East of Santa Maria, California, where the Santa Lucia Mountains fade into the Carrizo Plain, her parents had the little adobe ranch house built.
Her father bought the plot from a rancher he played gin rummy with at the Lakeside Golf Club in Burbank. It wasn’t much of a spread in terms of acreage but the terrain more than compensated for its size. They were next to BLM land with a dependable well and an unusual number of clusters of blue oak.
When school let out for summer, they went up to the adobe ranch house for a few months. At first, she was bored. Her parents were either in the vegetable garden or the kitchen, two places she quickly became adept at avoiding.
She spent most of her time on the patio reading. One day her brother came back from his daily explorations of the hills and canyons and showed her an elaborate coil of rope he had found.
It was frayed and brittle, crisped by the sun. Fibers like fingernail clippings fell from its strands.
They showed the rope to their father. Its filaments were scorched and its fibers baked.
He examined it carefully and commented on how skillfully it had been tied. He pointed out the precise symmetries, told them it was called a buntline coil and said it must have been out there roasting in the sun for years.
When they asked him what the name meant he said it was what sailors called a line for a sail. Her brother asked how a name used on ships wound up on a ranch. She asked if you had to be a sailor before you became a cowboy.
Her father smiled and told them he had no idea, that names were strange things and often assigned for no good reason.
The buntline coil intrigued her. She wondered who had tied it, what other skills the cowboy had, and how many different things he needed to know to do his job.
She thought it strange that a brittle length of rope from so long ago, something to hold things back or tie things down, had the opposite effect with her.
She had no idea how this old rope released her to imagine what had never been imagined before.
