by Pam Houston
One time, after a big storm, I fell off the side of the ghost of my old trail into a very deep drift. My legs were trapped under me in a strange position, and being more or less armpit deep in snow, there was a moment when I wasn’t sure I could get myself out. I gave it another try, and got one leg around to the front of me, and then another, until I was in a half-buried sitting position. I tried to use my arms to roll myself over, to get on my hands and knees, but everything beneath me still felt bottomless. I wasn’t exactly scared, I hadn’t yet had time to get scared, and though it was well below zero with a moderate wind, the sun was shining.
I decided to rest for a minute before the next try, and lay back in the little cave I had inadvertently fashioned to look at the sky. No sooner had I gotten into that position and let out a long slow exhale than William was right by my side—the windward side—the whole length of him tight against the whole length of me, body to body. His first instinct to block the wind, to keep me warm until I got out or until help came.
Today we make it—without falling—to the corral where the horses are waiting, and I distribute apples and carrots through the rails. In spite of the wind, the horses seem calm, a function of the temperature. Ten above beats 35 below in their book, no matter what the Weather Channel tells us the wind chill “feels like.” When it is coming down like this it simply can’t be 35 below—those conditions are mutually exclusive, and I believe the horses, at this stage in their lives, would choose the snow over the deep freeze on every occasion.
When it is 35 below, the sky is clear, the wind is still and it is as quiet outside as the beginning of time. Ice crystals form on the aspen tree outside the kitchen window, on the lead ropes that hang from the barn door, on the horses’ coats and eyelashes and whiskers. When the light is right, and you train your eyes just a few degrees off the direction of the sun, you can even see tiny crystals suspended in the frigid air. When I come out to check the animals right before bed, ice crystals swirl in the light of my headlamp. When it is 35 below, I take one step outside and the inside of my nose freezes; the crunch of my boots on the packed powder path is the definition of the word “dry” on my tongue. On those mornings, the equines eat the apples and carrots out of my hands quickly, before they turn into carrot- and apple-flavored popsicles, and I must do everything with great care because a few minutes with exposed skin is enough to cause frostbite.
But today there is time to pet under a forelock, to reach down into the snow to pick up a dropped apple or carrot bit. The mini-donks, Simon and Isaac, crowd in for their share. Simon won’t eat carrots, only apples. In between bites he occasionally likes to take a benign flat-toothed love nip out of my hip or thigh. Isaac thinks he’s the boss around here even though he is shorter than the wolfhounds. He puts his little hooves up on Roany’s neck sometimes just to push him around. Roany, a big Roman-nosed quarter horse, seventeen hands at the shoulder, has been on the planet for more than thirty years, getting along with pretty much everybody, and so lets him.
At one time, Roany was the most powerful beast on the ranch by far. He could have kicked Fenton the wolfhound over the fence with one back hoof if he wanted to stop his barking once and for all, stop all his showing off. But even when Fenton would chase Roany from the middle of the pasture all the way back to the barn, the big gelding would take care where he put his feet, would turn and pin his ears in warning, but never do anything more.
Roany was thin this September and thinner in December. He’s staying closer to the barn than he ever has and I fear he might be losing his sight. I’ve been sneaking him a coffee can of senior sweet feed most afternoons when the others aren’t looking. In December I worried he might not make the winter, but here we are in February, and he rubs his ice-crusted eyelashes against me and reaches his giant lips toward my pockets to get another carrot. Maybe the old roan will get to see another summer on the ranch.
When I arranged my UC Davis schedule in order to spend the coldest part of every winter here, I worried a ten-week solo stint at the ranch might make me antsy or lonely, or just plain weird from only talking to animals. It has not.
When I teach the intensive writing workshops that make up a considerable part of my income, I am around people 24/7 for weeks at a time, and I like that version of my life too. But I’ve recently realized what I’ve never had enough of since I was a kid is alone time. That kid who hid in the clothes dryer had almost unlimited alone time and she quickly came to realize it meant both safety and the possibility of unrestricted adventure.
At eight, on a vacation to London with my parents, I memorized the entire map of the Underground, got myself to the Tower of London, and took the terrifying beheadings tour at sunset before my parents—who were quite happy in our hotel bar—ever realized I was gone. At five, in the Bahamas, I befriended a giant dappled gray horse and his Bahamian rider, who scooped me into the saddle, galloped me all the way down the beach and chest high into the waves before my mother looked up from her beach towel. (From that moment on, I was horse crazy.) From the time I was ten until I turned sixteen, I rode my bike through the cornfields of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to the truck stop on Schoenersville Road, where I racked up ten games on each of the pinball machines and sold them at half price to the truckers.
Here at the ranch, the dogs and I can ski as far as we want for as long as we want. We can drive down those dirt roads we never had time for, just to see where we end up. I can clean the pantry at three in the morning, or do a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table or eat a whole bag of frozen peas for dinner with one pat of butter and a liberal dosing of Crystal hot sauce. I can take a bath in the middle of the day and I can stay in there until I shrivel. I can sleep anywhere I want to: out on the couch by the fire, in my bed with William or in his dog bed with him. I can take the bathroom door off of its hinges, bring a four-foot stainless steel water trough in there and raise six Plymouth Barred Rock chickens from pullets.
Every time an alone spell comes to an end, when I’m excited to welcome a friend to the ranch, or I’m off to a city to teach or speak or be public, there is always a sliver of regret as I watch the hours wind down. I always find myself wishing for just one more ranch day.
Today, though, any potential visitor would have to be dropped in by helicopter. On a Sunday, midstorm and this late in the season, I doubt I’ll even see the plow out on Middle Creek Road. Margaret closed up the Soward Ranch in early December. And my closest neighbors back toward town, the Albrights, are about two and a half miles walking, when it is walkable, which today it is not.
The big orange gate swings out from the corral. It is the main access to the barn as well as to the large pasture, the gate through which Rick so expertly backs his truck. In winter, the gate does not need to open big enough for a truck, but it’s important to shovel it out wide enough that if a horse had to be taken out in an emergency, the horse would not be afraid to walk through. The gate is about twenty feet wide, so, with a couple feet of snow drifted against it, it takes about twenty minutes of bust-ass shoveling to get it to open double horse-width. Then there is the barn door, which is smaller, but has the added challenge of the frozen solid horse briquettes that seem to collect there, and must be pried up along with the snow. By the time I finish both tasks I can feel a new set of blisters rising on top of my calluses.
In this much wind, I would normally put the hay in the three-sided windbreak on the barn’s south side. But this is an unusual wind, from the south, which accounts for its unseasonably warm bearing, so I drop the bale in the corner of the corral, on the north side of the barn, hoping the sheep pen will block most of the wind when it starts to clock around to the west, as it is predicted to do in a few hours.
I cut the orange twine with the hay hooks, making sure to pick it up and zip it in my pocket (hay twine wreaks havoc with a horse’s digestive system), and close up the barn. If it were grain day, I would give the horses their mix of beet pulp and senior mix for horses with metabolic conditions, j
oint formula, multivitamins, SureGut, and a scoop of Horseshoer’s Secret. (We are all big believers in supplements in this house.) Deseo’s metabolic condition means he can’t handle grain too often, so we stick tight to our every-fourth-day plan. Today is day two, which is going to work out great, because Tuesday, when the storm moves out and it really gets cold, they will be even happier for the grain to warm them up than they would be this morning.
The wind has calmed for a moment so I stand and listen to the altogether satisfying sound of four equines chomping good grass hay on a snowy morning, and think about all the mornings, over the last twenty-five years, I have spent standing right here in the snow.
The coldest January was in 2009. I went though six cords of wood that winter even with propane back up. For the first time ever the dogs had to be encouraged to go on walks, and Mr. Kitty wouldn’t even go out to the barn to hunt. He stayed in the basement for days at a time, cozied up to the big gas heater.
There were five feet of snow standing and no warm days to melt any of it. The white ground reflected back all the sun’s rays and couldn’t soak up enough heat during the short days to raise the temperature even to 10 below. The three-foot split-rail fence surrounding the house went completely under in early December and I walked daily on a white moonscape between the house and the barn. The roof slid so many times eventually there was nowhere for the snow to go and it formed an igloo around the house that actually kept the wind off and raised the temperature in the back bedroom by several degrees compared with a lighter winter. The house threw off enough heat to cauterize the insides of the igloo—like what a candle does on the inside of a jack-o’-lantern. It was beautiful, for the month it lasted, living inside a big old jack-o’-lantern of snow.
But now it is edging toward 15 above, and the horses are feeling it. The wind picks up again and Isaac lets out a big donkey bray that means he is either mad at the wind or happy about the hay or about to climb up on somebody’s neck, so I exit the orange gate and start the hundred-yard trek to the water trough.
On a normal day, even on a normal winter day, this walk is easy, but today I have the challenge of memory again, trying to stay above my old trail. Sometimes if I hold my head just right, I can see the faintest ghost of the path on top of all the brand-new snow. It’s like one of those magic eye drawings, the way I have to look not directly at it and soften my eyes to see. Only then can I see the slightest change in the snow surface that, princess-and-pea-like, indicates a change in the surface several feet down.
I know the trough will barely need topping off—snow has been falling into it for twenty-four hours and this kind of weather does not engender big thirst in the horses. But I have learned, over the years, that the best way to care for animals, especially barnyard animals, is to repeat the exact same tasks, in the exact same order, every day, forever and ever. A change in the barnyard means trouble, and if I do the same things the same way each day, I am more likely to notice a change. Also, any local will tell you that Murphy lives on a high-altitude ranch in a snowstorm. Were I to decide the trough did not need topping off today, this would be the day the trough heater failed, or the bottom seal wore out, or the pump froze, or a rat with hantavirus drowned himself in there and Isaac would be just churlish enough to eat it.
I am not a good farmer. I am not even a real farmer. Rick Davie is a real farmer and I am only pretend. But the hypervigilance I learned in childhood serves me well on the ranch in general and in big weather in particular. My mind runs a series of potential calamities, and my actions, insomuch as they can, guard against them.
The trough is less than an inch down, but I top it off anyway. All systems go. Then it is back along the trail, easier the second time through, to the sheep pen, and another door that needs to be dug out.
I decide to feed the sheep inside their enclosure, something I don’t do often because it radically increases the amount of inside poop. But even with ten pounds each of the warmest wool money can buy on their backs, the sheep don’t want to be outside today. I give them their four flakes of hay, and drag my feet around in the snow in the outside portion of their pen until I find the three black rubber feeders that went under hours ago. I dig them out and split a coffee can of grain among all three so they don’t ram one another fighting for it.
Outside the fence, William is watching Sheep TV. The whole time I am in the pen he sits perfectly still in the same exact place he sits every day, staring hard, his face so intent, so utterly concentrated, waiting for one of those sheep to make a wrong move so he can tear the chicken wire open with his teeth and rush in to rescue me from them.
I leave the sheep pen and head back on my water trail to the frost-free pump and fill a bucket to carry back to the pen. Last winter, because my back was ailing, I discovered if I carefully plucked all the icicles that hung on the back of the barn—there were hundreds hanging at half-inch intervals in accordance with the corrugated tin of the roof—and added those to the sheep’s water, I could save myself a good many bucket carries. The icicles are beautiful; they renew themselves every day until it warms up enough for the roof to slide, and they feel delicious when you hold them in your hand.
Every time I walk one of these little connector trails I improve the conditions. But when William and I turn back toward the house, the trail we made an hour ago has been utterly obliterated. I decide to wait at least until it stops howling to shovel the walkway to the house, or—a much bigger job—remake the path to the propane tank.
Last month, in a long spate of 30 below zero nights, the propane company called to say their man couldn’t deliver propane because I did not have an “appropriate path dug from the driveway to my tank.” In twenty-five years I had never been asked to dig a path to my propane tank—appropriate or otherwise. I’d always figured any propane man worth his salt owned a pair of snow pants. But perhaps the propane company had hired a new delivery guy who had recently moved here from Florida.
The day I got the call I channeled my outrage into action, went outside immediately and spent three hours digging a walkway to the propane tank so beautiful you could have rolled a red carpet out on it and used it for the Oscars. When I got to the tank and checked the gauge it turned out the lady on the phone had been wrong, the guy had crawled through the deep snow and filled it after all, which made me feel better about him generally, and happy to have spent my afternoon making him such a nice path.
Today has eliminated that path, along with the driveway, which is just a suggestion of itself between the ridges Randy Woods made the last time through with his plow.
Back inside, we shake off snowballs in the mudroom. I put some oatmeal on for breakfast, the steel-cut kind that takes thirty-five minutes because why not? It’s as good a day for writing as there has ever been so I join William on the couch, open my laptop and get to it.
Monday and Tuesday are much of the same but Wednesday morning dawns clear, as predicted, and 30 degrees colder. I open the back door to utter stillness and ice crystals in the air. Every living being in the county, it seems, is either resting this morning or frozen in place. When I start across the path toward the corral with my apples and carrots I can hear a car crossing the cattle guard three miles and two deep bends of river canyon away.
In a few hours, Randy Woods will be here with his giant blade to reconnect me with the rest of the world, and after I finish shoveling the walkway and the path to the propane tank, William and Livie and I will drive to town, pick up the mail, drop off the recycling, get a few fresh vegetables and a pint of sea salt caramel ice cream.
It will be nice, after all these days, to speak to a member of my own species, someone who can speak back in the same language. But there is another part of me, some eight-year-old part, who wants Randy’s plow never to come. It’s not only that the eight-year-old feels safer at the snowed-in ranch than anywhere, it’s that the snowed-in ranch was a story she used to tell herself—she is certain of it—when she needed a place for her mind to go, when she
needed a reason to make it to nine, and then ten and eventually seventeen, and freedom.
Ranch Almanac: Born in a Barn
In the winter of 2011 I had only two chickens—Sheryl Crow, who thought she was a rooster, and Martina. Two is not enough chickens—everybody knows that—but that is how many I was left with after the summer of ranch fatalities, so I put their henhouse in the back of the pen with the sheep and hoped for the best.
Martina and Sheryl Crow had made it through the fall okay, but deep winter around here tests everybody. I’ve been told Plymouth Barred Rocks put out 33 BTUs per bird, and if that’s true they were probably the warmest animals in the barnyard. But I had grown attached to Martina—her checkerboard feathers, the way she laid the most delicious egg you ever tasted each morning, like clockwork at a quarter to nine. So all that winter I would wake up in the middle of the windiest nights, the stormiest nights, the most frigid nights, and worry about everybody in the barnyard, especially her.
The thermometer on the front porch was influenced by heat coming off the house and was therefore unreliable. But a mile down the road, there’s a Weather Channel–sanctioned station that reports temperature and precipitation in real-time updates. It was usually around 10 below zero by the time I went to bed, and a couple of hours later, I’d wake up worried, turn my computer on and watch the numbers tumble. 20, 25, 28, 32 below. It’s always darkest just before the dawn, goes the saying, and it is always the coldest then too.
During the most frigid weeks of winter—the Arctic blast, as the Weather Channel calls it—my worry gets the best of me, so I get up around five, dress in my snow pants and my big down coat, and head out to the sheep pen with a headlamp and a space heater. I already have two heat lamps going out there on thermostatic plugs, a gesture of compassion that raises my electric bill from $90 a month to $140 in December, January and February. Though the eggs are very tasty, it’s not responsible energy use or cost-efficient ranching (what would Rick Davie say?), especially since Martina is the only one who lays. Sheryl crows like a rooster and beats Martina up from time to time, which, I believe, leads Martina to sometimes lay two eggs a day, just to spite her.