HIDING OUT

by Roberta Jean Bryant


Growing up in Santa Fe, New Mexico I had two favorite hideouts. Indoors I’d take a blanket and pillow and a stack of library books into the high top shelf of my bedroom closet where I’d have to shinny up the doorframe to gain access. Outdoors I’d take my books and climb up into the backyard tree house -- both happy places where my mother couldn’t find me.

Hideouts have been an integral part of my life ever since. As a teenager my mother was running Skyview Lodge (an early version of a motel for summertime tourists). It was two stories tall with the Southwestern pueblo-style architecture that featured a flat tarpaper roof. My books and I would migrate up top when there were chores to be done.

When I was eighteen I rode along with a friend and her mother to Chicago. After they left I stayed for my first solitary travel adventure. I got a trainee job and hid out in a Michigan Avenue pea-soup-green basement room where I shared a bathroom with the tailor shop down the hall.

The next year in college at Highlands University in Las Vegas (New Mexico not Nevada) I had to live in the women’s dorm with a doors-locked curfew at ten o’clock. I’d sneak out of the dorm several nights a week to hide out at Storrie Lake with my boyfriend and a shared sleeping bag.

We later married and my hiding places grew increasingly desperate in my increasingly manic-depressive life. In manic phase I’d shriek at the children and leave the house to huddle around the corner near the garbage cans until I could “get a grip.” Depression was a gray hideout all its own.

Years later when I began to earn money from my writing I made a down payment on a large station wagon to ferry the kids around in. The station wagon became my favorite hideout and my symbol of independence.

Divorce brought me a nine months reprieve from daily motherhood and a place of my own at the Blue Ridge apartments; finally, a place of my own, and no need to hide anywhere else. Then, a return to motherhood, and my car became my refuge once again; my car, and my queen-sized bed -- half for sleeping and half serving as a makeshift desk.

My next move was into a small office suite on Eastlake just north of downtown Seattle. I decided to temporarily sleep on a futon in the larger room where I held classes until I could afford a separate apartment of my own. With the doors locked and the drapes closed I had once again a place of my own. Eight and a half years later I discovered that temporary had obviously meant eight and a half years of camping out in my office.

Deciding to actively promote my second book, I closed down my office, put furniture in storage, and bought a small RV that functioned as a hideout on wheels. I became an itinerant teacher, working my way down the west coast presenting workshops in the major cities, attending American Book Association conventions, doing book signings in independent bookstores.

I figured if I couldn’t eke out a living, or got tired of all the driving and phoning, I could always return to Seattle and open up an office again. I knew how to do that. In the meantime I was living out my teenage dream of traveling for a living. My hope chest had been a cardboard carton full of travel folders. Marriage and children had sidetracked me for several decades. When I was back in the Seattle area I parked in what my oldest daughter-in-law called the “mother-in-law driveway.”

I loved my vagabond life. For twelve and a half years I loved my vagabond life. I finally had reached retirement age, was tired not so much of traveling as the upkeep and breakdowns of an aging vehicle, and put my name on a waiting list for senior housing.

My final hideout is my senior housing one-bedroom apartment; third-floor western exposure. All I see out my windows are trees and sky and occasional spectacular sunsets. People tell me the place is tiny, but having lived in a small RV for years, it still feels spacious to me. I feel like I’m living in the best of both the hideout worlds of my childhood. It’s clean and warm like my closet shelf, and hidden in the trees to give me a perfect tree house perspective.