The rare book room in Gisela's time was way up at the top floor of the building and was not a popular place, long and lavish as it was with ranks and ranks of stacks, ancient volumes and boxed documents behind a locking wooden door. As such it made a special refuge for a naive and impractical girl aged nineteen, full of visions of northern horizons and all manner of romance, however/wherever it happened into her grasp of a situation. The sturdy German-born librarian, with long black ponytails and teasing blue eyes, had skin as brown as ancestors from other land masses, other latitudes documented far back into time. I would talk to her of my obsessions and fears, all very abstract, and she would listen, listen and sympathize or starkly critique me in her dark European voice full of inflections and frequent snorted chuckles. Sometimes she would be swiftly harsh in her opinions, yet unfailingly discreet, as much given to scoffing as to reverence, toward me or whomever and whatever was the subject. Her judgment came of wide experience, since she had been a classroom teacher in Germany, a gymnastics instructor, an orchestra violist and music teacher, and later, in America, had been involved in 1960s political demonstrations. With two or more PhD degrees she was mentally quick in her reasoning and conclusions while gifted with strong intuition, which made her a decisive critic as well as a giver of apt suggestions where art, writing, cooking, plant propagation or a love or friendship were under discussion.
She had a little house with a quince tree, a hammock in the yard, and gardens with beans and rhubarb, root vegetables and cucumbers, strawberries and medicinal herbs such as comfrey. Off in the hardwood forest of surrounding Owen County, Indiana grew pawpaw trees and the occasional persimmon, black gum and sycamore, eastern cottonwood, black walnuts, oaks and maples and tulip trees. Ginseng and golden-seal were two scarce herbs that could be foraged there, which Gisela would harvest sparingly and sell at local marketplaces where they would be shipped off to end-users in Asia. At week-ends down at her house I tasted a green persimmon (so bitter I could taste it with imaginary taste buds seated on my teeth) and breakfasted on guinea-fowl and duck eggs from a neighboring small farm, shared in the task of making butter with a vintage glass butter churn that operated with wooden paddles inside, assisted in the hourly pressing of wild honey out of a section of tree trunk placed on the hearth to loosen the honeycomb that was hardened by December's cold, and later one June heard and saw the only Kentucky warbler I have ever encountered, a few steps away down her county gravel road.
The house, including its few acres of backwoods, was something she had just managed to buy out of earnings from the IU Lilly library half an hour's drive away. This house had only two rooms with a back bathroom, and had a root cellar which, if I remember correctly, Gisela had hand-dug under a few square feet of the main room, opening with a trap door. A rear sun porch with translucent green vinyl siding and roof was more of her own handiwork. Cats lived out on the front porch, which was open sided, but were not allowed indoors; in later years domestic geese gained residency around the entire yard and gardens, which they patrolled with shrill vigilance. In June of 1980 as a guest for my first time I spent the night in the hammock that hung from two trees, hearing no end of whippoorwill cries from the forest floor in each direction. Sultry heat, sung by cicadas with that pulsating intro and ebbing buzz that speaks to me Indiana and equivalent latitudes, a song I've yet to hear in Minnesota where by now I've lived most of my life, made up the soundstage of those summer or early-fall days. The forest's leaves, crisp and darkly green, as long and broad as shoe-soles, encircled the yard on three sides, for Gisela had left the the woods alone where ground for pathways or gardens or a bit of light and air current had not needed claiming.
Some time after I was gone away to study and live in the north, first to London, Ontario and subsequently to Minnesota, Gisela met, fell in ecstatic love with and married the son of a neighbor, Clyde Terrell, among other descriptions a pond-builder with carpentry skills, an appetite for history and back-country lore who owned a bulldozer and wanted release from an unhappy marriage. Gisela, who had known marriage, desertion and widowhood all three, destitution and hunger and a few of the personal dangers that can confront young foreigners who are obviously on their own, helped him with the process of getting a divorce, since each of the new couple had independently longed to move west to the mountains. They lived for a few years together in Owen County, then in the early 1990s left to scout Wyoming and Montana for a homestead. They found land they could buy within the Bighorn Range, in Sheridan County, Wyoming, in the village of Story, where they established a cabin and gardens and kept horses during what must have been about eleven exhilarating though financially challenging years. With the approach of 2005 Clyde, nearing the age of 70, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Gisela, as she told me last year, was 'under no illusions' as she cared for him, driving him to and from Denver for treatments, till his death on Labor Day week-end of that year.
So in this dignified aftermath of a dream pursued, met and lived, and heartbreak, and many mountain afternoons spent alone or with Clyde following trails, at trout streams and in dells below the sheerest of peaks, snow-cooled and re-baked by desert heat, and following many orchestral concerts in which Gisela played her viola for weddings, wakes or reunions, and rehearsals in donated space or lessons given in her living room, I met my old friend again after twenty-one years of irregular contact limited to phone, letter or email. This was on the third of June, 2012, as I followed her printed directions off westbound I-90, past Buffalo, nearing but not yet as far as Sheridan.
The log house where I found her was strange yet familiar, a transformation of the old clapboard shack in Indiana, having the same dark interior, jovial signs painted and hung in bathroom or kitchen, dried herbs dangling from the ceiling, and floor to ceiling book cases. Now, minimized in their midst, was also a computer. In the yard stood ponderosa pines and, out back, well-spaced aspen and narrowleaf cottonwood that provided a flickering shade.
We spent most of one week visiting, sharing evening or midday dinners that included heart of deer and bear meat pot roast (friends and neighbors had traded or given her the wild game, though she shot and dressed a deer per year on her own land for the venison as Clyde had taught her how to do) and taking car trips into the highest elevations of the Bighorn Range, seeing moose and marmot, summer snowpack, mesas, torrents within red canyons and sagebrush flatlands. All alone at the top of a Douglas fir one day I heard the song of an Audubon's warbler, the western version of our yellow-rumped warbler found east of the prairies, impossibly wistful and ringing between rock heights like the sincerest utterance of forlorn hopes.
Once as we hiked a road together I noted that Gisela, who long ago had exceeded my height by a couple of inches, but had acquired a hunch in her shoulders, now stood a tad shorter than me. But her stride made me hurry my fastest to keep up--even though she was nearly seventy years of age to my fifty-two and a smoker who'd smoked little brown cigars for as long as I'd known her. The gardens, the old sheepdog Mya and the attraction of mountain slopes not very far in the distance, a backdrop to all errands into the yard, kept her constantly stepping, striding, stooping, hauling, mixing, toting, bowing, tuning, summoning, often braving spasms of arthritis. She had grown stringy, stooped with constant busyness, on a diet centered around lean meat and her own fruit and vegetables. Her ways were the ways of our forebears on six continents.
In my mind she's a persistent survivor, to the extent that I wonder when if ever I'll accept her as a mortal human being truly dead. From most of what she ever said to me I think she believed she'd live to a ripe old age well beyond seventy, and so, had she lost the desire and outlook to attain great age, especially as a veteran tobacco user? At this stage I expect never to learn how she died, if it was sudden or long premeditated, attended by someone or in solitude, eminently influenced by Clyde's death at the same age of seventy years or coincidentally over and done with by that age.
A book I'm currently enjoying, Old Border Road by Susan Froderberg, Little, Brown and Company ©2010, has in its middle the quotable lines: "And do not the dead surely lay their claim? Perhaps more so than the living....Do as commanded or elsewise live in fear. Girl, I tell you this--death is but one less day to be afraid." And so, with the certain sense that the dead do live on inside those of us who knew them best or longest, I rest and act upon the discernments phrased by Gisela--that life is not easy, that it goes back on you just when you're lifted up by your fortunes, that mullein is safely gathered alongside highways and railway rights of way with today's pollution-control technology in cars, trucks and locomotives, that on meeting a cougar in open country you must simply stand your ground and make yourself look as big as possible.
I remember her AMC Gremlin down in Indiana, its rusting body held together by flowers and caterpillars, raindrops and other beautification painted up and down it in different colors of enamel, and the Ford Fiesta that succeeded it. I remember the days she didn't come in to the library due to car trouble, or the summer day she had to stop at every creek between Indianapolis and the town of Spencer to re-fill the radiator with a bucket. I remember the day we came upon car thieves dismantling vehicles beside a shallow pond in a pasture, and she made me stand aside while she passed them at close range to be sure they saw that she saw. (Later, they murdered her young dog Troll with a shotgun blast at close range, and were subsequently rounded up and flushed out of Owen County for good by outraged rural neighbors who showed up in a group with an ultimatum on hearing of what had happened.)
She was a person as large as all humanity, whose code of ethics and acceptance of other traditions she had pieced together from life-ways variably old and much forgotten, civilized American, native American, civilized and pre-civilized Eurasian--that is my best assessment of Gisela. But by now she's no longer in a position to argue with me...
Gisela,is indeed lucky to have had you as a friend as you were to have her.
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