by Pam Houston
And while my childhood was not what anyone would call easy, all the years I have spent holding space for my students’ stories has made me aware of so many others who had it far worse than me. I had enough food to eat, teachers who cared, and good friends to lean on. I had the wherewithal and the race/class-related privilege to get myself to college, to get myself into therapy, to get myself outdoors. Before I had any of that, I had Martha Washington.
Far more than either of my parents, she is the person I have tried to become—in the way I’ll roll up my sleeves and crawl under the furniture with anybody if that’s what’s required, in the way I have taught everyone I have even dated for five minutes to play the game casino (honestly, if you meet someone who knows how to play casino, I have probably slept with them), in the way I still know the names and location of all the stars.
Martha died more than a decade before I bought the ranch. She never saw it. She didn’t even know me after I came out west and found the place in the world I was meant to live. That’s the reason I kept trying to leave her out of this book. And yet her memory kept insinuating itself, demanding to be included. A voice in my head kept saying, But you never would have had the ranch if not for Martha, a statement that sounded undeniably true, though I wasn’t sure in what way.
Buying this ranch for 5 percent down with no job was clear evidence of something: either an urge toward self-annihilation or a deep-seated belief in myself. If it was the latter—and I’d like to believe it was the latter—it was Martha Washington who made me a believer. All those nights in her house proved there were safe places, rooms where I could sleep through the night without fear. She taught me how to identify kindness, to recognize it when it was coming at me, and to open wide my arms.
About a decade after I bought the ranch, I went on assignment to Patagonia with a photographer and her husband for five weeks over the holidays. Overgrazed beyond repair and almost entirely alcoholic, more sparsely populated than Alaska and with wind that is never less than a gust and far more often a gale, Patagonia is not a gentle place. A magazine had sent us there to chronicle the death of the gaucho. We spent most of our days watching sheep get castrated, listening to sad stories of drunken men and riding skittish horses behind them into the mountains against 80 mph winds. Even on the estancias that still kept cooks, there was only lamb to eat and wine to drink and pantry shelves full of Kool-Aid. Most of the ranchers lived without even potatoes and lettuce, even butter and bread.
The holiday season, after all these years, is still my Achilles’ heel. I’m edgy and grim from Thanksgiving until the tenth of January (the day after my birthday), and the photographer and her husband had a way of fighting that was so precisely like the way my parents fought I found myself smack in the middle of the type of holiday scenario I’d gone all the way to Patagonia to avoid. I spent Christmas Eve in my room crying and New Year’s walking in a dust storm. By the time my birthday rolled around, I was trying not to think suicidally and counting the minutes (8,640) until I got home.
We were at our tenth estancia of the trip, watching our sixth mass shearing and castration. The men were high on maté and the smell of lambs’ blood. The photographer snapped rolls of film and joked with the gauchos, and my poor Spanish couldn’t keep up. Two old women in housedresses peeked out of the weather-beaten farmhouse windows from behind tattered lace curtains. There are so few women left in Patagonia; even the men agree their departure is both the result of and the reason for everything going to hell. It was hard not to think of Martha and Mildred in their decaying brownstone in downtown Trenton.
I couldn’t watch any more sheep get their balls cut off, so I turned back toward the tents we had pitched three days before, just before the team of Uruguayan shearers rolled in. When I passed the ranch house, one of the old women, the younger of the two I thought, with still dark hair and piercing blue eyes, beckoned to me so briefly I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t my imagination. She didn’t smile, and when she opened the door she didn’t speak. She gestured toward a chair and I took it. I tried a few sentences in my pathetic Spanish, and we all looked nervously at our feet.
After a few minutes, both women disappeared into the kitchen and came back carrying a German chocolate cake between them. They sang happy birthday to me in Spanish. They apologized for having no candles. They didn’t seem to mind that I cried. We had given our passports over at every place we stayed, which is the only way they could have known it was my birthday.
Martha has been gone now, many more years of my life than I had her, but she set me up to trust these strangers and to trust the feeling I had arrived safe at home, the first time I sat on the ranch’s split-rail fence. Before writing this essay, I sat down and counted how many times I might have been dead if I hadn’t placed my trust in the kind and divine intervention of strangers. Even being conservative, I came up with forty-six. Whether Martha actually sends these visitors, or simply gave me the means to see them, matters less to me now than how grateful I am she opened my eyes.
I can still see her standing with her arms crossed at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, her eyes never leaving my small, bobbing frame, and I know I can trace every decent thing about myself back to her devotion, and the way she’d lock my hand inside of hers each morning, as we stepped into the path of the oncoming cars.
Ranch Almanac: Woolly Nelson
Woolly Nelson is the friendliest ram we have ever had at the ranch. He’s never butted anyone and he shows no inclination to harm his own offspring and he still wags his tail whenever you pet him, just the way the babies do. He has sired three generations of healthy lambs and the ewes can’t seem to get enough of him. He is black and white with such strict demarcations between the colors he looks like three different rams glued together, but his babies come out all colors, sometimes even orange or gold. Woolly’s only problem is that he has a genetic defect that make his large circular horns grow in too tight a spiral, the tip pointing in toward his face rather than out. After three years of adult growth, his horns were threatening, first to block his vision, and then to forcefully close his eyes.
I waited too long to call Doc Howard because I’d read that a sheep’s horns carry so much blood many animals bleed to death in the dehorning process. I was worried Doc would tell me it wasn’t worth the risk and I should put Woolly down. As the horns got closer and closer to his eyes I kept hoping they would twist away from them at the last minute, and his horns had curled so strangely over the years it seemed possible they would, until it didn’t seem possible anymore and I had a ram who was almost blind.
“Go ahead and bring him in, Pam,” Doc said, at eleven on the Tuesday morning I finally got the nerve to call. “We’ll cut those horns off and he’ll probably be all right.”
I hung up and my new ranchsitters, Emma and Kyle, looked at me expectantly. “Is Doc coming out?” Emma asked.
“He said to bring Woolly in,” I said, and we all thought about that for a minute. One more sign I am not a real rancher is that I don’t own a livestock trailer, and Doc had just had his knee replaced so I knew he wouldn’t want to come out.
“The 4Runner?” Kyle said, and because it had carried dogs, cats, a baby elk and, most recently, Ingrid the yearling lamb when she came down with a bad case of bloat, there seemed no reason not to give it a try.
Except that Ingrid weighed roughly a hundred pounds less than Woolly and we had been able to lift her into the hatchback. However gentle, Woolly was still a ram; if he made up his mind to take his horns to the back window of the 4Runner, there wouldn’t be any back window left.
Kyle is strong and wiry, a snowboard instructor and a gymnast. He thought if I backed the 4Runner up to the gravel pile near the cabin, he could pull, drag and/or ride Woolly from the corral across the yard, up onto the gravel pile and into the hatch. He would sit in the back with Woolly—well, basically on Woolly—to try to keep him calm, try to keep him from bashing his way out either the back or the side windows. I would drive to Doc’s, and
Emma would sit in the front passenger seat, holding tight a rope we would attach to the hatchback, because we had recently discovered the locking mechanism in the backdoor had a short in it and wouldn’t relatch unless we disconnected the battery at the same exact second the hatch hit the frame. Getting that timing right took an average of 200 tries, and with the nearest reliable mechanic ninety miles away, we had been avoiding opening the hatch for weeks. The dogs had no problem getting in and out the side doors but it was more than we could ask of Kyle and Woolly. Nor could we ask them to be patient for a half hour while we fiddled with the battery and the door.
It’s eight miles from the ranch to Doc’s and Kyle spent most of them riding Woolly the way I once upon a time rode mechanical bulls in bars, trying to keep his body between Woolly’s horns and the ceiling, between Woolly’s horns and the front seat, between Woolly’s horns and any piece of automotive glass.
Doc’s assistant, Sam, greeted me at the office door.
“You have a goat in the back of that car, Pam?” she asked.
“That’s Woolly Nelson,” I said. “He’s an Icelandic sheep.”
“And who’s his sidekick?” she asked.
“That’s Kyle,” I said. “New housesitter. Steep learning curve.”
“Bring him around to the side, Pam,” Doc said, so I backed around and after checking with Kyle to see if he was ready—“more than,” he said—Emma dropped the rope and we opened the hatch and Woolly and Kyle tumbled out.
“Tie him to the propane tank,” Doc said to Kyle, who was wrestling Woolly to the ground by his horns.
I glanced at Doc. “He’s just kidding,” I said.
“No, he’s not,” said Sam.
“No, I’m not,” Doc said, and so we tied all 200 pounds of Woolly to a half-full 120-gallon propane tank and Doc gave him a sedative that made him fall to his knees. Sam brought a veterinary wire saw strung between two hemostats and Doc went to work on Woolly’s first horn, about four inches from where it met his skull plate. We could smell the horn as the metal burned into it. Doc barked out orders for Sam to fetch him various drugs I’d never heard of, but I understood from context that one was in case Woolly started to wake up, one was to restart his heart if they gave him too much of the first one, and the third was to make his blood clot if we couldn’t stop the bleeding otherwise. We all leaned in and waited. Doc was about half an inch through a four-inch horn when he motioned Kyle over.
“You do this for a while,” he said, and Kyle glanced once at me and then took the hemostats from Doc’s hands.
“You want to do it fast,” Doc said, “if you go too slow he’s gonna bleed to death.”
Emma caught my eye. The day the two of them arrived at the ranch, Rick Davie delivered 250 bales of hay and we had stacked them. This was only week two.
Kyle got down on his knees and bore down with the saw. “A little faster if you can manage it,” Doc said, more kindly this time. After a few minutes my arms started tingling with sympathy fatigue and Kyle started emitting tiny grunts. Finally the horn fell into the dust and Sam jumped in to press gauze against the raw end of what was left, and then held the gauze up, revealing only a small spot of blood.
“Well done!” Doc said, “Take a minute, and we’ll do the other horn.”
The second horn bled even less than the first, and Woolly started waking up thirty seconds after Kyle finished, Doc’s estimates on the timing and amount of sedation uncannily accurate as always.
“If you get that ram home before he wakes up all the way,” Doc said, “Kyle will have an easier ride than he did on the way here,” so together we heaved Woolly—who looked now a little less like a ram and a little more like Princess Leia—into the hatchback, reattached the rope and headed back to the ranch.
Of Spirit Bears, Humpbacks, Narwhal, Manatees and Mothers
The Great Bear Rainforest is made up of approximately 1,200 square miles of the British Columbia coastline, from the Discovery Islands to the south all the way up to the Alaska-Canada border, and is part of the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world.
In October 2015, I was invited on a trip to the Great Bear by a Canadian philanthropist who is deeply invested in saving that wild place from logging and development, particularly in the form of a tar sands project and a proposed liquefied natural-gas pipeline.
Twelve writers, I was told, would spend a week on a sailboat, starting in Bella Bella, BC, and traveling the inland passages up as high as Hartley Bay before, weather permitting, coming to the outside and running back south in the Pacific. There would be humpbacks, orcas, grizzlies, wolves, and if we were very lucky, we might catch a glimpse of the all-white spirit bear. It was exactly the kind of invitation I live for.
But the day before I was to fly to Bella Bella, I noticed William was having a hard time urinating. It was taking him far longer than usual and the stream was very weak. I was in Davis at the time—the trip was during my teaching quarter—and my Davis vet told me William most likely had a stone in his urethra. She said it would be a routine procedure to flush the stone back into his bladder, and we could address it with diet from there. She said at 150 pounds he was too big for her operating table, and I should take him to Vista Veterinary in Sacramento.
“He’s not in an emergency situation at present,” she said, “because he’s still able to empty his bladder, but you don’t want to mess around because if that stone shifts things can change very fast.”
“I can do this,” Greg said, when I got home from the vet’s office, “I want to. You go on your trip.” Greg always says I should trust him with the big things in life, but trusting humans has never been my strong suit, and in my life, there’s nothing bigger than my dogs.
I wobbled but eventually capitulated. Greg dropped me at the Sacramento airport and took William straight to Vista from there. By the time I changed planes in Seattle, the procedure had turned out to be not so routine after all, and by the time the wheels touched down in Bella Bella at eight the next morning, William’s condition had worsened—the flushing procedure had not worked, and two Vista vets were arguing over whether surgery would damage his urethra irreversibly, making it not worth the risk.
Greg said he had it handled, but I wasn’t sure that was fair to him. And what kind of mother did this make me, that I would go gallivanting off on a sailboat, leaving my boy in what were turning out to be increasingly dire straits. If it had been a work trip, I would have told the person in charge it was a medical emergency and I had to go home. But this trip had been a gift—a big one—from a total stranger, which made it trickier to know what to do. Of course, I also wanted to see the spirit bears.
We got off the plane and stood in an awkward clump while we waited for the single airport employee to roll our luggage over on a handcart.
“Hi,” I said, sticking out my hand to the lady I took to be the philanthropist, “I’m Pam Houston.”
“Oh . . . the writer,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Aren’t we all writers?” I said, and several people standing around me smirked.
“I’m really sorry to bother you with this,” I said, “but my most beloved dog has fallen very ill in the last twenty-four hours and will probably have emergency surgery today or tomorrow. I know our letter said there’d be no connectivity, but I wondered, is there any place along the way we might get a signal, just so I can see if he made it through?”
My question was disingenuous. I had been a wilderness guide for more than a decade and knew no outfitter in the first world would run a trip like this without a radio phone—too much liability. I suspected the “no connectivity” clause was more of a preference than a condition. My guiding days had been mostly before cell phones, and I knew one great challenge of guiding in the cyber era was to get people to put away their devices and be where they were. I also knew the crew who’d been working on that boat all summer would know by heart every single spot on the journey, where if you climbed halfway up the mizzenmast, lick
ed your fingers and held your arm at a forty-five-degree angle to your body, you might get one bar of 3G to buzz in.
I’d spent the whole plane ride trying not to cry. Now the look on the philanthropist’s face was making it easier.
“Sorry,” she said, turning her palms in the air. “That’s against the rules of this trip.” She made to turn away from me, then possibly thought better of it. “You know,” she said, “it’s always something when you travel. If it makes you feel any better, I got sued this morning.”
It did not make me feel any better.
I watched the little plane that had deposited us in the Heiltsuk village of Bella Bella taxi to the end of the runway and considered making a run to catch it. From the air, Bella Bella had looked like a one-plane-a-day kind of town, if not three planes a week. I suddenly found myself less inclined to spend seven days shipboard with the people—writers or not—the philanthropist had assembled.
“I mean,” she said, “if it were your parent, we could make an exception.”
If it were my parent, I wanted to say, we wouldn’t need to. “Both my parents are dead,” I said, “but thanks.”
We rode an old school bus into town and were told we had an hour before the boat would arrive at the dock. I introduced myself to some of my fellow passengers—a massage therapist from Vancouver and a mother of three from the Bronx. I went into the one store in town that looked open, a café that sold T-shirts that said No Enbridge, No Tankers, No Pipeline, No Problem. There were scarves for sale with Native designs on them that looked mass-produced in Vancouver, and some jewelry that looked less so. In the middle of the jewelry was a string of antique Venetian glass trade beads.
“Are those for sale?” I asked the girl, sounding just like the tourist I was.
“Hmmm,” she said. “About those, I will have to get Charlie.”
