BEGINNINGS
By Georgia Hesse
I was born on the 28 Ranch on the south fork of Crazy Woman Creek in the shade of Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. (That’s what my father taught me to say and only if asked. The other possibility was “I’m Judith Basin. Judy from Judith Basin.”)
The outlines of the earth were clear. When I turned my back to the metropolis
of Buffalo (pop. 2,500) and, farther north, Alaska and Jack London, I looked south to Cheyenne, the Wicked Black Hills of South Dakota lay off to my left. Beyond stretched the Chicago stockyards and, east of them, you found New York and Broadway, where people sang and danced in the streets. Next, “over the water” as Grandmère Hesse said, stood sacred London where the Queen lived, observed by a cat.
Beyond the wall of the Big Horns, to my right, sat romantic Fresno, California, where our babysitter vacationed, next to the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco of the Earthquake. (“I must buy something to wear in Frezzz-no,” the babysitter would trill.) Beyond the Pacific, everything was China, the home of Marco Polo.
The world itself was Wyoming and the 28 Ranch was the center of it. An irrigation ditch from a clear creek named Clear Creek burbled through our yard and ran beyond the fence to who-knew-where: China for certain. My sister and I took some rubber dolls apart (Polly, Jack, and Little Wee, they were), tied their limbs to handy shingles, and sent them off downstream for the poor children of the Starving Chinese to play with. Days later, when my horse Mike stopped to sip, I spotted a rubber leg in the weeds. I didn’t tell my sister Marjo. She was too young to suffer failure.
What mattered, even then, was to move. My father would say let’s go and he didn’t like to wait. I would pack provisions: a bottle of Nesbitt’s Orange (“Nesbitt’s name on orange drink is like Sterling stamped on silver”), some Hershey’s chocolate, broken into squares if I had the time, and several comic books to be read and then sung about in the back seat of the Buick (“Poor little Captain Marvel, smallest of the forty-eight”).
The West was enormous. We rolled across it, headed for places with never-never-land names: KOA Denver and Santa Fe and Marfa, Texas, where the waitress put real butter on the table even though there was A War On.
Homeward bound, I stood in the back seat while my sister and brother slept and Mother snoozed in front. My father, silent at the wheel, and I would steer through black night, winked at by thousands of stars, until once again we reached the Wyoming state line and it was safe to fall asleep.
Once our father took my brother to Miles City, Montana, where they saw a
revolving door. We visited The Grandparents in the Black Forest near Colorado Springs where, if the car went fast, you could hurdle over humps and feel sick. We took a ferry from Seattle to Victoria (anything British, as in British Columbia, was good), and to celebrate the voyage threw rolls of toilet paper out of the porthole in the Ladies Room — in tribute to Neptune, I think.
We sailed paper airplanes (fashioned from hotel stationery) off the balconies of Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel, but we were awed by the Empress Hotel in Victoria and sat during teatime without wiggling.
Eventually, the grown-up trips began. We moved to Billings, Montana, where a Hammond organ played in the lobby of the Northern Hotel. I went skiing in Deadwood, South Dakota, with Charles Rashleigh Richard Ball III, and we got stuck in a blizzard. Once my team — the Rapid City Cobblers — played in the basketball finals at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, someone put an empty bottle of Old Crow in my dorm room bed, and on the way home, we stopped at Wall Drug Store in Wall.
One autumn when birch leaves trembled, I packed a Cornelia Otis Skinner-type steamer trunk and left home for Carleton College in Minnesota. The physical world was closed in by snowbanks but the mental one opened upon the Minneapolis Symphony, the Minnesota Vikings football team, real paintings in real galleries, jazz, professors who vacationed abroad and who prefaced their lectures with intrigues: “As anyone who’s driven over the heather in an Austin Six knows…”; or “We were attacked by mushrooms in Bloomington, Indiana.”
I rode a mule into the depths of the Grand Canyon and found trilobites in its walls.
On a day when spring came again, four years later, I moved the tassel on my mortarboard from left to right and wondered what to do for a living.
That autumn I sailed for France on the Queen Mary and have never looked back — until now.
Note from Don George 2.13.22
Georgia’s nephew Craig sent me this essay of Georgia’s, a wonderful remembrance of her youth. I think you will all be as enchanted by it as I was! It’s quintessential Georgia!!
Biography: Courtesy of Russell Johnson
Georgia I. Hesse was born on the 28 Ranch on Crazy Woman Creek at the foot of Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. A B.A. graduate of Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, she then studied political science as a Fulbright scholar at Paris’ Sorbonne, then at the University of Strasbourg in Alsace, France. She became the founding travel editor of the San Francisco Examiner (flagship of the Hearst chain) and then of the Examiner-Chronicle. Georgia holds the Ordre National du Mérite from the French government and the Chevalier l’Ordre de la République from Tunisia. Her articles have appeared in many national magazines and newspapers and she is the author of travel guides to France and California by three publishers, and a contributor to several anthologies. Georgia passed away on February 4, 2022, at the age of 88.
