"The Solace of Open Spaces"

Gretel Ehrlich's essay collection about Wyoming ranching life is the first surprise find of the year.

• What I had lost (at least for a while) was my appetite for the life I had left: city surroundings, old friends, familiar comforts. It had occurred to me that comfort was only a disguise for discomfort; reference points, a disguise for what will always change.
• The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.
• It’s May and I’ve just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep—sheltered from wind.
• At twenty, thirty, and forty degrees below zero, not only does your car not work, but neither do your mind and body. The landscape hardens into a dungeon of space.
• * behind them, a bold line of muscular scarps rears up ten thousand feet to become the Big Horn Mountains. A tidal pattern is engraved into the ground, as if left by the sea that once covered this state. Canyons curve down like galaxies to meet the oncoming rush of flat land. <> To live and work in this kind of open country, with its hundred-mile views, is to lose the distinction between background and foreground.
• * In the Great Plains the vistas look like music, like Kyries of grass, but Wyoming seems to be the doing of a mad architect—tumbled and twisted, ribboned with faded, deathbed colors, thrust up and pulled down as if the place had been startled out of a deep sleep and thrown into a pure light.
• * Instead of producing the numbness I thought I wanted, life on the sheep ranch woke me up. The vitality of the people I was working with flushed out what had become a hallucinatory rawness inside me... The arid country was a clean slate. Its absolute indifference steadied me.
• ranch work: A person’s life is not a series of dramatic events for which he or she is applauded or exiled but a slow accumulation of days, seasons, years, fleshed out by the generational weight of one’s family and anchored by a land-bound sense of place.
• The solitude in which westerners live makes them quiet. They telegraph thoughts and feelings by the way they tilt their heads and listen; pulling their Stetsons into a steep dive over their eyes, or pigeon-toeing one boot over the other, they lean against a fence with a fat wedge of Copenhagen beneath their lower lips and take in the whole scene. These detached looks of quiet amusement are sometimes cynical, but they can also come from a dry-eyed humility as lucid as the air is clear.
• * Sentence structure is shortened to the skin and bones of a thought. Descriptive words are dropped, even verbs; a cowboy looking over a corral full of horses will say to a wrangler, “Which one needs rode?” People hold back their thoughts in what seems to be a dumbfounded silence, then erupt with an excoriating perceptive remark. Language, so compressed, becomes metaphorical. A rancher ended a relationship with one remark: “You’re a bad check,” meaning bouncing in and out was intolerable, and even coming back would be no good.
• There have been tornadoes. They lay their elephant trunks out in the sage until they find houses, then slurp everything up and leave. I’ve noticed that melting snowbanks hiss and rot, viperous, then drip into calm pools... Water in such an arid place (the average annual rainfall where I live is less than eight inches) is like blood. It festoons drab land with green veins;
• * If anything is endemic to Wyoming, it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily, leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates, and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially shaped the state, wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage.
• Wealthy landowners, many of them aristocratic absentee landlords, known as remittance men because they were paid to come West and get out of their families’ hair, overstocked the range with more than a million head of cattle... the winter of 1886 laid out the gaunt bodies of dead animals so closely together that when the thaw came, one rancher from Kaycee claimed to have walked on cowhide all the way to Crazy Woman Creek, twenty miles away.
• The wealthy cattlemen tried to control all the public grazing land by restricting membership in the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, as if it were a country club. They ostracized from roundups and brandings cowboys and ranchers who were not members, then denounced them as rustlers. Tisdale’s death, the second such cold-blooded murder, kicked off the Johnson County cattle war, which was no simple good-guy-bad-guy shoot-out but a complicated class struggle between landed gentry and less affluent settlers
• The formality that goes hand in hand with the rowdiness is known as the Western Code. It’s a list of practical do’s and don’ts, faithfully observed. A friend, Cliff, who runs a trap-line in the winter, cut off half his foot while chopping a hole in the ice. Alone, he dragged himself to his pickup and headed for town, stopping to open the ranch gate as he left, and getting out to close it again, thus losing, in his observance of rules, precious time and blood.
• At night, by moonlight, the land is whittled to slivers—a ridge, a river, a strip of grassland stretching to the mountains, then the huge sky.
• closer to home we might also learn how to carry space inside ourselves in the effortless way we carry our skins. Space represents sanity, not a life purified, dull, or “spaced out” but one that might accommodate intelligently any idea or situation... We have only to look at the houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness.
• He was there the morning the freak was born: a lamb with two heads. Someone took a Polaroid of it, then the foreman cut its throats. <> While a western town will accept an idiot with quiet affection, it treats sheepherders with contempt. In the hierarchy of a ranch, herders are second-class citizens. Economics is a factor: cowboys make $700 to $1,000 a month
• He had a droll humor and after pointing out something funny—the bored way a ewe looked around as the first lamb squirted out—his wide smile seemed to encircle his whole face.
• Fred slept half sitting on the floor by the door, his mattress propped against these belongings whose bulk perhaps served as ballast against so many years alone... Under it all, his long underwear had been changed so infrequently, his body hair had grown into the weave... Since solitude was the peg he’d hung his life on, he saw no point in complaining about it.
• butcher a ewe: He’d slit her throat as deftly as a conductor slicing air to bring on a rush of music; then hang her by her hind legs to the crossbar.
• only paved street in a town so bland it might have been tipped on its side and all the life drained from it.
• * He said, “All this to become a ghost.” There was no aspect of dying we hadn’t talked about, and now our conversations often came to a halt. Though I was content just to hear him breathing, the silences were sometimes queasy, at others, purely ironic—an emotional iron ore flecked with rust.
• * Because dying prunes so much away—everything extraneous, everything that has not been squeezed into paradox—we’d often lie on the floor wordlessly, holding hands, looking at the spectacle of the other, then break into uproarious laughter that convulsed into tears. There is no joke as big as death, we agreed.
• My life felt flat, then euphoric, then flat again. These fluctuations gained momentum like a paddlewheel: I was dry and airy, then immersed again.
• * Winter scarified me. Under each cheekbone I thought I could feel claw marks and scar tissue. What can seem like a hard-shell veneer on the people here is really a necessary spirited resilience.
• * Living well here has always been the art of making do in emotional as well as material ways. Traditionally, at least, ranch life has gone against materialism and has stood for the small achievements of the human conjoined with the animal, and the simpler pleasures... The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation.
• The stench inside the house was of billy goats, dead mice, and unaired emotions. He sat on the floor with his head in his hands, but his lilting, ethereal voice lightened the squalor of the rooms.
• After I made my “debut” she was insulted if I declined any invitation to rope and gave praises when I did, no matter how many calves I missed. That’s how her seamless loyalty worked: once she had taken me on as a friend, there was no turning back.
• we saw the Northern Lights. They looked like talcum powder fallen from a woman’s face. Rouge and blue eyeshadow streaked the spires of white light which exploded, then pulsated, shaking the colors down—like lives—until they faded from sight.
• * All summer there had been the silent, whimsical archery of seeds: timothy and fescue, cottonwood puffs, the dilapidated; shingled houses of pine cones letting go of their seeds.
• * A cowboy is someone who loves his work. Since the hours are long—ten to fifteen hours a day—and the pay is $30 he has to. What’s required of him is an odd mixture of physical vigor and maternalism. His part of the beef-raising industry is to birth and nurture calves and take care of their mothers.
• heroism: Because these incidents are usually linked to someone or something outside himself, the westerner’s courage is selfless, a form of compassion.
• If a rancher or cowboy has been thought of as a “man’s man”—laconic, hard-drinking, inscrutable—there’s almost no place in which the balancing act between male and female, manliness and femininity, can be more natural. If he’s gruff, handsome, and physically fit on the outside, he’s androgynous at the core. Ranchers are midwives, hunters, nurturers, providers, and conservationists all at once.
• Because I forgot to bring hand cream or a hat, sun targets in on me like frostbite.
• * To herd sheep is to discover a new human gear somewhere between second and reverse—a slow, steady trot of keenness with no speed. There is no flab in these days. But the constant movement of sheep from water hole to water hole, from camp to camp, becomes a form of longing.
• Dust rises like an evening gown behind his truck. It flies free for a moment, then returns, leisurely, to the habitual road—that bruised string which leads to and from my heart.
• * Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals. We’re both humbled by and imperious with them. We’re comrades who save each other’s lives... What’s stubborn, secretive, dumb, and keen in us bumps up against those same qualities in them. Their births and deaths are as jolting and random as ours,... we give ourselves as wholly to the sacrament of nurturing as to the communion of eating their flesh. What develops in this odd partnership is a stripped-down compassion, one that is made of frankness and respect and rigorously excludes sentimentality.
• * Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who we’ve been or how our bank accounts describe us. What is obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that fattens our emotional résumés but what’s bedrock and current in us: aggression, fear, insecurity, happiness, or equanimity. Because they have the ability to read our involuntary tics and scents, we’re transparent to them and thus exposed—we’re finally ourselves.
• * Herds are democratic, nonhierarchical. Wyoming’s landscapes are so wide they can accommodate the generality of a herd. A band of fifteen hundred sheep moves across the range like a single body of water. To work them in a corral means opposing them: if you walk back through the middle of the herd, they will flow forward around you as if you were a rock in a stream. Sheep graze up a slope, not down the way cows do, as if they were curds of cream rising.
• I know it does no good to ask historical questions—why so many insects exist—so I content myself with the cold ingenuity of their lives. In winter ants excavate below their hills and live snugly in subterranean chambers. Their heating system is unique. Worker ants go above ground and act as solar collectors, descending frequently to radiate heat below.
• A famous riverman’s boast from the paddlewheel days on the Mississippi goes this way: “I’m all man, save what’s wildcat and extra lightning.” Les chats sauvages, the French call them, but their savagery impresses me much less than their acrobatic skills. Bobcats will kill a doe by falling on her from a tree and riding her shoulders as she runs, reaching around and scratching her face until she falls.
• * "THE SMOOTH SKULL OF WINTER": Winter looks like a fictional place, an elaborate simplicity, a Nabokovian invention of rarefied detail... the cows, dusted with white, look like snowcapped continents drifting.. If I read winter right, it is a scroll—the white growing wider and wider like the sweep of an arm—and from it we gain a peripheral vision, a capacity for what Nabokov calls “those asides of spirit, those footnotes in the volume of life by which we know life and find it to be good.” <> Not unlike emotional transitions—the loss of a friend or the beginning of new work—the passage of seasons is often so belabored and quixotic as to deserve separate names so the year might be divided eight ways instead of four.
• Every three days or so white pastures glide overhead and drop themselves like skeins of hair to earth. The Chinese call snow that has drifted “white jade mountains,” but winter looks oceanic to me. Snow swells, drops back, and hits the hulls of our lives with a course-bending sound. Tides of white are overtaken by tides of blue, and the logs in the woodstove, like sister ships, tick toward oblivion.
• The day I helped tend sheep camp we drove through a five-mile tunnel of snow. The herder had marked his location for us by deliberately cutting his finger and writing a big “X” on the ice with his blood. <> When it’s fifty below, the mercury bottoms out and jiggles there as if laughing at those of us still above ground.
• To offset Wyoming’s Arctic seascape, a nightly flush of Northern Lights dances above the Big Horns, irradiating winter’s pallor and reminding us that even though at this time of year we veer toward our various nests and seclusions, nature expresses itself as a bright fuse, irrepressible and orgasmic.
• above our ranches, the mountains hold their snows like a secret: no one knows when they will melt or how fast. When the water does come, it floods through the state as if the peaks were silver pitchers tipped forward by mistake.
• He set five dams, digging the bright edges of plastic into silt. Water filled them the way wind fattens a sail, and from three notches cut in the ditch above each dam, water coursed out over a hundred acres of hayfield.
• The hay they irrigate, for example, has to be cut when it’s dry but baled with a little dew on it to preserve the leaf.
• Brisk winds forwarded thunderclouds into local skies—commuters from other states—but the streamers of rain they let down evaporated before touching us.
• he knew he had to keep his cattle drifting. If they hit a fence line and had to face the storm, snow would blow into their noses and they’d drown.
• Dry air presses a stockman’s insides outward. The secret, inner self is worn not on the sleeve but in the skin. It’s an unlubricated condition: there’s not enough moisture in the air to keep the whole emotional machinery oiled and working.
• These rights were, and still are, awarded according to the date a ranch was established regardless of ownership changes. This solved the increasing problem of upstream-downstream disputes, enabling the first ranch established on a creek to maintain the first water right
• With the completion of the canal, the Mormons built churches, schools, and houses communally, working in unison as if taking their cue from the water that snaked by them. “It was a socialistic sonofabitch from the beginning,” Frank recalls, “a beautiful damned thing. These ‘western individualists’ forget how things got done around here and not so damned many years ago at that.”
• Two thousand years before the Sidon Canal was built in Wyoming, the Hohokam, a people who lived in what became Arizona, used digging sticks to channel water from the Salt and Gila rivers to dry land. Theirs was the most extensive irrigation system in aboriginal North America. Water was brought thirty miles to spread over fields of corn, beans, and pumpkins
• * There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration. Cascading water equates loss followed by loss, a momentum of things falling in the direction of death, then life.
• Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Lovers, farmers, and artists have one thing in common, at least—a fear of “dry spells,” dormant periods in which we do no blooming, internal droughts only the waters of imagination and psychic release can civilize.
• If I was leery about being an owner, a possessor of land, now I have to understand the ways in which the place possesses me. Mowing hayfields feels like mowing myself. I wake up mornings expecting to find my hair shorn. The pastures bend into me; the water I ushered over hard ground becomes one drink of grass.
• * Ropers are the graceful technicians, performing their pas de deux (plus steer) with a precision that begins to resemble a larger clarity—an erudition... One or two cranks and both arm and loop vault forward, one becoming an appendage of the other, as if the tendons and pulse that travel through the wrist had lengthened and spun forward like fishing line until the loop sails down on the twin horns, then up under the hocks like a repeated embrace that tightens at the end before it releases.
• Barrel racing is the one women’s event. Where the men are tender in their movements, as elegant as if Balanchine had been their coach, the women are prodigies of Wayne Gretsky, all speed, bully, and grit.
• Bull riders are built like the animals they ride: low to the ground and hefty. They’re the tough men on the rodeo circuit, and the flirts.
• He flips the loose bottoms of his chaps over his shins, puts a foot in each stirrup, takes a breath, and nods. The chute gate swings open releasing a flood—not of water, but of flesh, groans, legs kicking. The horse lunges up and out in the first big jump like a wave breaking whose crest the cowboy rides, “marking out the horse,” spurs well above the bronc’s shoulders. In that first second under the lights, he finds what will be the rhythm of the ride.
• rodeo: The point of the match is not conquest but communion: the rhythm of two beings becoming one. Rodeo is not a sport of opposition; there is no scrimmage line here. No one bears malice—neither the animals, the stock contractors, nor the contestants; no one wants to get hurt. In this match of equal talents, it is only acceptance, surrender, respect, and spiritedness that make for the midair union of cowboy and horse. Not a bad thought when starting out fresh in a marriage.
• * On a ranch, small ceremonies and private, informal rituals arise. We ride the spring pasture, pick chokecherries in August, skin out a deer in the fall, and in the enactment experience a wordless exhilaration between bouts of plain hard work. Ritual... goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with the rushing, irreducible conditions of life.
• We forget that our sun is only a star destined to someday burn out. The time scale of its transience so far exceeds our human one that our unconditional dependence on its life-giving properties feels oddly like an indiscretion about which we’d rather forget.
• * Sun Dance is the holiest religious ceremony of the Plains tribes, .. (the vow obligates them to dance four times during their lives) Sun Dance is a serious and painful undertaking; called “thirsty standing,” they eat no food and drink no water for four days.
• The drumming, singing, and dancing began all at once. It’s not really a dance with steps but a dance of containment, a dance in place. Facing east and blowing whistles made of eagle wing bones in shrill unison, the men bounced up and down on their heels in time to the drumbeat... The ropey, repeating pulse was so strong it seemed to pull the sun up.
• Songs pushed from the backs of the drummers’ throats. The skin on the dancers’ chests bounced as though from some interior tremor. When the light hit their faces, they looked as if they were made of sun.
• I began to understand how the wide ampleness of the Indian body stands for a spirit of accommodation. In the ceremony I had just witnessed, no one—dancer, observer, child, priest, or drummer—had called attention to himself. There was no applause, no frivolousness.
• * In air so dry and with their juices squeezed out, the bouncing looked weightless, their bodies thin and brittle as shells. It wasn’t the pain of the sacrifice they were making that counted but the emptiness to which they were surrendering themselves. It was an old ritual: separation, initiation, return.
• D. H. Lawrence described the Apache ceremonies he saw as “the feet of birds treading a dance” and claimed the music awakened in him “new root-griefs, old root-richnesses.”
• Gary was there and he drummed and danced and his son and wife danced, all the repetitions redoubled by multiple generations. How affectionately the shimmering beadwork traced the shapes of their dreams and threaded them back to the bodies that dreamed them.
• * I’d seen bead workers’ beadwork, dancers’ dance steps, Indianness for the sake of being Indian—a shell of a culture whose spontaneous force had been revived against great odds and was transmitting weak signals. But transmitting nonetheless.
• * A heavy snow can act like fists: trees are pummeled, hay- and grainfields are flattened, splayed out like deer beds; field corn, jackknifed and bleached blond by the freeze, is bedraggled by the brawl... Along the highway electric lines were looped to the ground like dropped reins. <> As the storm blows east toward the Dakotas, the blue of the sky intensifies. It inks dry washes and broad grasslands with quiet. In their most complete gesture of restraint, cottonwoods, willows, and wild rose engorge themselves with every hue of ruddiness—russet, puce, umber, gold, musteline—whose spectral repletion we know also to be an agony, riding oncoming waves of cold.
• All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite.
• * Weaning is noisy; cows don’t hide their grief. As calves are loaded into semis and stock trucks, their mothers—five or six hundred of them at a time—crowd around the sorting alleys with outstretched necks, their squared-off faces all opened in a collective bellowing.
• Now I can only think of mud as being sweet. At night the moon makes a brief appearance between storms and laces mud with a confectionary light... The morning sky looks like cheese. Its cobalt wheel has been cut down and all the richness of the season is at our feet. The quick-blanch of frost stings autumn’s rouge into a skin that is tawny.
• Immobilized, he scratched an SOS with the sharp point of a bullet on a piece of leather he cut from his chaps. “Hurt bad. In pain. Bring doctor with painkiller,” it read. Then he tied the note to the horse’s halter and threw rocks at the horse until it trotted out of camp. When the horse wandered into a ranch yard down the mountain, the note was quickly discovered and a doctor was helicoptered to camp.
• * October lifts over our heads whatever river noise is left. Long carrier waves of clouds seem to emanate from hidden reefs. There’s a logjam of them around the mountains, and the horizon appears to drop seven thousand feet.
• * Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay... Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons. <> Today the sky is a wafer. Placed on my tongue, it is a wholeness that has already disintegrated; placed under the tongue, it makes my heart beat strongly enough to stretch myself over the winter brilliances to come. Now I feel the tenderness to which this season rots. Its defenselessness can no longer be corrupted. Death is its purity, its sweet mud. The string of storms that came across Wyoming like elephants tied tail to trunk falters now and bleeds into a stillness.