Outside Magazine

Dody Fugate lives in a creaky, low-ceilinged prefab on seven acres of scrub outside Santa Fe. It was dark inside when I visited nearly two years ago. Navajo rugs were thrown over beige carpet matted with woodstove ash and animal feed. Mason jars were tucked into dusty bookshelves packed with cookbooks, novels, and archaeology texts.

In the garage sat a Ford pickup, the tires flat, which Dody and her husband, Paul, had driven home from the dealership in 1971. No pictures of Paul were anywhere that I could see, but his presence was all around. There was the old nameplate from his desk: “Paul B. Fugate, Park Ranger.” And pinned to the wall was a bumper sticker, white letters on a forest green background. “Where is Paul Fugate,” it read. The absence of a question mark suggested less an inquiry than a demand.

It wasn’t until my second full day here that Dody—an elfin woman in her late seventies with hip-length hair streaked gray—talked about the wrinkled work shirt and pair of jeans hanging on the back of a chair. She said they were Paul’s “civvies,” the street clothes he would have changed into after finishing work on the last day he was ever seen, four decades ago. She had no idea how long they’d been there. “People respond to these traumas in many ways,” she said when I commented on the disordered state of her home. “For a long time, I went into another dimension. I went nuts.”