Penthesilea's Wish [Vol.1]

Chapter Twenty-nine

Five hours later, Daniela had finished her office tasks for the day. These consisted of graphically appealing to the public's avarice for material things by pushing buttons and working monotonously with a mouse on a computer. She had become quite adept at accomplishing this through texts, design layout, line, and color. And she had just applied the last themed enhancements to an insipid project for time-share vacation homes when she abruptly turned off the monitor.

As a reward for her servitude, she glanced out the office window to take in the image of more real and pastel light exuding out across the City. At this point in the drudgery of her day she could not wait to take the elevator to the parking garage and begin her escape out into the cooler, greener ambience, north of the Golden GateBridge. It was to be once again an afternoon and evening of salvation on horseback.

Leaving the City in her cream colored Smart, Daniela finally made her way across the mouth of the Bay and on to the Waverly Riding Club, an oasis in the majestic foothills. Quickly and mechanically, she saddled Baylor in the stable and rode him out at full gallop to her recent place of hegira-a world beyond the club's designated trails. It was through these paths considered "off-limits" for riders and up the steep mountain side where the incline leveled off and morhped into a wooded paradise. A place where Daniela for the past six months had felt the only liberation from a universe that continued to close her in-with a vengeance.

Her hair was still down, loose and free as she entered the stables restroom. There, she changed into a lax-fitting shift over her yoga pants, for further freedom. Her legs felt bare against Baylor, save for her riding boots, and the sensual familiarity of being against his warm bulk of muscle was comfortable. Daniela cared little now for how she appeared to the pretentious patrons of the riding club-those certain members who could not refrain from asking where she had gone on these recent afternoons, now lasting just before nightfall.

All her life Daniela had been told she must conform. To look the part of the elite San Franciscan family she was a born into. And this stemmed from four generations in that incomparable city. Her great, great grandfather had become wealthy as an innovator-shipping ice for refrigeration down from Alaska to the West coast as far south as San Diego. It was a lucrative undertaking for those times. He had taken freight car-size blocks of frozen fresh water from the lakes of the Yukon, and inclosing them aboard ships in insulated crates, later sold smaller blocks of ice wholesale to icehouses then in the late 19th century. This entrepreneurial effort had begun shortly after California's great boom, following the seminal California Gold rush of 1849.

Daniela's father's father, Lawrence Collins, had promoted the established family name in the City with shipping ties to become a prominent member of the Board of Directors for the San Francisco Port Authority, serving on it admirably for almost forty years. It was his generation that had inherited a small catalog of choice properties in some of the most exclusive neighborhoods located in the downtown metropolitan area, high over the bay. The rental revenue from these commercial holdings and domestic real-estate tracts multiplied in value many times over in two generations, insuring Daniela's present family a fortune for the rest of their lives and for generations to come.

Having no brothers or sisters only added to her isolation as a child and over-protected upbringing. Yet, in spite of these factors, she had tried to maintain a normal life. This was evidenced by her willingness to work. Though recently, even that endeavor, which had once given her life purpose, was now held in the balance as she desperately felt a need for something to counteract her present discontent and inner lack of relevance. This sentiment now seemed to consume all things that took up her time and energy.

Finishing parochial high school and leaving home to live in a dormitory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, only served to reconfirm her inadequacies of confidence and lack of independence instead of helping to overcome them. As a young girl in grade school Daniela was often teased for her mouse-like demeanor and lack of assertiveness. And it was only much later after leaving the TempletonCatholicHigh School for girls, that Nicasio was to be her first crush, her surrogate counselor and friend. During her second year of college at UCSB, he also became her first real lover and emotional liaison to a world outside her all-consuming parents and the stifling social milieu of affluent City dwellers.