Massadona, Colorado dreams of a time when explorers pushed through, when flinty voices of frontiersmen floated through the blue air.
In the house off Kanan Dume Road, the five of them prepared an impromptu meal of Rao’s Homemade Marinara Sauce, farfalle and leftover bits of chicken and pork.
Afterward, Caroline took a book from the shelf and returned to the table.
“Let me read you what Teddy Roosevelt wrote after he had left the White House. It’s from a book called A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open, written in 1916.”
Her normally casual tone downshifted into gravitas.
“’Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the ‘the game belongs to the people.’
“’So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction.
“’Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.’”
She closed the book and returned it to its place on the orderly shelf, tucked between Listening To The Voice Of The Desert by Joseph Wood Krutch and The Land Of Little Rain by Mary Austin.
The five of them had now been together for a few days. The bomb that went off on the patio of the Hotel Bel-Air had seeped out of the Los Angeles news cycle.
Each juggled feelings of restlessness with the safety of seclusion.
In Massadona, Colorado, the unsettled way the wind blew stirred up similar conflicts.
