Her name was Maggie Gibson, and she changed my life.
I was a shy, insecure 18-year-old away from home for the first time in my life. She was a 44-year-old widow living out a life of quiet desperation, far from the scene of her prime. We were two ships in the night who collided for eight of the most wonderful weeks of my life. Our affair, though short, was passionate in the extreme. When we first met, I was a boy; when I left her to return home, I was a man.
My name is Robert Davis, and I am a 39-year-old English professor at a prestigious private college in the South. I have also written three well-received books of historical fiction and am working on a fourth. I'm married, to a beautiful woman that I love deeply, and who loves me with equal passion, and we have three children. I've had a wonderful life, and I'm not sure any of it would have happened had I not encountered Maggie that special summer.
It was the summer after I graduated from high school in my home town in West Texas, right in the middle of oil country. My father was an ex-military man who went into the oil business and did well. He was a robust, athletic man who married a quiet, religious woman of deceptive strength. I am the youngest of four children, with two brothers and a sister, and they all took after Dad. My brothers were athletes in high school, Sis was a cheerleader and played basketball, and they all three followed Dad into the petroleum industry after attending college at his alma mater, Texas Tech.
Me? I was the misfit. I wasn't exactly a wimp, physically, but I was considerably smaller than my brothers and I was no athlete. I did run on the track and cross country teams, and did decently, but as for the other sports, I was a dud. In baseball, I couldn't hit a fastball, I didn't have any interest in playing football, and I couldn't make an uncontested layup on the basketball court if you gave me a running head start. The fact that I wasn't the athlete my brothers were reflected negatively on me, and gave me a terrific inferiority complex.
It didn't help that I inherited my mother's personality, quiet and deferential. The one area where I did excel was in the classroom. I graduated with high honors, and landed a scholarship to Tech, thanks to my high ACT and my dad's influence. It was just assumed that I would follow the rest of my family into the oil business.
The problem was, I didn't want to go into petroleum. The fact is, by the time I graduated from high school, I wanted to break out of the mold my father was trying to pour me into. I wanted to study literature, wanted to write novels, even poetry. I wanted to see the world. All of the physical sciences had been hard for me, but I had made the grades because I was smart and worked my ass off. But the liberal arts - English, history, social studies - all came easy for me, and that's what I wanted to do.
I didn't want to go to Tech and study chemical engineering, but my dad wasn't someone who took no for an answer, especially not from me. Dad never had much use for me, I think, because I was an accident that he really didn't want, and because of the way I liked to spend my time. I preferred to read, all the time, preferred it to playing outside and being "athletic," so Dad made it his business to try to "toughen me up."
Of course, it didn't help any that my mom was somewhat overprotective of me, since I was the baby, "her" baby, as it were. I always got the sense that I wasn't an accident as far as she was concerned, that she knew exactly what she was doing when she got pregnant with me, and maybe that was a cause for my dad not to like me much.
My brothers joined my dad in his quest to make me into their kind of person. When I was 16, my brother Sam, who is two years older than me, thought he'd make me a man by taking me out with his buddies and picking up some whore to fuck me. It was the single most humiliating experience of my life. It took me forever to get a hard-on, then 30 seconds after I finally got my cock in her, I came. Of course, Sam and his friends laughed at me all the way home.
I did finally learn a little about sex my senior year, when I went steady with Liza Rosen. She was sort of an outcast like me, a member of one of the few Jewish families in town, and while she wasn't bad looking, she was a little overweight. But she thought she was in love with me, and I was just happy to have a steady girl for a change.
Sex with Liza was a milder version of that night in Sam's car, however. We'd be making out, and I'd get so nervous, I either couldn't get it up, or when I did, I had trouble lasting more than a couple of minutes. She finally got tired of trying to get satisfaction from me, and just before graduation, she dumped me.
Needless to say, my self-esteem was at a particularly low ebb when I graduated that spring of 1983. But I could see salvation on the horizon. As much as a year earlier, I had applied for a summer job with the Interior Department, working at one of the national parks, and, lo and behold, I was accepted to work at Rocky Mountain National Park.
Ah, the mountains. I had been in love with the high country since we'd taken a family vacation there when I was 12. Hiking, along with running, were the only real outdoor activities that I came to enjoy, largely because of the solitude they offered. Out running, or out in the country hiking, I could be alone and daydream to my heart's content without risking the scorn of my father and my siblings.
I wasn't sure what I would find when I got to Colorado, but just being there - being away from home - would be enough. I would be there 10 weeks, beginning the first week of June. Now most of the students that hired on for the summer stayed either at one of the youth lodges or at one of two dormitories. But some of the seasonal workers stayed with families in one of the towns at the edge of the park. It was cheaper than the lodges or the dorms, and there was more supervision.
This appealed to my mother, who didn't relish the idea of turning her baby loose with a bunch of heathens. And, based on what I saw of what went on in the dorms, she was smart not to let me. As frustrated and as low as my self-esteem was at that point in my life, I might well have fallen into some activities that I really didn't need, like drugs and alcohol. I had managed to avoid those pitfalls through high school, for the most part. I had gotten drunk on whiskey one time when I was a sophomore (my brother's doing, naturally), and I was as sick as I could ever remember being. I did subsequently learn to handle a beer or two and maybe a glass of wine, but I really didn't like liquor much. And the one time I smoked pot, I hacked my lungs out and it didn't do anything for me.
Mom, being a devout Methodist, used some of her church contacts to try to find a family to take me in. However, by the time she got around to looking into it, all of the families from the Methodist churches in Estes Park and Grand Lake, the two towns at either end of the park, were already booked up. But not to fear, Mom was told, the librarian in Estes Park, a widow, also took in summer boarders, and she was still available.
So, on Memorial Day, I packed up my little Mazda pickup with everything I thought I'd need for 10 weeks in Colorado and set off for the summer. When I finally got to Estes Park the next day, I expected to be greeted by a wizened old lady. I mean, Mrs. Gibson was a widow, right?
So imagine my shock when the door to her quiet little cottage opened to reveal a stunning redheaded beauty in her 40s. At first I thought I was in the wrong place, then maybe that she was Mrs. Gibson's daughter. But, no, she WAS Mrs. Gibson. And from that moment on, she had me spellbound.
Even today, 21 years later, I remember everything about her. She was a little taller than average, maybe 5-foot-7, with a long, thick mane of curly red hair that fell nearly to her waist. She had dazzling green eyes that actually twinkled when she smiled, flawless skin liberally peppered with freckles, and a sturdy body to whom time had been gracious. It was a woman's body. She had wide hips, a slight swelling at the belly and breasts that were large without being excessive. Earthy. That's the word that best describes how she was then.
But you could clearly see, too, the sadness in her soul. She'd been born Maggie Boyle in South Boston, daughter of a man who had fled the Irish Civil War in the 1920s, or at least that was the story she'd always been told. Maggie herself suspected that he hadn't fled, so much as he'd been planted, for she said he was always organizing something or another for Irish freedom groups, which she believed were fronts for the IRA.
At any rate, her father had been a heavy drinker, and had taken out his frustrations on his long-suffering wife and children. Maggie had left home as soon as she could to attend college in New York City, where she had met Russ Gibson. He was from California, and it didn't take much persuasion for him to convince her follow him out West, to San Francisco. She and Russ had gotten married out there, and were deep in the heart of the hippie movement. Those were the best times of her life. They had done the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll thing, but they also were active with various support groups, because they were older, and they helped out the hordes of starry-eyed kids who flocked to the area in 1966 and 1967.
Eventually, however, they had gotten burned out on that scene, and had moved to the country, and then to Colorado. By then, however, they both had significant drug habits, but Maggie had beaten hers. Russ, however, never really got a chance to beat his. One night in 1972, driving over an icy mountain road while drunk and high, Russ' car had left the road and plunged off the mountain. She said it took dental records to identify the body.
Maggie had been shattered by her loss, and had slowly, but surely closed off her life. She had been the librarian in Estes for eight years now, the perfect job for someone who seemed to prefer being alone. Her one real contact with the outside world was her church, and the kids she'd boarded for the summer for the Park Service to make some extra money. I was the seventh one she'd hosted, and while the others had been all right, they had been more interested in partying and chasing members of the opposite sex than anything else. Her only ironclad rule was no drugs were allowed in her house, not even marijuana. She said she'd known a few of the kids she'd had were users, but they kept it out of her sight, either stashed away tightly or in their vehicles.
The first couple of days were spent doing some sight-seeing, completing the paperwork for my job, and getting to know each other. Somehow, I got the sense from the first that she was attracted to me, because she seemed to open up to me. I guess I was different from the other kids she'd had. I was interested in books and reveling in the natural beauty, and we had remarkably similar personalities.
The first Saturday I was there, she took me into the park on a long hike. I found out that, like me, hiking was one of Maggie's few outdoor passions, and for the same reason, the solitude. The park is full of trails for every level of hiker, and features some stunning vistas. Although I thought I was in shape from track, the thin air at 10,000 feet left me winded and exhausted by the time we got back to her house.
