Ada's return to the Wolf Creek Ranch for the duration of the war years was a period of fantasy isolation from the world gone mad around them punctuated by shocking reminders that they were part of that world.
Beth proved to be a real delight for Ada—the daughter she had always wanted but that the Spanish flu had ripped out of her arms. Ada didn't know how she ever could have gotten the notion she'd had that being the daughter of a Hollywood movie star would make Beth's adjustment to life in the Wolf Creek valley an impossibility. The ranch did, indeed, need Ada's guiding hand, but Beth had done very well in managing both the ranching part and the celebrity entertainment part of the business. The clientele now was slightly different than it once had been, being composed more of the actor friends of Beth's parents rather than primarily artists and writers of Ada's days. But upon Ada's reappearance, her own set of artists and writers began reappearing. This war was even more frustrating and debilitating for Americans than any prior upheaval since the Civil War had been. In such circumstances, there always were the well-heeled and high-tempered celebrities who wanted to drop out of the limelight and the realities of life from time to time. And Wolf Creek Ranch was still good medicine for that.
Ada doted on her grandson, John, now nearly five when Ada returned to the ranch in early 1942. He was a sunny and active child, and Ada couldn't resist think of the namesake grandfather he would never know whenever she watched him playing in the sanding drive in front of the vast lodge front porch.
There were few men about to be employed at the ranch, all of the able-bodied and productive ones having gone off to war. But there were a few ranch hands who had been with the Wolf Creek Ranch for decades who helped Ada and Beth with the hard work required to minimally maintain operations. Some of the other ranching families in the valley weren't as lucky, however.
Ada's love for her daughter-in-law was solidified when Ada was called to the nearby valley-bottom farming ranch of an old friend of hers, whose husband had died and sons were now all off in the war. They'd planted the hay before they left and it was now sitting in the field, waiting to be harvested. But there was no one to harvest it—or at least not enough hands to harvest it. This was where Wolf Creek Ranch had been getting its hay for the horses used at the dude ranch stables for decades, but the hay was sitting there in the field. It would rot, the dude ranch wouldn't have the hay it needed, and Ada's friend would go under in a mound of debt.
Ada and her friend were standing on the porch of the woman's ranch house, commiserating with each other about how much damage wars did to the fabric of the economy much less people's lives, when Beth rode up with several of the guests at the ranch. She had told them of the situation and made cutting and bailing of hay sound like a real neat dude ranch outing, and they all pitched in and had the woman's fields stripped and her livelihood protected for that year within a week. The guests left saying this was the best vacation from the worries they had waiting for them themselves in the greater world that they ever could have wished for—and steeped in a good yarn to impress their city-bound friends and in the satisfaction of having accomplished basic manual work—and Ada and Beth left arm and arm, with a renewed respect and love for each other.
The first, straight to their hearts, jolt of war lightning stroke the peaceful Wolf Creek valley ranch in February of 1943, when Beth received notification that Hugh's ship, the destroyer USS De Haven, had been sunk in the South Pacific in the Battle of Guadalcanal, with Hugh listed among the missing seaman. Relief came weeks later when they heard he had survived and was being transferred to the destroyer USS Kearney in the Mediterranean theater. But the death's hand had already been sighted from the knoll on which the lodge sat for the first time, and no arrival of the post or knock at the door would be the same for the remainder of the war.
The Colorado guardsmen, who included not only Ada's stepson, Jess Wolf, but her former lover and savior, Congressman Peter Fair, as well, were rolled into the Army's 157th Regiment of the 45th (Thunderbird) Division and inserted into the war in Oran, Africa, in the summer of 1943. They were part of the army that landed in the boot of Italy and worked its way all the way up the Italian Peninsula, through France, and into Germany through the next two, grueling years.
Ada learned of the death of Peter Fair, at the Anzio beachhead landing in February 1944, when a tearful Aunt Martha called her from the Slater post office and told her all of the Colorado government offices had been told to fly their flags at half staff for their fallen congressman. Martha's husband, Thaddeus, who had been close to Peter since they had been sent from Detroit over twenty-five years earlier by James Shaffer to drive Ada and her family from Indiana to Colorado, was devastated by the news. By the summer of that year, Thaddeus was also dead, of a heart attack, an unacknowledged victim of a seemingly never-ending world war.
Soon thereafter they had received word that Jess Wolf also was missing in battle, just north of Anzio, but eventually they learned he'd worked his way back to Allied lines from a surrounded position and was doing fine—and, in fact, had been promoted to major and was up for a medal for having brought his men and the wounded men in what had been a hospital position to safety. But the war was dragging on, and so many of the Colorado men were being killed in the fighting, that Beth and Ada were losing hope for those in their own family.
It was almost a bittersweet comical scene one day in late August 1944 when Beth came rushing out of the lodge toward the stable where Ada was brushing down horses and, scattering celebrities left and right and waving a telegram in her hand, jubilantly cried out to her mother-in-law as she ran, "Good news, Ada! Jess's been shot."
The good news part was that he had received nonlife-threatening wounds through the muscles of his calves in a sniper attack in the Vosges Mountains of France when the regiment was preparing to push into Germany and had been sent back to Rome to recuperate. This meant he was out of the fighting, if for only a little while, and wouldn't have to face the German army defending its own homeland on the Rhine.
It was then, while he was recuperating in Rome, that Jess started to correspond with Ada, at first asking about how the family and his ranch were doing and, eventually, over the next three months in three exchanges that went between them, how Ada herself was doing. They both went into what they each wanted to do after the war, and Ada felt that, through these letters, she could open up and discuss where she was in her life as she couldn't do and hadn't done with anyone else.
