The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

Dust-devils are baby tornadoes in the desert. They wander around in summertime, sniff a sand-dune here, a bunch of sagebrush there, send them a thousand feet into the sky . . . dust-devils can go wherever they feel like going and do whatever they want to do.

With the generator running again, Leslie finished cleaning the trailer, put down the vacuum cleaner, glanced out the window. "Wookie, come see the huge dust-devil!"

I unfolded from under the water-heater, which was refusing to heat water. "My, that is a big one!"

"Hand me the camera, please, I want a picture."

"Camera was stolen," I said. "Sorry."

"The little new camera, on the bottom shelf. Quick, before it's gone!"

I handed her the camera and she snapped a picture from the trailer window. "It's getting bigger!"

"Not really bigger," I said. "It seems bigger, because it's getting closer."

"Is it going to hit us?"

"Leslie, the odds against that dust-devil, which has got the entire Nevada desert to move around in, the odds

against that dust-devil hitting this tiny trailer parked in the middle of nowhere are on the order of several hundred thousand to one. ..."

Then the world shook, the sun went out, our awning ripped its struts from the ground and exploded thrashing on the roof, the door burst open, windows howled. Sand, powdered dirt like a mine-collapse, billowed down our hallway. Curtains stood straight out inside the room, the house rocked, set to fly. It was familiar, a plane-crash without the view.

Then the sun blinked on, the howling stopped, the awning fell in a ragged heap, strewn on the side of the trailer.

". . . make that," I gasped, "that the chances ... of hitting us ... are on the order ... of two to one in favor!"

Leslie was not amused. "I just finished cleaning, finished dusting, this whole place!" If she could have gotten her hands around the neck of that tornado, she would have taught it about thrashings.

As it was, the devil had a full ten seconds to work on the trailer, so it stuffed forty pounds of sand through the screens and windows and doors. That much earth in so few square feet-we could plant potatoes on the kitchen counters.

"Wookie," she said hopelessly, "do you ever get the feeling that we are not meant to live here? That it is time for us to move on?"

I put down the wrench I had clutched through the storm, my heart filled with warm agreement. "I was just about to ask you the same thing. I'm so tired of living in a little box on wheels! It's been more than a year! Can we stop? Can we find a house, a real house somewhere that isn't made of plastic?"

She looked at me strangely. "Do I hear Richard Bach talking about settling down, a permanent place?"

"Yes."

She cleared a spot in the sand on the chair and sat quietly.

"No," she said. "I don't want to put my heart into getting a house and fixing it up and then stop in the middle of it if you decide you're restless and the experiment didn't work. If you're still convinced the boredom will get us, sooner or later, we're not ready for a house, are we?"

I thought about it. "I don't know."

Leslie thought we were finding inner horizons, frontiers of the mind; she knew we were on our way to discovering pleasures that neither she nor I could find alone. Was she right, or merely hopeful?

We've been married more than a year, ceremony or not. Do I still bow to the old fears? Did I sell my biplane and go searching for a soulmate to learn how to be afraid? Have I not been changed by what we've done together, have I learned nothing?

She sat without moving, thinking her own thoughts.

I remembered the days in Florida, when I had looked at my life and it was dead in the river-lots of money and airplanes and women, zero progress living. Now there's not nearly so much money, and before long there may be none. The airplanes are most of them sold. There's been one woman, only one. And my life is moving swift as a racing-boat, so much I've changed and grown with her.

Each other's company our sole education and entertainment, our life together had grown like summer clouds. Ask a woman and a man sailing their boat over oceans, aren't you bored? how do you pass the time? They smile. Not enough hours in the year to do what needs be done!

Same for us. Delighted we had been, laughed sometimes till we could not stand, scared now and then, tender, desperate, joyous, discovering, passionate . . . but not one second bored.

What a story that would make! How many men and women go through the same rivers, menaced by the same sharp cliches, the same jagged dangers that had threatened us! If that idea stands up, I thought, it would be worth uncovering the typewriter! How Richard-years-ago would have wanted to know: What happens when we set off searching for a soulmate who doesn't exist, and find her?