Cowboys Are My Weakness

by Pam Houston

Debra says, “Isn’t it time for you to think about having a baby?”

  “I am a dog mother,” I say. “And I can still live my life.”

  “Yeah,” Debra says. “Whatever that is.”

  I have always had a better relationship with Jackson than with Hailey. Part of it, I guess, is that you always love the problem child a little more, and part of it is the squeaky-wheel thing; Hailey is simply a low-maintenance dog. Jackson, on the other hand, is a charm machine. He has cost me over two thousand dollars in vet bills, I don’t even keep track of the money that goes to the dogcatcher, and who gets all the treats? Just ask Hailey.

  About once a month I have to go and bail Jackson out at the pound. I walk into the dark, urine- splattered corridor to find him resting comfortably, paws crossed. He’s bullshitting with the malamute next to him. “What’re you in for this time?” he’s saying. “Dog at large, or something worth talking about?” He raises one furry eyebrow in my direction. “Hi, Mom,” he says. “What kept you?”

  Only once in Hailey’s seven-year life has the dogcatcher picked her up for loitering at the end of my driveway and taken her to jail. I was in the bathtub when it happened, and she must have thought he was coming to visit us or she wouldn’t have wiggled up to him, wouldn’t have put that one fateful paw into the street. I was at the pound in minutes, and when I looked through the little glass window and I saw her and she saw me she made a noise like naked women burning in the fires of hell.

  When my horse’s hooves met and shattered the bones in my left forearm, I didn’t see them coming. He was on the lunge line, we had just changed leads, and I was walking back to the center of the circle he would make around me. And then I was lying on the ground, my hand flopped over backwards, still connected to me by muscle and flesh and yet separate somehow. Not only the fractures of the eighteen or nineteen bone chips the doctors had to remove, but another separation, a detachment made necessary by pain. It was something not wholly mine anymore, like a child, like a lover, it was and was not my arm.

  When the paramedics came and tried to pull my jacket off over my head, I asked them to please use a scissors. My jacket, my sweatshirt, my flannel shirt fell around me in strips.

  “If they’re in enough pain,” the nurse with the scissors said, “they’ll even let us cut their hair.”

  After the operation, after the implanting of the two steel plates, the fourteen screws, the piece of cadaver from the bone bank, my lover, the one whose favorite song was “Desperado,” dedicated himself to me like a husband, like a mother, like a best friend. He cooked and cleaned and read to me and washed my hair in the bathtub.

  He said, “I wish it could always be this way.”

  “Of course he does,” Debra said. “You’re helpless and he’s in control.”

  It didn’t last. My arm improved, as it was bound to.

  I said, “Is there anything I could do, outside of shattering bones, that would make you treat me like this again?”

  A few months later Jackson got arrested outside a shopping mall on an attacking dog charge. I was inside, trying on a dress for somebody else’s wedding, when I heard the barking. By the time I got there, this was the scene: a screaming eight-year-old, his outraged father, a security guard with a billy club, Jackson in the pickup, wagging his tail and barking like a madman.

  The outraged father said, “Your dog bit my son.”

  The security guard said, “Ma’am, you’re lucky I didn’t have a pistol, or your dog would be lying in a pool of blood.”

  I put Jackson on his leash and he sat like a statue at my feet. The cops came. One of them was a flirt. Nobody could find a mark on the little boy’s hand, on either of his hands, and the little boy had forgotten which hand Jackson bit.

  I showed them my rabies papers. The animal control officer said, “The dog will have to be impounded for ten days.”

  I said, “Even if he didn’t bite anybody?”

  He said, “Rabies is a very tricky disease.”

  He said, “It’s ten dollars a day plus court costs, plus fines. At least a hundred and fifty for ‘attacking dog.’ ”

  The little boy was in the cop car making the lights go around.

  A lady in a blue suit stopped to talk to Jackson. She surveyed the scene. Jackson looked at her as though he was Clark Gable. She leaned into the window of the cop car and said this:

  “Little boy, what goes around comes around and one day a great big German shepherd is going to bite off your hand.”

  I told you, Jackson has that effect on people. The animal control officer led the lady in the blue suit away. He took Jackson’s leash and asked him to jump into the big box on the back of his truck.

  Jackson took one look over his shoulder at me and jumped. “Anything, Mom,” he said, “anything, for a ride.”

  For the first time I noticed Hailey, curled quietly and almost asleep, on top of the spare tire in the back of my truck.

  “Frankly,” I said to Jackson, “this is getting a little old.”

  My friend Debra has a theory that women are the real male chauvinists. “You don’t believe it,” she says. “You should read more fairy tales. The man goes out and performs a heroic and spectacular deed, and the whole time the woman is at home waiting for him to return, to kiss and awaken her, waiting for her life to begin.”

  It’s not the way I would say it, but I can’t say she’s entirely wrong.

  In spite of that, I find a new lover. He is kinder, I’m guessing, than God. He is the type of man who knows that women have a secret, and even though he understands that he can’t know what it is, he’s smart enough to want to live in its light. To the best of my knowledge, he’s never heard of the Eagles.

  We plant a garden together, way too early in the season, not because we are ignorant about the weather, but because our need for a symbol outweighs our fear for the plants. On nights that threaten to freeze, we make paper hats for the tomatoes and peppers and our garden looks like a bunch of British navy men, buried to their eyes.

  I want to tell Debra that he speaks only French when we make love, even though it’s not true.

  Okay. Because it’s not true.

  Debra says, “You need this right now.”

  But this affair is not what she thinks: good sex with a nice man.

  It is a whole universe in there and I want to tell her I’m revising my list. Sky diving and hang gliding are gone. Babies, therefore, are higher.

  Everything about sex, even the simplicity of an orgasm, seems to be made more complicated by all this gazing into each other’s eyes. “High density” is the phrase I can’t shake from my mind.

  Afterwards, before sleep, with his body curled around mine, the only image I can hold on to is this:

  Once when Jackson and I were hiking we found a cow, at least twenty days dead and bloated. Jackson tore its swollen belly open with his toenails and crawled inside its rib cage and wouldn’t come out all that afternoon, all that night, and part of the next day.

  It hits me in the morning as I’m taking the hats off of the tomatoes:

  This is a kind of flying.

  A BLIZZARD UNDER BLUE SKY

  The doctor said I was clinically depressed. It was February, the month in which depression runs rampant in the inversion-cloaked Salt Lake Valley and the city dwellers escape to Park City, where the snow is fresh and the sun is shining and everybody is happy, except me. In truth, my life was on the verge of more spectacular and satisfying discoveries than I had ever imagined, but of course I couldn’t see that far ahead. What I saw was work that wasn’t getting done, bills that weren’t getting paid, and a man I’d given my heart to weekending in the desert with his ex.

  The doctor said, “I can give you drugs.”

  I said, “No way.”

  She said, “The machine that drives you is broken. You need something to help you get it fixed.”

  I said, “Winter camping.”

  She said, “Whatever floats your boat.”


  One of the things I love the most about the natural world is the way it gives you what’s good for you even if you don’t know it at the time. I had never been winter camping before, at least not in the high country, and the weekend I chose to try and fix my machine was the same weekend the air mass they called the Alaska Clipper showed up. It was thirty-two degrees below zero in town on the night I spent in my snow cave. I don’t know how cold it was out on Beaver Creek. I had listened to the weather forecast, and to the advice of my housemate, Alex, who was an experienced winter camper.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re going to prove by freezing to death,” Alex said, “but if you’ve got to go, take my bivvy sack; it’s warmer than anything you have.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “If you mix Kool-Aid with your water it won’t freeze up,” he said, “and don’t forget lighting paste for your stove.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I hope it turns out to be worth it,” he said, “because you are going to freeze your butt.”

  When everything in your life is uncertain, there’s nothing quite like the clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky. That was the first thought I had on Saturday morning as I stepped away from the warmth of my truck and let my skis slap the snow in front of me. There was no wind and no clouds that morning, just still air and cold sunshine. The hair in my nostrils froze almost immediately. When I took a deep breath, my lungs only filled up halfway.

  I opened the tailgate to excited whines and whimpers. I never go skiing without Jackson and Hailey: my two best friends, my yin and yang of dogs. Some of you might know Jackson. He’s the oversized sheepdog-and-something-else with the great big nose and the bark that will shatter glass. He gets out and about more than I do. People I’ve never seen before come by my house daily and call him by name. He’s all grace, and he’s tireless; he won’t go skiing with me unless I let him lead. Hailey is not so graceful, and her body seems in constant indecision when she runs. When we ski she stays behind me, and on the downhills she tries to sneak rides on my skis.

  The dogs ran circles in the chest-high snow while I inventoried my backpack one more time to make sure I had everything I needed. My sleeping bag, my Thermarest, my stove, Alex’s bivvy sack, matches, lighting paste, flashlight, knife. I brought three pairs of long underwear—tops and bottoms— so I could change once before I went to bed, and once again in the morning, so I wouldn’t get chilled by my own sweat. I brought paper and pen, and Kool-Aid to mix with my water. I brought Mountain House chicken stew and some freeze-dried green peas, some peanut butter and honey, lots of dried apricots, coffee and Carnation instant breakfast for morning.

  Jackson stood very still while I adjusted his backpack. He carries the dog food and enough water for all of us. He takes himself very seriously when he’s got his pack on. He won’t step off the trail for any reason, not even to chase rabbits, and he gets nervous and angry if I do. That morning he was impatient with me. “Miles to go, Mom,” he said over his shoulder. I snapped my boots into my skis and we were off.

  There are not too many good things you can say about temperatures that dip past twenty below zero, except this: They turn the landscape into a crystal palace and they turn your vision into Superman’s. In the cold thin morning air the trees and mountains, even the twigs and shadows, seemed to leap out of the background like a 3-D movie, only it was better than 3-D because I could feel the sharpness of the air.

  I have a friend in Moab who swears that Utah is the center of the fourth dimension, and although I know he has in mind something much different and more complicated than subzero weather, it was there, on that ice-edged morning, that I felt on the verge of seeing something more than depth perception in the brutal clarity of the morning sun.

  As I kicked along the first couple of miles, I noticed the sun crawling higher in the sky and yet the day wasn’t really warming, and I wondered if I should have brought another vest, another layer to put between me and the cold night ahead.

  It was utterly quiet out there, and what minimal noise we made intruded on the morning like a brass band: the squeaking of my bindings, the slosh of the water in Jackson’s pack, the whoosh of nylon, the jangle of dog tags. It was the bass line and percussion to some primal song, and I kept wanting to sing to it, but I didn’t know the words.

  Jackson and I crested the top of a hill and stopped to wait for Hailey. The trail stretched out as far as we could see into the meadow below us and beyond, a double track and pole plants carving though softer trails of rabbit and deer.

  “Nice place,” I said to Jackson, and his tail thumped the snow underneath him without sound.

  We stopped for lunch near something that looked like it could be a lake in its other life, or maybe just a womb-shaped meadow. I made peanut butter and honey sandwiches for all of us, and we opened the apricots.

  “It’s fabulous here,” I told the dogs. “But so far it’s not working.”

  There had never been anything wrong with my life that a few good days in the wilderness wouldn’t cure, but there I sat in the middle of all those crystal-coated trees, all that diamond-studded sunshine, and I didn’t feel any better. Apparently clinical depression was not like having a bad day, it wasn’t even like having a lot of bad days, it was more like a house of mirrors, it was like being in a room full of one-way glass.

  “Come on, Mom,” Jackson said. “Ski harder, go faster, climb higher.”

  Hailey turned her belly to the sun and groaned.

  “He’s right,” I told her. “It’s all we can do.”

  After lunch the sun had moved behind our backs, throwing a whole different light on the path ahead of us. The snow we moved through stopped being simply white and became translucent, hinting at other colors, reflections of blues and purples and grays. I thought of Moby Dick, you know, the whiteness of the whale, where white is really the absence of all color, and whiteness equals truth, and Ahab’s search is finally futile, as he finds nothing but his own reflection.

  “Put your mind where your skis are,” Jackson said, and we made considerably better time after that.

  The sun was getting quite low in the sky when I asked Jackson if he thought we should stop to build the snow cave, and he said he’d look for the next good bank. About one hundred yards down the trail we found it, a gentle slope with eastern exposure that didn’t look like it would cave in under any circumstances. Jackson started to dig first.

  Let me make one thing clear. I knew only slightly more about building snow caves than Jackson, having never built one, and all my knowledge coming from disaster tales of winter camping fatalities. I knew several things not to do when building a snow cave, but I was having a hard time knowing what exactly to do. But Jackson helped, and Hailey supervised, and before too long we had a little cave built, just big enough for three. We ate dinner quite pleased with our accomplishments and set the bivvy sack up inside the cave just as the sun slipped away and dusk came over Beaver Creek.

  The temperature, which hadn’t exactly soared during the day, dropped twenty degrees in as many minutes, and suddenly it didn’t seem like such a great idea to change my long underwear. The original plan was to sleep with the dogs inside the bivvy sack but outside the sleeping bag, which was okay with Jackson the super-metabolizer, but not so with Hailey, the couch potato. She whined and wriggled and managed to stuff her entire fat body down inside my mummy bag, and Jackson stretched out full- length on top.

  One of the unfortunate things about winter camping is that it has to happen when the days are so short. Fourteen hours is a long time to lie in a snow cave under the most perfect of circumstances. And when it’s thirty-two below, or forty, fourteen hours seems like weeks.

  I wish I could tell you I dropped right off to sleep. In truth, fear crept into my spine with the cold and I never closed my eyes. Cuddled there, amid my dogs and water bottles, I spent half of the night chastising myself for thinking I was Wonder Woman, not only risking my own life but the lives
of my dogs, and the other half trying to keep the numbness in my feet from crawling up to my knees. When I did doze off, which was actually more like blacking out than dozing off, I’d come back to my senses wondering if I had frozen to death, but the alternating pain and numbness that started in my extremities and worked its way into my bones convinced me I must still be alive.

  It was a clear night, and every now and again I would poke my head out of its nest of down and nylon to watch the progress of the moon across the sky. There is no doubt that it was the longest and most uncomfortable night of my life.

  But then the sky began to get gray, and then it began to get pink, and before too long the sun was on my bivvy sack, not warm, exactly, but holding the promise of warmth later in the day. And I ate apricots and drank Kool-Aid-flavored coffee and celebrated the rebirth of my fingers and toes, and the survival of many more important parts of my body. I sang “Rocky Mountain High” and “If I Had a Hammer,” and yodeled and whistled, and even danced the two-step with Jackson and let him lick my face. And when Hailey finally emerged from the sleeping bag a full hour after I did, we shared a peanut butter and honey sandwich and she said nothing ever tasted so good.

  We broke camp and packed up and kicked in the snow cave with something resembling glee.

  I was five miles down the trail before I realized what had happened. Not once in that fourteen-hour night did I think about deadlines, or bills, or the man in the desert. For the first time in many months I was happy to see a day beginning. The morning sunshine was like a present from the gods. What really happened, of course, is that I remembered about joy.

  I know that one night out at thirty-two below doesn’t sound like much to those of you who have climbed Everest or run the Iditarod or kayaked to Antarctica, and I won’t try to convince you that my life was like the movies where depression goes away in one weekend, and all of life’s problems vanish with a moment’s clear sight. The simple truth of the matter is this: On Sunday I had a glimpse outside of the house of mirrors, on Saturday I couldn’t have seen my way out of a paper bag. And while I was skiing back toward the truck that morning, a wind came up behind us and swirled the snow around our bodies like a blizzard under blue sky. And I was struck by the simple perfection of the snowflakes, and startled by the hopefulness of sun on frozen trees.