The two of us already had experience in living in the most primitive of conditions: I in a log house in Saskatchewan’s then nearly trackless bush country without electricity, telephones, running water, or bathrooms, and he at the ranch on the northern Great Plains of North America in a four-room, jerry-built house not much better than a cabin. But my family had moved on, bit by bit, to regular houses in an urban environment — Sean had lived only in modern dwellings — and Peter’s family members eventually left for better ways of living, too, but until I came along, Peter had continued into his early forties in these same minimalist buildings.
We were not the first to finally build a decent house. In those early years, I recall, one of the favourite subjects of conversation among the women was the need for a new house, or who was finally getting a new house. The women complained mostly of what I too found the hardest to deal with: the mice that could not be stopped no matter how many traps were set or holes plugged. We had an atavistic reaction to the very sound of them scratching in the walls. The cold floors, too cold for babies and toddlers to play on, and the cold wind and dust sweeping in through leaky window frames and sashes were the other chief complaints. Space was very limited in those houses, too, and we would often comment on how, in the early days, large numbers of people had somehow managed to live in the tiniest of houses that, in addition to the lack of space, hadn’t a single closet or storage space. That, we would tell each other, was because nobody owned anything more than a change or two of clothing.
Peter’s mother (who died in 1984, seven years after our marriage) recalled that during the Great Depression, with its accompanying ten-or-so-year drought and crop failures, many people in the southwest were reduced to living in conditions not much better than in third-world countries. The bottom was reached when, in a treeless land, settlers were reduced to burning cow pies, or “chips,” for fuel to keep warm and with which to cook. She spoke the truth, although she was less than popular for saying it. Peter once told me how much he admired his mother for her plain speaking, how lie or prevarication was beyond her, no matter what such truth-telling cost her. I used to wonder sometimes, as many women do, if that was why he was attracted to me, perhaps flattering myself in the process.
About the time that Peter began to build a better house, a lot of other families did the same, and before too many years had passed, everyone began to be more surprised at the people who didn’t have a new house than at those who did. These new places were almost always the commonplace three-bedroom aluminum- or vinyl-sided white bungalows of Western Canada, but a few people built what seemed to the rest of us to be mansions — very large frame houses with fancy windows and actual driveways and attached garages. They were usually the people with more land, or better land, or ones who also had a tidy income from rent for the oil wells located on their land. Twenty oil wells alone could at that time add up to a year’s income in themselves, never mind the income from the sale of crops or cattle. But so many oil wells on a farm or ranch was the exception rather than the rule. As for the sale of crops, the local farmer was almost always beholden to the international market, which had since the Great Depression or earlier been handled by the provincial wheat pools, and by the Canadian Wheat Board (a process referred to as single-desk selling), so that farmers, who in those days often didn’t have a high level of formal education, did not have to face these mysteries themselves, and so that Western farmers together had some clout in the increasingly competitive marketplace.
I was happy in our new house. It wasn’t elaborate, but it was comfortable. After it became our headquarters, we continued to travel back and forth whenever the work required it, or we moved into the small frame ranch house where Peter had spent his life for a couple of weeks while he (and usually I too) rode the cattle checking for accidents or illness or broken fences and escapees that had to be brought back. In the fall he got in the crops, or hayed the few sloughs in years when there was enough moisture to produce wild hay. Dugouts were dug, fencing was repaired (a job that never ended). When the cattle were at the ranch from spring into late fall, we would stay there for long periods. For a dozen years we were constantly back and forth the forty miles between the two places, and often, when I wasn’t needed, and after I had begun writing on one of the first personal computers that were too bulky and inconvenient to move, I would pack him a lunch rather than going with him merely to cook a meal or two. He began to come back at night, too, if he possibly could. He was aging, and he liked a warm house and a comfortable bed over the sparse, uncomfortable bachelor arrangements at the ranch as much as I did. Like most men, he wanted a real home of his own.
We were becoming hybrids, the two of us: one foot in the past and the wild prairie, and the other foot in the present of wireless technology, jet planes available for distant holidays, space exploration and central heating. Like so many rural people of his generation, Peter was conflicted, on the one hand marvelling at the past and his homesteader and rancher heroes, wanting in a way to go back to it, chasing wild horses on horseback with his father, living the free and easy life of the cowboy with other cowboys (but as the only son of a rancher, unable to be footloose as a real cowboy was). On the other hand, he became a pilot of small planes as well as a lover of all the new gadgetry, reading agricultural newspapers by the dozens in order to learn about the latest discoveries and inventions, yearning to get on a jet and fly all over the world. Yet he did not yearn to be someone else: a banker, an economist, a geologist, or a crop scientist. For the most part, he loved his life. And he loved his land.
In The Perfection of the Morning I told a story about how, in the first year of our marriage, on a hot summer afternoon when Peter had gone out to ride through his cows and I had stayed behind, I grew bored and decided to walk out to the highest hill on the ranch that was about a mile from the house, to see if I could spot him somewhere out there in the fields. I climbed the hill which had a long, rising slope to the highest point and then dropped off more or less precipitously to the slough below and the field spread out around it. I reached the highest point and let my gaze sweep out as far as the horizon twenty or more miles away and then brought my eyes in closer and closer. There was Peter, lying below me on the edge of the dried-up slough among his foraging cattle, his horse browsing beside him, and at the edge of the spread-out, peacefully chewing animals, a few antelope grazing as well. Peter was sound asleep. The animals were aware of him but unconcerned, as if he were one of them.
Something about this scene so struck me that I backed away down the slope of the hill and hurried back across the field to the ranch house. I did not tell him what I had seen; I did not tell anyone. It had struck me so hard, viscerally, in my soul, that I could not find words for it; I did not understand why I was so moved that for a second I had been unable to breathe, nor why I had hurried away as if I had no right to see what I had seen, as if I was an intruder in this tableau of such calm beauty.
For years I thought of what I had seen, and in another fifteen or more, when I began to write my book about learning to live in nature, I finally decided to tell that story. I began to understand slowly that what I had seen, that picture of great peace and harmony in nature, was the central figure of my entire book. It had been as if I had stepped into a dream, had come in that visionary moment to see the essence of who Peter was. I remember him too, in winter, snow falling on us, in his faded brown canvas jacket ragged at the wrists, his hat pulled low, doing something with his thick fingers, untangling a knot to open a gate, maybe, lifting his head a little to grin at me as I waited, snug in my down-filled jacket, mitts, tuque, and wool scarf, while the animals stood around us, waiting patiently, too, to be let into the shelter of a corral.
I was learning to live around animals. I had to watch out for bulls or stallions if they were about, or, if I was on foot, be careful not to get too close to the herd, as I am a small person and the cattle were huge and, if they became interested in you, might choose to crowd around you, inadver
tently crushing and even trampling you. Initially, I didn’t know that cougars stalked the coulees, that coyotes might attack — in those first twenty or more years, everyone insisted that no coyotes had ever attacked a human (except for a few incidents in Texas many years earlier) — and so although I saw them all the time, I wasn’t afraid of them, and our area apparently had no rattlesnakes except in drought seasons, although they were there to the east and to the west of us.
At the ranch on similar solitary forays I once walked by myself more than a mile north from the house, until I was well into the hills and far from any road, much farther still from any dwelling. My memory is that I had reached a place where in the midst of so many hills, nearly all of the same height with long, easy slopes leading to wide draws between them, I glanced up from my ruminations and saw perhaps a hundred feet away from me a large coyote trotting casually along perpendicular to me and gazing at me over his shoulder. I watched him, not in the least alarmed, as I still believed coyotes didn’t attack humans. For some reason, the remnants of an atavistic instinct at work, perhaps, I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the same distance behind me and also trotting perpendicular to me was a second large bushy coyote. At once I understood: They were circling me; I was prey, or as if I were prey, as I thought they were merely, as Peter always said, animals greatly curious about the comings and goings of people.
But I gasped aloud, I clapped my hands together as noisily as I could. Both animals paused, but they didn’t run away. There was nothing around me that I could have used as a weapon, not a long stick — there were no trees or even shrubs more than a foot high — and where I was, no rocks to throw that I was strong enough to lift. I ran; I ran until I had run completely out of breath, and when I stopped because I had to, I did not know where I was in relation to where I had been, because there was no way to tell one hill from another, and though it seemed to me I hadn’t run any distance at all, I was as winded as if I had run a very long way. But when I looked around, the coyotes had vanished; they might have been hiding behind other hills, but I couldn’t see them, and I kept going straight for home as fast as I could. At the time the experience seemed poetic; I actually wrote a long-ish poem about it that was published. Today, hearing about the rash of cases of people out alone on wilderness trails from Nova Scotia to Alberta who were attacked and killed by them, I marvel once again at my good fortune that they simply lost interest and went away.
Peter did the worrying. Born to this life, he needed nothing from me except the wifely things and, a lot of the time, as long as I was young enough to do it, unskilled labour. I had to drive the trucks or sometimes a tractor, make endless lunches and even more endless thermoses of coffee, chase calves up an alley, open or close gates, sometimes help with the winter feeding of cattle, at his direction ride horses and herd cattle. If I didn’t always like the work and wasn’t especially good at it, not being athletic and being too small to have much strength or “reach” for awkward jobs that took two people, for many years, although it often frightened me and always exhausted me, I found it endlessly fascinating. In the face of my inability to paint anymore — I had planned to spend my time on the ranch by returning to what I thought was my true vocation — and in the excitement and wonder of this foreign way of life and what it was opening inside me, I was becoming, instead, an observer, a writer. I’ve written in earlier chapters of my increasing understanding of the geological and historical layers of this land. I also started to see it through the eyes of a rancher. And a writer.
I bought many books, mostly about the plants that Peter could identify with ease, and I went with him to three different range schools given by the local agriculture department people, whose object was to teach you to recognize a certain number of the plants, to know their characteristic behaviour, where they might be found, their protein content in various seasons, and thus their value as feed for cattle and/or horses. I learned which animals would eat which plant and in which season, and which wouldn’t. One of the first range schools I attended with Peter was to be held in a field across the border in the Bears Paw Mountains in Montana. Those tantalizing and wild-looking mountains hovered low along the distant southern horizon. Just as a few Montana ranchers would come up to the Canadian schools, a few Canadians would go down to the American schools. As Peter didn’t know the way to the ranch and fields where this one was to be held, he arranged to follow a couple of his bachelor friends.
The man leading us in his half-ton drove like the proverbial bat out of hell on the rough gravel roads; it was all Peter, one of the best drivers I’ve ever ridden with, could do to keep up without having an accident. I had my left arm across the back of the seat and when we hit an unexpected bump the truck leaped up, as did I, then crashed down, nearly tearing my arm out of its socket. We stopped at a crossroads where there was a bar for a quick drink — it was only about eleven in the morning or maybe even earlier, but, curious as always about this new life I found myself in, and determined to be game, I made no comment. The woman behind the bar, tall, strong-looking, and stout, said to me, “What’ll yuh have, little lady?” This seemed, at the moment, perfectly natural coming from her, but really, who talks like that? Only people in early Western movies. But I was amused.
But then, I’m a Canadian, and despite the fact that Western Americans and Canadians make their living in the same way, in agricultural enterprises mostly and also in natural resources, notably in oil and gas extraction, the differences between the two cultures seem to be great. The American West is older, of course, and historically more violent than ours. I’ve heard their relationship with the Aboriginal people was even worse, and it was followed by the range wars between ranchers and settlers (even into the 1950s) over land usage. Canada managed to avoid these wars. However, in one crucial aspect, American history was more progressive. According to the Homestead Act of 1862, American women had the right to free land on the same basis as men did, while according to the Dominion Lands Act of 1872, Canadian women were almost entirely refused the right to free land. Combined with this basic injustice was the striking down of dower rights in 1886, which left Western Canadian women without the basic right of inheritance of their husband’s property on his death, and also allowed the husband during his life to dispose of his property as he chose without his wife’s agreement. It was out of the latter discovery that my novel Wild Rose came into being. Such systemic discrimination against women leaves its marks on the society that grows up within it, and perhaps this helped to explain why the region in which I found myself was so entirely male-oriented, at least in the public arena.
There was only one other woman in the maybe thirty of us taking part in the range school that day and she, although almost exactly my size, was something of a wild woman, a horse-breaker herself. Her husband, who had come separately, and who said he’d been “working colts in the corral,” wore his spurs through the whole event, at which the other men looked askance, while some snickered at or commented in low tones about this as mere showing off. Otherwise, they all seemed to get along, and Peter seemed to be accepted, if a bit stiffly, among the men. In any case, there were other Canadian men there for him to talk to, while I was the only Canadian woman.
When at the end of the day we arrived in someone’s ranch yard for the de rigueur beef barbecue, three or four of the wives of the other men appeared, but did not come near me and completely ignored the other woman. I couldn’t quite muster the courage to approach the wives, feeling sure I would be treated as if I were a Martian, even though we were at the most maybe seventy miles south of our own ranch house. Thus, I went to talk to that other woman; we chatted for quite a while and there was something about the way she spoke, utterly straightforward in a plain but gentle way and without much change in her facial expression — I think now that she was harbouring a steady pain that had perhaps been with her since childhood, although I could only guess what its source might be — that made me like her very much.
She told me about a
time when she was a girl out alone in the field on horseback checking her family’s cattle, when she was spotted by a crew of convicts from a nearby prison camp who were out fixing fence. One of the convicts leaped on his horse and went after her, she feared to rape her, and she, already on her horse, and not being stupid, rode as fast as she could for home. He chased her all the way to her home ranch. She barely outran him (which means, in that country, most likely that she outrode him) and pulled up and finally turned back to check on him only as she reached the safety of the buildings. She told me other intimate stories in that plain, thoughtful, but faintly puzzled way of hers that made me want to hug her, and to plumb her life for more stories and for other ways of looking at this world in which I’d found myself. In the years since, thinking of her gentle nature, I know that all the stories of “the true West” are not past, and do not belong only to men.
I wrote my first novel when I was nine. I remember the idea of doing such a thing occurring to me and how very excited I was by the notion, experiencing something far beyond a child’s normal excitement over good things, more like the exquisite excitement and wonder of a small child at Christmas. As it had for many children, especially those from a rural world, my reading had far outstripped my personal experience and I thought, at first, that I must be the only child in the entire world who had ever thought of writing a book herself. I knew that a book had to be about something dramatic, even exotic, and set in a faraway place. Accordingly, my novel was set in northern North Dakota, USA, which might as well have been on the moon given that I hadn’t been farther than the city of Prince Albert, or else Nipawin, Saskatchewan, where I’d been born, both places within one hundred miles of Melfort, the small farming town in which we then lived.
Where I Live Now Page 10