The Meadow 189 New Jersey draft board typed up their Thanksgiving letter: time for another physical and a tour of duty in Vietnam. I had just found a job working as a deckhand on an oil barge in the Houston channel, moving tows from Port Galveston to the refineries on the east side of the city, the windward view of town, downwind from the fancy Seven Oaks executive homes and Neiman Marcus malls. The work was a way to get my hands dirty, dump the book learning and dive into other lives. Get paid, sleep in used, smelly bunks, and gamble away a day’s wages as I passed the hours between my twelve-hour shifts. Waiting for my job to start, I wandered into the Rothko chapel; sitting among the purples, blacks, and grays with a touch of rose, I wondered where the next steps would take me. The moonrise over West Texas that November night after my turkey loaf dinner stayed. The white gravestones—there in the distance and captured by Ansel Adams years earlier during the dust bowl storms—stopped each of us. Do we die here, continue searching, or stand lost in thought? The trains rattled by twice a day; one stopped, the other did not. The Sad Rock Café served burgers, browned roast beef, turkey loaf, and breakfast to hikers and wildcatters. The diner was warm with talk in the almost abandoned town. Everyone took off their hats as we listened to the quiet breeze rising with the evening. The red/ brown baked dust covered the town with a Renaissance sheen. Bob stopped talking, looked at the fellow diners, and sighed. “We must start early, six-fifteen a.m. at the latest—get to Big Bend by nine a.m., before the noon sun stops all hikers in our tracks. What time do you open?” “Five a.m., just before the sunrise, hon.” Our waitress was probably twenty-one, just like me. Graduated high school; two so-so boyfriends—one gone to war, the other in some distant oil field. No children. She did not read poetry during her breaks but sat atop the café smoking kingsized menthol Kools, hoping to get out of this town of 451. The
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