by Margot Kahn
In this much wind, I would normally put the hay in the three-sided windbreak on the barn’s south side. But this is an unusual wind, from the south, which accounts for its unseasonably warm bearing, so I drop the bale in the corner of the corral, on the north side of the barn, hoping the sheep pen will block most of the wind when it starts to clock around to the west, as it is predicted to do in a few hours.
I cut the orange twine with the hay hooks, making sure to pick it up and zip it in my pocket (hay twine wreaks havoc with a horse’s digestive system), and close up the barn. If it were grain day, I would give the horses their mix of beet pulp and senior mix for horses with metabolic conditions, joint formula, multivitamins, Gut-Sure, and a scoop of Horseshoer’s Friend. (We are all big believers in supplements in this house.) Deseo does have a metabolic condition—something a little like diabetes, or Cushings, that means he can’t handle grain too often, so we stick tight to our every-fourth-day plan. Today is day two, which is going to work out great, because Tuesday, when the storm moves out and it really gets cold, they will be happier for the grain to warm them up, even than they would be this morning.
The wind has calmed for a moment and I stand and listen for a few minutes to the altogether satisfying sound of four equines chomping good grass hay on a snowy morning, and think about all the mornings, over the last twenty-five years, I have spent just like this, standing out in the snow.
2009 was the coldest January. We went through four whole cords of wood even with propane back-up. For the first time ever the dogs had to be encouraged to go on walks, and Mr. Kitty wouldn’t even go out to the barn to hunt. He stayed in the basement for days at a time, cozied up to the big gas heater.
There were five feet of snow standing and no warm days to melt any of it. The white ground reflected back all the sun’s rays and couldn’t soak up enough heat during the short days to raise the temperature even to ten below. The three-foot split rail fence that surrounds the house went completely under in early December and we walked daily on a white moonscape between the house and the barn. The roof slid so many times eventually there was nowhere down for it to go and it formed an igloo around the house that actually kept the wind off and raised the temperature in the back bedroom by several degrees compared to a lighter winter. The house threw off enough heat to cauterize the insides of the igloo—like what a candle does on the inside of a jack-o-lantern. It was beautiful, for the month it lasted, living inside a big jack-o-lantern of snow.
But today it is edging toward twenty above, and the horses are feeling it. The wind picks up again and Isaac lets out a big donkey bray that means he is either mad at the wind or happy about the hay or about to climb up on somebody’s neck, so I exit the orange gate and start the hundred-yard trek to the water trough.
On a normal day, even on a normal winter day, this is easy, but today I have the challenge of memory again, trying to stay above my old trail. Sometimes if I hold my head just right, I can see the faintest ghost of the path on top of all the brand new snow. It’s kind of like one of those magic-eye drawings, the way I have to look not directly at it and soften my eyes to see. Only then can I sense the slightest change in the snow surface that, princess-and-pea-like, indicates a change in the surface several feet down.
I know the trough will barely need topping off—snow has been falling into it for twenty-four hours and this kind of weather does not engender big thirst in the horses. But I have learned, over the years, that the best way to care for animals, especially barnyard animals, is to repeat the exact same tasks, in the exact same order, every day, forever and ever, amen. A change in the barnyard often means trouble, and if I do the same things the same way each day, I am more likely to notice a change. Also, any local will tell you that Murphy lives on a high-altitude ranch in a snowstorm. Were I to decide the trough did not need topping off today, this would be the day the trough heater failed, or the bottom seal wore out, or the pump froze, or a rat with Hanta virus drowned himself in there and Isaac would be just churlish enough to eat it.
I am not a good farmer. I am not even a real farmer. Rick Davie is a real farmer and I am only pretend. But the hypervigilance I learned in childhood does serve me well on the ranch in general and in big weather in particular. My mind runs a series of potential calamities, and my actions, in so much as they can, guard against them.
The trough is less than an inch down, but I top it off anyway. All systems go. Then it is back along the trail, easier the second time through, to the sheep pen, and another door that needs to be dug out.
I decide to feed the sheep inside their enclosure, something I don’t do often because I try to keep the amount of inside poop down. But even with five pounds each of the warmest wool money can buy on their backs, the sheep don’t want to be outside today. I give them their four flakes of hay, and drag my feet around in the snow in the outside portion of their pen until I find the three black rubber feeders which went under hours ago. I dig them out and split a coffee can of grain among all three so they don’t ram each other fighting for it.
Outside the fence, the dogs are watching Sheep TV. The whole time I am in the pen they sit perfectly still in the same exact place they sit every day, staring hard, waiting for one of those sheep to make a wrong move so they can tear the chicken wire open with their teeth and rush in to rescue me from them. Their faces are so intent, so utterly concentrated, so perfect in their tandem motions every time either I or a sheep takes a step; it is a daily sight gag, a relied-upon and appreciated moment of hilarity.
I leave the sheep pen and head back on my water trail to the frost-free pump and fill a bucket to carry back to the pen. Last winter, because my back was ailing, I discovered that if I carefully plucked all the icicles that hung on the back of the barn—there were hundreds hanging at half inch intervals in accordance with the corrugated tin of the roof—and added those to the sheep’s water, I could save myself a good many bucket carries. The icicles are beautiful; they renew themselves every day until it warms up enough for the roof to slide, and they feel delicious when you hold them in your hand.
Every time I walk one of these little connector trails I improve the conditions. The dogs walk with me, so it’s three of us packing down the trail each time. But when we turn back toward the house the trail we made an hour ago has been utterly obliterated. I decide to wait at least until it stops howling to shovel the walkway to the house, or—a much bigger job—remake the path to the propane tank.
Last month, in a long spate of thirty-below-zero nights, the propane company called to say their man couldn’t deliver propane because I did not have an “appropriate path dug from the driveway to my tank.” In twenty-five years here I had never been asked to dig a path to my propane tank—appropriate or otherwise. I’d always figured that any propane man worth his salt owned a pair of snow pants. But perhaps the propane company had hired a new delivery guy who had recently moved here from Florida.
The day I got the call I channeled my outrage into action, went outside immediately and spent three hours digging a walkway to the propane tank so beautiful you could have rolled a red carpet out on it and used it for the Oscars. When I got to the tank and checked the gauge it turned out the lady on the phone had been wrong, that the guy had crawled through the deep snow and filled it after all, which made me feel better about him generally, and happy to have spent my afternoon making him such a nice path.
Today has eliminated that path, along with the driveway, which is just a suggestion of itself between the ridges Randy Woods made the last time through with his plow. Back inside, all three of us shake off snowballs in the mudroom. I put some oatmeal on for breakfast, the steel cut kind that takes forty-five minutes because why not? It’s as good a day for writing as there has even been so I join Livie on the couch, open my laptop, and get to it.
Monday and Tuesday are much of the same, but Wednesday morning dawns clear, as predicted, and thirty degrees colder. I open the back door to utter stillness and ice crystals
in the air. Every living being in the county, it seems, is either resting this morning or frozen in place. When I start across the path toward the corral with my apples and carrots I can hear a car crossing the cattle guard three miles and two deep bends of river canyon away.
In a few hours, Randy Woods will be here with his giant blade to reconnect me with the rest of the world, and after I finish shoveling the walkway and the path to the propane tank, the dogs and I will drive to town, pick up the mail, drop off the recycling, get a few fresh vegetables and a pint of Talenti sea salt caramel ice cream.
It will be nice, after all these days, to speak to a member of my own species, someone who can speak back in the same language. But there is another part of me, some eight-year-old part, who wants Randy’s plow never to come. It’s not only that the eight-year-old feels safer at the snowed-in ranch than anywhere, it’s that the snowed-in ranch was a story she used to tell herself—she is certain of it—when she needed a place for her mind to go, when she needed a reason to make it to nine, and then ten and eventually seventeen, and freedom.
Pam Houston is the author of Contents May Have Shifted; two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat; the novel Sight Hound; and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The 2013 Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, The Evil Companions Literary Award and multiple teaching awards. She directs the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers, is professor of English at UC Davis, teaches in The Institute of American Indian Art’s Low-Res MFA program, and at writer’s conferences around the country and the world. She lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
Undergraduate Admissions Essay Draft
Elissa Washuta
First-Year Applicants:
Robert Frost once wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Thomas Wolfe once wrote, “You can’t go home again.” In an essay of 500–1000 words, explain which author you agree with and why.
I did not apply for admission to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003 because I couldn’t, at that time, respond to their prompt.1
INTRODUCTION
The introduction should include the thesis statement, tell the reader what the essay is about, and contain a “hook.”
The summer I visited colleges, my younger brother and I watched The Skulls every day. I needed to choose the college that was most likely to have a secret society like the one Luke McNamara joined: a secret society with robes and tombs and power. My brother and I only spoke to each other in movie quotes:
“You’ve been digging, Luke, and if you keep digging, you’ll be digging your own grave.”
“Our membership has its pleasure, its hardship, and sometimes its pain.”
“Our rules supersede those of the outside world.”
“We have been watching. We will be watching.”
“We live by the rules, we die by the rules.”
I didn’t know, then, that there were places without crickets, without mothers. I didn’t know that the rubbing of tiny legs was happening outside my body because it had always been in my ears. I wanted a dead place, anyway, having dreamed about the city. When fall came, I applied to colleges with brick buildings choked by ivy. In the spring, I chose a college built in a place where I had made only two memories: campus tour and scholarship interview. In the summer, I bought bed sheets out of a catalog and, with every bright plastic item I acquired that matched the sheets, I felt my grip clenching upon my tidy new world. I lived on the seventh floor, which is a height so extreme that nothing can grow there, like on Saturn. This is not the room where my body died, but it’s the room that taught me what it would be like to live without my old body and grow a new one.
You might want to write the introduction last.
FIRST BODY PARAGRAPH
The first body paragraph should contain the strongest argument
• or the most significant example
• or the most illuminative illustration
• or a good starting place
and it should include a topic sentence relating to the thesis.
In the freshman dorm, unlike at home, the residents are nasty. Some people learn to use the microwave for the first time. Some people learn to vomit. I learned to sleep in a room with another body in it. I didn’t learn to be naked in front of another person; I didn’t know I was supposed to. My roommate and I changed in the bathroom behind closed stall doors. Some people learn to fuck each other in the freshman dorm, but I didn’t. I learned that nobody was like me. For example, every night, I sat in the dark and watched Fight Club or American Beauty while my roommate hung out with her friends, an activity I could not imagine, describe, or replicate. When I returned to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving, I recognized the smell of the forest soaked into the walls—I had thought that was the smell of the universe, or of the skin inside my nose. When hardwood creaked under my feet, my legs shot taproots into the floor. I hadn’t known that the whole world wasn’t made from smoke and ferns. When I was a child, I asked my dad why the world smelled different in springtime. “It’s the bacteria released from the thaw,” he said. Later, I would learn that I was full of more bacterial cells than human cells. I was made of thaw. The dorm was made of grime on the undersides of things. I could not live there.
SECOND BODY PARAGRAPH
Each body paragraph will have the same basic structure. Body paragraphs are the middle paragraphs that lie between the introduction and conclusion. A strong body paragraph supports your thesis statement or central argument using claims, evidence, and analysis. It is in the body of the essay that your preparation comes to fruition: your topic must now be investigated through argument.
I learned that college had nothing to do with ivy. Some of the buildings must have been throttled by the vines’ tiny fingers, but I don’t remember which. What I do remember from that first year must be what college was about: eating as many eggs per day as I wanted without concern for cholesterol; avoiding the protestors outside the biology building who displayed photos of mangled flesh labeled “MURDERED BABY, 16 WEEKS,” or something like that, alongside photos of people in Nazi concentration camps; weeping in two professors’ offices in a single hour; handing my completed calculus quizzes to my TA, watching him look them over, feeling his warm whisper in my ear, returning to my desk to write down the solutions he gave me, and receiving a perfect score in the class; eating two slices of chocolate cake on my birthday, alone in my dorm in the dark with styrofoam balanced on my knees; passing the football stadium but never entering because I was afraid of young men who raised their voices; knowing about Route 1, the road bordering the campus, a boundary between our brick and the frat row brick, but never going there because I was afraid of people who gathered after basketball games to burn couches and throw rocks through windows and rip off their shirts; consuming the contents of my parents’ care packages in a single sitting; knowing about the cow outfitted with a hole in its side through which people could reach, for research or spectacle, without harming the cow; encountering black squirrels, whose large population on campus resulted from the introduction of eighteen black squirrels at the National Zoo during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency for reasons unknown. All of this differs from what my house was about: fingering moss; sitting on the porch and listening to Ace of Base for hours every summer night; speaking with cats; swimming in the lake while never forgetting for a moment that I believed it to be packed with water snakes; being quiet with the three people who knew me deeply because we were made of the same bacteria; never, for a second, thinking about taxonomy when I picked berries and salted slugs and sat under trees and yelled at black bears who strolled through the yard, and never identifying any insect sound because it never
occurred to me that those sounds were made by individual creatures rather than a vast field of living energy. Home was a place unlike campus: at home, I was one of the animals; on campus, there were no animals, only installations.
THIRD BODY PARAGRAPH: TRY AN ACCORDION PARAGRAPH!
Accordion paragraphs are written according to a specific structure:
Topic sentence: position, “power statement,” claim
Reason/fact/detail
Analyze/explain
[Repeat several times; the paragraph can expand like an accordion!]
Conclusion: summarize, convince, challenge
Remember to use transitional words and expressions to unify your paragraph.
During freshman year, my boyfriend Arthur—leftover from high school, two years older, and a college dropout—moved to College Park, despite my protests, because he had nothing better to do and thought he might become useful by bearing down upon my newly unfettered life.
He thought that without him there, the way I walked on campus alone after dark, I might be raped.
That there were streetlights meant, to him, that there were treacheries needing illumination; every person was a potential threat, and even in crowds, I wasn’t safe, because in this concrete place, nobody would look out for me.
