The ground had just thawed when I drove to Wyoming in 1976. It was night. All I could see of the state was white peaks, black sky, and the zigzag promenade of rabbits unwinding in front of the car. It’s said that sudden warmth drives frost deeper into the ground before it loses its grip, as if to drive home one last tentstake of numbness before the protective canvas unfolds. That’s what happened to me that year: things seemed better than they were, then took a declivitous slide before they improved.
I arrived in the town of Lovell in the early morning hours and took a room in a pink motel called the Western. The kitchenette came equipped with a coffeepot and a frying pan; there was an antiquated black phone by the bed, and the proprietor, who was asthmatic, listened in on all my calls.
I was there for Public Broadcasting to film four old sheepherders on the Big Horn Mountains from June through September. I had come alone because my partner in the project—also the man I loved—had just been told he was dying. He was not quite thirty.
Afte a month of ranch work and long hours spent at each sheep camp, John, the sheep foreman, invited me to use the spare bedroom in his trailerhouse. “Catty corner” to the bar and the Mormon church (as he described it), the trailer was set at an angle to the main and only paved street in a town so bland it might have been tipped on its side and all the life drained from it. The interior was extraordinary: crushed red velvet loveseats, gold lamps hung from what looked like anchor chain, a pink kitchen with blue rugs, an empty bookshelf, a statue of Adonis on an end table.
The grandson of the original Mormon rancher who used the homestead laws to amass 200,000 acres of land, John is tall and long-legged with a homely-handsome face. His high cheekbones give him a startled look and he has a bachelor’s hotheaded fussiness. “You wanted to come to an outfit where things was done ass-backwards, and you’ve come to the right place,” he said. On the way to sheep camp a coyote crossed the road in front of us. “God, I don’t want to shoot that dirty little sonofabitch,” he said. He stopped the truck, rummaging in back of the seat for his rifle while the coyote disappeared from sight. We drove on. “Hell, I don’t carry any shells anyway,” he confessed a few moments later. He had once kept a pet coyote tied up in his back yard, but when he came home from school one day, the animal was gone. “Your grandfather just didn’t think it looked right having a predator staked out front,” his grandmother explained.
That night one of the would-be “stars” of the film stumbled into John’s trailer at two in the morning drunk and on a binge. “Wake up, Hollywood,” he yelled into John’s bedroom, then ran outside to where his horse was tied to the door handle of a car and threw up. “Don’t you get sick in there or I’ll take you so far out in them hills you’ll never find your way back,” John said in his mock-stern voice. The more brusque he sounded, the more affectionate the message he was sending. At three-thirty the coffeepot started perking, waking us by four.
In June my crew—Joan and Nick—and I moved to John’s cabin on top of the Big Horns which served as summer headquarters for the ranch. Filming began. Every two or three days I’d drive down the mountain to phone David. His voice was raspy, but his mind was bright. He said, “All this to become a ghost.” There was no aspect of dying we hadn’t talked about, and now our conversations often came to a halt. Though I was content just to hear him breathing, the silences were sometimes queasy, at others, purely ironic—an emotional iron ore flecked with rust.
Born in Swansea, Wales, David had a Welshman’s hard-drinking indignation, but his brilliant sardonic asides were cooled and keenly balanced by a roll-with-the-punches good-naturedness. His dark hair curled away from a sharp down-curved nose and twinkling black eyes. A minister’s son, he raged against false piousness and gentility, accepting a scholarship at Harvard only to play hockey with the French-Canadian toughs, though he read literature on the side. Once in a New York hotel room he asked me to stand naked next to him in front of a mirror. “Look at how different we are,” he said as if our rushing, mutual love had hatched out of antithesis. Except for our looks, quite the opposite was true. Having corresponded long before we met, we already knew how alike we were in all ways but one: I was healthy and he was dying.
Earlier in the spring we had holed up in a windowless cabin in a forest of birch, larch, and beech. We ate raw vegetables and drank Guinness Stout. He fed a loaf of stale bread we had found to the “pinto” mouse that crawled into our sleeping bags. Night after night we listened to my one tape of Beethoven’s late quartets. Finally the batteries wore down. David slept little and when he did drift off, searing pain awakened him. I’d massage his back and legs until morning came, continuing on into the day until my hands moved on their own and I’d lose track of where on his body they were.
Because dying prunes so much away—everything extraneous, everything that has not been squeezed into paradox—we’d often lie on the floor wordlessly, holding hands, looking at the spectacle of the other, then break into uproarious laughter that convulsed into tears. There is no joke as big as death, we agreed.
By the time David joined me in Wyoming we had stopped talking about marriage. The doctor’s prognosis had vacillated: first there was hope of remission; now he said David’s chances of making it were “pie in the sky.” His stay was brief. “All this space reminds me of possibility, of the life you and I could have had together,” he said. His pain worsened and after ten days he wanted to go home and see his children.
We stopped for a beer on the way to the airport. It was the Fourth of July. Kids were setting off firecrackers in a grainfield next to the highway. “I’m not sure what we’re celebrating,” David said as we held each other in the motel room, rented for an hour, while bottle rockets and “black cats” exploded in the air over us.
The film became an absurd chore. During the next month of phone calls David’s voice grew thinner. The elegant, ironic torque decelerated, then dropped away. At the same time the Wyoming sky changed. Its ebullient blue depths contracted and the white bedsheets of autumn clouds pulled it flat. After fits and starts the filming came to an end. It was late September. The last night at summer headquarters I dreamed a fierce windstorm felled two trees. Three ravens circled them; they cawed and cawed.
There was, in fact, a storm: two forty-foot pines in front of John’s cabin snapped in half. Attached to them was the crossbar where, for years, he had butchered mutton ewes for food. That was the day the ranch’s retired foreman came to stay at the cabin. His usually well-behaved dog acted strangely: he clawed at the picture window and whined but refused to go outside. That night I slept in town. There was a phone call in the morning: Keith had been found dead on the cabin floor. When I woke John to tell him the news he was silent for a moment, then said, “The dog knew.”
I made a reservation to fly east the next day. David had been experiencing massive pain and in delirium had called out for me. Another dream crowded in: There was a ferry pulling two plywood platforms. I stood on one, my mother on another. We moved toward a small island. David’s young son stood on the shore holding a message. When I debarked to read it, the paper shook so violently I could decipher nothing.
In the morning I packed and was in the bathtub when David’s mother called: David was dead.
I stayed in Wyoming and went to Keith’s funeral instead of David’s. Keith’s wife, supported on either side by her children, slumped into the shape of an “S” and could not stop the flow of tears. I was dry-eyed for a while. David’s presence—his “ghost”—appeared everywhere, mischievous and glinting. It felt scandalous to be alive, obscene to experience pleasure or pain. Then a wheel of emptiness turned inside me and churned there for a long time.
The tears came and lasted for two years. I traveled. One childhood friend was indulgent enough to let me stay in his Santa Fe house and lie on top of his bed while he slept under the covers. To be alone in a room at night was anathema. Windows flew open and voices yelled, “Wake up!” I’d call John at the ranch. “You still driftin’?” he’d a
sk. After many months he said, “One place is as good as another, you might as well come home.”
When I pulled up to the trailerhouse—after a nonstop, seventeen-hour stint of driving—John was packing groceries to go to sheep camp. “You might as well come along,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I don’t know why, but these guys have been worrying about you.”
In the next weeks a handful of women befriended me. One of the myths about the West is its portrayal as “a boy’s world,” but the women I met—descendants of outlaws, homesteaders, ranchers, and Mormon pioneers—were as tough and capable as the men were softhearted. BobbyJo, juggling five young children and a temperamental husband, called. “Come on over and cry in my kitchen,” she said until I laughed. Dorothy, a cowgirl in her forties whose parents’ homestead was an overnight depot for stolen horses coming down the outlaw trail, showed up at John’s one night: “Let’s go honky-tonkying,” she yelled through the window, but because she didn’t drink and there was no place to dance, we’d go for a ride instead. “Most people don’t know what it is to grow up lonely. The only friends I had growing up were desperados and the army guys going by on the train,” she said. We ran our horses across the foothills of the Wild Horse Range. A stud bunch (a stallion and mares) lunged up out of a dry wash as we passed by. We came across the carcass of a horse. Its stiff hide was draped over the bones. I wanted to cut it away and wear it around my shoulders. This was how I could wear death and still be alive. “If they ever operate on our hearts they’ll need a gallon of glue,” Dorothy said as we rode away.
When I visited her house, two goats, a milk cow, a steer, geese, and two dogs chained to a tree greeted me. In the kitchen a Shetland pony warmed himself by the cookstove. Dorothy appeared holding a magpie. “It’s for you,” she said. “You can teach these guys to talk; then you won’t be lonely.” She told me about another Wyoming ranch woman who, having survived her husband, brought her saddle horse into the living room on winter nights for company; she suggested I do the same.
Summer brought no rain and one hailstorm. In half an hour a friend’s hundred acres of alfalfa were a field of sticks. That’s how I felt—stiff, weightless, exposed. I drove to town with the rancher. He ate a whole bag of sunflower seeds, laughing nervously about his loss, and the floor of his pickup looked like a parrot’s cage.
By Labor Day the gray, clayish ground had cracked. Between clumps of sagebrush it looked smooth and pale as a mask. John, two rancher friends, and I went “on a party.” To “go on a party” means being carbound for a couple of days and part of the fun was feeling their legs next to mine and being destinationless. We went to a bar just over the Montana line called Snuff’s. Dust from the calcium plant across the road washed everything pink. I danced in the parking lot with Rex and Chuck while John danced inside with the wallflowers—three obese young women in sundresses. Later we drove on a back road to Red Lodge, Luther, and Roscoe, handing out beers along the way to cowboys who were gathering cattle.
At one bar a woman bent a cowboy backward over the fender of a pickup and kissed him. When she finally let him go he dropped, mocking unconsciousness. We drove home. I woke from a toxic snooze on someone’s front lawn. The truck we had driven was parked in the middle of a cornfield. The horn was blaring. When I woke up again, it was gone.
My life felt flat, then euphoric, then flat again. These fluctuations gained momentum like a paddlewheel: I was dry and airy, then immersed again. Was it a lie to be here? Was I an impostor? My city friends called and asked when I was going to stop hiding. Wyoming hospitality was an extravagant blend of dry humor and benign neglect. But I wavered. One morning a couple in a car from New York drove by. “Ah …” they must have thought, “a real cowgirl.” As the car slowed to go through town I found myself trotting behind it. I wanted to pound on the windows and explain that I knew every subway stop on the Seventh Avenue IRT. They speeded up and drove on. I laughed at myself, then went inside and wrote to a friend: “True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.”
After a good many tequilas-and-something (that was one of the odd liberties of the state: you could buy a mixed drink in a “go-cup” from the drive-up window of any bar), I decided to winter alone in a one-room log cabin on the North Fork of the Shoshone River. I was betting against masochism in thinking that solitude might work as an antidote to solitude.
Nineteen seventy-eight turned out to be the third worst Wyoming winter on record. After an extreme of sixty below zero, the thermometer rose to ten below and the air felt balmy. One cowboy lit a fire under his pickup to thaw out the antifreeze, then drove over the Continental Divide wrapped in horse blankets because his heater fan had snapped and he had 120 horses to feed in the valley below.
Another friend’s transmission froze while he was in a bar. The only gear that worked was reverse so he drove the eight miles home backward through two towns and up the hill past the hospital, waving at astonished onlookers all the way. When his wife accused him of drunkenness he said, “I just got tired of looking at things the same old way.”
It was hard to know who suffered more—the livestock or the ranchers who fed and cared for them. One rancher’s herd of Angus cattle started aborting spontaneously. He performed an autopsy on one of the cows. “She was just jelly inside. Everything in her had been plumb used up,” he said.
Days when the temperature never rose above zero my log cabin felt like a forest pulled around me. Outside, hard wind-packed snowdrifts grew, flanking the cabin like monstrous shoulder pads. Rusty, the dog John and I quarreled over and whose custody I won, was my only companion. I played Scrabble with him every night and he won.
Ellen Cotton, who ranches alone northeast of the Big Horns, called me late one night: “I just don’t think I can get this feeding done by myself. This snow is so darned deep and this old team of mine won’t stand still for me when I get down to open the gates. Could you come over and help?” The next morning, after a passing rancher towed my pickup three miles down the highway to get it started, I drove across the Basin, trying one unplowed road after another. No route would take me to Ellen’s. Defeated, I returned to my solitary roost.
I had once asked Ellen how she withstood the frustrations of ranching alone. Because she is the granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I imagined she possessed unusual reserves of hardiness. But she protested. “I don’t do a very good job of it,” she said modestly. “I get in these hoarding moods and get mad at myself for all the stupid things I do. Then I pick up this old kaleidoscope and give it a whirl. See, it’s impossible to keep just one thing in view. It gives way to other things and they’re all beautiful.”
Winter scarified me. Under each cheekbone I thought I could feel claw marks and scar tissue. What can seem like a hard-shell veneer on the people here is really a necessary spirited resilience. One woman who ran a ranch by herself had trouble with a neighbor who let his cattle in on her pastures. She rode out one morning to confront him. When he laughed, she shot the hat off his head. He promptly gathered his steers and departed. “When you want that hat back, it’ll be hanging over my mantel,” she yelled as he loped away. When he suffered a stroke a few months later, she nursed him, though his hat still hangs over the fireplace today.
Living well here has always been the art of making do in emotional as well as material ways. Traditionally, at least, ranch life has gone against materialism and has stood for the small achievements of the human conjoined with the animal, and the simpler pleasures—like listening to the radio at night or picking out constellations. The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.
In June I moved again—all the way across the Basin to a rambling house near a town of fifty, “including the dead ones.” Though the rightness of anything had long since vanished, I had a chemical reaction to this old-fashioned ranching community. I was loved, hated, flirted with, to
lerated. I fitted in. The post office, miniature-sized and adorned with deer antlers, provided a hitchrail out front. I rode my horse there every day. Mail was handed out in person by a postmaster who had a haggard, beaten look. He once stood in the middle of the road, trying to shoot a crop duster’s plane out of the sky.
Across the street a gorgeous, ramshackle stone building housed the general store where the selection of undusted canned goods was spotty, and peeling green paint fell on customers like snow. The entire north end was a majestic mullioned window comparable to any in a Parisian atelier. A big copper-colored dog named Bum ruled the roost, and the proprietors, oddly mismatched, were generous and convivial. They were native anarchists, showing no interest in false appearances, orderliness, or the art of making money.
Above town on a sage-covered bench I was told a hermit lived in the low-slung house that faced the mountains. He was a painter but kept his windows covered with army blankets, afraid not of seeing but of being seen. I visited him one day. The stench inside the house was of billy goats, dead mice, and unaired emotions. He sat on the floor with his head in his hands, but his lilting, ethereal voice lightened the squalor of the rooms. His bed was a narrow plank blanketed with torn overcoats; hanging from the ceiling by a piece of barbed wire were a baseball bat and a paintbrush—icons, perhaps, of the battle he had taken up with the problems of imagination and survival.
I met Reyna and Pete, who lived in a tree-shrouded house next to the tiny cemetery. They had come north from Arizona to find ranch jobs. As soon as they moved in, a transformation took place: Reyna painted the mailbox purple, hung a canary cage from the eaves, and festooned dead tree branches with garlands of plastic flowers. Small, big-breasted, and vivacious, she told me she came from a poor family and went to work when she was twelve. “I’ve been everything,” she said. “I’ve slept on the dirt floors and also in the best houses. I’ve eaten just beans and the best steaks. That’s how I am. I know what the world is made of, and I still love all of it.” She met Pete when he was working horses at a racetrack. He had a gnarled, intense handsomeness and attributed his vigor to the potion of powdered rattlesnake skin he ate every day.
The Solace of Open Spaces Page 4
