After the first cold spell hit, Reyna and Pete decided to go south for the winter. She gave a party and invited the ranchers she had worked for. After they ate she played a pretaped farewell speech because she was afraid she would cry if she had to face them. “God almighty, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place. I didn’t know some of those old buzzards knew how to cry,” one guest said. A box of Kleenex made its way ceremoniously around the room. After Pete and Reyna moved out, the owners of the house inexplicably cut all the trees down. That’s how the community felt without them.
Radiating up and down the small valley were the third-and fourth-generation family ranches. When Mary Francis—“Mike”—asked me to go cowboying with her, nothing could have stopped me. Thus began an apprenticeship that continues to this day. Now in her sixties, she had grown up on one of the big cattle ranches near Kaycee. “When I told my father I wanted to ride with the men, he said, ‘Okay, but you damned well better make a good hand of yourself.’” She rode and roped, doctored and held night herd, gathered, branded, and rode with the steers on the train to market. “That really caused a stir,” she told me. “When one of those green-eyed wives asked about my sleeping arrangements, I told her I’d slept with all the men but I liked the horse wrangler best.”
Tall, fastidious, an elegant dresser, there’s nothing mannish about her. “I guess they didn’t mind having a woman cowboy with them—it was kind of unusual at the time—but they damned near burst their bladders until they figured out they could hang back and I wouldn’t turn to watch them.”
When Mike taught me to rope I practiced all winter inside my house, where no one could see me. After I made my “debut” she was insulted if I declined any invitation to rope and gave praises when I did, no matter how many calves I missed. That’s how her seamless loyalty worked: once she had taken me on as a friend, there was no turning back.
Two other women in the valley cowboyed: Laura, who had herded sheep for John, then moved to Shell, and Mary, who ranched right alongside her husband, Stan. At branding, spring roundup, and fall gathering, the four of us rode together and worked as a team.
During calving, the camaraderie grew even thicker. One night I helped Laura, Mary, and Stan perform a Caesarean. After the epidural I held the flashlight while Stan shaved the cow’s side, then cut through seven layers of skin. “Why don’t they put zippers on these sonsofbitches?” he asked as the calf bobbed up in a pool of liquid, then disappeared again. Holding the flank apart, we went elbow-deep in blood to pull the calf out, our hands grappling for a leg. “Okay, one, two, three—pull!” We yanked the calf straight up, then swung violently to the side and the calf came free. Breathing began. “Looks like a damned yearling,” Stan said. Mary peered into the cow’s gaping side. “I think I lost my wedding ring in there,” she said. Stan groaned. “These cows sure are getting expensive.” Laura rubbed the calf’s back with straw while Stan sewed up the cow. Both patients lived.
Walking to the ranch house from the shed, we saw the Northern Lights. They looked like talcum powder fallen from a woman’s face. Rouge and blue eyeshadow streaked the spires of white light which exploded, then pulsated, shaking the colors down—like lives—until they faded from sight.
During one of those early weeks in Shell a young rancher rode into my yard looking for stray cows. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence, but something about him startled me. His wide blue eyes sagged at the far corners as if pulled from innocence into irony. His mouth hung open a little bit. Always, he had a canny, astonished look quickly obliterated by a white-fence-tooth-flash smile. We discussed the missing cattle and he left.
Another day we passed each other on the road and talked. That was the day I saw a grasshopper chase a chipmunk in circles. Later in the week, at six in the morning, there was a knock on the door. I let him in. We talked at the kitchen table. When he stood up to leave he embraced me ardently, then apologized, stepped backward out the door, vaulted the fence, and sprinted up the hill to the pickup he had left idling.
He stopped by often after that, at odd times of the day. Every time before he arrived, I’d start trembling—a signal that he was in the vicinity. The same ritual ensued each time: fragmented conversation, awkward mutual clasping, troubled departures. Sometimes there were other visitors at the house but the chemical razzle-dazzle between us was trance-like and nothing interrupted our meetings.
In September we rode the mountain to check cows, fishing with a flyrod from horseback the creeks we crossed. All summer there had been the silent, whimsical archery of seeds: timothy and fescue, cottonwood puffs, the dilapidated; shingled houses of pine cones letting go of their seeds. Now his full weight on me was ursine, brooding, tender. Sexual passion became the thread between having been born and dying. For the first time the concussive pain I had been living with began to ebb. One never gets over a death, but the pain was mixed now with tonic undulations.
The next morning, at the spot where I had seen the grasshopper and chipmunk, I found the note my friend had scrawled in red dust: “Hello!” it read, as if greeting me after a long trip away from home.
ABOUT MEN
When I’m in New York but feeling lonely for Wyoming I look for the Marlboro ads in the subway. What I’m aching to see is horseflesh, the glint of a spur, a line of distant mountains, brimming creeks, and a reminder of the ranchers and cowboys I’ve ridden with for the last eight years. But the men I see in those posters with their stern, humorless looks remind me of no one I know here. In our hellbent earnestness to romanticize the cowboy we’ve ironically disesteemed his true character. If he’s “strong and silent” it’s because there’s probably no one to talk to. If he “rides away into the sunset” it’s because he’s been, on horseback since four in the morning moving cattle and he’s trying, fifteen hours later, to get home to his family. If he’s “a rugged individualist” he’s also part of a team: ranch work is teamwork and even the glorified open-range cowboys of the 1880s rode up and down the Chisholm Trail in the company of twenty or thirty other riders. Instead of the macho, trigger-happy man our culture has perversely wanted him to be, the cowboy is more apt to be convivial, quirky, and softhearted. To be “tough” on a ranch has nothing to do with conquests and displays of power. More often than not, circumstances—like the colt he’s riding or an unexpected blizzard—are overpowering him. It’s not toughness but “toughing it out” that counts. In other words, this macho, cultural artifact the cowboy has become is simply a man who possesses resilience, patience, and an instinct for survival. “Cowboys are just like a pile of rocks—everything happens to them. They get climbed on, kicked, rained and snowed on, scuffed up by wind. Their job is ‘just to take it,’” one old-timer told me.
A cowboy is someone who loves his work. Since the hours are long—ten to fifteen hours a day—and the pay is $30 he has to. What’s required of him is an odd mixture of physical vigor and maternalism. His part of the beef-raising industry is to birth and nurture calves and take care of their mothers. For the most part his work is done on horseback and in a lifetime he sees and comes to know more animals than people. The iconic myth surrounding him is built on American notions of heroism: the index of a man’s value as measured in physical courage. Such ideas have perverted manliness into a self-absorbed race for cheap thrills. In a rancher’s world, courage has less to do with facing danger than with acting spontaneously—usually on behalf of an animal or another rider. If a cow is stuck in a boghole he throws a loop around her neck, takes his dally (a half hitch around the saddle horn), and pulls her out with horsepower. If a calf is born sick, he may take her home, warm her in front of the kitchen fire, and massage her legs until dawn. One friend, whose favorite horse was trying to swim a lake with hobbles on, dove under water and cut her legs loose with a knife, then swam her to shore, his arm around her neck lifeguard-style, and saved her from drowning. Because these incidents are usually linked to someone or something outside himself, the westerner’s courage is selfless, a form of compassi
on.
The physical punishment that goes with cowboying is greatly underplayed. Once fear is dispensed with, the threshold of pain rises to meet the demands of the job. When Jane Fonda asked Robert Redford (in the film Electric Horseman) if he was sick as he struggled to his feet one morning, he replied, “No, just bent.” For once the movies had it right. The cowboys I was sitting with laughed in agreement. Cowboys are rarely complainers; they show their stoicism by laughing at themselves.
If a rancher or cowboy has been thought of as a “man’s man”—laconic, hard-drinking, inscrutable—there’s almost no place in which the balancing act between male and female, manliness and femininity, can be more natural. If he’s gruff, handsome, and physically fit on the outside, he’s androgynous at the core. Ranchers are midwives, hunters, nurturers, providers, and conservationists all at once. What we’ve interpreted as toughness—weathered skin, calloused hands, a squint in the eye and a growl in the voice—only masks the tenderness inside. “Now don’t go telling me these lambs are cute,” one rancher warned me the first day I walked into the football-field-sized lambing sheds. The next thing I knew he was holding a black lamb. “Ain’t this little rat good-lookin’?”
So many of the men who came to the West were southerners—men looking for work and a new life after the Civil War—that chivalrousness and strict codes of honor were soon thought of as western traits. There were very few women in Wyoming during territorial days, so when they did arrive (some as mail-order brides from places like Philadelphia) there was a stand-offishness between the sexes and a formality that persists now. Ranchers still tip their hats and say, “Howdy, ma’am” instead of shaking hands with me.
Even young cowboys are often evasive with women. It’s not that they’re Jekyll and Hyde creatures—gentle with animals and rough on women—but rather, that they don’t know how to bring their tenderness into the house and lack the vocabulary to express the complexity of what they feel. Dancing wildly all night becomes a metaphor for the explosive emotions pent up inside, and when these are, on occasion, released, they’re so battery-charged and potent that one caress of the face or one “I love you” will peal for a long while.
The geographical vastness and the social isolation here make emotional evolution seem impossible. Those contradictions of the heart between respectability, logic, and convention on the one hand, and impulse, passion, and intuition on the other, played out wordlessly against the paradisical beauty of the West, give cowboys a wide-eyed but drawn look. Their lips pucker up, not with kisses but with immutability. They may want to break out, staying up all night with a lover just to talk, but they don’t know how and can’t imagine what the consequences will be. Those rare occasions when they do bare themselves result in confusion. “I feel as if I’d sprained my heart,” one friend told me a month after such a meeting.
My friend Ted Hoagland wrote, “No one is as fragile as a woman but no one is as fragile as a man.” For all the women here who use “fragileness” to avoid work or as a sexual ploy, there are men who try to hide theirs, all the while clinging to an adolescent dependency on women to cook their meals, wash their clothes, and keep the ranch house warm in winter. But there is true vulnerability in evidence here. Because these men work with animals, not machines or numbers, because they live outside in landscapes of torrential beauty, because they are confined to a place and a routine embellished with awesome variables, because calves die in the arms that pulled others into life, because they go to the mountains as if on a pilgrimage to find out what makes a herd of elk tick, their strength is also a softness, their toughness, a rare delicacy.
FROM A SHEEPHERDER’S NOTEBOOK: THREE DAYS
When the phone rang, it was John: “Maurice just upped and quit and there ain’t nobody else around, so you better get packed. I’m taking you out to herd sheep.” I walked to his trailerhouse. He smoked impatiently while I gathered my belongings. “Do you know anything about herding sheep after all this time?” he asked playfully. “No, not really.” I was serious. “Well, it’s too late now. You’ll just have to figure it out. And there ain’t no phones up there either!”
He left me off on a ridge at five in the morning with a mare and a border collie. “Last I saw the sheep, they was headed for them hills,” he said, pointing up toward a dry ruffle of badlands. “I’ll pull your wagon up ahead about two miles. You’ll see it. Just go up that ridge, turn left at the pink rock, then keep agoing. And don’t forget to bring the damned sheep.”
Morning. Sagesmell, sunsquint, birdsong, cool wind. I have no idea where I am, how to get to the nearest paved road, or how to find the sheep. There are tracks going everywhere so I follow what appear to be the most definite ones. The horse picks a path through sagebrush. I watch the dog. We walk for several miles. Nothing. Then both sets of ears prick up. The dog looks at me imploringly. The sheep are in the draw ahead.
Move them slow or fast? Which crossing at the river? Which pink rock? It’s like being a first-time mother, but mother now to two thousand sheep who give me the kind of disdainful look a teenager would his parent and, with my back turned, can get into as much trouble. I control the urge to keep them neatly arranged, bunched up by the dog, and, instead, let them spread out and fill up. Grass being scarce on spring range, they scatter.
Up the valley, I encounter a slalom course of oil rigs and fenced spills I hadn’t been warned about. The lambs, predictably mischievous, emerge dripping black. Freed from those obstacles, I ride ahead to find the wagon which, I admit, I’m afraid I’ll never see, leaving the sheep on the good faith that they’ll stay on their uphill drift toward me.
“Where are my boundaries?” I’d asked John.
“Boundaries?” He looked puzzled for a minute. “Hell, Gretel, it’s all the outfit’s land, thirty or forty miles in any direction. Take them anywhere they want to go.”
On the next ridge I find my wagon. It’s a traditional sheepherder’s wagon, rounded top, tiny wood cookstove, bed across the back, built-in benches and drawers. The rubber wheels and long tongue make it portable. The camp tender pulls it (now with a pickup, earlier with teams) from camp to camp as the feed is consumed, every two weeks or so. Sheep begin appearing and graze toward me. I picket my horse. The dog runs for shade to lick his sore feet. The view from the dutch doors of the wagon is to the southeast, down the long slit of a valley. If I rode north, I’d be in Montana within the day, and next week I’ll begin the fifty-mile trail east to the Big Horns.
Three days before summer solstice; except to cook and sleep I spend every waking hour outside. Tides of weather bring the days and take them away. Every night a bobcat visits, perched at a discreet distance on a rock, facing me. A full moon, helium-filled, cruises through clouds and is lost behind rimrock. No paper cutout, this moon, but ripe and splendid. Then Venus, then the North Star. Time for bed. Are the sheep bedded down? Should I ride back to check them?
Morning. Blue air comes ringed with coyotes. The ewes wake clearing their communal throats like old men. Lambs shake their flop-eared heads at leaves of grass, negotiating the blade. People have asked in the past, “What do you do out there? Don’t you get bored?” The problem seems to be something else. There’s too much of everything here. I can’t pace myself to it.
Down the valley the sheep move in a frontline phalanx, then turn suddenly in a card-stacked sequential falling, as though they had turned themselves inside out, and resume feeding again in whimsical processions. I think of town, of John’s trailerhouse, the clean-bitten lawn, his fanatical obsession with neatness and work, his small talk with hired hands, my eyesore stacks of books and notes covering an empty bed, John smoking in the dark of early morning, drinking coffee, waiting for daylight to stream in.
After eating I return to the sheep, full of queasy fears that they will have vanished and I’ll be pulled off the range to face those firing-squad looks of John’s as he says, “I knew you’d screw up. Just like you screw up everything.” But the sheep are there. I can’t stop
looking at them. They’re there, paralyzing the hillside with thousands of mincing feet, their bodies pressed together as they move, saucerlike, scanning the earth for a landing.
Thunderstorm. Sheep feed far up a ridge I don’t want them to go over, so the dog, horse, and I hotfoot it to the top and ambush them, yelling and hooting them back down. Cleverly, the horse uses me as a windbreak when the front moves in. Lightning fades and blooms. As we descend quickly, my rein-holding arm looks to me like a blank stick. I feel numb. Numb in all this vividness. I don’t seem to occupy my life fully.
Down in the valley again I send the dog “way around” to turn the sheep, but he takes the law into his own hands and chases a lamb off a cliff. She’s wedged upside down in a draw on the other side of the creek. It will take twenty minutes to reach her, and the rest of the sheep have already trailed ahead. This numbness is a wrist twisting inside my throat. A lone pine tree whistles, its needles are novocaine. “In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are only consequences.” I can’t remember who said that. I ride on.
One dead. Will she be reborn? And as what? The dog that nips lambs’ heels into butchering chutes? I look back. The “dead” lamb convulses into action and scrambles up the ledge to find his mother.
Twin terrors: to be awake; to be asleep.
All day clouds hang over the Beartooth Mountains. Looking for a place out of the wind, I follow a dry streambed to a sheltered inlet. In front of me, there’s something sticking straight up. It’s the shell of a dead frog propped up against a rock with its legs crossed at the ankles. A cartoonist’s idea of a frog relaxing, but this one’s skin is paper-thin, mouth opened as if to scream. I lean close. “It’s too late, you’re already dead!”
The Solace of Open Spaces Page 5