by Pam Houston
For
Emma, Kyle, Becky, Dustin, Meghan,
Jessica, Kyle (#2) and Maggie,
who tended the ranch while I was away,
and who let themselves be mothered.
And for Mike Blakeman,
who has given me one more big beautiful reason to come home.
None of the single original claims was capable
of providing a living for a family, but land is fascinating and
more or less magnetic and has always had a value and probably
always will. It is a feeling of stability and security to own
a piece of land. You always feel like you have a home,
no matter how humble.
—John LaFont,
The Homesteaders of the Upper Rio Grande
What elegy is, not loss but opposition.
—C. D. Wright
Contents
Introduction: Some Kind of Calling
Ranch Almanac: Buying Hay
PART ONE | GETTING OUT
The Tinnitus of Truth Telling
Ranch Almanac: Stacking Wood
Retethering
Ranch Almanac: Donkey Chasing
PART TWO | DIGGING IN
The Season of Hunkering Down
Ranch Almanac: Leonids
Mother’s Day Storm
Ranch Almanac: Puppy
A Kind of Quiet Most People Have Forgotten
Ranch Almanac: Log Chain
The Sound of Horse Teeth on Hay
Ranch Almanac: Born in a Barn
Ranch Archive
Ranch Almanac: First Warm Day
Eating Phoebe
Ranch Almanac: Lambing
PART THREE | DIARY OF A FIRE
Diary of a Fire
Ranch Almanac: Carving Rivers
PART FOUR | ELSEWHERE
Kindness
Ranch Almanac: Woolly Nelson
Of Spirit Bears, Humpbacks, Narwhal, Manatees and Mothers
Ranch Almanac: Almanac
PART FIVE | DEEP CREEK
Deep Creek
Acknowledgments
DEEP CREEK
Introduction:
Some Kind of Calling
When I look out my kitchen window, I see a horseshoe of snow-covered peaks, all of them higher than 12,000 feet above sea level. I see my old barn—old enough to have started to lean a little—and the low-ceilinged homesteaders’ cabin, which has so much space between the logs now that the mice don’t even have to duck to crawl through. I see the big stand of aspen ready to leaf out at the back of the property, ringing the small but reliable wetland, and the pasture, greening in earnest, and the bluebirds, just returned, flitting from post to post. I see Isaac and Simon, my bonded pair of young donkey jacks pulling on opposite ends of a tricolor lead rope I got from a gaucho in Patagonia. I see Jordan and Natasha, my Icelandic ewes nibbling on the grass inside the goose pen, keeping their eyes on Lance and L.C., this year’s lambs. I see two elderly horses glad for the warm spring day, glad to have made it through another winter of 30 below zero, and whiteout blizzards, of 60 mph winds, of short days and long frozen nights and coyotes made fearless by hunger. Deseo is twenty-seven and Roany’s over thirty, and one of the things that means is I have been here a very long time.
It’s hard for anybody to put their finger on the moment when life changes from being something that is nearly all in front of you to something that happened while your attention was elsewhere. I bought this ranch in 1993. I was thirty-one years old, and it seems to me now I knew practically nothing about anything. My first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness, had just come out, and for the first time ever I had a little bit of money. It was $21,000—more money than I had ever imagined having—and when my agent said, “Don’t spend it all on hiking boots,” I took her advice as seriously as any I have ever received.
I had no job, no place to live except my North Face VE 24 tent (which was my preferred housing anyhow), nine-tenths of a Ph.D., and all I knew about ownership was it was good if all of your belongings fit into the back of your vehicle, which in my case they did. A lemon yellow Toyota Corolla. Everything, including the dog.
I drove the whole American West that summer, giving readings in small mountain towns and looking for a place to call home. I started in San Francisco and headed north—Point Reyes, Tomales, Elk, Mendocino. I crossed into Oregon and looked at land in Ashland, Eugene and Corvallis. All I knew about real estate was you were supposed to put 20 percent down, which set my spending ceiling at exactly $105,000. I had no idea people often lied to real estate agents about their circumstances, and sometimes the agents lied back. I had $21,000, a book that had been unexpectedly successful, no job and not three pages of a new book to rub together. I understand now that in a certain way, I was as free at that moment as I had ever been, and would ever be again. I came absolutely clean with everybody.
I checked out Bellingham, and all the little towns on the road to Mount Rainier, and then headed over the pass into the Eastern Cascades, where I put a little earnest money down on a place in Winthrop, Washington. Forty-four acres on a gentle hill with an old apple orchard and a small cabin. I worked my way over to Sandpoint, Idaho, and Bozeman, Montana, still looking, still unsure.
But when I drove through Colorado, a place I had ski-bummed between college and grad school, I remembered how much I’d loved it here. In those days I had lived in the Fraser Valley, at a commune of tarpaper shacks and converted school buses called Grandma Miller’s New Horizons. I lived for three winters in a sheepherder’s trailer named the African Queen. The twenty or so alternatives who lived at Grandma’s shared an outhouse, a composting toilet and a bathhouse. From late December to early February it often got down to 35 below. I was working as a tourist bus driver by day and a dishwasher at Fred and Sophie’s steakhouse by night. I would collect every strip of steak fat the diners would leave behind on their plates in a giant white Tupperware next to my station. When I got off work, I would go home and feed all that steak fat to my dog, Jackson. If I packed the little woodstove just right, it would burn for exactly two and a half hours. I would don my union suit, my snow pants, my down coat, hat and mittens, and get into my five-below-rated North Face sleeping bag. I would invite Jackson up on top of the pile that had me at the bottom of it, and he would metabolize steak fat all night, emitting not an insignificant number of BTUs.
It was my writer friends Robert Boswell and Antonya Nelson who first told me about Creede. When you drive into town, the sign at the outskirts boasts 586 Nice Folks and 17 Soreheads. It was, and still is, the kind of place where if you happen to be in town for a couple of days poking around, someone will invite you to a wedding. That September, the guy who owned the hardware store was getting ready to marry his longtime sweetheart, and instead of sending out invitations they just put an ad in the weekly Creede Miner, so everybody would know to come by.
At the wedding, I met three women who owned their own businesses: Jenny Inge who made jewelry out of silver and horsehair, Victoria Beecher who sold flowers and plants, and Max McClure who had opened a coffee shop and was making Creede residents their very first lattes.
“Creede people wouldn’t have even thought the word ‘flowers’ until I showed up,” Victoria told me. “But this town supports anyone who has a dream. Nobody goes to dinner without a handful of tulips anymore.”
The morning after the wedding, a real estate lady named Kathleen, whom I’d met in the buffet line, showed me an empty lot of approximately five acres and a couple of houses in town that had been built by silver miners using paper and string. She said, “I really ought to take you out to see the Blair Ranch,” and I said, “Sure,” and she said, “But, it wouldn’t be right, a single woman living out there all by herself,” and I said,
“How far?” and she said, “Twelve miles,” and I said, “Maybe I should see it,” and she said, “I’m afraid it’s out of your price range.”
For that I had no argument.
I was sitting in my car, studying the Rand McNally, contemplating the next potential future home . . . Lake City? Gunnison? Ridgway? I was just that close to driving out of Creede forever, when a tall, rodeo-buckle-wearing cowboy named Dale Pizel knocked on the window. “I hear you want to see the Blair Ranch,” he said. I got out of my car. “This is Mark Richter,” he said, indicating his equally tall, handsome friend. “The property is his listing and he is going to take you out there right now.”
If you can’t fall in love with the San Juan Mountains during the third week of September, you can’t fall in love. The mountainsides are covered with the world’s largest aspen forests, and they are changing in vast undulating swathes: yellow, golden, orange, vermilion. The sky is a headstrong break-your-heart blue, the air is so clear you can see a hundred miles on a straight horizon, and the river is cold and crisp and possibly even clearer than the air. The coyotes sing, all night sometimes, and the elk bugle in the misty dawn along the river.
And there was the Blair Ranch, with the best view of it all I had ever seen. One hundred and twenty acres of high mountain meadow in the middle of the larger Antelope Park: 9,000 feet above sea level, with the Upper Rio Grande cutting serpentine turns through the center of it, surrounded on three sides by the 12,000-foot peaks of the Continental Divide, the lower slopes carpeted in Engelmann and blue spruce, Douglas fir, bristlecone pine and aspen. The house was a simple two-bedroom log structure that, rather than being ostentatious, seemed to apologize for itself in the middle of all that beauty. It hunkered down behind a little hill, just enough to miss the worst of the wind and weather. At the top of the hill, Mark told me, the homesteaders, who were called the Pinckleys, were buried in shallow graves. Old Man Pinckley’s tiny cabin was still standing behind a weathered fence, along with some outhouses and a pen where he had bred Canada geese. But the real prize was the barn—raised by Pinckley himself in 1920 and built from hand-hewn spruce logs, silhouetted against Red Mountain to the south, and leaning now, just slightly, to the west.
I had no way to imagine, in the first moment of seeing it, that the view out the kitchen window—of the barn and the corral and the Divide behind it—would become the backdrop for the rest of my life. That I would take thousands of photographs of that exact view, in every kind of light, in every kind of weather. That I would write five more books (and counting) sitting at the kitchen table (never at my desk), looking, intermittently, out at the barn. That it would become the solace, for decades, for whatever ailed me, and that whenever it was threatened—and it would be threatened, by fire, flood, cell-phone-tower installation, greedy ranchsitters and careless drunks—I would fight for it as though I had cut down the trees and stripped the logs myself.
The price tag was just shy of $400,000. I told Mark the same things I had told every real estate agent from Mendocino to Casper. My $21,000, in terms of the Blair Ranch, would represent just over 5 percent down.
Mark rubbed the back of his hand against his chin for a minute and said, “I believe Dona Blair is going to like the idea of you. Dale knows her pretty well and between the two of us. . . . Why don’t you give me your five percent down and a signed copy of your book and I will see what I can do.” He snapped a picture of me sitting on the split-rail fence like a girl who already owned the place.
Dona Blair sold me the ranch for 5 percent down and a signed hardcover of Cowboys because she liked the idea of me, and she carried the note herself because any bank would have laughed in my face. I bought the ranch for its unspeakable beauty, and if I am completely honest, for the adrenaline rush buying it brought on. I nearly killed myself the first few years making the payments. I wrote anything for anyone who would pay me, including an insert for an ant farm, which I turned into a brief Communist ant manifesto I imagined the enlightened but bored parent discovering with pleasure when he helped little Johnny open the box. I wrote an article for a magazine about why Clint Eastwood was my hero (he wasn’t). I wrote an article about twenty-something women who were getting plastic surgery to combat signs of aging (who cares?). In the process, I learned how to hustle, and I mean that about myself in only the kindest way.
Dona spends her winters in Texas now and her summers in Creede, and what she’s been saying in the coffee shop about me for twenty years is “You know she makes those payments, and on time!”
The people in town, mostly miners and ranchers, didn’t understand or much care what I did for a living, but they respected the fact that I had to work hard to keep the place and that I was willing to. I began to get looked out for by the locals who matter: the postmistress, the banker, the judge, the owner of the hardware store, the cops.
There was the night my first winter when Sheriff Phil Leggitt came barreling up my driveway at three in the morning, and ran into my house, yelling “Pam, Pam are you all right?” because, in an attempt to get my apparently dead phone to work, I had dialed 911 and then hung up fast when it began to ring. There was the time the president of the Creede bank intervened to keep one of my early ranchsitters from taking the ranch right out from under my nose in a kind of old-fashioned Wild West land grab. There was the time the postmistress, knowing I was snowed in, brought all my Christmas packages to her house, close enough that I could ski over there and drag them home on a utility sled.
In twenty-five years at the ranch I have learned a few things: to turn the outside water spigots off by mid-September, to have four cords of wood on the porch and two hundred bales of hay in the barn no later than October 1. I’ve learned not to do more than one load of laundry per week in a drought year, and that if I set the thermostat at sixty and bring the place up to sixty-eight using the woodstove in the living room, the heater doesn’t do that horrible banging thing that sounds one tick shy of an explosion. I’ve learned barn swallows carry bedbugs, and the only way to kill those little suckers is to wait until it is 30 below and drag the mattress out onto the snow and leave it for forty-eight hours. I have learned to hire a cowboy every spring to come out and walk the fence line, because much as I would like to believe I could learn to be handy with a fencing tool, I have proven to myself I cannot. I know eventually the power always comes back on, that guaranteed overnight is a euphemism, and for a person who flies a hundred thousand miles most years, choosing a place five hours from the Denver airport was something I might have given a little more thought.
But right from the beginning I’ve felt responsible to these 120 acres, and for years I’ve painted myself both savior and protector of this tiny parcel of the American West. And this much is true: as long as I am in charge of it, this land will not turn into condos, it will not be mined or forested, it will not have its water stolen or its trees chopped down. No one will be able to put a cell tower in the middle of my pasture and pay me $3,000 a year for the space. One of the gifts of age, though, is the way it gently dispels all our heroic notions. All that time I thought I was busy taking care of the ranch, the ranch was busy taking care of me.
All my life I’ve said I am happiest with one plane ticket in my hand and another in my underwear drawer. Motion improves any day for me—the farther the faster the better—on a plane, a boat, a dogsled, a car, the back of a horse, a bus, a pair of skis, in a cabbage wagon, hoofing it down a trail in my well-worn hiking boots. Stillness, on the other hand, makes me very nervous. So what happened to all that wanderlust in the moment I became the first person in my family since my mother’s grandfather (who raised pacing horses back in Indiana) to be responsible to a piece of land, to fall in love with a barn and a meadow, to be land rich and money poor for decades?
My parents were travelers too, though they preferred cruise ships to kayaks and beachfront resorts to a North Face tent. Homeownership meant nothing to them, though they grudgingly engaged in it a few times, paying a local kid to
mow the lawn and rake the leaves in autumn. My mother had been happiest careening around Europe with the USO in a plane with teeth painted on either side of its nose, and my father often said he’d have been happiest living out his life in his single room at Sloan Simpson’s home for bachelors, watching the incessant motion of the Delaware River out the window. I thought this was one way I might be like my parents, until I laid eyes on the ranch.
I have written elsewhere, at possibly too much length, about how unsafe, unwanted and unsettled I felt in the houses where I grew up. One thing I was looking for when I bought the ranch was a place I might be comfortable sitting still. I also wanted something no one could take away from me, but my upbringing left me addicted to danger. So I put a tiny down payment on a property that cost four times more than I could afford, one that required so much maintenance the tasks fell into two categories: things I didn’t know how to do, and things I didn’t even know I didn’t know how to do yet.
That I survived, and that the ranch did, suggests something good about my karma. That when I thought I could go to Denver for New Year’s Eve and keep the pipes from bursting by dripping the faucet, it was only the mudroom floor that got flooded. (It got to 38 below zero that night.) That when I thought it would be really cool to paint my propane tank to look like a watermelon, the dark green paint did not, in fact, absorb enough 9,000-foot solar heat to explode. That someone always came along in the nick of time to say “When was the last time you had your chimney swept?” or “How often do you coat your logs with that UV protector?” and then I’d know what I was supposed to have been doing all along.
Because of the short summer tourist season, it’s hard for anyone to make a living in Creede, even if you don’t have 95 percent of a ranch to pay off. Given my particular skill set, earning a living always has and always will mean leaving. America loves one or two hermit writers desperately, but the rest of us are encouraged to spend weeks, months and years on the road, giving readings, teaching workshops, hawking books, making sure people don’t forget our names. I’ve spent more nights at the ranch, these two and a half decades, than I’ve spent any other place; that’s certain. Though, a lot of years, between teaching and touring, it doesn’t add up to half the year’s nights.