Life Lived Wild: Adventures at the Edge of the Map

by Rick Ridgeway

I took off my glasses, looked at our hundreds of friends, and asked them to hold the hands of those next to them. A choir then sang “Going Home.” Morning star lights the way, Restless dream all done. Shadows gone, break of day, Real life has begun. There’s no break, there’s no end, Just a-living on. Wide awake, with a smile, Going on and on . . . * * * For thirty of our forty years of marriage, Jennifer and I lived in the same house in Ojai, a historic Spanish Revival designed by Paul Williams, the first successful Black architect in America; we could feel his noted advocacy of self-reliance imbued in the walls. Jennifer had painted those walls with the colors of the palette of Provence favored by the Impressionists. Doug Tompkins, noted for his design aesthetic, told many of his friends it was his favorite house in the world. For my part, I told Jennifer, “Su casa es su casa.” A friend built a small box for Jennifer’s ashes out of wood from a live oak dead-felled on a neighbor’s property; the corners were perfectly mortised and tenoned. At my request he inlaid an old worn tile that Jennifer had bought in Mexico depicting Our Lady of Guadalupe on the front of the box. Mexico was Jennifer’s favorite country, and Mexicans her favorite people, and while she was not religious she did believe in spirits. And she believed that some of those spirits were guardians, and that Guadalupe was her guardian. I don’t feel Guadalupe abandoned her, but I do feel it is possible—in the way t...