The Solace of Open Spaces

My 11 highlights

• many of the men who came to the West were southerners—men looking for work and a new life after the Civil War—that chivalrousness and strict codes of honor were soon thought of as western traits. There were very few women in Wyoming during territorial days, so when they did arrive (some as mail-order brides from places like Philadelphia) there was a stand-offishness between the sexes and a formality that persists now. Ranchers still tip their hats and say, “Howdy, ma’am” instead of shaking hands with me.

• The roominess of the state has affected political attitudes as well. Ranchers keep up with world politics and the convulsions of the economy but are basically isolationists. Being used to running their own small empires of land and livestock, they’re suspicious of big government. It’s a “don’t fence me in” holdover from a century ago. They still want the elbow room their grandfathers had, so they’re strongly conservative, but with a populist twist.

• Winter lasts six months here. Prevailing winds spill snowdrifts to the east, and new storms from the northwest replenish them. This white bulk is sometimes dizzying, even nauseating, to look at. 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. During the winter, while I was riding to find a new calf, my jeans froze to the saddle, and in the silence that such cold creates I felt like the first person on earth, or the last.

• The tears came and lasted for two years. I traveled.

• Bob was a workingman’s man: he didn’t want to own sheep, he wanted to unionize ranch labor. “Goddamn, we’d have the whole world on its knees. But how in hell are you going to get guys like us to stick together. We won’t do it. We’re just too damned ornery. We’d rather starve than agree on anything,” he said, pushing his Scotch cap back on his head and looking out the window. “But even if we are underpaid, I’d rather herd sheep than have some flat-footed prick telling me what I can and can’t do and when and how to do it.” The last time I saw Bob he was in jail for shooting six cows. “A bunch of smartass cowboys were putting their cattle in on my pasture. I warned them … but they kept it up. I should have shot the cowboys instead.…”

• In her book O Pioneers!, Willa Cather gives a settler’s version of the bleak landscape: The little town behind them had vanished as if it had never been, had fallen behind the swell of the prairie, and the stern frozen country received them into its bosom. The homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow.

• The geographical vastness and the social isolation here make emotional evolution seem impossible. Those contradictions of the heart between respectability, logic, and convention on the one hand, and impulse, passion, and intuition on the other, played out wordlessly against the paradisical beauty of the West, give cowboys a wide-eyed but drawn look. Their lips pucker up, not with kisses but with immutability. They may want to break out, staying up all night with a lover just to talk, but they don’t know how and can’t imagine what the consequences will be. Those rare occasions when they do bare themselves result in confusion.

• 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.

• 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.

• the highest ground—the Laramie Plains—is on the Colorado border.

• To live and work in this kind of open country, with its hundred-mile views, is to lose the distinction between background and foreground. When I asked an older ranch hand to describe Wyoming’s openness, he said, “It’s all a bunch of nothing—wind and rattlesnakes—and so much of it you can’t tell where you’re going or where you’ve been and it don’t make much difference.”