Two thousand years before the Sidon Canal was built in Wyoming, the Hohokam, a people who lived in what became Arizona, used digging sticks to channel water from the Salt and Gila rivers to dry land. Theirs was the most extensive irrigation system in aboriginal North America. Water was brought thirty miles to spread over fields of corn, beans, and pumpkins—crops inherited from tribes in South and Central America. “It’s a primitive damned thing,” Frank said about the business of using water. “The change from a digging stick to a shovel isn’t much of an evolution. Playing with water is something all kids have done, whether it’s in creeks or in front of fire hydrants. Maybe that’s how agriculture got started in the first place.”
Romans applied their insoluble cement to waterways as if it could arrest the flux and impermanence they knew water to signify. Of the fourteen aqueducts that brought water from mountains and lakes to Rome, several are still in use today. On a Roman latifundium—their equivalent of a ranch—they grew alfalfa, a hot-weather crop introduced by way of Persia and Greece around the fifth century B.C., and fed it to their horses as we do here. Feuds over Water were common: Nero was reprimanded for bathing in the canal that carried the city’s drinking water, the brothels tapped aqueducts on the sly until once the whole city went dry. The Empire’s staying power began to collapse when the waterways fell into disrepair. Crops dried up and the water that had carried life to the great cities stagnated and became breeding grounds for mosquitoes until malaria, not water, flowed into the heart of Rome.
There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration. Cascading water equates loss followed by loss, a momentum of things falling in the direction of death, then life. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the river is a redundancy flowing through rain forest, a channel of solitude, a solid thing, a trap. Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River is the opposite: it’s an accepting, restorative place. Water can stand for what is unconscious, instinctive, and sexual in us, for the creative swill in which we fish for ideas. It carries, weightlessly, the imponderable things in our lives: death and creation. We can drown in it or else stay buoyant, quench our thirst, stay alive.
In Navajo mythology, rain is the sun’s sperm coming down. A Crow woman I met on a plane told me that. She wore a flowered dress, a man’s wool jacket with a package of Vantages stuck in one pocket, and calf-high moccasins held together with two paper clips. “Traditional Crow think water is medicinal,” she said as we flew over the Yellowstone River which runs through the tribal land where she lives. “The old tribal crier used to call out every morning for our people to drink all they could, to make water touch their bodies. ‘Water is your body,’ they used to say.” Looking down on the seared landscape below, it wasn’t difficult to understand the real and imagined potency of water. “All that would be a big death yard,” she said with a sweep of her arm. That’s how the drought would come: one sweep and all moisture would be banished. Bluebunch and June grass would wither. Elk and deer would trample sidehills into sand. Draws would fill up with dead horses and cows. Tucked under ledges of shale, dens of rattlesnakes would grow into city-states of snakes. The roots of trees would rise to the surface and flail through dust in search of water.
Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Lovers, farmers, and artists have one thing in common, at least—a fear of “dry spells,” dormant periods in which we do no blooming, internal droughts only the waters of imagination and psychic release can civilize. All such matters are delicate of course. But a good irrigator knows this: too little water brings on the weeds while too much degrades the soil the way too much easy money can trivialize a person’s initiative. In his journal Thoreau wrote, “A man’s life should be as fresh as a river. It should be the same channel but a new water every instant.”
This morning I walked the length of a narrow, dry wash. Slabs of stone, broken off in great squares, lay propped against the banks like blank mirrors. A sagebrush had drilled a hole through one of these rocks. The roots fanned out and down like hooked noses. Farther up, a quarry of red rock bore the fossilized marks of rippling water. Just yesterday, a cloudburst sent a skinny stream beneath these frozen undulations. Its passage carved the same kind of watery ridges into the sand at my feet. Even in this dry country, where internal and external droughts always threaten, water is self-registering no matter how ancient, recent, or brief.
JUST MARRIED
I met my husband at a John Wayne film festival in Cody, Wyoming. The film series was a rare midwinter entertainment to which people from all over the state came. A mutual friend, one of the speakers at the festival, introduced us, and the next morning when The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was shown, we sat next to each other by chance. The fact that he cried during sad scenes in the film made me want to talk to him so we stayed in town, had dinner together, and closed down the bars. Here was a man who could talk books as well as ranching, medieval history and the mountains, ideas and mules. Like me he was a culture straddler. Ten month’s later we were married.
He had planned to propose while we were crossing Cougar Pass—a bald, ten-thousand-foot dome—with twenty-two head of loose horses, but a front was moving through, and in the commotion, he forgot. Another day he loped up to me: “Want to get hitched?” he said. Before I could respond there was horse-trouble ahead and he loped away. To make up for the unceremonious interruption, he serenaded me that night with the wistful calls sandhill cranes make. A cow elk wandered into the meadow and mingled with the horses. It snowed and in the morning a choir of coyotes howled, “Yes.”
After signing for our license at the county courthouse we were given a complimentary “Care package,” a Pandora’s box of grotesqueries: Midol, Kotex, disposable razors, shaving cream, a bar of soap—a summing up, I suppose, of what in a marriage we could look forward to: blood, pain, unwanted hair, headaches, and dirt. “Hey, where’s the champagne and cigars?” I asked.
We had a spur-of-the-moment winter wedding. I called my parents and asked them what they were doing the following Saturday. They had a golf game. I told them to cancel it. “Instead of waiting, we’ve decided to get married while the bloom is still on,” I said.
It was a walk-in wedding. The road crew couldn’t get the snow plowed all the way to the isolated log cabin where the ceremony was to be held. We drove as far as we could in my pickup, chaining up on the way.
In the one hushed moment before the ceremony started, Rusty, my dog, walked through the small crowd of well wishers and lay down at my feet. On his wolfish-wise face was a look that said, “What about me?” So the three of us were married that day. Afterward we skated on the small pond in front of the house and drank from open bottles of champagne stuck in the snow.
“Here’s to the end of loneliness,” I toasted quietly, not believing such a thing could come true. But it did and nothing prepared me for the sense of peace I felt—of love gone deep into a friendship—so for a while I took it to be a premonition of death—the deathbed calm we’re supposed to feel after getting our affairs in order.
A year later while riding off a treeless mountain slope in a rainstorm I was struck by lightning. There was a white flash. It felt as though sequins had been poured down my legs, then an electrical charge thumped me at the base of my skull as if I’d been mugged. Afterward the crown of my head itched and the bottoms of my feet arched up and burned. “I can’t believe you’re still alive,” my husband said. The open spaces had cleansed me before. This was another kind of scouring, as when at the end of a painful appointment with the dentist he polishes your teeth.
Out across the Basin chips of light on waterponds mirrored the storm that passed us. Below was the end-of-the-road ranch my husband and I had just bought, bumped up against a nine-thousand-foot-high rockpile that looks like a Sung Dynasty painting. Set off from a series of narrow rambling hay fields which in summer are catar
acts of green, is the 1913 poor-man’s Victorian house—uninsulated, crudely plumbed—that is now ours.
A Texan, Billy Hunt, homesteaded the place in 1903. Before starting up the almost vertical wagon trail he had to take over the Big Horns to get there, he married the hefty barmaid in the saloon where he stopped for a beer. “She was tough as a piece of rawhide,” one old-timer remembered. The ten-by-twenty cabin they built was papered with the editorial and classified pages of the day; the remnants are still visible. With a fresno and a team of horses, Hunt diverted two mountain creeks through a hundred acres of meadows cleared of sagebrush. Across the face of the mountain are the mossed-over stumps of cedar and pine trees cut down and axed into a set of corrals, sheds, gates, and hitchrails. With her first child clasped in front of the saddle, Mrs. Hunt rode over the mountains to the town of Dayton—a trip that must have taken fifteen hours—to buy supplies.
Gradually the whole drainage filled up with homesteaders. Twenty-eight children attended the one-room schoolhouse a mile down the road; there were a sawmill and blacksmith’s shop, and once-a-month mail service by saddle horse or sleigh. Now the town of Cloverly is no more; only three families live at the head of the creek. Curiously, our friends in the valley think it’s crazy to live in such an isolated place—thirty miles from a grocery store, seventy-five from a movie theater. When I asked one older resident what he thought, he said, “Hell almighty … God didn’t make ranchers to live close to town. Anyway, it was a better town when you had to ride the thirty miles to it.”
We moved here in February: books, tables, and a rack of clothes at one end of the stock truck, our horses tied at the back. There was a week of moonless nights but the Pleiades rose over the ridge like a piece of jewelry. Buying a ranch had sent us into spasms of soul-searching. It went against the bachelor lives we had grown used to: the bunkhouse-bedroll-barroom circuit; it meant our chronic vagrancy would come to an end. The proprietary impulse had dubious beginnings anyway—we had looked all that up before getting married: how ownership translates into possessiveness, protection into xenophobia, power into greed. Our idea was to rescue the ranch from the recent neglect it had seen.
As soon as the ground thawed we reset posts, restrung miles of barbed wire, and made the big ranch gates—hung eighty years ago between cedar posts as big around as my hips—swing again.
Above and around us steep canyons curve down in garlands of red and yellow rimrock: Pre-Cambrian, Madison, Chugwater formations, the porous parts of which have eroded into living-room-sized caves where mountain lions lounge and feast on does and snowshoe rabbits. Songbirds fly in and out of towering cottonwoods the way people throng office buildings. Mornings, a breeze fans up from the south; evenings, it reverses directions, so there is a streaming of life, a brushing back and forth like a massage. We go for walks. A friend told us the frosting of limestone that clings to the boulders we climb is all that’s left of the surface of the earth a few million years ago. Some kinds of impermanence take a long time.
The seasons are a Jacob’s ladder climbed by migrating elk and deer. Our ranch is one of their resting places. If I was leery about being an owner, a possessor of land, now I have to understand the ways in which the place possesses me. Mowing hayfields feels like mowing myself. I wake up mornings expecting to find my hair shorn. The pastures bend into me; the water I ushered over hard ground becomes one drink of grass. Later in the year, feeding the bales of hay we’ve put up is a regurgitative act: thrown down from a high stack on chill days they break open in front of the horses like loaves of hot bread.
RULES OF THE GAME: RODEO
Instead of honeymooning in Paris, Patagonia, or the Sahara as we had planned, my new husband and I drove through a series of blizzards to Oklahoma City. Each December the National Finals Rodeo is held in a modern, multistoried colosseum next to buildings that house banks and petroleum companies in a state whose flatness resembles a swimming pool filled not with water but with oil.
The National Finals is the “World Series of Professional Rodeo,” where not only the best cowboys but also the most athletic horses and bucking stock compete. All year, rodeo cowboys have been vying for the honor to ride here. They’ve been to Houston, Las Vegas, Pendleton, Tucson, Cheyenne, San Francisco, Calgary; to as many as eighty rodeos in one season, sometimes making two or three on a day like the Fourth of July, and when the results are tallied up (in money won, not points) the top fifteen riders in each event are invited to Oklahoma City.
We climbed to our peanut gallery seats just as Miss Rodeo America, a lanky brunette swaddled in a lavender pantsuit, gloves, and cowboy hat, loped across the arena. There was a hush in the audience; all the hats swimming down in front of us, like buoys, steadied and turned toward the chutes. The agile, oiled voice of the announcer boomed: “Out of chute number three, Pat Linger, a young cowboy from Miles City, Montana, making his first appearance here on a little horse named Dillinger.” And as fast as these words sailed across the colosseum, the first bareback horse bumped into the lights.
There’s a traditional order to the four timed and three rough stock events that make up a rodeo program. Bareback riders are first, then steer wrestlers, team ropers, saddle bronc riders, barrel racers, and finally, the bull riders.
After Pat Linger came Steve Dunham, J. C. Trujillo, Mickey Young, and the defending champ, Bruce Ford on a horse named Denver. Bareback riders do just that: they ride a horse with no saddle, no halter, no rein, clutching only a handhold riveted into a girth that goes around the horse’s belly. A bareback rider’s loose style suggests a drunken, comic bout of lovemaking: he lies back on the horse and, with each jump and jolt, flops delightfully, like a libidinous Raggedy Andy, toes turned out, knees flexed, legs spread and pumping, back arched, the back of his hat bumping the horse’s rump as if nodding, “Yes, let’s do ’er again.” My husband, who rode saddle broncs in amateur rodeos, explains it differently: “It’s like riding a runaway bicycle down a steep hill and lying on your back; you can’t see where you’re going or what’s going to happen next.”
Now the steer wrestlers shoot out of the box on their own well-trained horses: there is a hazer on the right to keep the steer running straight, the wrestler on the left, and the steer between them. When the wrestler is neck and neck with the animal, he slides sideways out of his saddle as if he’d been stabbed in the ribs and reaches for the horns. He’s airborne for a second; then his heels swing into the dirt, and with his arms around the horns, he skids to a stop, twisting the steer’s head to one side so the animal loses his balance and falls to the ground. It’s a fast-paced game of catch with a thousand-pound ball of horned flesh.
The team ropers are next. Most of them hail from the hilly, oak-strewn valleys of California where dally roping originated.1 Ropers are the graceful technicians, performing their pas de deux (plus steer) with a precision that begins to resemble a larger clarity—an erudition. Header and heeler come out of the box at the same time, steer between them, but the header acts first: he ropes the horns of the steer, dallies up, turns off, and tries to position the steer for the heeler who’s been tagging behind this duo, loop clasped in his armpit as if it were a hen. Then the heeler sets his generous, unsweeping loop free and double-hocks the steer. It’s a complicated act which takes about six seconds. Concomitant with this speed and skill is a feminine grace: they don’t clutch their stiff loop or throw it at the steer like a bag of dirty laundry the way I do, but hold it gently, delicately, as if it were a hoop of silk. One or two cranks and both arm and loop vault forward, one becoming an appendage of the other, as if the tendons and pulse that travel through the wrist had lengthened and spun forward like fishing line until the loop sails down on the twin horns, then up under the hocks like a repeated embrace that tightens at the end before it releases.
The classic event at rodeo is saddle bronc riding. The young men look as serious as academicians: they perch spryly on their high-kicking mounts, their legs flicking forward and back, “charging the poi
nt,” “going back to the cantle” in a rapid, staccato rhythm. When the horse is at the high point of his buck and the cowboy is stretched out, legs spurring above the horse’s shoulder, rein-holding arm straight as a board in front, and free hand lifted behind, horse and man look like a propeller. Even their dismounts can look aeronautical: springing off the back of the horse, they land on their feet with a flourish—hat still on—as if they had been ejected mechanically from a burning plane long before the crash.
Barrel racing is the one women’s event. Where the men are tender in their movements, as elegant as if Balanchine had been their coach, the women are prodigies of Wayne Gretsky, all speed, bully, and grit. When they charge into the arena, their hats fly off; they ride brazenly, elbows, knees, feet fluttering, and by the time they’ve careened around the second of three barrels, the whip they’ve had clenched between their teeth is passed to a hand, and on the home stretch they urge the horse to the finish line.
Calf ropers are the whiz kids of rodeo: they’re expert on the horse and on the ground, and their horses are as quick-witted. The cowboy emerges from the box with a loop in his hand, a piggin’ string in his mouth, coils and reins in the other, and a network of slack line strewn so thickly over horse and rider, they look as if they’d run through a tangle of kudzu before arriving in the arena. After roping the calf and jerking the slack in the rope, he jumps off the horse, sprints down the length of nylon, which the horse keeps taut, throws the calf down, and ties three legs together with the piggin’ string. It’s said of Roy Cooper, the defending calf-roping champion, that “even with pins and metal plates in his arm, he’s known for the fastest groundwork in the business; when he springs down his rope to flank the calf, the resulting action is pure rodeo poetry.” The six or seven separate movements he makes are so fluid they look like one continual unfolding.
The Solace of Open Spaces Page 8
