Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak.    On a cold Sunday morning Bette Rittinger sits at the head of her sunlit dining room table. Waiting for tea, Bette, like the room, is quiet, save for the on-again off-again of a kitchen mixer her housemate is using to whip up whole-wheat honey waffles. The table is covered with newspaper clippings and write-ups about Bette and the alpacas of her Double BR Alpaca Ranch. Spread out like an impromptu scrapbook kept by someone who’s got just enough time to cut them out and file them away, they’re ready for the next time a reporter rolls around, curious about the 80-year-old woman’s story, asking, “So tell me, how did you get into alpacas?”

“It’s a gift from the universe, that’s what it was,” she says. “I love my land and was looking for a way to make a living by it when one day I passed a truck with alpacas painted on the side. Except for remembering an alpaca sweater I’d loved in high school, I didn’t know anything about them, so I googled them. They’re so cute, and at the time, it made good business sense too.”

Which is to say that for Bette, her connection with these animals is part spiritual, part intuitive and part practical, although now that she’s spent nearly two decades with the critters, it’s spirituality that seems to matter most.

“But don’t ask me what that means,” she says. “Because I have no idea.”

Instead of explaining, she just imitates their sound, “hmmm, hmmm, hmmm,” a noise somewhere in-between a hum and a song.

Pick any of the dozens of clippings off the table and you’re bound to see at least one silly alpaca face staring back at you and it’s easy to imagine them singing off the page. With googley eyes and buck teeth and mohawk hair-do’s, there’s an inherent zaniness in their demeanor, the kind that makes you laugh in that special way that doesn’t object to the conflagration of the silly and the scared, but just accepts it as fact.

“Life is funny,” Bette says. “And I think at the end you revert to how you came in at the beginning,” which begs the question of where, exactly, Bette began.

She grew up in Cantonsville, Maryland in a house her father built on the shores of the Patapsco River. Her parents were “doers; always making, creating, recycling, tinkering,” and taught their daughter and son to do the same.

Bette remembers working with her father’s Boy Scout troop to assemble toy wooden trucks, just like she remembers painting on silk by her mother’s side. But she also had it in her bones. Before she was ten, she’d run a small business selling shaved ice at little league games, painted custom trash cans out of recycled tins, and made decorative book ends with a jigsaw. By the time she was 12, she’d built her very own boat.

“My father and I made the whole thing ourselves,” she says, eyes closed, presumably imagining the thin plywood craft. “I steamed the wood and bent it. My mother sewed the sail and I painted it with the boat’s namesake, Grundoon, from Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip. My father made the mast, but it was much too heavy for the boat, a quirk that was troublesome, but that I learned to work with over the years.”

By the wry smile on her face, it’s easy to imagine that the boat was home to more than just a young girl’s early explorations, but to youthful shenanigans and burgeoning romances, of which she had more than just a few. With her mouth now full of whole-wheat honey waffle, she lists them all:

“My 1st grade boyfriend was Kenneth Moore with the big brown eyes. In 2nd grade it was Ernie Howe, who lived in the German orphan home. In 3rd grade his name was Billy Pearson, and when we were at a reunion about 10 years ago, he asked if I remembered my first kiss, and I said, “Yeah I do it was in your barn.” In 4th grade it was Phil Bond who was a troublemaker and was always made to stand in the corner.”

The list goes on. A tom-boy of sorts and a girl raised doing what was then considered “guy” stuff, Bette explains she was just more comfortable around men and enjoyed time spent in their company. She didn’t really fall in love though until college, but even then, romance was never her objective, just a fun way to live a life in good company.

“I’ll tell you one thing, I could beat most of those guys in marbles. I was almost the champion once. Almost,” she says, grabbing the box of marbles she’d used back then, her eyes flickering with the 2nd place that burns her still.

Maybe that’s what drove her to live such a full life. She’s worked in the Department of State (where she edited Kennedy’s Berlin Papers) and at a big fancy marketing firm. She’s earned a degree in art education, raised two kids and taught herself husbandry. She’s owned houses, built houses and lost houses. She’s been married and divorced.

“I’ve taken a lot of risks in my life, like with the alpacas. I didn’t really think that through. It’s just something I did and figured it out along the way,” she says.

“I listen to my gut and I do things and I don’t really think there’s any other way for me to live. And hey, before I go toes up, do you think I should go to Barcelona?”

A weekly column about locals living along the Peak-to-Peak. To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.

(Originally published in the November 22, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)