The Solace of Open Spaces

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  Fencing ultimately enforced boundaries, but barbed wire abrogated space. It was stretched across the beautiful valleys, into the mountains, over desert badlands, through buffalo grass. The “anything is possible” fever—the lure of any new place—was constricted. The integrity of the land as a geographical body, and the freedom to ride anywhere on it, were lost.

  I punched cows with a young man named Martin, who is the great-grandson of John Tisdale. His inheritance is not the open land that Tisdale knew and prematurely lost but a rage against restraint.

  Wyoming tips down as you head northeast; the highest ground—the Laramie Plains—is on the Colorado border. Up where I live, the Big Horn River leaks into difficult, arid terrain. In the, basin where it’s dammed, sandhill cranes gather and, with delicate legwork, slice through the stilled water. I was driving by with a rancher one morning when he commented that cranes are “old-fashioned.” When I asked why, he said, “Because they mate for life.” Then he looked at me with a twinkle in his eyes, as if to say he really did believe in such things but also understood why we break our own rules.

  In all this open space, values crystalize quickly. People are strong on scruples but tenderhearted about quirky behavior. A friend and I found one ranch hand, who’s “not quite right in the head,” sitting in front of the badly decayed carcass of a cow, shaking his finger and saying, “Now, I don’t want you to do this ever again!” When I asked what was wrong with him, I was told, “He’s goofier than hell, just like the rest of us.” Perhaps because the West is historically new, conventional morality is still felt to be less important than rock-bottom truths. Though there’s always a lot of teasing and sparring, people are blunt with one another, sometimes even cruel, believing honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

  The formality that goes hand in hand with the rowdiness is known as the Western Code. It’s a list of practical do’s and don’ts, faithfully observed. A friend, Cliff, who runs a trap-line in the winter, cut off half his foot while chopping a hole in the ice. Alone, he dragged himself to his pickup and headed for town, stopping to open the ranch gate as he left, and getting out to close it again, thus losing, in his observance of rules, precious time and blood. Later, he commented, “How would it look, them having to come to the hospital to tell me their cows had gotten out?”

  Accustomed to emergencies, my friends doctor each other from the vet’s bag with relish. When one old-timer suffered a heart attack in hunting camp, his partner quickly stirred up a brew of red horse liniment and hot water and made the half-conscious victim drink it, then tied him onto a horse and led him twenty miles to town. He regained consciousness and lived.

  The roominess of the state has affected political attitudes as well. Ranchers keep up with world politics and the convulsions of the economy but are basically isolationists. Being used to running their own small empires of land and livestock, they’re suspicious of big government. It’s a “don’t fence me in” holdover from a century ago. They still want the elbow room their grandfathers had, so they’re strongly conservative, but with a populist twist.

  Summer is the season when we get our “cowboy tans”—on the lower parts of our faces and on three fourths of our arms. Excessive heat, in the nineties and higher, sends us outside with the mosquitoes. In winter we’re tucked inside our houses, and the white wasteland outside appears to be expanding, but in summer all the greenery abridges space. Summer is a go-ahead season. Every living thing is off the block and in the race: battalions of bugs in flight and biting; bats swinging around my log cabin as if the bases were loaded and someone had hit a home run. Some of summer’s high-speed growth is ominous: larkspur, death camas, and green greasewood can kill sheep—an ironic idea, dying in this desert from eating what is too verdant. With sixteen hours of daylight, farmers and ranchers irrigate feverishly. There are first, second, and third cuttings of hay, some crews averaging only four hours of sleep a night for weeks. And, like the cowboys who in summer ride the night rodeo circuit, night-hawks make daredevil dives at dusk with an eerie whirring sound like a plane going down on the shimmering horizon.

  In the town where I live, they’ve had to board up the dance-hall windows because there have been so many fights. There’s so little to do except work that people wind up in a state of idle agitation that becomes fatalistic, as if there were nothing to be done about all this untapped energy. So the dark side to the grandeur of these spaces is the small-mindedness that seals people in. Men become hermits; women go mad. Cabin fever explodes into suicides, or into grudges and lifelong family feuds. Two sisters in my area inherited a ranch but found they couldn’t get along. They fenced the place in half. When one’s cows got out and mixed with the other’s, the women went at each other with shovels. They ended up in the same hospital room but never spoke a word to each other for the rest of their lives.

  After the brief lushness of summer, the sun moves south. The range grass is brown. Livestock is trailed back down from the mountains. Water holes begin to frost over at night. Last fall Martin asked me to accompany him on a pack trip. With five horses, we followed a river into the mountains behind the tiny Wyoming town of Meeteetse. Groves of aspen, red and orange, gave off a light that made us look toasted. Our hunting camp was so high that clouds skidded across our foreheads, then slowed to sail out across the warm valleys. Except for a bull moose who wandered into our camp and mistook our black gelding for a rival, we shot at nothing.

  One of our evening entertainments was to watch the night sky. My dog, a dingo bred to herd sheep, also came on the trip. He is so used to the silence and empty skies that when an airplane flies over he always looks up and eyes the distant intruder quizzically. The sky, lately, seems to be much more crowded than it used to be. Satellites make their silent passes in the dark with great regularity. We counted eighteen in one hour’s viewing. How odd to think that while they circumnavigated the planet, Martin and I had moved only six miles into our local wilderness and had seen no other human for the two weeks we stayed there.

  At night, by moonlight, the land is whittled to slivers—a ridge, a river, a strip of grassland stretching to the mountains, then the huge sky. One morning a full moon was setting in the west just as the sun was rising. I felt precariously balanced between the two as I loped across a meadow. For a moment, I could believe that the stars, which were still visible, work like cooper’s bands, holding together everything above Wyoming.

  Space has a spiritual equivalent and can heal what is divided and burdensome in us. My grandchildren will probably use space shuttles for a honeymoon trip or to recover from heart attacks, but closer to home we might also learn how to carry space inside ourselves in the effortless way we carry our skins. Space represents sanity, not a life purified, dull, or “spaced out” but one that might accommodate intelligently any idea or situation.

  From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as a filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but, being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We have only to look at the houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.

  OBITUARY

  One of the largest sheep ranches in northern Wyoming went under this week. Eight years ago it was a robust community of a hundred or so hired hands employed in a diversified program of beef cattle, farming, and sheep. The auction was held during the height of the lambing season in one of two capacious sheds used for that purpose. It was empty that day for the first time in eighty-seven years. Cliff, the auctioneer, who had worked for the ranch and ran the lambing shed, began the sale: “Used to be, I’d lamb out two hundred ewes a day in here.… Well, I guess we better begin.” The sheep sold, then the pens, kennels, water trough
s, feed bunks, as well as the buildings that housed them. The owners were there, a husband and wife, she a descendant of the original Mormon homesteader. They had the drawn, brittle look that comes from a lifetime of doing work you don’t love, then finding out you’re a million dollars in debt to boot. “She’s got so many wrinkles she has to screw her hat on to go to church,” said a sheepherder, now unemployed, as she walked by. Her husband, who had married into the family, squinted as if he had been slapped in the face.

  Outside, above the stock trucks that had come to cart things away, clouds stretched vertically, spanning half the sky, and just before a rain squall hit, the light turned violet. A pair of eagles circled above the tin roof as if from habit—in past years there would have been a man-sized dead-pile to pick at. They cocked their heads, scanned the ground, and flew away.

  A big ranch is a miniature society. Its demise has the impact of a bankruptcy in a small town: another hundred people out of work and a big chunk of the town’s business is suddenly gone. A ranch offers more than jobs; whole families are taken in, their needs attended to: housing, food, schools, even a graveyard plot for those who died on the job or liked the place so much they wanted to be buried there. Itinerant cowboys and sheepherders are given tools of their trade—a horse, a working dog, a saddle, rifle, binoculars—if they arrived empty-handed, and the farm hands are provided with air-conditioned tractors. Altogether, this extended ranch family includes not just cowboys and sheepherders but irrigators, mechanics, camp tenders, foremen, and cooks. A loyal veteran of the outfit would always be assured of a place to live out his days. When he became too old or infirm to work, he might live in the ranch yard and feed the dogs or clear the kosha grass from the pens in the spring. In exchange he could eat in the cookhouse or batch it with a year’s supply of elk meat or mutton.

  Ben, who had herded sheep and couldn’t work after a bout of tick fever, preferred solitude. They pulled his sheep wagon to a remote piece of deeded land twenty miles from town. Because he had no facilities there—no car, running water, or electricity—a plumber from town agreed to bring a weekly supply of groceries, all charged to the ranch. When we sheared sheep below the bluff where Ben lived, we could see him pacing back and forth in front of his wagon like a caged lion, but when I drove up to ask if he wanted to join us for the noon meal, he jumped inside his wagon and from behind closed doors replied, “No thank you, ma’am, I don’t believe I will.”

  Henry Tucker lived at the heart of the ranch, although like Ben, he talked to almost no one. He was tall and Lincolnesque, a man in his seventies who had to stoop in order to move about in his tiny, hump-backed trailer—a posture that stuck with him out-of-doors. To top off his gawkiness, he wore a dirty, narrow-brimmed Stetson. He hated women because somewhere in his roamings he’d picked up a case of syphilis. Its debilitating effects had made him “not quite right in the head.” He was the one we found scolding a dead cow and saying, “I never want you to do this again.” When Henry drove the front loader during lambing, everyone stayed out of his way. Once he careened down the alley between pens side-swiping panels and sheep, crashed through the east wall of the sheds, and came to a stop with a scoopful of splintered boards while lambs ran loose on the highway.

  Lambing, which started in late February and ended in April, was one of the times of year when everyone on the ranch worked closely together. Sheep wagons, pulled in from their lonely sentinels on the range, were lined up behind the sun sheds. Because of the cramped quarters there were feuds. Three or four of the herders would always insist on having their wagons moved: Albert’s to the far side of the small shed; Ed’s in front of the cookhouse; Rudy’s by the horse corral. Even in close proximity the sheepherders, who lived alone ten months of the year, remained aloof.

  While there was plenty of work for everyone, some herders preferred to “winter in town.” That meant going to the bars with nine months’ pay—about $2,700—and spending it as quickly as possible. When they were broke, they’d borrow from the ranch. This was the dark side of paternalism: a down-on-his luck herder quickly became an indentured servant, working all year to pay off his debts from the previous season.

  With fifteen thousand sheep to lamb out the two big sheds ran twenty-four hours a day—a hospital maternity ward experiencing an epidemic. It smelled strongly of ammonia, wet straw, and wool. At the end of each alley, between rows of pens, green light from the skylights shone down on neat piles of dead lambs. Some they skinned, dressing an orphaned lamb with the hide in hopes that the ewe who had just lost her lamb would think the “jacketed” lamb was hers. Men and women from surrounding ranches and towns were hired to work in the sheds. Some did nothing but fill water troughs all day; others “picked drop”—pulled newborn lambs inside from the drop corrals; others branded lambs and ewes with bright red paint because sheep, like humans, don’t know their new offspring by sight.

  Dorothy, a vivacious cowgirl in her forties, ran what they called the “outlaw shed” where she matched up orphaned lambs with unwilling ewes. Having already mothered eight children herself, she was an expert at such things. Her itinerant life read like the Old Testament: tragedy, revenge, and an on-going feeling of homelessness. During the great Alaskan earthquake her husband abandoned her and the eight kids. “He’d taken the car so we just climbed the highest hill we could find and kneeled down and prayed.” Later, one of the children was hit by a car and died. A second husband left her during a stint in Louisiana, but he burned the house down first. Back home in Wyoming, where her parents had staked a hard-scrabble homestead and lost it, she hired on at ranches, maintaining a reckless, horse-breaker’s sense of humor, and working strenuously between crying jags.

  Cliff, the auctioneer, a small, skin-and-bones man who ran the big lambing shed, was her boyfriend at the time. He’d center a cigarette between his chapped lips, then roll it from one side of his mouth to the other, humming country tunes as he gave shots and suckled weak lambs. Fancying himself a songwriter; he read Billboard during coffee breaks and every morning when I arrived at the sheds he’d look me squarely in the eyes and say, “Gretel, when you’re looking at me you’re looking at country.” The next year he quit the sheep business to raise pigs.

  A town idiot was hired. Balding and egg-shaped in overalls, he had a sweet, moon-shaped face and carried a leafless willow branch wherever he went. His usual job in town was to sweep the grocery store after closing. At the sheds he cleaned pens. His watery eyes seemed to see through us with uncorrupted vision. Once, when he thought no one was looking, he shoved a hand down into the sponge of wool on a ewe’s back, then wiped the lanolin across his forehead in two strokes as if blessing himself. He was there the morning the freak was born: a lamb with two heads. Someone took a Polaroid of it, then the foreman cut its throats.

  While a western town will accept an idiot with quiet affection, it treats sheepherders with contempt. In the hierarchy of a ranch, herders are second-class citizens. Economics is a factor: cowboys make $700 to $1,000 a month while sheepherders make only $300 to $500. Heroics and athletic prowess are another: cowboys ride hard, rope, and wrestle calves; sheepherders tag along behind the herd at a slow pace. What their job lacks in physical demands is made up for with patience. Herders stay out on the range with their sheep year around; cowboys go home at night.

  Part of the sheepherder’s mystique is having opted to be an outsider. It’s a first-century job with nineteenth-century amenities—a traditional wagon with rounded top and a ship-tight interior, a saddle horse, and stock dog to help get the work done. But to have chosen a life of solitude is seen as a sign of failure. In most cases they’ve abandoned the world for less saintly reasons than spiritual transformation. More often, it’s a social defect that’s kept these men at bay—women troubles, alcohol, low self-esteem. Others prefer the company of animals. But in the process of keeping their distance they may learn what makes the natural world tick and how to stay sane.

  Because herders are thought of as misfits, t
hey sometimes behave that way and adopt a self-deprecatory humor to go with the label. “You’ve got to be stupid, lazy, and a grouch to herd sheep,” said Red, a one-armed Texan in his seventies who’d lost his arm between railroad cars while hopping a freight to come north and get a ranch job. “He was born in a town called Liberty and he took that name to heart,” his sister told me. “He didn’t even finish his schooling, just quit us one day and started roaming.” He worked in a circus “polishing white horses,” rode the rails, then cowboyed in Montana. Red could be a rascally drunk—he had cut off a sheepherder’s nose with the broken end of a beer bottle during an argument—but he worked sheep gently, quietly, in slow adagios across the range, and at shipping time his lambs were fat. No matter how long he had been out in the hills, Red had the spruced-up looks of a cowboy, not a sheepherder. He referred to faded jeans as “married men’s pants” and gave them to his comrades who dressed less meticulously.

  As if to remind us that sheepherders do live apart with a unique sense of time, Red refused to set his watch forward for what he called “goofy time”—daylight savings—nor would he write out a grocery list for the camp tender—even if he could (he was illiterate)—believing that a man should conduct his business in person.