guy who could help his replacement get used to Sherman and make sure Sherman understood what was going on. Zeke wasn’t just a new man; he was the new Tanya.
Zeke and Sherman, reunited after the long trip from the Southern End
“So how does this work?” Kip asked. Even though they’re locals, Kip and Kristin had spent so much time working overseas that they’d never actually been in Fairplay for a burro race. I was happy to let Zeke answer while I sank back and relaxed, ready for a little more shut-eye. Zeke filled them in on tactics and training, then Mika explained how Sherman had joined our family in the first place. Suddenly it got very quiet, as if everyone was holding their breath. I cracked an eye to see what was going on, and found Kristin and Kip swiveling their heads from Sherman to Mika, listening intently as Mika described Sherman’s transformation from a sick, lame loner into this affectionate doofus who—fingers crossed—was about to compete in a World Championship mountain race.
“Wow,” Kip finally sighed. “That is so punk rock.” Kip had been a hardcore headbanger growing up, and he’d never forgotten the time a front man opening for Fugazi kept singing through the blood after someone in the mosh pit splattered his nose with a glass ashtray. “Idiot who threw that, that ain’t punk,” Fugazi’s lead singer raged when he came onstage. “The guy you hit, he’s punk. Being there for his band. Never giving up. Taking the pain. That’s punk.”
You’re damn right, I thought as I lay back down in the sun. What’s more punk than burro racing? Every other sport in America is about throwing the ashtray. They teach you to hit hard, be aggressive, play better than girls, never give up the ball. Power and possession, strength and domination: that’s American sports in a nutshell. Then along comes this scruffy crew who give the finger to all that. Burro racing was inspired by prospectors and jackasses, the true American misfits, and it flips everything about modern sports on its head. Try any of that No pain, no gain stuff with a donkey, and you’re in for a world of disappointment. You’ve got one hope of getting to the finish line, and that’s to forget about dominance and ego and discover the power of sharing and caring, compassion and cooperation. That’s not to say burro racers are powder puffs; they’re as fit as panthers and ferociously competitive, but the men still salute the women who beat them, and the women will run their guts out but still respect the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pee Break: “You never want to leave a competitor alone out there on the mountain,” Barb Dolan explains. “So if one of the girls has to pee, we all stop and wait. After that, it’s gangbusters.” Taking the pain. Being there for your band.
Kip saw it immediately. Burro racing is a rebel yell from our outcast ancestors, a reminder that things used to be different—and it’s not too late to go back.
* * *
—
“So who’s going to fill in for Zeke?” Kip asked.
That flicked my eyes open. The day after Zeke broke his foot, I started calling everyone I could think of in Colorado in search of a sub. Turns out, we weren’t the only burro racers who were jinxed that summer. Just about everyone I spoke to was dealing with some kind of injury, calamity, or Grade A ass-ache. Lynzi Doke had hurt her hip during track season and needed surgery. Barb Dolan’s knees were bothering her, plus she’d been shocked when a dear friend suddenly dropped dead from an aneurysm. Barb decided it was time to step back and reassess, so she was re-re-retiring. Hal Walter, meanwhile, was at his wits’ end with Teddy, the new half-wild burro he thought was going to be a speedster but was turning out to be a bit of a head case who freaked around water.
But I still had Wann card left to play: Brad Wann, the grizzly-tough dad who got into burro racing to help his epileptic son. Brad is a man-mountain of radiant energy who loves finding stone walls in his path so he can leave them with Brad-shaped holes. He’s made it a point to become best buds with everyone in burro racing, if n
ot most of the Southwest, so I was sure he’d tear into this challenge and come up with the perfect candidate to step in for Zeke. I thought it was pretty odd when Brad never responded to my first two messages, and just when I was considering a third, I heard from his wife, Amber. A week earlier, she told me, Brad had been overcome by a mystery illness that landed him in intensive care. His doctors had no idea what was causing the raging fever and fluids pooling in his lungs, and were keeping him alive with oxygen and a twenty-four-hour antibiotic drip. “It’s breaking my heart to see my big guy wasting away and not 100 percent there in his thoughts,” Amber told me. Their son, Ben, was also being hit by seizures again after a four-year respite. Between her two guys, Amber was living a nightmare of helpless uncertainty. Luckily, after Brad had lost a quarter of his body weight and undergone a battery of organ and toxicology tests, he began to recover and was finally able to come home. Ben’s seizures were still worrying Amber sick, but at least her man was out of the woods.
I couldn’t bring myself to even mention my problems to Amber. I was at the end of the road—until I realized I was looking down the wrong road. Just about every burro racer alive lives in Colorado, but there is one glorious exception: the clan Pedretti. Every year, as they have for more than a decade, Pedrettis of all ages caravan down from Wisconsin to compete in the World Championship in honor of the late Rob Pedretti. Out of all those nieces and brothers and cousins, there had to be at least one Pedretti they could spare, right? I got Rob’s brother on the phone, and all I had to do was tell him the basics about Zeke and Sherman before he cut me off.
“Same problem Rob faced,” Roger said. “Straight A’s in school, amazing athlete, best mountain lion guide in the state, maybe the country…” Roger’s voice trailed off. Suddenly, he snapped back. “And your burro! We can’t let them down. No way.” Roger thought for a moment. “You know what? My sister-in-law will run with you. Count on it.”
Running with Sherman Page 30