LETTERS FROM HOME: TOP OF THE WORLD

Feb. 3, 1994

Dear Mom and Dad,

On Saturday, DC and I drove the twisty mountain road over to Petrolia, the place where all the sheep ranches are. The Mattole River runs green through a high valley to headlands that tower above the sea. It's "Ryan's Daughter" country.

Alexander Cockburn, who writes for The Nation, lives in Petrolia, and another 250 other people are scattered about. At that, DC wonders what they all could possibly do for a living. I think they do whatever it takes to live there.

Fifteen years ago I asked one of the ranch helpers, who had ridden her horse to work that day, why she lived way out there so far from "civilization," which at the time I equated with an interstate highway. She looked at me as if I'd pronounced sugar sour.

Later that day I walked farther out on the high hill the ranch was built on. Way up there in the bright sun the sky and the ocean merged into a disorienting blue vastness that made me want to sit down and grab hold of the hill. I began to understand why some people would live there on top of the world, so far from the rest of us, but it seemed lonely to me.

There is good and bad news from California today. The bad is that DC is miscarrying, the good that it's happening so early in her pregnancy.

We hadn't told people she was pregnant yet because we knew that miscarriages are more frequent when the mother is a first-timer. Age is another factor. Sure enough, the statistics are right.

At this point, what went wrong is a mystery and might remain one. Our bright side is that getting pregnant happened so easily.

You know all those expectant mother Christmas presents you were so curious about? Well, they were kind of an inside joke. When DC was in Cape Girardeau over Thanksgiving, she told me all she wanted for Christmas was to be pregnant. I figured a cradle and a crib toy would reassure her that my heart was in the right place, and that my body would be by Christmas Eve.

So Christmas Day, DC walked out of the bathroom, handed me a little plastic strip and asked, "What does this say?" It said she was pregnant. She said she was sorry she couldn't have made it more romantic, but it was just so shocking. After all, we'd spent so little time together.

For days she walked around saying, "I don't believe I'm pregnant." My position was that conception is more miracle than science.

More of a believer in the latter, DC tested herself again on New Year's Eve, and then had the clinic do another a week later. The positive results were getting harder and harder to question.

Then we started getting used to the idea. Thinking up names. Claire or Clayton were the frontrunners. DC the caffeine fiend went decaf, and sleep suddenly became very important. An embarrassed call actually went out for sweet gherkins at 11 o'clock one night. We didn't get far enough to find out how stereotypical we could be.

So this is marriage. Sometimes you're on top of the world, sometimes down in the valley. But always someone to hold on to.

Love, Sam