by Pam Houston
Cry me a river, says the cynic. How about we make a short list of all things that could be wrong and are not. So I do. At this moment, none of my close friends are dying (except inasmuch as we are all dying). I have a job—I have several jobs—and at only one of them am I not respected. I am not underwater on my mortgage. I have a barn full of hay and four cords of wood on the porch and a cabinet full of dark-chocolate-covered figs and almonds. My upstream neighbor has not gotten into bed with the frackers and the condo village at the top of Wolf Creek Pass got defeated yet again. My presence on this ranch means these 120 acres will not be subdivided, will not be paved over, will not be turned into dream homes for people who come here one week a year.
And still, this morning, that dark undertow, the feeling of looking up from the bottom of a dank, wet well . . .
Time to move. On this point, all selves are in agreement. Put the smart wool on, lace your boots, don your barn coat. Cut the apples, cut the carrots, feed the equines from your hands. Cut the string that holds the bale of hay together, two flakes for the mini-donkeys, six for the horses, everything that’s left for the sheep. Top off the horse water, top off the sheep water, double-check the heaters in the troughs. Listen to the reassuring thump of cold boot soles on frozen ground, the contented burps and purrs of the chickens as they peck around after their organic scratch grains, the otherworldly whoosh of wing beats overhead—the bald eagle who winters upriver, back after his one-year hiatus. This is how the ranch heals me with its dailiness, its necessary rituals not one iota different than prayer.
The forecast is calling for wind and possibly snow tonight but right now it is perfectly still and almost 20 degrees, too warm for my heavy barn coat. The creek at this time of year, with all the freezing and unfreezing, is an ice sculpture, the willows lining it pencil drawings, the mountaintop beyond it already feet deep in snow.
Olivia, still a pup, is charging and leaping to see above what’s left of the tall grass while William patrols the perimeter. From here I can see Middle Creek Road, Lime Creek Road, as well as the state highway across the river, and though this represents some fairly large percentage of all the roads in Mineral County, for the hour we’ll be walking, not one car will go by.
Out here, on this acreage, I’ve learned not only to hear my own voice, but to recognize what makes my heart leap up and then go toward it: the snowshoe hare—halfway through his biannual color change—William scares up along the back fence, his big white feet flashing as his still tawny body gains distance. A coyote, sitting, dignified and still as a church, two hundred yards across the pasture, watching us make our way to the wetland, and then the flash, when William sees him, and he sees William see him, his total evaporation into thin air, like a ghost dog come from some other plane of being.
These are the things that have always healed me; it just took me half a lifetime to really trust them, to understand how infallible they are. Moving through space, preferably outdoor space, preferably outdoor space that maintains some semblance of nature, if not this nature, some other nature. When I’m happy it’s a carnival out here and when I am sad it is almost too beautiful to bear—but not quite. It is definitely too beautiful to contemplate leaving. I climb the hill where John Robert Pinckley—the first man to build a cabin on this land—and his children, Bob and Ada, are buried, and I know well that when I claimed these 120 acres they also claimed me. We are each other’s mutual saviors.
Sitting at the Pinckleys’ gravesite, William pressed up against one thigh and Olivia on the other, looking across the river at Bristol Head all aglow in the low winter light, I am certain the world is not out to hurt me but to heal me, and I’ll hold on to it with both hands for as long as I am able.
This is what I try to explain to Kyle and Maggie over a second round of beers and Pellegrino in Pittsburgh. We decide bison burgers sound better than falafel, so Maggie drives me to BRGR while Kyle runs home to drop off Apacha. Maggie and I talk about the eleven-month trip she and her boyfriend took four months after her mother’s death. “I was afraid I wouldn’t survive her absence if I stayed still,” she said, and I said, “Maybe you were collecting new things to love about the world.”
We wait for Kyle for thirty minutes and then an hour. Finally she calls to say she is on her way so we order for her, but by the time she actually gets there her food is stone cold and she barely eats a bite.
She’ll send me an email a few weeks later thanking me for the things I said to her, admitting she had been driving around all that time we were waiting, crying, trying to pull herself together enough to join us, but that I wasn’t to worry too much about her because since that night she had been working on her writing and spending quality time with Maggie and Apacha and feeling a whole lot better. I wrote back and told her though I thought of her often, I hadn’t, exactly, been worried. She sounded so solid, so grounded in her email I decided I didn’t need to say the other thing I was pretty sure of: that she had cried that night, not so much for the disappointing past, as for the dawning possibility of an unspeakably beautiful future. I was pretty sure she already knew.
Ranch Almanac: Log Chain
Right before sunset (4:08, during these, the darkest days of December) the dogs and I stop whatever we are doing and take a walk down to the river. William especially likes this time of night because lots of animals are moving around. The river is still open, still has a stripe down the middle of silvery glorious movement between giant white sheets of ice. We’ve gotten eight inches of snow over the last several weeks, and Livie’s got snowballs in her feet, so I sit down on the riverbank and pull her on to my lap to warm her feet and legs. She likes to sit in my lap, which she will be able to do for approximately two more weeks. After that it will be like having a little horse on me.
In spite of the encroaching darkness, there’s nothing out here to be afraid of. Coyotes, even a whole pack of them, aren’t brave enough to attack a full-grown woman and a 150-pound dog. Mountain lions hunt at dusk and dawn, but in this county, there’s never been an attack on a human. A black bear won’t be hanging out on the riverbank, but even if he were, he’d hear us before we’d hear him and hightail it back into the forest.
It gets darker as we walk, and we ought to turn around, but the river is glowing so beautifully in the twilight and smelling just how a river smells when it’s early winter and there isn’t much snow yet but the ground has already been frozen for weeks. Across the river, Bristol Head rises more than thirty-five hundred feet off the valley floor, a massive wall of sheared-off compressed volcanic ash, resembling, especially in this light, Yosemite’s iconic Half Dome. There’s more than half a moon, which is enough to get us back as long as we stay on the elk trail, and in the worst case, we can go up to the road and return to the ranch that way.
Out here, it never occurs to me to worry about running into a human being with ill intent, not because the humans around here are necessarily harmless (though most of them are) but because there just aren’t very many of them. According to the latest census, Mineral County Colorado is made up of 921 square miles, and has 704 residents—fewer than one person per square mile.
For the better part of two years, a man who went by the name of Log Chain—a person of great interest to the law enforcement officials in a Midwestern state—camped out in a sheepherder’s trailer just over my back fence. I got used to him being out there, and thought he might be there forever, until one day he vanished, as silently as he had arrived.
Log Chain wore clothes he made from skins he tanned from animals he shot himself. I’d see him out there looking like Davy Crockett, crawling on all fours along my back fence with a .22 or a .270 in his hands, hoping to scare up a fox or a coyote. When I asked my neighbor Scotty Lamb what he’d been in prison for, Scotty said, “I’m pretty sure he killed a man, Pam,” but then followed that story with another one about seeing Log Chain in Creede one day, and seeing another guy, a tourist, try to get in a fight with him, and watching Log Chain walk away, gentle
as a lamb.
Log Chain earned his living making steel knives with long blades and beautifully carved handles. He built me a hanging pot rack by melting down and refashioning junkyard truck springs. I promised to pay him $200 cash for it, and when he brought it over, I realized I’d need to go to the bank. He asked what time he should come back, flipping one of the many layers of tanned skins in his tunic over to consult a dime-store digital clock he’d sewn in there.
Log Chain helped me dig out my 4Runner one time when I got high-centered in a drift in my driveway I shouldn’t have tried. I was grateful to him even though he talked about thalidomide babies and the end of days the whole time. Now there is no telling where Log Chain is, but I stand by the consensus that in his Colorado incarnation he was not only harmless, but helpful.
The Sound of Horse Teeth on Hay
This morning the wind woke me at first light, howling against the storm window and threatening to tear a loose piece of flashing off the kitchen gutter. I’d been awake writing until two, and hoped to sleep until eight, but William was worried, emitting a micro-squeak the way he does every thirty seconds—just long enough for me to have nearly dropped back off to sleep—so I was worried too, not about the house, but the horses.
We’ve made it to February 1, which means, hopefully, there won’t be too many more nights of 35 (or worse) below zero. We’ve had a lot of those nights this year, in December and January, too many for the comfort level of my old horses who manage to endure, year after year. A storm like this will elevate the temperature to zero or above. Still, a 40 mph wind can turn 20 above into 20 below, and I am starting to suspect that Isaac, the mini-donk, who has a bit of a Napoleon complex, has begun bullying the horses, keeping them out of the giant stall I leave open for them. If he’s successful, it means two tiny donkeys are (relatively) warm and dry right now, while the horses are doing their best to use the angles of the barn to stay out of the wind.
I roll out of bed and cautiously open the door to the wood porch (I’ve lost doors to big wind twice in the past), but this wind seems to be from the south, and though the snow is swirling around the porch like some kind of ghostly special effect, the door opens normally. I tump the snow off of a couple of logs and bring them inside, knock the coals around in the woodstove and add the new logs to the fire.
If there is any doubt about how cold this winter has been, my wood and hay supply attest to it. I am going to run out of both, probably by mid-March, and since the pasture doesn’t come in until late May and since it can snow anytime until the Fourth of July, I am going to have to buy another two cords and another hundred bales.
It’s not the buying that’s punishing; hay and wood are reasonably priced around here. It’s moving the hay from the plowed part of the driveway to the barn, and moving the wood from that same spot, across the front yard and around the house to the covered porch—all of this with four feet of snow still on the ground. It will involve packing a trail with snowshoes, and then sledding the rounds of wood and bales of hay, one or two at a time to their destinations. And then there is the stacking them once I get there.
Rick Davie will help me move and stack the hay—he’s too much of a gentleman not to, but I’ll move and stack the wood alone.
It’s easy to lose track of the days out here, but I know this is Sunday because the blizzard was supposed to arrive Thursday, but only amounted to flurries until yesterday (Saturday) morning, when it started to come down in earnest. The forecast kept edging the winter storm warning forward—increasing its duration by two or four hours at a time, as if they didn’t want us to notice—but now they’ve gone ahead and said we are in for it pretty much continuously until Tuesday night. There is so much wind it’s hard to say from the kitchen window whether we’ve gotten two feet or four, but I know the drifts will have made the driveway out of the question, even in the old reliable Toyota truck with the manually locking hubs.
I’m mostly here by myself during the winter, or I guess, more correctly, I am the only human on the ranch, which feels the opposite of being alone to me. I am in the good company of two wolfhounds, two horses, my bonded pair of miniature donkey jacks, three Icelandic ewes and a ram, and one aging mouser named Mr. Kitty. I have well-stocked cabinets and there’s always something in the freezer to make soup out of. Randy Woods, who plows my driveway, usually gets to me within twenty-four hours, unless it’s a three-day storm and then he gets to me twenty-four hours after it stops.
I make some cinnamon tea—double warmth—and dress in layers of wool, fleece, down and whatever it is snow pants are made of these days, and step out onto the dog porch into the blow. I squint to see the horses in the corral, their manes, backs and tails frosted with snow. No sign of the donkeys nor the sheep, who have wisely decided to stay inside their enclosures.
I have always preferred the company of animals to the company of people. I’ve been told this means I am emotionally stunted in some way, and perhaps I am. But when I compare myself with the people I’ve known who can’t handle being without the company of another human being for even five minutes, I think I might be less emotionally stunted than they are.
My childhood home did not have any safe places. When my parents were drinking, when my father stomped through each room of the house looking for a target, I often hid in the basement, in the clothes dryer with the round Plexiglas door cracked just enough for air. Yet, beginning with Martha Washington, who entered my life when I was two days old, I have felt safe in the presence of more than enough human beings to offset, at least cognitively, all the ways I was conditioned to distrust them. There were so many teachers—Mr. Kashner in grade school, Mr. Miller in high school, Dr. Kraus, Dr. Burkett, Dr. Bennett, Dr. Consolo and Dr. Gamble in college—who took a special interest in me, who made me feel loved and safe and smart and valued. I have had men in my life, off and on, who have loved me (and a few who did not), and if I never learned to trust them, exactly, at least I learned to reach for trust. I have good and loving friends spread from coast to coast and elsewhere whom I visit, and who come to the ranch, people who have had my back in every situation and enriched my life in more ways than I can enumerate. And if I say, even so, that it has been only the rare human who has given me an animal’s worth of love back, it’s not because I underestimate the power of human love. It’s because I have been lucky enough to live in the unconditional, unwavering, uncommon, gale force of love directed at me from my animals.
The wind stills for a moment and the whole world is silent as a prayer. In the aftermath of a blizzard, the snow looks more like a painting of snow than snow itself. Everything sculpted and softened by all that power pushing it for hours in one direction. The hill that rises behind Bob Pinckley’s old cabin looks less like landscape and more like contemporary art. White on white, a tiny row of fence poles the only distinguishing factor. And then the wind starts howling again.
I go back inside and call Randy Woods and get on his schedule for Wednesday morning. I slice two apples and break eight carrots into pieces while William sits patiently beside me. I don the hat I bought right out of an Inuit lady’s kitchen in Arctic Bay, Nunavut, Canada (the warmest hat I have ever owned), my neck gaiter, my winter work gloves, and my Carhartt barn jacket. No need to call William, who is already standing at attention in the mudroom. It is just as well that Livie, who is snoring soft puppy snores by the woodstove, sits this one out. I open the door and off we go.
From what I can see, and I can’t see all that much in this gale even though it is full daylight now, we’ve gotten about two and a half feet of new snow since midday yesterday. But the drifts between me and the barn run anywhere from one to three feet higher than that. My beautifully engineered two-weeks-in-the-making snowshoe-packed trail to the barn is nothing but a distant memory, but it still behooves me to try to stay on top of its old footprint, because when I fall off of it, I sink yet another foot and a half down into the last storm’s uncompacted snow. I get about thirty steps into my trek when a wind
blast stops me cold and I realize I’ve left the porch without the snow shovel, so back I go, using the boot-sized post holes I have just created to retrieve it. William doesn’t really love snow this deep. It gets up in his paws and makes ice balls which eventually bleed, but he’s nothing if not loyal, so he returns to the porch with me.
Today, I don’t need to shovel my way to the barn (though one year we got five feet in one storm and then I did have to shovel my way there). In this wind, any progress I’d make trying to use the shovel to remake my old trail would be erased in minutes. I’ll need the shovel once I get there, to shovel out the orange gate, which lets me into the corral, and then to shovel out the barn door, which lets me get to the hay.
But first things first. The remaining hundred or so steps to the barn. It seems impossible, but it is snowing even harder than it was five minutes ago. A giant gust of wind lifts more snow into the air, and the barn, which is only about a hundred yards from the house, disappears entirely. This is the kind of day that makes a person believe those stories where the farmer gets lost between the house and the barn and freezes to death in a snowdrift while his wife cooks his dinner. If I get lost in a snowdrift today, no one will know I’m there until the spring thaw.
