by Margot Kahn
The Sound of Horse Teeth on Hay in the Snow
Pam Houston
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 till two, and hoped to sleep till eight, but William the wolfhound 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, and now I was worried too, not about the house but the horses.
We have made it to February first, which means, hopefully, that there won’t be too many more nights of thirty-plus below zero. We’ve had a lot of those nights this year, in December and January, too many for the comfort level of my elderly horses who just keep hanging in there year after year. A storm like this will elevate the temperature, possibly even above zero. Still, a forty mph wind can turn twenty above into twenty 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 is successful, it means that 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 plenty of times 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 wood stove 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 attests 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 is punishing; hay and wood are reasonably priced around here. It’s getting the hay from the plowed part of the driveway to the barn, and getting the wood from the 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. That will involve packing a trail with snowshoes, and then sledding the rounds of wood/bales of hay, one or two at a time to their destination. And then there is the stacking them once I get there.
Rick Davie, my hay man, will help me move and stack the hay—he’s too much of a gentleman not to, but I tend to move the wood alone, a half cord a day if there is no snow in the forecast threatening to bury it, or all at once if there’s a storm coming in.
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 turned out to be flurries until yesterday (Saturday) morning, when it started to snow in earnest. The forecast kept edging the winter storm warning forward, increasing its duration by two or four hours at a time, like they didn’t want us to notice, but now they have 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 have gotten two feet or four feet, 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 you would say more correctly that 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 elderly geldings, a 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 is 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 is a three-day storm and then he gets to me twenty-four hours after it stops. Being snowed in on the ranch with the wolfhounds, tending the barn animals, doing my work, makes me happier than just about anything else on earth.
I make some cinnamon tea—double warmth—and dress in layers of wool, fleece, down, and whatever it is that snow pants are made of these days, and step out onto the dog porch into the blow. I squint to the 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 enclosure.
I have always preferred the company of animals to the company of people, and I know that when I say that you’ll think I am emotionally stunted in some way, and maybe I am. But when I compare myself to the many people I have known who can’t seem to handle being alone for five minutes, I think I might be less emotionally stunted than they are. My childhood home did not have any safe places—when my father was drinking, stomping 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 barely cracked. But life is long, and in the decades since then I have felt safe in the presence of enough human beings to offset, at least cognitively, all the ways I was conditioned to distrust them. Still, it has still been a rare human who has given me an animal’s worth of love back.
My partner Greg is pretty good at giving love of the human variety, and my decade with him has made me better at giving love to a human too. But if it were not for the fact that both Greg and my fourteen-week-a-year teaching job are in California, I’d probably have thirty rescued donkeys and at least five dogs, if not ten. I’d become the crazy old dog lady who wears so much fur all her clothes tend to look the same color. (At the airport the other day the TSA guy gave my black fleece a once over and said, “So, you decided to bring the dog with you today… huh?”) I’m not sure in that scenario I’d be any less happy, or any less loved.
The wind stills for a moment and the whole world is silent as a church. 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 force pushing it for hours in one direction. The hill that rises behind the homesteaders’ 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 Livie hops around on the kitchen floor and William sits patiently beside me. I don the hat I bought right out of an Inuit lady’s kitchen in Arctic Bay, Nunavut, Canada, last year (the warmest hat I have ever owned), my neck gaiter, my winter work gloves, and my Carhartt barn jacket. No need to call the dogs, who are competing for the pole position in the mud room. 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 snow. I get about thirty steps into my trek when a wind blast stops me cold and I realize I have left the porch without the snow shovel, so back I go, using the boot-sized post holes I have just created to retrieve it.
The dogs don’t really love snow this deep. It gets up in their paws and makes ice balls which eventually bleed, but they are nothing if not loyal and so they return to the porch with me. Thirty steps doesn’t sound like much unless you are walking in snow that varies from eighteen inches to four feet deep and you are trying to use your memory to stay on a trail that is now at least a foot and a half under.
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 need the shovel just to get there). In this wind, any progress I would make trying to use
the shovel to remake my old trail would be erased, literally, 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 in 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.
One time, after a big storm, I fell off the side of the ghost of my old trail into a very deep drift. My legs were trapped under me in a strange position, and being more or less armpit deep in snow there was a moment when I wasn’t sure I could get myself out. I gave it another try, and got one leg around to the front and then another, until I was more or less in a half-buried sitting position. I tried to use my arms to roll myself over, to get on my hands and knees, but everything beneath me still felt bottomless. I wasn’t exactly scared, I hadn’t yet had time to get scared, and though it was well below zero with a moderate wind, the sun was shining.
I decided to rest for a minute before the next try, and laid back in the little cave I had inadvertently fashioned for a minute to look at the sky. No sooner had I gotten into that prone position and let out a long slow exhale than William was right by my side—the windward side—the whole length of him tight against the whole length of me—body to body. His first instinct was to block the wind, to keep me warm until I got out or until help came.
Today we make it without falling to the corral where the horses are waiting and I distribute apples and carrots through the rails. The horses seem calm, in spite of the wind, which must be a function of the temperature. Fifteen above beats thirty-five below in their book no matter what the weather channel tells us the wind chill “feels like.” When it is coming down like this it simply can’t be thirty-five below—those conditions are mutually exclusive, and I believe the horses, at this stage in their lives, would choose the snow over the deep-freeze on every occasion.
When it is thirty-five below, the sky is clear, the wind is still and it is as quiet outside as the beginning of time. Ice crystals form on the aspen tree outside the kitchen window, on the lead ropes that hang from the barn door, on the horses’ coats and eyelashes and whiskers. When the light is right, and you train your eyes just a few degrees off the direction of the sun, you can even see tiny crystals suspended in the frigid air. When it is thirty-five below, I take one step outside and the inside of my nose freezes, and the crunch of my boots on the packed powder path is the definition of the word dry on my tongue. On those mornings, the equines eat the apples and carrots out of my hands quickly, before they turn into carrot- and apple-flavored popsicles, and I must do everything with great care because one minute with exposed skin is enough to cause frostbite.
But today there is time to pet under a forelock, to reach down into the snow to pick up a dropped apple or carrot bit. The mini-donks, Simon and Isaac, crowd in for their share. Simon won’t eat carrots, only apples. In between bites he occasionally likes to take a benign flat-toothed love nip out of my hip or thigh. Isaac thinks he’s the boss around here even though he is shorter than the wolfhounds. He puts his little hooves up on Roany’s neck sometimes just to push him around. Roany, a big Roman-nosed quarter horse, seventeen hands at the shoulder, has been on the planet for more than thirty years, getting along with pretty much everybody, and so lets him.
At one time, Roany was the most powerful beast on the ranch by far. He could have kicked Fenton the wolfhound over the fence with one back hoof if he wanted to stop his barking once and for all, stop all his showing off. But even when Fenton would chase Roany from the middle of the pasture all the way back to the barn, the big gelding would take care where he put his feet, would turn and pin his ears in warning, but never do anything more than that.
Roany was thin this September and thinner in December. He’s staying closer to the barn than he ever has and I fear he might be losing his sight. I’ve been sneaking him a coffee can of senior sweet feed most afternoons when the others aren’t looking. In December I feared he might not make the winter, but here we are in February, and he rubs his ice-crusted eyelashes against me and reaches his giant lips toward my pockets to get another carrot. Maybe the old Roan will get to see another summer on the ranch.
When I made the decision some years ago to slash my time at UC Davis in order to spend the coldest part of every winter here, I thought a four- or eight-week solo stint at the ranch might make me antsy or lonely, or just plain weird from only talking to animals. It mostly has not.
You might be thinking right now that I don’t like people, but my writer’s life puts me around them, 24/7 for weeks at a time, and I like that version too. This summer I taught eight back-to-back seven-day workshops with only two days off over the entire period and for the most part managed to keep both my humor and my good will. I have friends spread from coast to coast and elsewhere whom I visit, or who come to visit me, and so I always have someone to go travelling with (if I want), someone to spend the holidays with (if I want), someone to call in some long, troubled middle of the night. And for the last ten years I have had an honest-to-goodness—if long distance a lot of the time—family in the form of Greg and his daughter Kaeleigh.
I am deeply grateful for all of those things and would not trade any of them, but I’ve also recently realized that what I have never had enough of since I was a kid is alone time. That kid who hid in the clothes dryer had almost unlimited alone time and she came to realize that alone time meant both safety and the possibility of unrestricted adventure. At eight, on a vacation to London with my parents, I memorized the entire map of the Underground, got myself to the Tower of London, and took the terrifying beheadings tour at sunset before my parents—who were quite happy in our hotel bar—ever realized I was gone. At five, in the Bahamas, I befriended a giant dappled grey horse and his Bahamian rider, who scooped me into the saddle, galloped me all the way down the beach and chest high into the waves before my mother looked up from her beach towel. (From that moment on, I was horse crazy.) From the time I was ten until I turned sixteen, I rode my bike through the cornfields of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to the truck stop on Schoenersville Road, where I racked up ten games on each of the pinball machines and sold them at half price to the truckers. My solo adventures this winter have mostly involved snowshoes, cross-country skis, and an occasional run down to Pagosa Hot Springs.
Last month, after three solid weeks alone here, I went outside after the last blizzard with my good camera, took a bunch of photos and sent them to Channel Four CBS news in Denver where, during the weather report, they flash the best photos from viewers and sure enough that night they chose mine. Several people in Creede called the house to tell me I was “famous,” and a good friend in Denver who had seen my photos called to ask if I was sure I didn’t want to come down to the city for a day or two.
The concern in her tone was not lost on me, and so I tried to explain how much I delight in the simple—some would call it selfish—pleasure of living alone in an isolated place. I can ski as far as I want for as long as I want. I can sleep with the dogs in my bed, or out on the couch near the fire, or even with them in their dog beds if I want to. I can take a bath in the middle of the day and I can stay in there until I shrivel. I can (and did) take the bathroom door off of its hinges so I could bring a four-foot silver water trough in there and raise six Plymouth Barred Rock chicks. I can clean the pantry at three in the morning, or do a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table or eat a whole bag of frozen peas for dinner with one pat of butter and thirty six shakes from a bottle of Crystal hot sauce.
Every time an a
lone spell comes to an end and I am about to welcome a guest, or a friend, or Greg and Kaeleigh, or I have to go back out into the world to teach or speak or be public, along with the excitement there is always a shred of regret as I watch the hours wind down. On the last day alone I invariably find myself wishing for just one day more.
Today, though, all potential visitors will have to be dropped in by helicopter. On a Sunday, mid-storm and this late in the season, I doubt I’ll even see the plow out on Middle Creek Road. My octogenarian neighbor to the west, Margot Lamb, descendant of one of the original homesteaders of the Soward Ranch, moves into town every winter. So usually, for these months, I am the last occupied house on this side of the river. My closest neighbors back towards town are the Albrights, and they’re about two and half miles walking, when it is walkable, which today it is not.
The big orange gate swings out from the corral. It is the main access to the barn as well as to the large pasture. In the fall, Rick Davie backs his flatbed loaded with 120 bales of hay through it, backs it up to the barn door, and we buck the hay off it and stack it along every available wall and every available corner, six bales high.
In winter, the gate does not need to open big enough for a truck, but it’s important to shovel it out wide enough that if a horse had to be taken out in an emergency, the horse would not be afraid to walk through. The gate is about twenty feet wide so, with a couple feet of snow drifted against it, it takes about twenty minutes of bust-ass shoveling to get it to open double-horse-width wide. Then there is the barn door, which is smaller, but has the added challenge of the frozen-solid horse briquettes that seem to collect there, and must be pried up along with the snow. By the time I finish both tasks I can feel a new set of blisters rising on top of my calluses.
