Nicholas
Chapter 2
In the late summer of 1968, Nicholas Card returned to Berkeley to celebrate his 20th birthday at the Mill Street Brewery. He’d spent the summer in the golden-grassed hills that rose up from the Bay riding fast ponies and herding longhorns into upper and lower forties. The California beef industry was booming, and he’d loved the cowboy lifestyle for its realness — for the concentration it required and the way it tethered his mind. The leather of the reins, the animal smell of the horses, the clap of their hooves on packed earth, the scream of the steers, the dried salt on his neck when he removed his kerchief at each day’s end. He’d even loved the other men, hard men, ranchers, and sons of ranchers, who’d not grown up in the cloistered enclaves of academia and class-consciousness. Their faces, like hides, were tanned and lined. Their shoulders were broad and sinewy. Their women were thickly, like the dry loaves of bread that emerged brittle from their ovens. Nick, they’d called him, and he’d appreciated that they’d not excluded him, but embraced him when they’d seen his willingness to work.
He’d arrived on the ranch with 2 other boys his age and had immediately set to work demonstrating his ethic. He rose at 4 each morning and retired at 10 in the evenings. He’d water and wash the horses before the camp stirred, and he’d light the camp-fires with the cook in the pre-dawn darkness. It didn’t take him long to find comfort in the saddle, and within a few days, he was galloping through the long grasses, clipping past more experienced riders.
The adrenaline of such pure muscular power surging underneath him, carrying him across the earth at great speeds, had for him the feeling of an elixir, and on some days, when the men finished their work early, he’d unsaddle his horse, and gallop bare-back across the plains until he came upon some lonely stand of live oak. There he’d dismount and stomp his boots into the dust to scare off rattle-snakes, before leaning against the trunk and removing his hat to examine the new sweat stains piling on top of the old, like the jagged layering of mountain ranges. On these days, as though famished, he would devour the works of Thoreau, London, Stevenson, and Kipling, their heroes and adventures and places bleeding into him, and then he would sprint his horse back across the plain as the sun bled into the sea.
Nicholas returned that fall to a Berkeley mad with rebellion, and he took up the chorus of the other anti-war activists, protesting and marching alongside women that at night would pass him LSD and weed and shrooms and spin his mind into ecstatic oblivions. His mother lauded his every move, and in the classrooms, the side-burned professors further incensed the righteousness of their revolution.
