Perfection of the Morning

by Sharon Butala

  Now I found I couldn’t concentrate at all, couldn’t find that level of absorption, could not for the life of me dredge up desire anymore. I had thought naively in my new life I would go back to being a painter, and now I had to accept that that dream was over, that I would never paint again. I had lost the heart for it. I was devastated.

  I was still an urban person; I came from a world where everyone was defined precisely by what he or she did. With no job, no friends, no family, nothing to do, I began to search for an anchor, or a framework, a shape, in which to live out my days in this strange, new world which unexpectedly was, at least on a day-to-day level, as alien to me as if I’d married an Arab or an Inuit and gone to live in his culture.

  The afternoon I walked out into the field, climbed the hill and saw Peter asleep on the ground with his animals was a deeply significant moment for me, a benchmark against which I measured each of my new experiences. It seemed to me that something had been revealed to me about my new husband that I had never guessed at, that I had seen a glimmer of something about my new life that would inform and instruct me if I could just understand it. The moment was like my dream-visions in that whatever its significance was, I felt it rather than verbalized it or assimilated it intellectually. Like the childhood morning when my chest had filled with light, my entire body felt what I was seeing not like a blow but more like opening the door of a dark, gloomy house onto the outdoor world of light and warmth and color. I filed this experience away, too, as I had the visions of the spirit coyote, and of the wonder and beauty of the universe. I didn’t speak of them, but this did not mean I’d forgotten them.

  In secrecy I pondered and pondered over Peter asleep on the grass among the animals, wondering what it meant, feeling that there was, just out of my grasp, a message that once deciphered would be the key to understanding my new world which in turn would provide the foundation I was missing, that would show me what to do with the long hours of my days, the ways in which I might begin to think about this new world and how to live in it. For I was beginning to see that this new world I’d come to live in was different from my old one, not because of education, class or social structure, but because of whatever it was I had seen that so moved and troubled me the day I’d found Peter asleep in the grass among his animals.

  RIDING AND WALKING

  If I had no job to go to, no friends I could telephone when I felt lonely, no child to fuss over, if I could not draw or paint, there was always Peter and his work to watch and learn about. Peter was an old-fashioned rancher in that he still did as much of his work as he could on horseback. In the first years of our marriage, trying hard to learn what he and his neighbors actually did all day and how they did it, and why, I asked question after question the way a four-year-old does. His fund of knowledge about the prairie and about ranching was inexhaustible and he enjoyed explaining things to me. By the second year I had begun to record my experiences in a journal.

  I rode with Peter in the early years in the truck most of the time, and very often when he went out on horseback, I went too. I wanted very much to learn to ride at least competently, but I wasn’t that young anymore; I had never been athletic, and having been on a horse only once or twice before in my life, I was more than a little afraid of them.

  If all of that wasn’t enough to contend with, I had the additional handicap of being barely five feet tall. Bridling one of Peter’s big, none-too-amenable American Saddlers myself was impossible, and getting off and on my horse without help or a feed trough or hay bale to stand on was a challenge. Peter taught me to mount as he did, from beside the horse’s head, facing toward his rump, keeping the reins short and toward me, and turning the stirrup toward me, which is how bronc riders mount in order to avoid getting kicked or, should the horse take it into his head to run, to avoid being dragged. To this day this is the only way I can get on the quietest horse.

  Our daily rides were usually a couple of hours, but often they were six or eight and sometimes even ten. Naturally, during such long rides, I had to get off my horse. Dismounting, I slipped my feet out of the stirrups, held on to the saddle and jumped like an Olympic equestrian does from an English saddle, but in order to remount in the field, I had to learn to position my horse in a hollow while I mounted from the high side, or to put him up against a rock so I had something to stand on.

  Peter felt it part of his duties as a husband to catch, bridle and saddle my horse for me, but being by nature laconic he didn’t try to instruct me verbally about how to ride. He believed, as he told me when I asked for instruction, that the best way to learn was as he had as a child: to ride till you were tired out and then, because it was the most comfortable, your body would naturally fall into the right way. I had doubts then and I still do.

  But all these difficulties seemed less important once we were saddled and riding together in some far field. Without roads, miles from not only houses but even power lines or telephone poles, from all signs of human presence, I forgot my fears and even my aches retreated into the background.

  Now the cattle drive I had taken part in before our marriage that had so frightened and exhilarated me became part of my yearly routine too. Every winter we moved the cattle the forty miles from the ranch where there was no shelter or feed supply, to the hay farm where, along the breaks of the Frenchman River and against the main irrigation canals, there was plenty of shelter and a winter’s supply of food. As the Butala family had been doing since they’d bought the hay farm in 1949, every spring we moved them back again to the summer pasture—the ranch—where they stayed seven or eight months.

  These were times I learned to both look forward to and to dread—dread because we never knew what we might run into. We’ve moved in the midst of blizzards, extreme cold when the temperatures dropped to forty and even fifty below Fahrenheit (about the same in Celsius), when it rose to plus fifty Fahrenheit (plus ten Celsius) in January so that the cattle were slogging reluctantly through mud, and were so confused by the unseasonable weather that they kept wanting to turn around and go back to the ranch as if it were spring—and that was worse even than fifty below. One year we moved in snow so deep that because I couldn’t handle the truck without getting stuck every two minutes Peter drove and I led his horse, since I didn’t dare ride him. I lost five pounds in one day. We moved in spring winds which were so strong and cold that we actually wore two parkas, one on top of the other to keep warm. There was also the wrath of farmers to contend with, a historic hatred of an opposing way of life sometimes so strong that some of them didn’t like cattle even to walk down the road past their farms, much less cross their unseeded, frozen land.

  The spring we married, the cattle had already been moved. It was not until the next spring, the second year of our marriage, that Peter and I became the typical rancher husband-and-wife team. I’d done the truck driving the first couple of days while Peter and others rode, until we’d gotten the cattle within a few miles of the field where we wanted them, at which point all our help went back home to their own chores. Peter and I were left to bring the herd the rest of the way. We also had to go back several miles to pick up several cows which had calved on the way and been left behind because their newborns couldn’t yet travel.

  We set out from the ranch at daybreak in zero degree Celsius temperature, with a strong wind blowing and the occasional patter of rain mixed with snow. We rode all day, with only a chunk of cheese to eat and a couple of apples I’d stuffed in my pockets. Together we rounded up most of the cattle in fields as big as six or seven sections, six and more square miles, the size of which exhausted me, especially since the terrain was hill after hill, many a good hundred feet high, but which Peter was rather disdainful about. He’d been raised in time when from late fall to about the first of May there were open herd laws. This meant he and his father and their hired men rode out each day to herd cattle which were often twenty or more miles away from the barn where they’d saddled their horses.

  We brought the cattle
down the fireguards plowed in the grass—these are the only roads in such big fields—which curved around the bases of the hills. When we reached a fence corner where there was a gate into the next field, Peter left me to hold the herd while he rode back to the far corners of the field to pick up strays. In each field he was gone a couple of hours, and since there was nobody around but me to make the cattle nervous, and since we’d moved them slowly and quietly, as real cowboys do, without shouting or needlessly running them, and they knew they were going home, they stood patiently enough, or moved out short distances to graze. I was free then to sit on a grassy hilltop from which I could see them all, hold my horse’s reins, and wait for his return.

  We were, in various directions, from five to ten miles from the nearest inhabited building. There was nobody else in the field; all the days we rode out there we didn’t see another person, nor any motorized vehicle. It was cold, nasty weather, but I was warmly dressed and I was learning the art of keeping warm: simple things, like staying in the lee of a hill out of the wind and, where there was no hill, like deer and antelope, lying on the ground in tall grass where it was warm and still, or getting off my horse, positioning him between me and the wind, and walking till my feet were warm. Alone, I’d lie on my back in the grass and watch the clouds, or pluck a handful of grass and let the wind carry it away. I remember, when I was supposed to be herding, lying with my hands under me to keep them warm, my face to the sky, while small, dry snowflakes drifted down on me, and falling asleep on a lonely hill lost in a vast sea of grassy yellow, snow-mottled hills.

  I was never bored; the time passed unnoticed. I think I must have been absorbing the atmosphere and the feel of Nature because I wasn’t studying anything in particular, not the grasses, not the few birds’ nests we found, not the horned larks or the hawks or the eagles or the antelope we saw. I was just being there at a time in my life when I could be still and in the present, because my new life was so full of strange and compelling experiences in need of being assimilated that I had little thought of the future.

  I rode with Peter that spring bringing the cattle home for, my journal says, one six-hour and three nine-hour days. On the morning of the fifth day, after we’d breakfasted and the horses were saddled and waiting in the barn, I had on my outdoor clothes and was about to pull on my second boot, I said to Peter, “I can’t go.” I was exhausted, too tired even to find the strength to pull on that second boot. Peter rode that day, the last before the cattle reached home, without me. The entry in my new journal—one of the first I made—ends: It’s five o’clock, Peter’s not back yet, and I’m still tired. I was tired for days.

  Every spring for perhaps the first five years of our marriage we did this, so that eventually I wasn’t constantly lost, but gradually gained a clearer idea of where I was even in these huge fields empty of any conventional landmarks, since one hill looks much like another. As I learned the geography of the wilderness, Peter was teaching me about the animals and birds which inhabited it. Without direct teaching I was learning to read the sky for weather, the habits of range cattle by spending days with them, the precise composition of the shortgrass vegetation by crossing over it day after day. I began to observe the passages of the moon. Like most urban people, I had never even paid attention to the moon before coming to the country to live; I was so embarrassed that I didn’t even tell Peter that I was paying attention nightly to her for the first time in my life. I knew nothing about the moon’s phases, about her rhythms, about where she rose and where she set. As I gradually learned what to expect from her night after night, month after month, a kind of awe was dawning in me, and I was gaining a hint of what it was that made Peter so secure and calm.

  I wanted to tell everyone about my discoveries—no, I wanted first to understand them clearly, then tell everyone. But these weren’t things you could tell people, I was realizing. Did you know the moon has phases? My friends would have thought I’d lost my mind. And anyway, such a question hardly conveyed the magnitude or quality of my real discovery, which was closer to something like this: life makes sense, or the world has a governing body, or the power and beauty of Nature is astounding.

  I wanted to tell everyone, but the people I now lived with already knew these things, whether they spoke of them or not, and I could not convey in conversation any of them to my old friends, if they’d been around to listen, which they weren’t. As a way out of my frustration, I wrote them down. I did this with no clear reason in mind; I certainly wasn’t thinking of turning them into a book or even of sending them to anyone else to read. I wrote them out of a deep drive, a need to fully assimilate them, so extraordinary did they seem at the time that I couldn’t think of them as my life until I had in some familiar way concretized them.

  In these early notes I tell, in utilitarian prose, exactly what happened. For example, there is a three-page record, dated February 9/78, of our adventure one evening going by snowmobile in the middle of a five-day blizzard to visit a neighbor a few miles away. (The snow had drifted across the road in fingers that were as deep as eight feet, sloping up on one side, and dropping abruptly off on the other. We had to drag the snowmobile up the sloping side, then Peter drove it down the cliffside, braking all the way so as not go end for end. We did this for almost two miles before we reached a flat field that was smooth driving. It was worse going home at one in the morning, but anybody blizzard-bound for four days will tell you it was worth it.) Before that detailed description, I found a paragraph of ruminations about the rural value system.

  By May 1979, exactly three years after my new life began, I was writing notes in a consistent pattern. I have kept journals continuously since, although their character changed fairly quickly from detailed, factual accounts of events to the psychic journey I was already, without knowing it, launched on.

  I couldn’t be with Peter all the time; I needed time to myself, and I had housework to do and cooking and clothes-washing. Sometimes Peter was out fencing with his hired man and didn’t need me, or he was off at a cattle sale or a farm auction, or working with other men at one or the other grazing cooperatives. All of these meant that I was often alone in the house, working by myself.

  In those first years I was trying to be a traditional country wife, and in the trying, I often felt that I was living in history. Both houses were very small and very old; although both had electricity and running water in the kitchen, neither had central heating systems or indoor bathrooms. I had been raised that way, it’s true, but I’d had these conveniences all my adult life. Although most of the women I was meeting in the country not only had lived that very traditional life as children but also to some degree as adults, I was one of the few who still did, partly because once children were born, women’s lives were more circumscribed—many of them gave up riding and working outdoors with their husbands except during seeding or harvest—and because then, after the pioneering period was over, efforts would be made to provide them with running water, indoor bathrooms and central heating. Many of my new acquaintances who were close to my age had had babies in diapers when they had no running water. But memories of that life, about which many of them were ambivalent, were very clear and familiar to all of them who’d been raised in the West.

  I was, of course, suffering for this traditional life in all the ways traditional country wives suffered: physical exhaustion, the occasional sense of being out of fit with my own feminine nature, and my own peculiar nature as an individual human being, though I didn’t really know what my own nature might turn out to be, and having occasional yearnings to dress up, paint my fingernails and curl my hair, and go somewhere elegant and luxurious and be waited on.

  Of that period my journal says:

  My right hand has a blackened fingernail from pumping water where I hit the pumpjack on the downward stroke. [Our water system had frozen underground and we were pumping water by hand into June when it finally thawed.] My right thumb is sprained from helping load two-year-old steers. I was poking a bi
g stick through the chute railings and the steer I was trying to move backed up, jamming my hand between my stick and the log railings. I thought my thumb was broken. I have a rope burn on the palm of my left hand. I was watering one of the horses and it jerked away from me, and tonight I cut my finger slicing vegetables.

  I was learning to be a different kind of woman from the one who’d danced all night in clubs to rock ‘n’ roll, competed with men at a job, borrowed money at the bank, bought a house, had a manicure, and set her cap for men and fended off others, who faced an urban, modern world on her own. As I lived this new way part of me was beginning to feel all that—the life of the modern, urban woman—had been a mistake, and maybe not the great improvement on my mother’s life I thought it had been.

  The ranch house had a cast-iron cookstove in the kitchen used more for heat now than for cooking, although Peter liked to make the breakfast coffee on it, swearing it tasted better, and a propane heater in the living room. The bedrooms were unheated. At the ranch in late fall when it might become as cold as minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit, even on seasonably cold days in the spring and fall, Peter and I had to keep the cookstove fired up to keep warm.

  In a country where there were no trees and therefore no wood, people saved old fence posts and the wood from granaries or shacks that had been torn down to use as firewood. In the early days they’d burned buffalo chips till they were all gone from the prairie, then those who couldn’t afford coal and had no wood collected and burned cow chips.

  In the dirt cellar at the ranch there was still a little coal left, which on the coldest days I would add to the fire so it would burn longer. Then I remembered my youth in small-town Saskatchewan and the coal shuttle beside the kitchen cookstove and the shiny black pile in the basement under the coal chute where we would be sent to collect it.