by Pam Houston
I love the ranch differently than someone who goes to bed and wakes up 365 times a year here, someone who was born and raised here, someone whose most regular routine does not involve TSA security and running for connecting flights. You have to be a certain age, I think, to understand longing as scarcely distinguishable from pleasure, and my love affair with the ranch is defined by a thousand leavings and a thousand returns. It’s the only place I always miss, no matter how fabulous my temporary circumstance. When the road turns to gravel and bends with the river into Antelope Park, every single part of me takes a deep breath.
It doesn’t seem like twenty-five years have gone by since that girl who lived in her VE 24, whose belongings all fit into the back of her Corolla, first sat on the split-rail fence that sits in front of the aging barn, which sits in front of Red Mountain. That girl who dared herself to buy a ranch, dared herself to dig in and care for it, to work hard enough to pay for it, to figure out what other people meant when they used the word “home.”
Blink your eyes and that girl is a fifty-six-year-old woman who has lived five times longer than she has ever lived anywhere on a ranch in a high mountain meadow of lupine and fescue, surrounded by granite and spruce. Every penny that has gone toward the mortgage payments I have earned with my writing and that fact matters so much to me that when my father died ten years ago and what was left of his money fell to me, I left it in his brokerage account and pretended it didn’t exist.
Sometime in the last twenty-five years, the ranch changed from being the thing I always had to figure out how to pay for, to the place I have spent my life.
And when the chores are all done, the ranch is a meditation in stillness. It says, Here, sit in this chair. For the rest of the afternoon, let’s watch the way the light lays itself across the mountain. Let’s be real quiet and see if the three hundred head of elk who live up the mountain come through the pasture on their way to the river to drink.
In 2013, during the largest fire in southwestern Colorado’s history—110,000 acres burning less than a mile from the ranch—treetops exploding into flaming rockets down one arm of the horseshoe of mountains that for twenty years had kept me safe, I drove under an apocalyptic orange sky through lung-searing smoke past two roadblocks the firefighters had set up to take Dona Blair my final ranch payment, my fiction writer’s mind unable to decide whether this gesture would make it more or less likely the ranch would be engulfed in flames. When I got to her driveway I saw that all the giant spruce trees her husband had carefully designed the house to fit among had orange flagging tied in their branches. These would be the first ones the Forest Service firefighters would cut if the fire got too close.
We’d been on standby to evacuate for weeks, and I’d decided the only thing I really wanted to save (other than the animals, who were enjoying a smoke-free vacation a hundred miles away in Gunnison) was the barn, which wouldn’t fit in the back of my 4Runner. But the summer monsoon came in time to save us, as it always has, right on schedule on Fourth of July weekend—you can set your watch by it—and now it looks as if I will get to spend the rest of my life watching the charred mountainside to the west of me regerminate, revitalize, regrow.
This is the only real home I have ever had—this log cabin with its tilted horse barn, a leaking propane tank and a resident pack rat who has a weakness for raspberry soap. The house isn’t plumbed for a clothes dryer, so in the winter I string clotheslines in the kitchen, the mudroom, and around the woodstove in the living room. The fifty-year-old furnace can only keep up with the regular subzero temperatures if the woodstove is burning all the time, and as a result, when I go out into the world in a public way in the winter, I smell as if I have just come from a Grateful Dead concert. All the window screens are frayed because my little coydog, Sally, who came to me from some traumatic puppyhood that landed her in the Flagstaff pound, could predict a lightning storm at fifty miles, and at the first rumble would make a neat little X-shaped slice with her toenail and then power her body through the window and to her place of choice, under the porch.
Sometimes, when I’m driving back out Middle Creek Road after a week teaching writing in Mallorca, Spain, or Ames, Iowa, and I round the corner where Antelope Park stretches out huge and empty and magnificent in front of me, I am openmouthed with astonishment that this is the place I have lived the largest part of my life. It’s a full-time job lining up ranchsitters for the significant chunks of time I need to be away, and even if it is someone more competent with a fencing tool than I am, it makes me nervous to leave so often. The ranch and its animal inhabitants sometimes want and need attention of a kind that just can’t wait until I’m scheduled to get back, and my life becomes a balancing act I don’t always get right. Some days I think I would like to live near the ocean, or a sushi bar, or a movie theater, or my friends, who by and large live vibrant lives in sophisticated cities. But a low-level panic that feels downright primal always stops this kind of thinking in its tracks. A quiet certainty that if I gave up the ranch, there would be no more safe home, no place of refuge, no olly olly oxen free.
And there is one more thing. The summer before I drove all over the West looking for a home was the summer I lost my mother. I am only telling you now because I had never realized the coincidence of it, had never thought about the cause and effect relationship of it—until I began to write the story of the ranch.
I am only a little better at giving in than I used to be, at slowing down, at sitting still. But progress is progress, and any amount of it I have made, I owe entirely to this 120 acres of tall grass and blue sage, with a simple log house, a sagging barn and a couple of equine senior citizens.
How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea what the answer will be.
It might have been fate, or some kind of calling. It could have been random, but it doesn’t feel random. Sometimes a few pieces of the puzzle click into place, and the world seems to spin a little more freely. In other words, maybe I didn’t choose this ranch at all. Maybe this ranch chose me.
Ranch Almanac: Buying Hay
A farmer named Rick Davie has kept me in hay for twenty-four years. Rick grows both good certified grass hay and alfalfa. I’ve always bought the grass, because my Paso Fino, Deseo, has a metabolic condition a little like diabetes and can’t handle rich forage. But now that the horses are as old as the hills, I have Rick throw in twenty bales of alfalfa for the coldest January mornings.
A few times over the two and a half decades I’ve lived here, I got talked into buying somebody else’s hay, and each time I was sorry. Rot, mildew, sick horses and not enough volume to get me through the winter. Rick’s bales are large, dry and heavy, and they keep weight on my guys all winter. When I post a photo on Facebook of my horses eating in the snow, invariably one horsewoman or another will ask “Hey, where did you get that nice-looking hay?”
Each autumn, Rick backs his giant, ancient flatbed through the orange gate—this itself is a thing of beauty, like watching a blind man thread a needle—and swings it around to the front door of my barn. He’s stacked a hundred bales on the truck to a height of about twelve feet—a risky proposition considering the fifty-mile drive from his place to mine, but the hay always arrives in perfect condition. Rick climbs up on top of the pile and asks me to position one bale right in the doorway of the barn. He calls it a “bouncer,” and sure enough, if he tips each subsequent bale just right every one of them will spring off the bouncer bail and straight into the middle of the barn. From there a couple of Rick’s ranch hands and I, and eventually Rick himself, will drag and stack those bales in every available space.
Rick makes fun of me for dragging the bales with my hay hooks. He’s sixty-five and strong as a bull and can still pick those suckers up and toss them on top of a stack five bales high. He also makes fun of my fancy ginger ale (Bruce Cost Original with real ginger puree I buy in Denver), but every time he delivers hay he drinks two
bottles. Every once in a great while, he’ll stay for lunch. He’ll come inside and take his cowboy hat off, and, without fail, announce that raising four daughters made all his hair fall out.
All my friends say, upon meeting Rick, Now that’s a man, by which they mean if I would stop—for the love of God—falling in love with poets, I might have some help getting things done around here. I had, for most of a decade, been in a long-distance relationship with the poet Greg Glazner. He lived first in New Mexico, and then in California, and came to the ranch to visit over the holidays and part of every summer. And while Greg did help me with the care and feeding of the animals during the several weeks each year he visited, he would be the first to admit he wouldn’t be able to build a birdhouse with a kit.
Rick, by contrast, built a full-sized basketball court in the loft of his 1915 barn to use as a dance floor because he didn’t want his daughters to have to get married on some golf course somewhere. When he delivers the hay, I see him looking around at all the things that need fixing around here—stuff he could do some morning before break fast with one hand tied behind his back.
Rick is bringing 250 pair of Gelbvieh Angus cross cattle down off the range tomorrow, but he still makes time to bring me some hay today. I told him I would feel better going back out on the road next week if there were thirty bales of hay in the barn, so he goes ahead and brings me a hundred. My ranchsitters might not use a single bale before I return on the first of November. On the other hand, they could be up to their rumps in snow by the weekend. Rick tells me I don’t have to pay him for these hundred bales until he brings the second load, so I go ahead and pay him for all two hundred. These sorts of business deals are one of the best things about living in this place.
PART ONE
Getting Out
The Tinnitus of Truth Telling
My beautiful mother ran away from Spiceland, Indiana, at the end of the eighth grade. Her Aunt Ermie, who had raised her to that point, had bet my mother fifty dollars she could not get straight Cs on her final report card. But she did get straight Cs, took the cash and got on a bus bound for Broadway. There, she got plucked off the streets by two young actors who, thirty years later, became my Uncle Tommy and Uncle Don. Tommy and Don fed my mother, clothed her and bailed her out of most of the teenaged trouble she got herself into. For the next two decades, she danced, sang, told jokes and did cartwheels across stages in countless theaters, nightclubs and cabarets in New York and elsewhere. During World War II, she went overseas with Bob Hope’s USO touring show. After that she became Frank Sinatra’s opening act in Vegas, then returned to New York and acted in supporting roles, on and off Broadway, with some of the best of the time: Jackie Gleason, Walter Pidgeon, Nancy Walker.
Then, somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-two (she always lied about her age and my father lied in her obituary, so now I will never know for sure), for reasons utterly inexplicable to me, she married my father and got pregnant. In that order—I have checked the dates a hundred times.
At the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, my father went backstage with a dozen roses and an invitation for the pretty actress to take a spin in his cream-colored Buick convertible. She got so drunk on their first date she threw up all over his milky leather seats, and he said, “You better get your shit together because we are going to get married,” and six weeks later they did.
My mother had a big, hearty laugh, which boomed out of her when she was happy, or sometimes angry, or sometimes for not much reason at all. She was so very beautiful. I think of her, more than anywhere else, at her makeup mirror, “putting on her face,” her honey hair pulled back in a headband, the eye she was lining super-magnified in the glass. She had gorgeous long legs—dancer’s legs, with pretty knees and sturdy calves—which she gave, like a promise, to me. She could do roundoffs and even handsprings down the beach at the Jersey Shore well into her sixties. She could bring people together to put on a show—in the old-fashioned sense—like nobody’s business. In Trenton, New Jersey, and then after my father lost his job there, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, my mother raised money for the United Way and United Cerebral Palsy by turning amateurs into professional singers and dancers with only a few weeks of rehearsal. And though she would be frustrated by poor lighting, bad sound systems and long-out-of-tune pianos, I believe those hours in the theater made her miss her Broadway days a little less.
“I gave up everything I loved for you,” she’d say to me almost daily, to get me to order my salad dressing on the side or use the organic apricot scrub she bought me, or not to wear my retainer in front of company. And I would want only to find a way to give it all back, to restore to her the life she’d had before being saddled with the burden of me.
“But why did you do that?” I wish I’d had the wherewithal to ask her.
Alcohol addiction notwithstanding, my mother had the strongest will of anyone I have ever known. She barely ate and she never perspired and she did not grow body hair. I am fairly certain if her biological clock had ticked one time she could have willed it silent with her mind or smashed it with her fist.
My father was charming, but she had had forty-two years, plus or minus, to learn to see through his kind of charm. Had thirty years in the ups and downs of show business simply worn her out? Did she marry my father because she saw a future rushing toward her where the fact of her age would make it harder and harder to land roles? Or did some Indianan idea of conventionality sneak up out of the cornfield and grab her from behind, dragging her back to the cul de sac?
If it did, it lied to her about how she would feel once she got there.
My mother’s mother died in childbirth with my mother, so it stands to reason my birth would have killed my mother, at least a bit. She lived on until my thirtieth birthday, an honorable life that included her variety shows, devotion to the altar guild, work with the developmentally disabled, good friends and lots of tennis. But it seemed to be only a half-life, a shadow of the thirty years that had preceded it, and when a combination of vodka and Vioxx took her out at seventy, give or take, I was, alongside my sadness, glad that she didn’t have to witness herself losing any more than she already had.
My mother liked to say she stopped working after she married my father, but that is not precisely true. For several years she kept doing summer theater. Even after she gave that up, she still landed roles in TV commercials and bit parts on soap operas: the long lost cousin, the visiting aunt. For several years she was Betty of Betty’s Roadside Stand in a series of Post Raisin Bran commercials, and she predated Jane Russell as the face of Playtex’s “I Can’t Believe It’s a Girdle.” Yet for every day she went off to New York for an audition or shoot and came home glowing and singing, there were ten other days when her task list read: laundry, dinner, dry cleaning, Pam to dentist, cat to vet.
And then there is this. Even in the “Betty’s Breakfasts” years, when her residual checks added up to more than his income, my mother handed her checks directly over to my father. He gave my mother two hundred dollars household money every two weeks to buy groceries, clothes and every single other thing the family needed, from the time I was born until the time I left for college, with no adjustment for inflation. My father carried more than two hundred dollars in his wallet at all times, bought used Cadillacs and hand-tailored suits while my mother made our clothes on the sewing machine and scoured magazines to find interesting things to do with leftovers. The song that was on continuous repeat in my childhood kitchen was my mother reasoning or flirting or begging for an advance on next week’s money, and my father shaming her, no matter what the circumstances, for spending it too fast.
My father was a child of the Depression, which left him and his single mother in such dire circumstances he never recovered emotionally, even though he made a good living all his life. He couldn’t stop himself from driving across the state line to New Jersey to buy gas that was a few cents cheaper, from smashing a lamp that had been carelessly left on by my mothe
r or me in an empty room, from putting his finger down on the disconnect button of almost anyone’s long-distance phone call. He hated phones in general—even when the call was local, some unspecified meter was running in his head. When forced to speak on the phone, he would say whatever he had to say in as few words as possible and then hang up without saying goodbye.
My father was incapable of organizing the world into anything but profit and loss columns, keeping a running tally in his mind of everything, especially what my mother and I cost. He billed us for his time, not just in dollars but in life energy as well, and made it clear there was nothing we could do that would come close to paying him back.
Now that I am roughly as old as he was when I was born (he lied about his age too, but I did my best to tell the truth in his obituary), I can see how my father built himself a prison out of his own stinginess. Not only did he group people in his life by the ways they were trying to “rip him off,” he allowed himself to be affronted by every good thing that happened to anyone, even if they were strangers or public figures. He was a golf fan, though not a golfer, and I can remember him boiling with rage when a young Tom Watson won $40,000 in his first Masters victory. Why should Tom Watson have cashed in big for playing seventy-two holes of golf, when my father had had no such opportunity? Why should a tall, talented left-handed pitcher named Steve Carlton command $65,000 to play baseball for his first season with the Philadelphia Phillies, when my father had to work forty hours a week at a job he hated to make far less? When I told my father about the modest—even in those days—advance W. W. Norton paid for Cowboys, he shook his head and grimaced. “You know,” he said, “Wayne Newton is the highest paid performer in the free world.”
