But before I could add the fence posts Peter had first sawed into manageable lengths and then chopped into chunks that would fit into the stove, I had to collect chips of wood and long slivers with which to start the fire. Before long all the chips and slivers at the woodpile from Peter’s last chopping session would be used up. Then I would put on my boots and jacket, scarf and mitts, and go out to range through all the corners of the yard to search, kicking aside snow or rooting in the tall grass, gathering small pieces of wood with which to start and keep my fire going. I would find myself falling into a reverie as I walked, sounds in the already silent yard muffled by the falling snow, the vistas blurred and narrowed by it, nobody around for miles, and I would have this sense of having moved into another world.
It was a world where things were what they seemed to be; where they were clear and simple and made a kind of sense so elemental that I didn’t have to learn them and I didn’t have to think at all with my mind. I thought instead with my bones and my muscles, with some deeply human place in my gut.
Then I would go in and build a fire and nurse it while I cooked on the propane stove and read or wrote, waiting until Peter returned. Today is the sixth day that I have been alone here every day, I wrote in my journal. It was my third spring of living that way.
I had to wear long underwear inside and out, partly because I had to go to an outdoor toilet, and though everything was old and worn out and even ugly by my own standards and life was stripped to the absolute basics and, with my college degrees obtained with such struggles so I wouldn’t have to live like this, I was doing hard physical labor, I found myself moving in beauty. I found my life beautiful.
I was experiencing firsthand what I knew from their stories and from my earliest memories had been the lives of my mother, my aunts and my grandmothers. That was deeply gratifying, despite those very real physical hardships, in a way I don’t feel able to articulate other than to say that it had to do with some primal sense of womanhood stemming both from what I knew of their lives, and from an unconscious tribal memory, much more basic than mere family history, and which I had not even known existed.
It was also this: I was learning to live in Nature, shaping my life, my everyday activities in a direct way according to the weather, the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun and the moon. I was once again becoming aware of Nature’s all-powerful presence. If anyone had asked me, I would still have been unable to say what might be learned from Peter asleep among his animals on the prairie as I had seen him that first summer, but I was learning it. I was learning it slowly, painfully, in solitude and silence and out of my own experience.
Every once in a while, with great relief—because I hadn’t yet fully accepted my new life as permanent, or was satisfied that conditions would remain the way they so far had been—I would go home, back to the city to visit my family, and to see my son who was living with his father and his new wife in order to go to high school in the city. I would call up my dearest women friends and meet them for a drink when they’d finished their day’s work.
As affectionate and empathic toward me as ever, they would question me about my new life. I would try to answer. I could speak in facts, but I couldn’t go any further. Their questions, though, seemed never to be about facts, but instead were about my emotional life, my relationship with my new husband and my new community. I didn’t know the answers to those questions, or if deep down I did know the answers, they hadn’t yet floated up to the conscious level and I couldn’t articulate them.
And, in the face of their questions, I felt powerless about my life, not just in concrete ways such as that I no longer had a job and therefore had no money of my own, or that I didn’t own a car and lived so far from town that what hadn’t mattered in the city now was a basic determinant of existence. I didn’t know how to talk about this either because I hadn’t come to terms with my new dependence, knowing that it wasn’t unusual in traditional marriages, that I had voluntarily chosen it, that I wasn’t convinced that my relationship with Peter had settled into what would be its final form, or that if I tried to explain I could make my friends, all feminists to some degree, understand. And if they did ask me about facts, neither was I always sure what the facts were.
I felt powerless too because, having moved into a community where I had no family and no friends, no one who would stand exclusively by me as an ally, I felt myself at the mercy of the family into which I had married and the community into which I had moved. I was not expecting to be, nor in any way prepared to be, fully self-sufficient. Those long, intimate conversations with my friends, founded as they were on a mutual lifestyle, which had once been the most important thing in my life aside from my child, were no longer relevant in terms of what I was going through. I, who had never been at loss for words, had run out of things to say.
In fact, I was discovering the truth in the dictum “You can’t go home again.” I clung to my old world, terrified I was losing something valuable in myself by losing touch with it, but at the same time I had made a commitment to my new world and I was trying desperately to understand it and make a place for myself in it.
For a variety of reasons, I had not completed my thesis for my master’s degree when Peter and I decided to marry. I had carried with me to the ranch boxes of papers: copies of research articles pertinent to it, the actual test papers of the many children who’d taken part in my study—about the validity and usefulness of a new children’s intelligence test—the preliminary proposal, sheets of data from the computer and all the versions of the thesis itself of which I had had only one chapter left to write when I decided to give it up.
I had brought many books with me as well as household articles and personal belongings; there was simply no room for those boxes of now useless papers. I kept saying I would burn them, but as a measure of my difficulty in accepting that my old life, however illsuited to me, was truly over, I made this entry in my journal:
I was burning my papers that I have kept around now for three years and not looked at. As I burned them I was very careful not to read anything. I thought, these papers are memories. If I don’t look at them, I won’t remember. So I am burning memories…But this thought led to whether I could burn all my papers instead of selected trivia. I debated and I…realized that I am the one who refuses to let the past go. It isn’t people in the present…it is I who am afraid to let go because I have been afraid to make a final, permanent commitment to this place and this life.
For a long time I was to hover partly in each, without solid footing in either one.
I had so much to learn before I could call this place home. Listening to neighbors in conversation, listening to Peter, watching the countryside and asking questions, I began to build a fund of facts which would contribute to my eventually feeling at home. When I first arrived here I knew nothing of the history of the area or its people or of the land, although Peter—at his best in talking about the land itself—soon taught me that the soil quality was poor, mostly brown soils, pale and sickly looking to someone who’d been raised on the rich black loam of the fertile central part of the province, and that it was a region of such meager precipitation as to be officially classified as semiarid, a heartbreaking one step up from desert.
The first farmers had arrived only about seventy-five years before, and they had faced such hardship that during the twenties and the Depression the government had actually to move whole families out to better land or it was feared they would starve to death. In districts with good soil and adequate rains it was possible to arrive from Europe with nothing and after a few years of farming to be comfortably off. This was never true in the southwest, Peter told me. We were now living among second- and sometimes third-generation farmers and only rarely, when people had been lucky enough to settle in good pockets, had any of them had any real prosperity.
Abruptly, just after I arrived, all this changed. It began to rain, wheat prices soared—durum went to an all-time high of over eight doll
ars a bushel—and the Wheat Board was able to find markets for all of it. Farmers, our neighbors, suddenly had money, some of them a lot of it, and for the first time farm families were able to enjoy some of the amenities of life that urban people had been taking for granted for years.
The first money went to buy the latest farming equipment: air seeders replaced drills, combines got so big that the biggest of them could fill a three-ton grain truck in about two minutes, and four-wheel-drive tractors as big as small houses appeared overnight in farmers’ fields. Although our grain gave a nice bonus to our income too, Peter held firm to his decision when he’d first taken over the place in the mid-sixties: he was not a farmer, he didn’t like farming, he was now too old to spend the almost quarter of a million dollars it would take buy a full set of the best farming equipment. All around us the shortgrass prairie was being plowed up to grow more wheat—the government was encouraging farmers in this by subsidizing new breaking—and as it disappeared Peter was filled with regret. He would never allow a plow to touch his if he could help it, he said.
Such is the fragility of this landscape that even today a practised eye can spot land that was broken as long as seventy or more years ago and then allowed to go back to Nature; nobody knows if it will ever return to its original condition. Peter’s school pony trail from the ranch house over hill and dale the four and a half miles down to his old school at what is now the nonexistent town of Divide is still easy to see. The school pony trail almost a mile away made by a man who died in old age remains an eroding scar on the landscape I can see from my front window when the light strikes it the right way.
We did, in the third year of our marriage, build a new house, though; God knows, we needed it if anybody did. All around us new houses were at last springing up, since most people were still living in the houses their parents had built in the forties and fifties which were far too small, and hopelessly worn out so that they let in flies and cold air and rain and, worst of all, were riddled with mice. I wanted to build it at the ranch. I thought it would be paradise to live all day, every day, in the midst of such beauty. The remoteness seemed to me an added bonus.
But Peter wouldn’t hear of it. “You’ve never wintered here,” he told me—although I’d lived there into January two years running. “In the winter the wind never stops blowing and there’s no shelter, the roads are always drifted in so you can’t get out, and it’s too far to the nearest neighbor, never mind the nearest town.” He was adamant, and I had by this time learned that in such matters, given his experience, he was always right. We built our new house on the hay farm in the valley, and although I have learned to love this place as much as the ranch, I still have days when I regret not living there.
The new prosperity allowed people to travel, too. For a few years there in the late seventies and early eighties the winter trip to Hawaii or Mexico was de rigueur among farm families. Even Peter and I had two short holidays in Mexico during those years, paid for by wheat, not by cattle. Whole gangs of neighbors and their families went into Montana to ski each winter, too, but the ultimate must have been the winter some ten couples, all friends and neighbors—not including Peter and myself—booked a separate tour and went together on a two-week trip to Mexico.
I couldn’t help but look with some envy at our neighbors, but Peter kept telling me that the new prosperity of the farmers was just a boom before the inevitable bust, that Palliser had been right: this was dry country and would be dry again, and no matter what the crop scientists were doing and saying, you still needed rain to grow wheat. He also said that soil fertility in the area, never great to begin with, was rapidly being depleted by the new farming practices—huge, heavy machinery, chemical fertilizers, monocropping, repeated summerfallowing—and that eventually a price would be exacted by the land for their use.
It is a strange thing to live in the midst of a culture changing so abruptly. Although I was taking some part in all of this—the new house, the trips to Mexico—I felt to some degree removed from it, partly because we weren’t really farmers and our income was only slightly different from what it had always been, and because I viewed everything that happened in my new community from the vantage point of somebody who was slowly and painfully learning she would never be anything but an outsider.
And I was still reveling in the freedom of my new life despite the inevitable loneliness, and in the real balm for the heart and soul of waking each morning to birdsong and the open sky, and going to bed each night listening to the muted croak of the nighthawk and the distant, melodious choir of coyote voices. Submerged in the truly wondrous present, and surrounded by a community of which most of the members in their newfound prosperity seemed to have no worries, I didn’t think much about the future, either for myself or for them.
Instead, I found solace in the extraordinary beauty of the land itself. On a warm spring day riding a horse, walking or traveling in a truck across true shortgrass prairie that had never known a plow in all its history since the glaciers, I thought I had never smelled anything so wonderful in my life: sage and grasses mixed with sunlight, carried on the light fresh air as it swept freely across miles of unbroken grass.
Peter taught me to see the grassland through his eyes and to love it as he did. If native grassland was disappearing from the farms all around us, Peter hung on even more fiercely to all he had control of that had never been broken since the soil was deposited by the glaciers in the previous geological era. I had, and still have, all the prairie wilderness I need to look at and walk on and, as the years of my new life here have passed, that land has become more important to me than I would ever have thought possible.
Because I was alone a great deal, still had no close friends to visit and not much housework, and I could only read or write so much, walking had long since become part of my daily routine. I walked every day, I told people, to keep fit; in my heart I knew I was using walking as a reason to be outdoors since, aside from my small and usually unsuccessful garden (with the short growing season, the fierce summer heat, the constant, killing wind and the poor soil, I was having to learn to garden all over again), and my occasional days spent out riding with Peter, I had no other practical reason to spend an hour or two in Nature each day.
Walking was a way to pass the time, to familiarize myself at a deep level with my new environment, to enjoy what was fast becoming to me the best thing in my new life—the landscape. It didn’t require a membership, social skills or specialized skills, companions, a vehicle, money, a weapon, or even a special costume. All I had to do was open the door, pick a direction and start walking. I had to be careful to avoid fields I knew had bulls in them, or in the spring especially, cows with new calves, but on such a big place this was easy to do.
As time passed and I grew familiar with the landscape and the small landmarks on it, my walks grew less aimless. When I left the house, I usually had a destination in mind: a rock, a spot on the riverbank, a particular coulee, or just a stretch of country road that was especially isolated where I almost never encountered a vehicle. I became familiar with each field within walking distance of either house. Some fields I liked better than others to walk in because the view was better, or I always saw antelope there, or it seemed to me I felt better there. Each field had its own character.
There is a place in one of the fields at the ranch, though, which I always hated riding in because whenever we were there I could feel my horse tensing, changing his steady gait to an uneven prance and throwing his head, resisting my direction. I could feel him wanting to break into a gallop, or to rear and, expecting at any second to be bucked off or to fall as he bolted, I tightened my legs and shortened the reins, and talked to him, as Peter had taught me to do.
The only reason I could think of for this strange behavior was the way the wind swept down through a break in the hills right there, reaching us across twenty miles of uninhabited grassland, and I thought he must catch its scent of wilderness and freedom coming through that long dra
w down the fields. Once past that stretch of land, he would settle down. Although that field always affected my horse, it affected me not at all, and I’ve never bothered going there to walk.
But the field that seemed different to me is a quarter section of native grassland with the nearest human dwelling only a mile away. I remember walking there once during the first summer I spent here and I continued to go there, although not very often since it’s some distance from the house, because it is so much more pleasant to walk in wilderness than down a country road. And for a long time—years—I tended to hold that field in reserve for the days when it felt right to go there, not that I could explain what that means, other than that, I see now, it had a different and puzzling feel to it, which caused me to approach it in a less offhand way.
Since the Butalas had bought it, it had rarely been grazed by cattle and, since it was too steep and stony to break for farming, it has remained very much the way it had been since the melting of the last glaciers. In time, going there became a special pleasure because of that exhilarating, gritty feel to the air there, and because I had learned to find in a landscape which most might find chillingly sparse and uneventful, a unique beauty. I attributed my desire to be there to the taint of wildness I could feel, although why I should have felt it there more than in any of the other fields I walked in I didn’t know. But of all the land Peter owned, it became my favorite place to walk.
Occasionally, during the first year, I would take a book with me, intending to sit on the grass far from any signs of the presence of humans, and read. I did this because I thought I might otherwise be bored, I suppose, because of all those years at the university where I was never without a book. I found, and this greatly surprised me, that reading was boring in the middle of such splendor—splendor that saturated all the senses, not merely the vision—that reading was clearly meaningless in this context. I needed only the prairie, I discovered, whether I saw wildlife or not, whether a flower bloomed in a ten-mile radius or not. Just the ground, the feel of it underfoot, the thin cover of club moss and wild grasses, the stones, these were enough—more than enough.
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