Where I Live Now

by Sharon Butala

Old Man On His Back

  I became a rancher’s wife, I became a writer, I lived a life in nature. I lived under the stars — seeing the stars every single night as you can’t see them in the city. I was out in all kinds of weather, heavily bundled in winter, my breath streaming out white in front of me, the sky so brilliant and the snow even brighter so that it hurt my eyes to look, made them run with water. More than once we found ourselves in situations, never entirely by chance, where only Peter’s strength and knowledge kept us alive.

  Once when we were driving to the ranch from the hay farm, we finally could go no farther because of four-foot, wind-hardened snowbanks across the road. Peter (as women would say, being a man) kept plowing forward, believing, I can only guess, that it would get better at the higher reaches where the road would be windswept clean. Instead, we became thoroughly stuck in this heavy, crusted snow. It was about thirty below Fahrenheit (about –34˚C), and miles to the nearest occupied dwelling. Usually, when we became stuck in snow, on Peter’s instructions, I just waited in the cab, or kicked at the crusted snow the tires were embedded in while Peter shovelled for the few necessary moments. This time, though, mid-afternoon on a frozen winter Sunday, with a vast, hard, cloudless pale sky above us, no traffic, and miles from an open road, in any event, I realized the seriousness of our situation right away. I had only to look at Peter’s determination as he reached into the truck box and pulled out a second shovel, and I started moving snow too.

  I did so eagerly, with a kind of shared purpose, because I understood how close we were to freezing to death. All my life, although winter had always been something to fear in the West, I had protected myself from risky situations. I had been raised with such caution, taught to be always careful because I was a girl, and a small, inexperienced one. As a child I had dared nothing, because I thought the world belonged to others, never to me. Now I was finding the side of myself I had never known. I was finding strengths I’d been unaware of. That instant of fear when I realized our dire situation passed at once into a kind of inarticulate joy that even now I marvel at.

  The bitter winters were followed by sweltering summers. In summer heat, carrying out coffee or lemonade in hundred-plus-degree temperatures (104˚F is 40˚C) and sitting with Peter in the cleared patch of cut alfalfa while insects buzzed around and there was no other sound except maybe the faint drone of a neighbour’s swather a mile or more away, I inhaled the delicious fragrance of the hay, both cut and standing, filling my nostrils while little ground-nesting birds flittered cheerily and swooped around us. I remember those endless summer days when the sun was up by five and darkness didn’t come until ten at night, and it seemed, somehow, that the sun didn’t ever fully set, that the sky glowed faintly all through the short northern night. The nights were magical and if for some reason you rose in the dark, you just held your breath for the beauty of it.

  Am I imagining the pleasure of that world? The wonder? The ecstasy, even? I do not think so; my heart cracks for what I have lost, even given the travails that I also struggled with there.

  Peter and I often rode together in the early years, he giving me advice about how to ride a horse, what to do and what not to do, but more often I had to draw it out of him, because he belonged to what I privately thought was an idiotic school of thought which was that if you do it wrong long enough, you’ll eventually figure out the right way yourself. How much time did he think I had? I was already thirty-six and not exactly in love with horses or riding, or with chasing cows. Yet in those days we never went out merely to ride; every single trip out from the corral was to do a job: to pick up a sick cow or calf and move it or them back to the corrals for doctoring or a trip to the vet, to move the bulls to where the cows were, to move cattle from one field to another, to separate the steers and bring them in, or to fix fence (although then we usually went in the old truck that served for fencing only and that rarely went on a road anymore). Riding for pleasure didn’t exist. Even when we had visitors who wanted to ride, Peter would make good use of them, and sometimes, because they were actually working whether they knew it or not, they got more riding than they’d bargained for.

  And yet, one of my proudest moments as a wife came when one day we were riding side by side, heading back to the barn, and our horses were being driven mad by horseflies and mosquitoes, so much so that mine was doing something the cowboys called “crow-hopping,” that is, jumping on all fours. (He was also swinging his head and twisting just a bit, although hardly to the degree of rodeo saddle-bronc twisting.) He couldn’t be stopped from this behaviour, which was why we were heading back — to spray them with horse insect repellent — and I, in order to stay on the horse, was laughing and standing and swinging in my stirrups. Peter glanced over at me and, seeing this, beamed in surprise and pleasure and said, “Now you’re riding!”

  It could not be said of me that when it came to riding horses I was a natural.

  Nonetheless, I got so that I enjoyed riding most of the time, although sometimes I got too tired, and still I had to sit on that horse and keep going. Sometimes I found myself wondering if I had failed to understand something about the contract Peter and I had made. Was I to be a hired hand, and one who, because of my inexperience, always took the last place if anybody more experienced came along? More than once I pointed out to him that at least our hired man got paid. When I told people that even the cattle dog had higher rank than I did, they thought I was joking. But any rancher will tell you how invaluable a well-trained, smart cattle dog is. I could only pity a wife who was that loyal. But although I sometimes fumed and sometimes complained out loud and wondered what I’d spent all those years at university for, if this was how I was going to spend my life, I was so stimulated by what I was seeing, and so thrilled that, for the first time since I was a child, I had free time to spend on my own, I just did what was asked of me. And of course I held rank in the house and made a special effort to become a good cook, something during my first marriage I had never had time to concentrate on and had always wanted to achieve. Often, when Sean became old enough to drive and was on his way to the ranch for a long weekend, I would knock myself out in the kitchen, sometimes cooking a turkey with stuffing and all the other dishes usually reserved for Christmas dinners, just so he would know how much he was loved, how very happy I was to see him.

  My pleasures with Peter were simple and invariably involved the land around us. When he had time off, or wanted to celebrate my birthday, for instance, he would take me on his motorcycle into a field I wanted to see with him — not by myself — where we could sit on rocks and study the flora and the fauna and talk about the sky, or the deer in the coulee behind us, or where we just sat in silence and gazed around in quiet pleasure. Or else we would get in the truck and he would drive us to some far-distant, seldom-travelled road nobody else was on where we could drive slowly and take in the countryside in an especially beautiful part of the country. Or we would go cross-country on trails he had learned about as a boy trailing cattle to the railway or to a sale ring with his father that were far from any highway or even a ranch yard. He knew that I liked nothing better than to be out in the landscape, going slowly or not moving at all, just looking at it, trying to get the feel of it, with nothing required of me but to look and look and look, to smell the air and the many scents always riding on it, to feel it on my skin. The same was true of him, and of who knows how many other ranching men who would keep this love well hidden from others. Over the years we drove everywhere, to distant landmarks, or to towns via narrow dirt back roads you wouldn’t go near if they were wet, or in winter when they would be buried under snow and ice. Every one of these forays was material for my writing, not just because I became more familiar with the landscape in which I lived, but also because there was so much opportunity to notice details about the animals who lived there and about the trees, plants, and the general lay of the land, all of which I needed to know to be able to write authentically.

  One of our favourite drives, al
though we didn’t do it very often, was to aim for Medicine Hat, Alberta, but to go west and then north to Cypress Hills Park on the Saskatchewan side, drive through the park, steadily climbing, and at the top of the hills, keep on heading west past the far park boundary, onto ranchers’ land on trails that were marked with the sign IMPASSABLE WHEN WET and which were taken very seriously by even the most local of the local men (gumbo again, and not a speck of gravel). We would pass historic Fort Walsh, nestled in its beautiful green valley with the forest behind and the creek running by that in spring might be a roaring cataract, take the road above it that continued west across the high yellow prairie, drop down into a deep, long, partially treed valley, and move on slowly through grassy ranchland, and finally into Cypress Hills Park on the Alberta side, go through the resort village of Elkwater, drive north on a paved road until, finally, a couple of hours after we’d first driven into the park, we would meet the Trans-Canada Highway and head east again into Medicine Hat. It took a lot longer to go that way, but when we did it, the pleasure of it always seemed to us to be well worth the extra time.

  We didn’t talk much on these drives, Peter not being a loquacious person at the best of times, and I was silenced by the beauty we were driving through. Sometimes Peter would tell me a story about the people who had once owned the land we were passing by, or remark on the condition of the fields and corrals. As it might from any rural man, new farm machinery always brought a comment too. But when I think back on our years of driving together, I don’t really remember a single conversation. We travelled comfortably side by side, each lost in our own thoughts, our eyes turned to the landscape outside the truck windows, and at such moments I believe we were thinking much the same thoughts. Chiefly, though, the emotion we shared was sheer, deep-seated pleasure.

  Peter and I never quarrelled, chiefly because Peter couldn’t stand quarrelling, would leave the house, saddle his horse, and ride through the fields until he figured the quarrel had dissipated — not resolved, never resolved. I wanted to talk everything through, but what that in practice meant was that I talked and he mostly didn’t listen, although pretending to, and didn’t reply. You can well imagine that by the end of our first year together I gave up completely the urban-academic method of resolving differences as a waste of my time. If I wanted to get my own way about this or that, I was going to have to be a lot cagier about it. But Peter was no dummy, and being cagier often didn’t work either.

  We had our difficulties, but they seem unimportant now: his belief in his ability to read the character of others, which I privately thought was abysmal; my increasing intolerance for the less charming of local practices, to which he was required to continue to pay homage, despite his knowing better. Sometimes I lost patience; I grew angry; I refused to participate. Sometimes he buried himself in his work. But don’t all couples find ways to overcome the inevitable frictions? I retreated into nature, and he wandered off to do whatever it was he did when I wasn’t around. In any event, it was a community where men and women for the most part kept their roles separate. But I was also becoming a writer, for which a certain distance was necessary. I often wonder if my increasing role as an observer set me apart from other people.

  As Peter aged, though he never made more than a brief mention of his concerns to me, he began to think about what would become of his ranch. (The hay farm wasn’t at issue: We had come a long way since the 1886 striking down of Western women’s dower rights that left abandoned farm wives penniless and helpless. Now, should Peter die first, my rights to the hay farm were legally assured.) He had no direct heir; despite all the time Sean spent with us, and his ability to ride horses and understand the basics about cattle and the land, he had no desire to become a rancher. And Peter silently harboured a different, bigger dream. He was afraid that if he simply put the land up for sale it would be sold off piecemeal, as few people could have afforded to buy the whole place outright, most of which was Crown land anyway — that is, land belonging to the government of Saskatchewan and leased to the Butala family for an extended period, with the lease renewed periodically until in nearly everyone’s eyes it was Butala land. He had managed the ranch so that the grass was in excellent condition, and such was the nature of his heart that he couldn’t bear to see the place destroyed as one grassy whole, not to mention that a good part of its value for conservation purposes was the fact that it was such a large intact area.

  He wanted to find a conservation organization that would buy the ranch and acquire, along with the native prairie that he owned, the lease as well, so that the whole miraculous place could be kept in one piece. Together, that is what we set out to do, and as I always point out to people, it was Peter’s initiative. If I had wanted to do this and he hadn’t, it would never have happened, despite my name on the deeds; with my name on the deeds and my dower rights he could not do it without my assent. But I was with him 100 percent right from the moment he declared this to be his desire. His parents were dead by then, and his sisters did not object, were even, I think, rather proud of him, and in the end, pleased with his innovative and creative decision. Suffice it to say that this took a long time, several years, to become fact, and the organization in question was the Nature Conservancy of Canada, who in 1996 became the owners of both the deeded land we donated to them and the remainder that they purchased, along with control of the government lease.

  It was heartbreaking to both of us to have to give up the place, I am sure much more to Peter than to me, but he was never one to show his feelings if he could help it. He was caught up in the excitement (and the drudgery of the endless legal work) of being the first to do such a thing in the Province of Saskatchewan — that is, with an area of such size — and in the many meetings he had to attend, and the applause he received, even though most of his neighbours were aggrieved. They had wanted access to his lease and/or to buy his deeded property on his retirement; worse, he had brought the much-dreaded environmentalists right into the neighbourhood.

  Nowadays, when all I see of the ranch is good photographs online, I can’t look too hard or for too long, because it hurts too much. The beauty of the place takes away everyone’s breath: the long, seemingly endless acres of slowly rolling, grass-covered hills, and the way the grass captures the light, at sunset turning rose and pink, at dawn turning to gold, often during the day dissolving into hazy aqua or green outlines against the horizon; miles of grass, backed by layers and different shades of blue-green and tan, pale yellow or sage, into the distant sky. Standing on one of the high hills, you can feel as if you have reached the top of the world. This endless Eden is too much for a single person to encompass. It renders everyone who cares about nature speechless. No wonder Peter had his heart — no, every cell of his body — set on saving it for others, for future generations. No wonder any objections had zero effect on him. He was in the grip of a vision.

  The people who worked for the Nature Conservancy of Canada as well as their board members, as far as I could tell, fell in love with the place too, and put their considerable brains and vast expertise to work to enact the vision Peter had. We all agreed that in time the true plains buffalo should be brought back home to again inhabit the land they had come from. In the early 2000s, a herd of twenty-five males and twenty-five females was donated from Elk Island National Park in northeast Alberta. They were the descendants of the last remnants of the original herds of the plains, at peak as many as 60 million in number, rescued by a couple of Montana ranchers and purchased by the Canadian government about a hundred years before our project. They were the real thing, their biological name being Bison bison bison — genus, species, subspecies (the only other subspecies is wood bison). In later years, Peter used to drive out to the ranch by himself and sit in his unobtrusively parked truck, and watch them for hours as they went about their wild business. He would come back to the hay farm and tell me excitedly all about their habits, the way they moved and slept and generally behaved, and how this was different from the habits of c
attle he knew so well.

  All of us — the nature conservancy and its experts, Peter and I, and the major donors to the project — wanted to preserve the native prairie, and so it was agreed that the 1,200 acres of the 13,108 that made up the Butala ranch, that had been broken by settlers and that Peter usually had cropped by a neighbour, would be returned to their original state. To restore native prairie isn’t very easy either, and took considerable effort. Unexpectedly, oil companies knew something about how to do that, because many of their lease agreements required that they return any disturbed land back to its native condition, and they employed people who knew how. But we knew that the seeds for the original prairie had to come from a place very near to the land being reseeded so that the composition of the seeds and the soil they had grown in, as well as the weather conditions and characteristic amount of moisture, would be comparable. It wasn’t very long before this came about; the reseeding was a stunning success, and when we first saw the newly grassed fields a year later, Peter and I just stood there grinning in delight and surprise. The first year, though, the grass came in at nearly four feet high, causing us to scratch our heads in puzzlement, but the scientists explained that in time, the new grass would slowly revert to, at most, the foot-high grass characteristic of the mixed-grass prairie around it. As predicted, this came to pass.

  The third major initiative that all parties agreed on was that the invader species of plants (plants not native to that particular prairie ecosystem) would be removed, although at that stage my impression was that nobody was sure precisely how to do that. In our case, yellow clover was a problem, as well as crested wheatgrass from Siberia, which had been introduced back in the 1920s by grazing specialists as preferable to the native prairie grass. They saw it as hardier and more nutritious. It certainly turned out to be hardier. Now it was taking over, crowding out the original prairie. A University of Alberta scientist brought in a team and carried out experiments to determine which of the three usual methods worked best: early heavy grazing, fire, or plowing. It took a while to do this, but the result was, I was told, that, in that situation, early heavy grazing was the best way of killing off the unwanted invaders.