Old, Fat and Frumpy; Standing On the Street of Desire

 Old, Fat and Frumpy; Standing On the Street of Desire

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            Finally we made the trip to Etzatlan, near Guadalajara, to visit my friend Loni. I did not make the trip solo. Lupe watched me struggle to secure a bus ticket and said, “Let me take time off work. We’ll drive.  Roshanna Vanna wants a road trip.”

            I believe Lupe had visions of me stranded, totally lost and alone, begging outside the bus terminal in Tepic. I had already had that vision. Ever prepared, I planned to take pencils and paper. I could write letters for people who have a hard time saying what they want to say to those they love or to those they hate. The language barrier might even be a plus. I could listen to my clients voice and heart and write what I heard, which would then have to be translated by the recipient of the letter. This could be a good business model, one with the potential for, well, potential. 

            As it was, I came unwittingly close to another ancient business model on our return when we stopped in Tepic. But that was on the way home.

            Mexico is a country of startling beauty. We drove through Sinaloa, a state that hugs the coast, into Nayarit which starts the climb up through ancient volcanic mountains and still higher into Jalisco. I wanted a guide, a botanist and books depicting the flora. I saw trees so spectacular I had to bow down, blooms which blanketed entire mountainsides, next to oddities such as a stunted little tree with perfectly round tumor-looking balls stuck out of both trunk and branches. Lupe said the balls are the fruit of the tree and both balls and bark are used medicinally.

            My cousin Nancie and friend Loni were determined to move me to Etzatlan. There just happened to be three haciendas for sale. They just knew one called my name. The brick haciendas, beautifully built in modest size and Mexcian style, are located at the entrance of a working ranch. Tempting, but my heart is in Mazatlan.

            We explored town and country, soaked at hot spring pools in Ixtlan Del Rio, visited potters in San Marcos and Magdalena where I bought a clay olla or bean pot, a casuela and flower pots. Imagine lugging those heavy pots home on the bus! We climbed a mountaintop to a shrine, picnicked, played cards, visited neighbors. We froze to death each night when thermometers plunged into the low forties. I know. You don’t feel one bit sorry for me. But the houses are not heated. The sun is turned on from mid-morning to about five-thirty.  Then it shuts down for the night.

            On the drive home, we plunged right into the historic district of Tepic, to roam the market. But first we had to park. Picture dropping severely downhill on a side street, swinging a sharp right, through columns with an inch to spare each side, up an even steeper ramp into a teensy parking garage.  I closed my eyes and held my breath, certain sure the side panels would be sheared off.

            The Tepic market is huge, bustling with everybody selling everything imaginable.  I bought a beadwork necklace, fresh ginger and chamomile, a mystery fruit, tamarind candy and a kilo of strawberries.  We ate birria de chivo at a street stand. After I licked my bowl, and said, “This is the best beef I ever ate,” Lupe told me it was goat. It was a good goat. After feasting eyes, body and soul, we walked back to retrieve Roshanna.

            I’m a good driver. I can make a perfectly fine forty-two-point turn-around. I said to Lupe, “I’ll just wait out here on the street for you to bring her out.”

            So there I stood, back against the adobe wall. Across the street strutted a woman wearing the highest shoes I have ever seen. Wow, was she ever dressed. Makeup troweled on. Hairdo cemented into place. She was gorgeous in black. I looked down the street. Another woman leaned against the wall, dressed for the evening in red. I looked further. In all, I saw eight women, all dressed for a night on the town at mid-afternoon.

            And there I was.  Cut-offs, flowered shirt, flip-flops, scrubbed face, straw hair. Leaning against the same wall. A man walked by, gave me a strange look, grinned, shook his head and kept going. Another man came along, stopped, looked me over head to foot, laughed out loud and went on up the street.

Then I got it. There were no fruit and vegetable vendors on the street of desire; only women of pleasure. I would rather have been huddled outside the bus terminal, writing letters.  

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

January 23, 2014

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From Fish to Furniture--The Three Day Rule

From Fish to Furniture--The Three Day Rule

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I try to be cognizant of the three day rule when I am a guest, whether I'm visiting with friends or family. After three days, fish or guest, one stinks. One notices the speculative eyeball, "When do you think she'll leave?"

There is a slight difference when one is a paying guest, such as I am at the hotel in Hot Springs where I spend hours each day soaking in steaming pools, sleeping, reading, and healing.  Just this morning when I was warming a chair in front of the fireplace, a young man who works here, Willy, I believe his name is, asked, "You still here?"

The day I arrived I committed to three days. One or two would not be enough so surely three would be perfect. However, the second day I found myself thinking about leaving and a mild state of panic set in. Not real panic but pseudo-panic, which feels the same. So I added another day. Then I asked for yet another day, or maybe two--no, let me see the calendar. So will my room be available for another week? Aw, let's just run my stay through a full two weeks. 

So the first three days I am indeed a guest, rather pampered with my needs catered to by the cheerful staff.

Day four segues into an interesting blend of being a guest and being family.  Definitely, I am family the rest of the first week.  I help myself to coffee.  I know where the pot sits on the burner beneath the coffee maker. When I need fresh towels, I know which staff is doing house-keeping this day. Silverware is wrapped comfy in a roomy napkin in the basket on the table around the corner.  I helped a guest get some this morning at breakfast.

Now and then, someone checks to see if I need anything. But mostly we have short conversations. They know my name. I am getting to know them.

And like with any blended family, tasks are shared. The woman taking reservations might also be waiting tables in the dining room, two phones stuffed inside her apron pockets. The maintenance man doubles as the breakfast chef. Job descriptions at the hotel must be either a nightmare of paperwork or everyone simply signs up to do whatever task needs doing. See what I mean--family.

After the first week I feel like furniture, quite comfortable perched in my corner, ignored by everyone. Any day now I expect to be dusted as 'house-keeping' makes the rounds, especially if I've already been to the hot pool and am sitting immobile in my favorite chair before the fire, seemingly comatose but actually in perfect imitation of a Zen meditative state.

I will leave eventually, honestly, I will. Saturday I will be on my way to Washington, happy to have use of my phone once more. Oh, dear, the maintenance man is coming my way with two light bulbs and a lampshade. Oh, dear, do you suppose . . .

            Sondra Ashton

            HDN: Looking out my back door

            October 17, 2013

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Up To My Neck in Hot Water

Up To My Neck in Hot Water

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     Last week I headed down the road from Havre to begin my journey to Mexico. I thought I might go to Saratoga in southern central Wyoming for their hot springs. That stubborn van I drive has a mind of her own, that's for sure. She insisted we bop into Missoula and head down I-90 west, never my favorite route. Just out of St. Regis, I tripped over nostalgia, took the exit and continued north another twenty miles to Quinn's Hot Springs.

     Back in the 80's Quinn's was our favorite family get-away place, usually in the winter. I'd load the kids in the car along with a cooler of cheese, apples and orange juice. For seventeen dollars a night we stayed in a musty decrepit cabin. We changed into bathing suits, ran through the snow down the icy trail, through the bar and out back to the little round hot pool which I seldom left and the larger pool which the kids splashed in and out of all day.

     Sometimes the restaurant opened for Saturday night steaks or Sunday brunch. Most days we drove to Plains for our one restaurant meal. Otherwise we foraged from the cooler. I set up a bar tab for my kids with the admonishment that I would close it, no excuses, if they abused it. The tab covered sodas and chips and I never had to close it.

    

     Memories crowded my mind as I drove along the river and finally turned into the renovated Quinn's with newly built cabins, and a posh lodge. Inside I recognized the original bar and restaurant structure. Otherwise all the buildings were expanded or new, while keeping the simple rustic log-cabin appeal.  

     Ah, but the water, which now flows through six pools, each one a different temperature, has the same healing minerals and the restaurant serves meals full time. I arrived for a night and stayed for three. When I left, I turned north and drove the few miles to Symes Hotel in Hot Springs. I wanted more days to soak in the healing springs.

     One could say I went from posh to the pits. Or back in time about eighty years. This place is old, funky and boasts the stinkiest water. There is no cell service in town. I drove around and checked. In order to send email, I must park in the lobby with my computer. However in a postage-stamp sized room off the lobby, there is a pay telephone. When did you last see a working pay phone?

     With the curved-front dresser, boudoir chair, and tiny closet, my room in the hallway below the stairs could be the backdrop for Miss Kitty in an old-fashioned western. It is modern though. I have a toilet and porcelain sink. Showers are down the hall. From my room I hear every shout and whisper, the comings and goings of all the guests. Though more than the seventeen dollars a night for the old cabins at Quinns, this place is easy on my budget.

     Down that same hallway with the shower are makeshift rooms with huge clawfoot tubs where guests may disrobe and sink to their chins or lie full length in soft water of whatever temperature one wants, any time of the day or night.

     The water keeps me here. The water is stinky, slimy and laden with minerals that appear as tiny floating ghosts. Town folks carry off jugs of water for drinking. I hold my nose and drink it too. If they can, I can. Others fill 500 gallon tanks to haul back home to their hot tubs in Libbey or up on the Yaak. And true to the healing claims, not for a long time have I felt so good or slept so well.

     Judging from the license plates I see in the parking lot, mostly locals are here this week; local being western Montana and near-by Idaho with a smattering of Spokane. I've been here a week--does that make me a local?

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

October 10, 2013

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The Road Least Traveled—In the Footsteps of Least Heat-Moon

The Road Least Traveled—In the Footsteps of Least Heat-Moon ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
So many decisions! So many choices! After spending hours on the phone with my daughter, under the assumption that two heads are better than one, a cliché not necessarily true but I needed someone to hold my hand, we concluded that there is no wrong road.

I am now homeless. My auction sale is Saturday out at the Havre Fairgrounds, so come, say good-by to me. Early next week I will head out. All the right roads beckon. Being me, I want to drive every road. What way to take? Which way to go? I have two, no, three criteria. I want to visit my son and granddaughter and friends in Seattle. I wish to explore hot springs, so my route will necessarily zig and zag. And I intend to be at the border November 5, to be met by my friend who will help me drive south on foreign roads.

That leaves me a month to travel north border to south border. In the last week I have entertained routes and changed my mind no less than two dozen times. I could zoom over to Seattle, hugs and kisses, and race to the Border. Google map, which does not have my best interests in mind, assures me I could make the border from Harlem in 23 hours. Not my style—no, not my style at all.

Google does not know that I despise Interstate Highways. Interstates homogenize and pasteurize travel. One tends to head up the on-ramp, grip the wheel and proceed as if Death is on one’s heels, as indeed, it may be. Interstates cross through the most beautiful parts of the country and assure that you, the traveler, see none of it. You don’t dare slow down and look. You tend to eat franchise food and stay in franchise motels, all within sight of the ramps.

Like William Least Heat-Moon, I prefer to travel the "Blue Highways", the by-ways and back roads. I want to be able to stop for a power nap when tired, eat in mom-and-pop cafes, walk in the nice little city park along the river, and admire the architecture of the old buildings in the center of downtown. One of my favorite off-the-map motels features a pyramid of homemade huckleberry jellies for sale at the counter. You won’t find that at a Holiday Inn Express.

A couple days ago, I heard from Tara, one of my "girls" from when she and my daughter were in college. Tara lives in Las Vegas. She told me Vegas sits in the middle of geo-thermal heaven with more than three-hundred hot springs. Immediately my mind changed once more. I’m feeling like my neck is on a swivel.

As of today, my loosely held plan is to spend a week or ten days getting out of Montana/Idaho, soaking in hot water at some of my favorite north-country hot springs. I’ll take Highway 2 to Seattle to spend a week or ten days with family and friends, then head south. But I have not defaced my maps with markers. No route is permanent in my mind. Nothing is cast in concrete.

Leaving Seattle is where my fun really begins. This morning I lean toward I-90 to I-82 to I-84 to Pendleton, gratefully exit the interstate for 395 to Reno, a lovely and relatively empty route. From Reno perhaps I’ll head east on 50 to Ely. South on 93 to Vegas to explore and soak and visit with Tara and Tim. Or maybe Seattle to Sacramento to Reno to Vegas. Or Seattle to Ellensburg to Pocotello to Salt Lake to Vegas. See what I mean?

Leaving Vegas, I can stay on 93 into Phoenix. Somewhere along the way, I will need to turn south on 85 which will take me through Why and into Lukeville and to my border crossing. My map is rather vague about how to do this. Tele-transportation, perhaps.

If you look at the US map in the front of your travel atlas, you can see my quandary. In the western United States, there are a lot of ways to get from here to there on relatively isolated roads. Roads where one can dream; where one can imagine what life is like in this town, in that little ranch house way off over there with the yard light shining. Roads where the waitress pouring coffee stops to ask you where you’re going. She’ll tell you about the bridge out up the way and the best place to stop for lunch. Roads with towns that make one want to turn in and stay a while.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

September 26, 2013_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I Want to Ride My Bicycle—I Want to Ride My Bike

I Want to Ride My Bicycle—I Want to Ride My Bike
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I want to ride my bicycle; I want to ride it where I like. And therein lies the problem. My bicycle doesn’t go anywhere.

I grew up with a bike. I remember learning to ride, wobbly wheeled when my dad let go and I was on my own. But in no time I was riding my bike up and down our lane by myself. I rode for hours. I liked racing along the roadside. I loved the kiss of the wind in my face.

When I was twenty-three I was in a serious automobile wreck that shattered my knee. That was the end of my bike riding.

Three years ago I had knee replacement surgery. Physical therapy required that I ride a stationary bike. A friend loaned me his, lugged it down into my basement and set it up for me. He tried to talk me into putting it in the middle of my living room. I glared at him. He had no sense of aesthetics.

Every day I went faithfully to the basement for a ride. (Liar, Liar, pants on fire.) (Hush, I’m telling this story.) Okay. A few times a week, for a few weeks. I was bored. I tried to listen to music. I tried to read a book. The walls closed in on me.

My stomach clenched at the thought of going downstairs and riding that contraption into the nothingness. In a short time my exercise bicycle became a prop, a base for the card table to lean against, a divider between two bags of puffy stuff I use in my business, a clothes tree and a dryer rack.

Ha! You know just what I mean, don’t you. Yes, you. You also have an idle exercise bike or treadmill or stair-stepper in your bedroom or living room or on the porch, don’t you? I knew it. I have ideas for this seemingly useful but actually useless equipment.

With a quick welding course, a few basic tools and your inherent ingenuity, you can transform your unused exercise equipment into an objet de arte. Set your giant mosquito or pre-historic beast, or an extraterrestrial monster in your front yard. Give it a name. Your creation will generate discussion and admiration throughout your neighborhood. Folks will drive by and take photos of it—might even make the front page of the Havre Daily News.

Or make it pay. Get off the grid. With belts and pulleys and a do-it-yourself book from the library, hook your unused stationary bike or treadmill up to a battery storage pack. Now that you’ve thumbed your nose at the power company, you will be motivated to spend a part of each day riding your bicycle, smugly assured that each calorie burned will generate electricity to run the refrigerator and turn on the light. This, unfortunately, does not remove said device from your living room since you will station it where you have the best view of the television. However, this solution has multiple benefits if you have children. Each child will take a turn, contributing to familial well-being. Need I say more.

If, in your initial enthusiasm for losing weight or building a buff body, you impetuously purchased free weights, these too can be converted to a useful purpose. If you choose to separate your home from the power lines, you probably will install a wood stove in the living room. Before bedtime on those cold winter nights, heat the weights in the coals, wrap them in heavy towels, and tuck them beneath the covers to warm your feet as you drift off into dreamland. They also make marvelous patio pavers.

Or, with a blowtorch, a saw and sledge hammer, you might decide to dismantle your exercise equipment and haul it to the landfill. Tear down is best done in the back yard rather than in the living room.

Now that spring is more than a vague promise on the calendar, go to your local bicycle shop and purchase a real bicycle that you can ride wherever your heart desires. You will also buy a helmet which will make you look like a hard-shelled beetle, a spandex body suit which will emphasize every tuck and roll, and a water bottle with a hose to your mouth. I recommend draining the water and filling the reservoir with a more palatable drink. All this will set you back a few thousand dollars. Your new purchases will not take up any more space in the living room than the old equipment did.

Sondra Ashton
HDN: Looking out my back door
April 5, 2012
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Work makes you happy

Work makes you happy; I read it in a magazine so it must be true!
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My appointment was for one o’clock. As I walked over to Marcia’s for a haircut I knew I would be a few minutes early. But I also knew if I stayed home I would dig into another phase of my current project, forget the time, and be late. It suited me to while away a few moments in somebody else’s space. I let myself in Marcia’s shop door and wandered to the window to admire the new patio her husband had recently built. I sat down and picked up the top magazine from the stack on her table. I had idly flicked through several pages when this title, “Work Makes You Happy”, or something to that effect, caught my eye.

Though I snorted with derision, a quick scan of key phrases plunged me into agreement with the article’s main premise. Marcia walked through the door so I put the magazine down. But the idea of work equating with happiness had become glued to my brain.

My Dad would have loved this. Dad was a worker. If you grew up in my family, you worked. My Dad once told me that work was the only thing that gave him satisfaction. He did not know how to relax, how to find enjoyment in idle pleasures. He worked and he gardened, which is work in disguise, and I think he found equal enjoyment in both. He taught me to do whatever I did with all my heart; to do my best. I thank him for that.

I certainly never knew a moment of boredom. Nor, once they were older, were my children ever bored. One look at the gleam in my eye and they quickly found multitudes of fascinating things to do.

I grew up with too much work. Today many of us don’t have enough work. With such a plethora of labor saving devices, with whatever one desires (for a price) at one’s fingertips, with jobs structured into meaningless fragments, one might find oneself longing for the days one left the cabin in the quiet rays of dawn and returned at dusk dragging a moose, walked through the door to the pot of stew bubbling on the hearth and sour dough biscuits steaming in the dutch oven and the candle flickering on the table. I have lived too close to that and it is romantic hogwash.

My premise is that if one is going to open the door to happiness, balance is the key. I learned work from a master. Other pleasures I had to learn on my own. It took many a year for me to realize rest and relaxation are just as important as work. But they don’t negate it nor should they replace it.

The past several weeks have been filled with more work than usual. While I long for a short trip to Lincoln or Kalispell or north to Saskatchewan to visit friends, right now I must content myself with mini-vacations during each work day. So I take time out to make a batch of dill pickles. Or bake bread. Or read another few pages in my much-neglected book. These things give me great satisfaction. A knock on my door is not an unwanted interruption but an opportunity to visit with a neighbor. A trip to the post office, four blocks from home, often consumes an hour. Filling my short list at the grocery store can take even longer, with folks to chat up in every aisle.

As I work I am entertaining the thought of a real vacation at one of my favorite get-away spots, Quinn’s Hot Springs north of St. Regis. It will be a multi-purpose vacation, melding work with play. The work agenda will include planning a job with my son and his wife; play will be splashing with my granddaughter Lexi, plus hours of soaking in hot water. I envision Lexi squealing with joy as I point out the lofty mountain goats clinging to precarious perches. When she splashes water on me, I’ll pretend to be properly annoyed. Then we will giggle together.

Meanwhile, I am content with a vacation on my back steps, sitting in the sun, with cats curling their tails around my legs, blissfully aware of leaves jiggling in the slight breeze, admiring my apples hanging on the trees, redder and juicier and sweeter each day, wondering if I should harvest the potatoes today, watching the bees gathering the last sweetness from my patch of mint and the gold finches cavorting among the remnants of sunflowers. Just a few minutes more, and then back to work.

Sondra Ashton
HDN: Looking out my back door
September 22, 2011
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Up To My Neck in Hot Water

Up to My Neck in Hot Water
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It was a night much like tonight. The wind whipped sheets of snow around the corner of the house, ice rimed every surface. Snow piled in drifts which the wind, like a restless housewife, never satisfied, picked up, dragged elsewhere, then shoved back again. Temperatures had plummeted and settled with no notion of moving upward. Aspen , Karla and I sat on the floor in my living room playing rummy. The boys kneeled in the opposite corner, constructing fantastical buildings with Legos.

We were single women in Missoula , raising children, and adrift in the same boat of poverty. Karla did odd jobs about town. Aspen worked at St. Pat’s and raised two children she had not birthed but loved just the same. I put an ad in the paper and called myself the “Scissors Wizard”. I hemmed blue jeans, replaced zippers in ski jackets, and altered chiffon formals. If it could be done with a needle and thread, I did it.

Our pleasures were few, simple and mostly of our own contrivance. I had moved to town late in the fall and these women were new-found friends. Karla said, “Let’s bundle up the boys and drive out to Sleeping Child.”

Aspen walked to the window and looked outside. “In this mess? My jeep won’t even start.”

“What is ‘Sleeping Child’?” I asked. “ Hot springs ,” they answered in unison.

We emptied our purses and pockets into a pool on the floor and counted the loot. Entry was only a dollar or two and we could stay as many hours as we wanted. We had enough money leftover to put gasoline in Karla’s clunker. Mine was sitting out front with a flat tire. It would sit there a couple more weeks. I had a block of commodity cheese and a loaf of bread so I made sandwiches. Aspen lived a couple blocks across the park. She ran home and came back with orange juice. Karla had brought over brownies for later. We were set.

We packed the boys and our winter picnic lunch into the backseat of Karla’s beast of a car and headed south out of town to Sleeping Child. We undressed in the change house and, nearly naked in our bathing suits, skittered and slipped through the snow, across the ice. The boys dived into the large pool and frolicked about. We eased into the smaller hot pool. As our limbs relaxed, we basked in the heat, watched the steam roll off our shoulders. We floated and gazed, mesmerized, at the star-studded sky. Some time later fat snowflakes drifted lazily into the hot waters. On the way home we all sang songs until our worn-out boys fell asleep. Then we women, sated by the warm waters, quietly shared our fears and hopes to the tune of the tires shooshing along the snowy road.

Thereafter, nearly every week, seduced by hot water, we loaded food and boys into whosever car was running and drove out of town. We went to Lolo Hot Springs, at that time housed in a primitive barn. Sometimes we drove to Paradise and Quinn’s Hot Springs . If the roads allowed, we crossed into Idaho to Jeremiah Johnson Hot Springs , a series of bubbling pools in the briskly flowing Lochsa River .

When I moved to Washington I traded hot springs for a hot tub on my back deck, which my family and I used daily. It wasn’t the same and I missed my friends. Oh, the kids and I occasionally trekked to Olympic Hot Springs, where numerous thermal pools snuggled into the hillsides, a short drive and a long hike into the mountains near Port Angeles .

What had begun as a subtle seduction had turned into an addiction. So twenty five years later I returned to Harlem , hooked on hot water. And I had a dilemma. Sleeping Buffalo , the nearest hot spring, was a bit of a drive, though I did avail myself of its pleasures now and then. I wanted to sink to my ears in hot water every day. Most bathtubs are useless for soaking. The tubs that were deep enough cost too much, were huge and inappropriate for my tiny 1970’s bathroom. I could not afford to buy, maintain and heat a hot tub. What was a woman to do?

One day in Havre I drove up the hill to Big R and parked. Right in front of me, stacked behind the fence, in a variety of sizes and shapes, sat the solution to my problem. I nearly danced with excitement. I took some measurements, drove home and took some more measurements, drove back and bought a galvanized stock water-trough for a mere seventy dollars.

Then I proceeded to rip apart my bathroom, plumbed in the trough, lined the walls with cedar and burlap, propped an ancient wooden ladder in place of a towel rack, installed an old dresser to hold my sink, and built an outhouse surround for the commode. The traditional quarter moon on the door completed my rustic in-house out-house.

Let the wind roar, the snow fall, the drifts pile and shift and bury all evidence of yards and sidewalks and streets. Let the ice build and snow and cold have their way. Tonight I am in my own tub, in my own home, steam wafting off my shoulders, up to my neck in hot water.
Sondra Jean Ashton
Havre Daily News: Looking out my back door
January 7, 2010
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