FREE TRAPPER

I don't know about your world, but in mine there is one feeling like no other: a little boy's hand in mine. That little hand with my big one surrounding it - an apricot in a warm bun. He's two and a half. It doesn't happen often - he's quite independent and fearless - but it's there when we walk down steps or cross the street to get the mail or need to clamber over a stone wall. He feels safe. I feel light and sure, useful, solid. He gives me the strength I give him.

There is an irony to all this. When I first met Jamie I kept a Charlie Russell print right there on my desk where I couldn't miss it - Free Trappers. Could not miss it. Every day. Always smack in my face. There's a fantasy for you. Stephen Foreman in buckskins on a paint pony with a leather band and an eagle feather around his long, filthy hair alone in the mountains, dependent on no one, surviving on its critters, trapping fur I'd bring to the rendezvous come spring. Oh, yeah. I'd had that fantasy for years, since I was little, actually. I used to daydream about taking a Winchester rifle to the Rockies, alone, to hunt and live for a month. Where did a Jewish kid from Baltimore get that one? Phillip Roth dreamt about shiksas. I dreamt about elk. And then I lived with them (and, by the way, also got to marry a shiksa). A herd of elk actually lived on my place in Montana, maybe 25, 30 of them. In the Fall I saw them most early mornings when they came down Ward Mountain to begin their day. It began my day as well. Like a morning prayer. One day Jamie and I were riding on a trail we had broken up Ward Mountain when I saw a cow ahead of us, and said to J it must be one of our neighbor's got out. But, whoa! Oh, man!, it was no cow but an elk, and we found ourselves in the midst of that elk herd. right there, surrounded by them. We were on four legs, so they didn't spook. We were part of them. At first. My horse, Blaze, had some cutting horse in her, spotted the huge bull, a royal bull, a seven point bull at the edge of the herd, and went for him. Uh, oh, "This could be ugly",  but the move spooked the bull and then the herd. In what seemed less than a second, and without a sound, the entire herd of 800 pound animals vanished leaving us breathless.

Irony.

That Free Trapper never had a grandson whose hand disappeared in his. He never had anybody while I have everybody: a daughter, a son, a grandson, daughter's mate, son's mate, all under our roof, a goddaughter just a jump across the creek, her mate, four horses, two goats, fifteen chickens, two dogs, two puppies, one black bear back there somewhere...Damn! Free Trapper, my ass. How has this happened to me? It snuck up. It just snuck up. I used to pride myself that I could survive in the boonies with only a knife and a match. What kind of Free Trapper ever carried a diaper bag or struggled with a car seat or held the kid down for a tetanus shot? What kind of Free Trapper ever ordered a dozen bagels from Zabar's? Cream cheese, please. What kind of Free Trapper ever ate creme broulet? It must have started when Jamie agreed to marry me only if we had an apartment in New York City, the polar opposite of Montana where no place would dare serve creme broulet which nobody could pronounce anyway. I was making Hollywood money then so carrying two places was not the problem. The commute was. Long and brutal and one day just too much. But how we got to the Catskills is not the story I want to tell. This is.

1980. NYC was hoppin'. J got us a brownstone apartment on Morton Street in the West Village. I hadn't seen it, yet, because I was still in Montana. A month or so before our wedding. Time to head back East. I'd been helping a neighbor move his wheel line, then he drove me up to the airport in Missoula. "Highway 93/Pray For Me" was the bumper sticker on his pick-up, a short bed International Harvester with the stick shift on the floor. Another bumper sticker popular at the time was, "Montana: Where Men Are Men, And Sheep Are Nervous." Another: "Keep Montana beautiful. Shoot a land developer".

I flew as is (or was): scuffed boots, modest Western work shirt, leather belt, nice buckle, silver and turquoise but modest as well, not imposing, nothing like those rodeo buckles big as cantaloupes. I took a taxi from JFK to Morton Street, or tried to. The taxi could not get through the West Village as the streets were flooded with rivers of men, thousands of men, thousands and thousands and thousands of them, every one, it seemed, dressed just like me, except their boots weren't scuffed. I'd arrived just in time for the Gay Day parade. No Free Trapper ever had that to work with.

And now?

I remember a little boy sitting in an armchair much too big for him, toddler legs sticking straight out like pencils, little feet like little loaves, still far from touching the floor, asking, "Can we please just have a quiet evening at home tonight?" Sometimes, I'm told, we remember things that never happened. That quiet evening was what never happened. The evenings around our place are not always quiet. When they aren't, uh, let's just say those times are rough. One wants every molecule of one's body to be teleported somewhere else, anywhere else, New Guinea, Guam, Devil's Island, anywhere there are no telephones and the internet is against the law. However, when they are quiet, which is most of the time, when they are quiet and everybody's doing what they do, going to the frig and turning on faucets and flushing toilets and letting out the dog and everything else you do with each minute of your day, that is what I look for. Marianne Williamson once said to me, "There is in you a place of perfect peace." However, since my soul is an early model, it has no GPS, I can't always find this place. But, there are times I do, times that, now that my feet touch the floor, I stretch out my legs and listen.