Joyce Simdars

Joyce Simdars enters Joe Rantz’s life as the girl who sits beside him on the school bus and sings in harmony. She becomes a source of companionship and a witness to the burdens he carries, while bringing her own history of strict discipline, pain, and constrained choices into their relationship. Her importance lies not simply in loving Joe, but in seeing both his strength and his hurt—and, at moments, insisting that the hurt be acknowledged.

Family and Early Life

Joyce grew up in an austere household in Sequim, descended from German and Scottish immigrant pioneers. Her parents treated work as a moral end in itself and believed that no amount of labor was excessive. Her father continued plowing behind mules despite an enlarged heart and inflammatory rheumatism; during planting season he sometimes worked six days a week, from shortly after dawn until evening. The account describes the mules eventually more or less dragging him across the field. In this home, endurance was expected, while comfort and ease were scarce.

Her mother, Enid Simdars, imposed a different but equally powerful discipline through Christian Science. Enid believed that only a good version of Joyce existed, and that a disobedient or misbehaving Joyce was an impostor. When Joyce misbehaved, she was made to sit alone on a chair, ignored until the good Joyce supposedly returned. As a child she sobbed and repeatedly checked that she still existed, fearing that wrongdoing made her unworthy of love. Years later, she remembered reassuring herself that she was still there. The punishment made ordinary childhood misbehavior carry an unnerving consequence: the threat of emotional disappearance.

Outdoor work offered some relief. Joyce disliked housework, both because it never ended and because it kept her under her mother’s watchful eye. From her midteens she also suffered from arthritis, apparently inherited from her father; washing dishes, scrubbing floors, and wiping windows aggravated the pain in her hands and wrists. She preferred tending animals or working in the vegetable garden with her father. Although he was not demonstrative with his children, he seemed glad to have her nearby, and farm tasks appealed to her interest in practical problems and making things.

That practical curiosity extended beyond the farm. Joyce was an unusually proficient, scholarly student, eager to explore subjects from photography to Latin. She enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together, whether a windmill or a speech by Cicero. Yet each day’s outdoor work ended with more chores inside and the return of her mother’s close scrutiny. Her attraction to Joe would develop in a life already shaped by labor, intellectual appetite, bodily pain, and the desire for room to be herself.

Meeting Joe and Finding a Wider World

Joe became a popular student, but people who knew him more closely could see that his humor and sociability sometimes gave way to guardedness. Music offered him a way to gather people around him. With old instruments acquired through barter and friends’ generosity, he taught himself to play; on the school bus he carried a guitar and entertained the other students with comic songs and cowboy ballads. Joyce, blond-curled and smiling, increasingly sat beside him and joined in with a second vocal line.

When Joyce first saw Joe strumming in the back of the bus, singing and grinning up the aisle, she experienced him as an opening onto a wider, sunnier world. His circumstances were precarious, and she understood that many girls might have judged his prospects too poor. Instead, she watched how he met difficulty: he was strong and resourceful, and, like her, he enjoyed solving practical problems. She also came to recognize the self-doubt beneath his apparent ease. What mattered most was that he seemed to care for her as she was, whether good or bad—a sharp contrast with the childhood lesson that a bad Joyce might cease to count as Joyce at all. She resolved that one day she would find a way to make up for how the world had treated him.

Their courtship required negotiation with her mother’s vigilance. Joe could afford to take Joyce on dates, but she was rarely allowed to go unless her mother accompanied them, sitting watchfully in the back of the Franklin. Meanwhile, Joyce’s father’s example of relentless work and her mother’s religious discipline continued to frame her home life. The freedom she glimpsed in Joe was not an abstract ideal: it was the possibility of being accepted without having to perform a version of herself deemed worthy of love.

Work, Affection, and Shared Plans

Joe’s working life in Sequim was punishing. One summer he earned fifty cents an hour laying asphalt for the Civilian Conservation Corps on the new Olympic Highway, shoveling and raking the hot material through long days. On weekends he cut hay and dug irrigation ditches; by winter he was back in the woods cutting cottonwoods with Charlie McDonald. Joyce often got off the school bus near the river and hurried through the woods to find him. Their meetings offered a regular point of tenderness amid his labor. Many decades later, on her deathbed, she remembered his embrace and the smell of wet wood, sweat, and the outdoors.

Joe also made a ritual of finding four-leaf clovers for her. He insisted that finding one depended not on luck but on keeping one’s eyes open. The recurring gift gave their courtship a small, concrete emblem of his attentiveness: affection expressed through looking carefully and bringing back something found. Joyce loved the lesson implicit in the ritual, which joined his practical way of seeing the world to the persistence she admired in him.

Her own work later brought her to a live-in position at a judge’s house in Laurelhurst. She disliked the job as much as she had expected: she had to wear a uniform and move quietly so as not to disturb the judge’s deliberations. Housework, which had already been a source of pain and confinement at home, again occupied her days. She studied for classes as well, and the unusually long, wet winter left her wan, pale, and sometimes depressed.

A day out in a canoe gave the couple a reprieve. Joe took Joyce from the university lawn down to the canoe house, helped her into the boat, and paddled across the Cut, steering among lily pads and beaver lodges on the south side of Union Bay before letting the canoe drift. As she trailed her hand in the water, Joe rested in the stern and fell asleep. When motorboats’ wakes rocked them, he woke, smiled at her, and took out his battered guitar. They returned to the familiar funny songs from the Sequim school bus, then he moved into slower love songs. They talked earnestly about marriage, a home, and perhaps children until the sun sank behind Capitol Hill and Joyce grew cold in her light dress. The day became a memory they both carried into old age; the conversation made explicit the shared future their courtship had begun to imagine.

Loyalty and Conflict with Joe’s Family

Joyce accompanied Joe when he went to see Thula Rantz at the family’s house on Bagley. The visit was tentative from the outset: Joyce and Joe parked, took a moment before climbing the steps, and held hands as they approached the yellow Dutch door. A violin sounded inside until Joe knocked. Thula opened the door only halfway, acknowledged Joyce with a nod, and did not invite either visitor in. After a strained silence, Joe asked how she was doing. Thula eventually told him to make his own life and stay out of theirs, then gently shut the door and slid the deadbolt into place.

For Joyce, the encounter joined the immediate rejection to what she had learned about Joe’s past. She knew of his mother’s death, his lonely train journey to Pennsylvania, and what had happened before and during the family’s time at the Gold and Ruby mine. She could not understand Thula’s coldness toward a motherless child, or Joe’s father’s passivity; nor could she understand why Joe showed so little anger, continued trying to ingratiate himself with his parents, and seemed to act as though the harm had never happened. The visit did not resolve the estrangement. Instead, it exposed the difference between Joyce’s response to Joe’s history and his own guarded way of living with it.

As Joe drove her back to the judge’s home, Joyce finally erupted. She asked why he let his parents treat him that way, why he pretended they had done no harm, why he did not demand to see his half-siblings, and why he never became angry. She was nearly sobbing by the time she finished. Joe’s eyes were full of hurt, but he kept his jaw set and stared over the steering wheel rather than turning toward her. Joyce’s anger was not a simple quarrel with him: it was a demand that the pain he had learned to contain be admitted into the relationship. Her insistence marks both her loyalty and the limits of what she could make him say.

Public Support and Narrative Significance

Joyce’s support also followed Joe into the public world of rowing. On race day she took a rare afternoon off from the judge’s household job to watch him, knowing how much success at crew meant to him and to their future together. She rode a student-chartered ferry with hundreds of other students, resting in the sun while the band played and the crowded boats and spectators gathered along the lake. Her excitement was accompanied by anxiety: she wanted to see Joe race and afterward, whatever the result.

After the Washington freshmen defeated California by four and a half lengths, Joe came aboard clutching a California jersey and searched through the crowd for Joyce. She pushed through the press of students until she reached him; he enveloped her in a sweaty hug and lifted her off her feet. Later, after eating the crew’s share of a mountain of ice cream, Joe took her back to the deck. With the band playing, he twirled her under his outstretched arm, and they danced together in the sun. The scene answers the strain of the family visit not by erasing it, but by showing the couple’s shared happiness in a moment of earned success.

Joyce’s presence binds together the book’s contrasting forms of work and belonging: the exhausting labor of home and farm, Joe’s precarious jobs, the collective discipline of a crew, and the private ease of a song or a dance. She is perceptive enough to see that Joe’s humor does not mean he is unhurt, and determined enough to challenge the silence that protects him from confrontation as well as intimacy. At the same time, the account gives her a life and outlook of her own: a student drawn to logic and practical invention, a young woman constrained by painful chores and vigilant authority, and a partner who finds in Joe a kind of acceptance she had been taught to doubt. Their relationship offers not effortless rescue but mutual recognition, tenderness, and the continuing hope of making a home together.