Nancy Hunts(wo)man, as she would occasionally call herself, and I met somewhere some time ago. She always wore the name and always kept her own attitude. We’ve been laughing loud, sharing adventures, and moving at full-throttle speed along deeply connected paths for some time. Our separate circles of friends barely overlapped, but our connections are innumerable. Together, we celebrated independent film, our adult children, and stories about each other’s growing and evolving grandchildren. Spirituality explored in the outdoors, in radically different ways, anchored many of our most significant conversations. Music in a cacophony of notes, books of all stripes, brilliant theater, smart speakers, beautiful dancers, and cranes—- those prehistoric long-legged, magical, slightly comical, creatures… And of course politics as we explored care for the planet and the creatures on it, the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies, freedom to love whomever you might, and that — with any luck — you might just find someone to love deeply.
Nancy found love once and then again, a year after COVID started. A mutual friend of hers and Ken’s, former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, introduced them. And then two typically reserved humans bound themselves in love and life and married after five whirlwind months of courtship.
At that point, Nancy’s cancer was an inconvenient truth, but nothing that limited their spirit or adventure. And oh the places they went! To her family ranch in the Tetons, his business interests in Texas, the east coast for a bike trip, the west coast to see her family of origin, Europe, the Galapagos, Zion National Park for a Utah symphony concert, back to the Tetons for the crane festival just this month…
Last Thursday, Nancy and Ken and their children who had gathered from other states went out to dinner to celebrate the couple’s one-year wedding anniversary. And then on Friday, Nancy took her leave. My feisty, full-throttle friend left last Friday night, but not without wringing every single bit of life from her embattled body and the universe in the time she was given.
Nancy leaves behind daughter Merodean and her son Stewart, both from her marriage to industrialist and real estate developer Blaine Huntsman who passed away about a decade ago. They had eloped where she was living at the time in Oregon. Nancy would offer sometimes in a cheeky way that she was “the second wife,” one who enjoyed a lasting relationship with her stepchildren and their children, each of whom shared the other love in Nancy’s life – Fox Creek Ranch in the Tetons. Her greatest pride was an almost-20-year project restoring Fox Creek to a place where fish swim easily and in great numbers once again— approximately 420 trout per mile at the beginning now up to a staggering 3,867 according to the Teton Regional Land Trust that presently stewards the land. Eliminating the cattle eventually proved the key that allowed so many more of God’s creatures to return to the waterway. A fly fisher herself, Nancy urged not long ago, “When you speak of this — and you will — please say I was proudest of having returned that habitat to its natural state where native species could live freely.” In repairing the waterway for fish, her work also reengaged birds that thrive on a spring creek — redwing blackbirds, bald eagles, horned owls, trumpeter swans, and the sandhill cranes that forever fascinated her — as well as moose and the namesake fox.
We were both Californians. I spent 19 years in the Bay Area and then a decade in Tahoe. Nancy hailed from Crescent City, a community so far north it was almost more Oregon than California. We spoke often of our different Californias and we mostly only missed Dungeness crab. Nancy left after college to take a job in Japan, and she worked there in finance as one of very few American women. She loved her time in the Far East. The elegance, refinement, and gentleness of her spirit were informed greatly by those post grad years. Sundance Film Festival, the Utah Symphony, and other visual, performing, and literary arts were also lifelong loves of Nancy’s. Her home is a remarkable mix of mountain sensibility and Asian refinement.
In spring this year, Nancy, Ken and I spent a few nights visiting the area around Boulder Mountain Lodge in Boulder, Utah. The lodge’s restaurant, Hell’s Backbone Grill, wasn’t yet open, but it’s angelic owners, Blake and Jenn, delivered us a meal, so Nancy could have a taste of the award-winning place.
Not too long ago, Nancy wanted me to come and porch-sit. We enjoyed her beverage of choice — gin and tonic — on her deck. She expressed great dismay at the new golf course being put in at Promontory given the state of water in the west. A terrific golfer herself, she chose her words carefully. “It is excessive,” Nancy said.
We held our own mini film festival this winter online at her home, the same home in which she’d hosted Sundance filmmakers and volunteers for years. She was both an accomplished pianist and a talented cook, a voracious reader of books and viewer of movies, political enthusiast and devotee of former Parkite Phyllis Robinson’s Tandem chocolates.
Ken, her “prince,” as Nancy called him, loved her deeply and completely with eyes wide open to their numbered days. But a full heart counts only moments. Nancy’s passing is a blow to Ken, who hoped there would be more time. But time is a thief, and the alchemy that allowed numbered days to stretch and suspend, warp and shift, these past 18 months snapped back harshly for all of us all with Nancy’s passing. The kindness, curiosity, intelligence, and extreme generosity of spirit that connected the rest of us in overlapping orbits around Nancy’s sun remains.
We will keep sharing sunsets, laughter, and stories of our shared lives as we reengage to honor our friend. We’ll find places in nature and crank up piano concertos and pour ourselves gin and tonics and toast the cranes and the fish. As Ram Dass says, we are all just walking each other home. We should all be so lucky and so present as to do so with Nancy’s grace and her full-throttle living even a few of our days, including Sundays in our Park…