by Pam Houston
Four Christmases ago they froze solid, and my friend Steph and I went out there on a 10 below afternoon with a pry bar, a crème brûlée torch, two space heaters and a bunch of space blankets, made a kind of tent around us, and chipped and clawed our way a foot down into the frozen soil trying to defrost the pipe. After three hours, Greg came out with two cups of hot chocolate and the message that, in case we hadn’t noticed, it was getting dark. We worked on into the night with headlamps, warming the dirt before we replaced it and packing it tight around the pole, making sure no stones or clods were leaving frigid air pockets. But every time we tried the pump, we got nothing.
Eventually we gave up, came inside, and took turns in the clawfoot tub thawing our frostbitten toes and fingers. But the next morning, a sunny one, where the 10:00 a.m. temp climbed above zero for the first time in a week, we went out to test the pump and after a few noisy sputters water began flowing. Some combination of the crème brûlée torch and the space-heater-warmed dirt we repacked around the pipe must have been just enough to give the heat tape a chance to catch up overnight. Steph and I high-fived and all but did the bump we were so excited. It was almost as satisfying as the time I took my cell phone apart and fixed it with a steak knife.
Retethering
In my first semester in a Ph.D. program in creative writing at the University of Utah, a professor had laid out the rules for stories turned in to his workshop: “No trees, no snow, no mountains, no skiing, no eyes, no tears, and no female bodily excretions.”
If you have read Cowboys Are My Weakness, you might conclude I wrote it as an act of defiance, and, knowing me, I probably did. But it’s also true I both avoided and survived the hip parade of graduate school by working as a river, hunting and skiing guide simultaneously. I rowed rubber rafts down all the rivers of the Colorado Plateau: the Colorado, the Green, the San Juan and the Yampa; as well as the Salmon, the Middle Fork and the Selway in Idaho. I guided for whitetail deer in Montana’s Little Snowy Mountains and for Dall sheep in the Alaska Range and the Brooks Range in the far north. I worked as a ski instructor and backcountry ski guide in Park City. My daily life was full of trees, snow, mountains, skiing, eyes, tears and female bodily excretions, and so were my stories. They were the ones I had to tell.
But my professors at Utah didn’t like my work and did not receive news of the book’s success warmly. One accused me of glorifying an archaic form of masculinity. Another had written on my evaluation, “Pam should find something else to do with her hands.”
Two months after publication, I waited outside the graduate studies director’s office door a full hour after our appointment time. I needed him to sign my tuition waiver for what would be the final quarter of my Ph.D. It was not uncommon, in our department, for the creative writers to be treated like the poor cousins of the literature students, especially by this man who we had nicknamed “Our Advocate.” But this was a simple piece of paperwork, imaginary money passed from one imaginary entity to another within the university’s bureaucracy. I didn’t anticipate trouble.
Eventually My Advocate waived me in but did not invite me to sit.
“Fiction or poetry?” he asked, by way of a greeting.
“Fiction,” I said.
“And you are ABD, or what?”
“My dissertation is finished.” I took a small breath. “And published.”
He narrowed his eyes. “That must be nice for you,” he said.
“It is,” I said.
He moved a few papers around on his desk and sighed. “I can’t sign this today,” he said, “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
I was living in Park City. “Coming back tomorrow” would involve a two-hour round-trip drive and we were supposed to get snow. My Advocate picked up his office phone and started dialing. I rose to leave. Somewhere between the office chair I had not been asked to sit in and the little hallway that connected us to the main English office, the idea of walking out of Orson Spenser Hall forever sprang up in my mind, and once it had lodged there I could not shake it free. By the time I passed the copy machine, where the guy who had said I should find something else to do with my hands and the guy who disallowed female bodily excretions were having a conversation about whether it was better to be an imminent writer or an eminent writer, leaving felt more like a promise I had already made myself. I walked down the hall gaining speed, flushed, almost giddy with this thing I was about to do.
In the two and a half months since my book had come out I’d been on tour, spending time with real writers, who, generally speaking, cared more for life and one another than those who populated that building. I banged out the front door of Orson Spenser Hall and never went back—not for my books or my coat. I’ve not been back to this day. I never told anyone I was leaving, and no one ever asked if I would return.
My book tour rolled on, taking me all over the country as well as to England, Scotland, Ireland and France. I didn’t have much time to worry about what I’d given up. My lease in Park City ended on June 30 and I hadn’t even begun to think about where I’d next call home when one morning my father called me, shock so thick in his voice it was almost unrecognizable. The night before, my mother had told him she didn’t feel well. He asked her if she wanted to go to the hospital and she said no. When he woke up that morning next to her, she was dead. He said, “I keep asking the paramedics why they can’t bring that machine in here and do that thing they do on TV.”
What I remember most about the funeral is being scared. Of my mother’s friends who would shame me for moving to the other side of the country and leaving her to suffer my father’s anger alone. Of the void that would open up now that my lifelong occupation—keeping my mother from despair—was no longer required. Mostly, though, I was afraid of my father, of how we would face each other without my mother always finessing and controlling that neutral space between us.
My father had been hypercritical of my mother for the thirty years I had been on the planet, but the day she died she became the most wonderful woman in the world. Without her, would he even be able to clothe and feed himself? Two nights after the funeral I found him standing in the kitchen, contemplating the dishwasher. “I discovered,” he said, “if you put the glasses in there right side up, they get all full of water.” I barely had time to teach him how to push the buttons on the microwave before I was back on the road to writers’ conferences and summer workshops.
For the first time in my life there was no back to school, there was no back to anything, only forward. I rented, on a month-to-month basis, a bedroom in the Oakland Hills, where I knew virtually no one. I spent mornings working on my second book, and cultivated a macchiato addiction in the late afternoon. Predictably sleepless, I drove the three bridges in circles half the night. Bay Bridge—Golden Gate—Richmond and back home again, listening to Tori Amos’s “Little Earthquakes,” singing along to “Silent All These Years” at the top of my voice.
The next six months went by in an instant, and in January the paperback of Cowboys came out, marking the start of another long tour. Those months are blurry now, but I do remember, with perfect clarity, after a reading at the King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, my friend Terry Tempest Williams taking my face in both of her hands and saying, “Now you are untethered. There is nothing holding you, anymore, to this earth.”
All these years later, it’s impossible for me to say whether I remember so little of 1992–93 because I was in shock over my mother’s death, or because all of my dreams were coming true to an extent I had no way to contextualize. It was probably a little of both.
It was the summer of 1993 when I embarked upon the aforementioned western-states reading and real estate tour. In early September, I found myself in Steamboat Springs, where I met a pair of writer sisters who invited me to Denver for a couple of days. They had tickets to Monday Night Football, Broncos-Raiders as well as a Rockies make-up doubleheader against the Houston Astros on Tuesday afternoon. My years in Colorado between coll
ege and grad school had turned me into a Broncos fan, and as of that season, Denver had gotten the baseball team they’d been vying for for years.
The Rockies were playing at gigantic Mile High Stadium—Coors Field had yet to be built—and were on track to break the all-time MLB season attendance record. Never mind both teams were in last place in their division and Houston had played most of their home games that dismal season in front of fewer than a thousand people. I remember the look of astonishment on the Houston players’ faces as the Astros took the field. Fifty-five thousand Rockies fans showed up on a Tuesday afternoon in September to show the media and the organization just how excited Denver was about baseball.
It was that enthusiasm for life, for the mountains and everything you could do in them, that had thrilled me when I’d lived in Colorado before graduate school. Two days after that doubleheader, I rolled into Creede. By the weekend I’d made my offer on the ranch.
Did I ask myself whether putting 5 percent down on a 120-acre ranch I had no idea how to take care of and no foreseeable way to pay for might have been taking the idea of retethering to the earth to a radical extreme? I did not. Did I ask myself whether my whirlwind year and a half on the road surrounded by people who were rabidly (and unfoundedly) thrilled to make my acquaintance had me so freaked out I bought 120 acres of protection in a town even most Denverites had never heard of? I did not. If buying the ranch was a gross overreaction to either my mother’s death or my book’s unexpected run, it was a secret I kept from myself.
What I was becoming aware of in those days was that something I thought of as the greater physical world had always had an uncanny way of looking after me. My parents had been drunk so often—crazy raging drunk, absolutely no-business-getting-behind-the-wheel drunk—and yet they were always getting behind the wheel. As a result, I was in sixteen totaled automobiles before my sixteenth birthday. My parents and I collided with trees, guardrails, other cars and mailboxes; we were catapulted through cornfields and onto median strips and underneath one tractor-trailer.
One Sunday morning in April, my mother sent me in to the local 7-Eleven to buy a copy of The New York Times after church because she had drunk so much of the blessed but unused communion wine (a fringe benefit of being a member of the altar guild) she couldn’t get her legs underneath her. Just before getting back in the car, I dropped the paper under her MG Midget and was bent over gathering sections together when the wheels began to spin and spit gravel. Leaning over to see what was taking me so long, my mother had jammed her foot onto the accelerator rather than the brake. The car leapt the significant curb, knocking me backward and picking up with its bumper one of those big plastic horses you put a dime in to make rock. My mother’s car pushed that horse all the way to the stand-up coolers in the back of the store, where the glass exploded spectacularly, sending cans of soda careening all the way out into the parking lot.
One Christmas Eve, my father and I rolled a Cadillac convertible seven times, into the median, across two lanes of opposing traffic, and down into a creek bottom, shattering every piece of glass, shredding every tire, caving in every piece of steel except the portion of the roof above the front seat where the highway patrol had to cut us out with chain saws.
Not just sixteen car crashes before I was old enough to get my learner’s permit, sixteen totaled vehicles. And I never, as a result of any of those crashes, spent one night in the hospital.
After high school, having gotten out of my parents’ house alive, I predictably replaced the dangers inherent there with risks of my own choosing. I ran class V rapids at flood stage, sat up all night with fresh Dall sheep carcasses in grizzly country, and skied out-of-bounds avalanche chutes and couloirs with the toughest of the boys.
When an avalanche on a moonlight telemark ski on Berthoud Pass failed to pull my skis under the snow and me with them; when the water cooler popped up beside me after I flipped my raft in Big Drop 2 in Cataract Canyon (the highest runnable falls in North America), providing me more than enough flotation to survive Big Drop 3; when I guided a 52-foot sailboat out of the peak winds of Hurricane Gordon through a narrow break in a coral reef and into an unlit harbor on Bimini (the hurricane had knocked the light out) by listening hard to the way the waves were talking to me; it was hard not to believe the earth was somehow keeping my best interests in mind.
It’s not so much of a stretch, then, for me to believe the ranch somehow urged me toward it; that it spoke to some ancient part of my brain, which despite all evidence to the contrary, still felt an urge toward home.
I have always taken the greatest comfort in being surrounded by wild things. From the time I was eight months old and my babysitter Martha Washington would take me out in the stroller every afternoon and I would grab the scruff of two neighborhood German Shepherds, Salt and Pepper, one with each hand, and they would flank my stroller like some kind of suburban secret service. Or in my grade school years, when my mother would say “I don’t even want to see you until dinner!” and I would disappear for hours with the neighbor girls into the little remnant woods on the other side of Stoke Park Road, where we would hit our own hips with imaginary crops and gallop over fences made from fallen trees. On those first camping trips with Colonel Bob Miller, who would load fifteen neighborhood kids into the back of his station wagon and make us ride under wool blankets, telling us we were headed “out west,” which was really just an overgrown portion of Bethlehem’s Monocacy Park. He’d teach us how to use a compass and how to keep from walking in circles without one, and how to move through a dark forest without fear. During all the trips to the ocean with my parents, where, on the last day, I would stand at the edge of the sea for hours saying goodbye to every wave. In high school, where I would walk the train tracks alone through miles and miles of deciduous forest, making friends with all the animals, memorizing birdcalls, leaf patterns, every bend in Monocacy Creek. In college, when my roommate Mary and I would head down to Hocking Hills in southeastern Ohio for camping, hiking and cross-country skiing, or farther into the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia near towns with names like Thomas, Douglas and Job. During the years between college and graduate school when I worked seasonally in ski towns, and lived in the off-season all over Utah’s red rock country in my VE 24, eating freeze-dried food, going weeks sometimes without a proper shower. For the decade I spent guiding river trips and hunters. I am never more content than when I am cooking, eating, sleeping, waking and walking in the wilderness.
Even now, in my grown-up professional life, too much of which I spend on airplanes, I am likely to grab the sleeve of an unsuspecting stranger and say, Look! There! That’s Upheaval Dome, or the Mogollon Rim, or the Blue Ridge Escarpment—as we sail 39,000 feet above the places I’ve walked in my life, carrying everything I needed on my back. It still makes me so happy just to say their names.
It is no wonder, then, the ranch opened my heart like a tin can. A place with so little light pollution the Milky Way is truly milky. The big mountains—Bristol Head, Red Mountain, Copper Ridge, and Baldy—hold me in place, the gamma grass dancing in great undulating swathes, the aspens quaking their comfort, the creek and the coyotes combining for a lullaby, the big sky, whether full of stars, sunshine or snowflakes is always watching over me.
The initial mortgage Dona carried for me was a fifteen-year note, with a monthly payment that verged on $4,000. (In 2003, she would refinance me, extending the mortgage by five years.) Along with the magazine work, I started a bootleg river business where I applied for private permits and then advertised, “Write and Run the River with Pam Houston.” I told myself I was more or less within the parameters of the law because I wasn’t charging folks for the river trip itself, only the writing instruction that came with it. We all split the cost of the river expenses just as we would have on a private trip, though I’m pretty sure the BLM/Forest Service wouldn’t have gone for that explanation if push had ever come to shove. I also accepted offers to read or teach wherever and whenever they
occurred.
At one of those college visits, I met a young woman—I’ll call her Dani—who was eager to help me with my river business. She had recently received a great deal of money in a trust fund, she said, so I wouldn’t need to pay her for her work. I could teach her to row and to crew, and she would work in exchange for the knowledge. I accepted, since that sort of trade was exactly how I had learned to run rivers myself.
Dani and I led several trips together, and to say she was helpful would be a grotesque understatement. She was Radar O’Reilly to my Henry Blake. I would turn my head fifteen degrees to scan the shoreline for a suitable lunch spot, and there she would be, readying the bowline. I would only have to glance at the bottom of the boat and think “bail bucket,” and she was already putting it in my hand. I had run river trips over the years with a couple of different boyfriends, but I had never teamed up with someone who was willing to help me and let me be the trip leader.
Perhaps that’s why, at the end of river season, when Dani offered to buy a third of the ranch from me to alleviate the financial pressure she knew was driving me to distraction, I accepted. In September 1995 I sold her one-third of my acreage and none of the buildings for $120,000. I started a job teaching as a one-semester visitor at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, and Dani went to Creede to take care of the ranch.
The letter came to my rented cottage in California via FedEx during the first week in October. I was shocked to see it, because at the time I could not imagine FedEx was a thing Creede had. I no longer have the letter, so I’m relying on memory here, but it said something along the lines of “I don’t want to own the ranch with you anymore, and I know you don’t have the money to buy me out, so I am going to buy you out. Please contact me so we can make arrangements ASAP.”
A colleague at work assured me she wasn’t serious. “She’s just saying ‘love me, love me, love me,’ ” he said. “She thought when she bought the ranch with you, the two of you were going to be roomies. Fly home this weekend, make her vegetarian lasagna, let her read you her poems, and everything will be all right.”
