This is an essay I wrote for Deep West, a literary anthology recently published by the Wyoming Center for the Book. I was very happy to be included in this landmark publication, which is the first collection of its kind to establish a sense of Wyoming’s literary history and heritage.

 

Things of the World

 

When I first came to Wyoming in 1981, I knew I would not be able to write about this place right away. I knew also that I would want to write about it, because I knew myself as a person who needed to be rooted to a place and who wrote about things in relation to their setting.

As I was growing up in rural California, my sense of place was growing on me without my being aware of it. I observed plants and animals, I paid attention in school, and I listened to the family stories. I grew up with a farming and ranching heritage, and my sense of where I lived, like my sense of history, was western. Mine was the country where the Spanish missionaries had come, and the first vaqueros. It was the destination for gold miners, wagon train emigrants, and Pony Express riders. It was the golden state, the culmination of westward expansion. I stored up all the little bits I had learned on my own, in school, and in all the anecdotes of my early years. Together they defined for me the place where I lived, the center of the world. When I began to write, I wrote about the things I knew.

When I moved to Wyoming, the center moved. I still wrote, and do write, about the other place as I knew it, but I also had to find out about the new center. In many respects, this world was like the one I had left. I moved to a small town with a J.C. Penney, a post office, banks, bars, churches, stockyards, farm implement dealers, and greasy-spoon restaurants. The local farmers raised sugar beets, corn, alfalfa, beans, and wheat. I knew those crops, just as I knew sheep and cattle and horses, which dotted the new landscape with their familiar shapes.

But despite some similarities, enough to help me feel grounded, I began to process the new things. I had already told myself I needed to take this country on its own terms, and I was open to them. I sensed right away that the air was different, and after I had been here through a winter and spring, I realized the greens were of a different hue. I am still conscious of this difference, because I have not lost my earlier sense of place. Maybe the lilac bushes and the ash trees and the corn stalks have the same greens I knew before, but it seems as if even those greens have a different tone. Perhaps it is a function of a different sunlight, due to a different latitude and elevation. But certainly the native greens of the countryside are different, especially the native grasses and sagebrush.

Furthermore, variation in color is more subtle here than in the place where I used to work as a farm laborer, gardener, and landscaper. The native plants had a broader range of green, I believe--or at least brighter--and the domestic crops and yard plants certainly had a greater variety. I can recall seeing, close together, a windbreak of silver-green eucalyptus trees, a grove of dark green orange trees, and an orchard of pale green peach trees--all with dramatically different leaves as well. The climate was hospitable to these immigrants from Australia, Spain, and the Middle East.

The color green is just one way of describing what I have come to understand as an ascetic, spare way of life. I was already familiar with the crops raised here, and I had worked in all of them; but I had also worked in dozens of other crops, from chives to boysenberries to oranges. I had tons of apricots and fresh prunes pass through my hands, and I hauled hundreds of tons of peaches with an orchard tractor and a four-wheeled trailer. I hauled cannery tomatoes in huge gondola trailers, with watery juice running out of the tail end like a fat cow pissing. In contrast with such lavish diversity, and marked with fewer trees, the landscape of Wyoming stretches out in what seems to be simplicity. Again, the climate (including the latitude and the elevation) favors less diversity.

In some ways, the simplicity is an illusion, or a superficial perception, for the ecosystem is complex. I just have to look closer. But in other ways, the perception is valid. When I first came here I had more trouble than before at learning students' names--especially the young women. It seemed, at least, as if most of them had the same color of hair (cut and combed the same), the same complexion, and the same clothes. These students were all named Kim and Kelly and Tammy. A few years later they became Shelly and Lisa, then Jennifer and Jessica, then Amber and Crystal. With less diversity in the economy, we naturally have less diversity in population.

To some extent, there is a same-mindedness. Many of the people in this part of the country have eaten very few meats other than beef, pork, chicken, and turkey. Many have never tasted lamb or venison, much less domestic goat or rabbit, and they will scowl at the mention of food they have not tried. Many of them do not know what an abalone is, much less what it takes like. "This is cow country," they say. "Eat beef." But even in that credo there is some narrowness; many of these people would not touch beef tongue or tripe.

In a land where so many people share a taste for chicken-fried steak with catsup, one is likely to find similarities in thought as well. One encounters widely held beliefs such as the federal government needs to stay away, Californians are weird, road construction is beneficial, and tourism is desirable. The latter two opinions prevail in the face of the previous two because of a widespread assumption that economic gain (in a world of low economic influx and diversity) justifies a lot of inconveniences, indignities, and "hard choices." People who hate the idea of a store selling girlie magazines or of a bar being open on Sunday fight a losing battle against the argument that it's hard to make a living here and we need every chance we can get.

This argument is based, among other things, in two major facts of life in Wyoming: low population and inclement weather. People are spread out at liberal distances, and the distances are emphasized by the weather. These facts pervade every facet of our lives here, even unto the sale of girlie magazines--we have a low population of resident buyers, and our non-residents are seasonal, so we need every chance we can get.

I came to Wyoming because of the low population. I declared that I wanted to live in a place where the cows out-numbered the people, and I was heartily assured that this was such a place. I learned soon afterwards that the antelope came in as a close third, and that made me even happier.

Low population is important to me. I don't care for large towns, tall buildings, and heavy traffic. I don't like crowds or machines. I like to live and write in a world of things, and I like those things to be in their natural state as much as possible. I always wanted to own my own place in the country, where I could observe life close up and unbothered, where I could write in peace.

Low population makes it all possible for me. I can (if only barely) afford to live on a small acreage with a horse outside my window, geese in the winter skies, and wild plum trees in the gully. If more people lived here, I would not have deer and pheasants wandering through my horse pasture, nor would I be at liberty to shoot the jackrabbits and gophers when they ravage the trees and flowers and vegetables I have planted. (It all fits together. Step aside from the main topic for a moment and ask, why shoot jackrabbits and gophers? The answers: it's hard enough to grow anything in this climate, it's good practice for hunting, and I've got the freedom to do it.) Low population makes it possible for me to hunt antelope, deer, and elk with some sense of original purpose, just as it allows me to go camping without making a reservation.

As for the weather, it conditions everything we do. It reminds us that we live in nature. It makes us take all of life seriously, and it makes us pay close attention. Because of low population a person can leave the keys in the car (and a gun in the gun rack), but because of unpredictable weather, she won't leave the window rolled down if she's going to be away from the vehicle for very long. One bad hailstorm or one bad blizzard will put all the pleasant days into perspective. Bad weather reminds us of our own mortality and the need to write when we can, and it also gives us plenty to write about.

Coming from a temperate climate, I was worried about the weather. I learned soon enough, however, that it was part of the whole scheme, inseparable and interesting. I came here because I wanted to live in nature, and the weather was part of what I came for. Once I had my own place in the country (even though I lived in a mobile home on a wind-buffeted hilltop), I was sure I wanted to stay here.

When I got my own place I had been here three years, and I felt I had taken in enough to be able to write about this world. On my own place I continued in earnest, observing the hawks, the geese, the deer, the rabbits, the toads. I took special interest in the wild flowers. I wrote a poem entitled "Wild Rose of Wyoming" and later developed the image more fully in a western novel entitled Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon. My love of the blue flax, the wild rose, and the pincushion cactus found its way into a story called "Flowers for Rebecca." It has been the most praised story of One Foot in the Stirrup, a collection of Old West stories. Also during my first fifteen years in Wyoming, I wrote several contemporary short stories that I brought together in a collection called Antelope Sky. These stories reflect the world around me as I have taken it in.

Where I live is so closely integrated into what I write that I abhor the idea of moving somewhere else, losing what I have here, and starting over. Although it might seem tedious to live in a world in which the children all have names like Jason and Jessica and parents with names like Mike and Cathy, and who all together do not read many books or bother to learn things that aren't required, these people are real. They know, as I have come to know, that we are all in it together. There aren't many of us, we're far apart, and we share the same problems of dealing with the weather and trying to make a living. And, despite the gossip of small towns and rural areas, people pretty much leave each other alone.

Such an environment leaves me free to study what is below the surface appearance of similarity. I do not have to be overpowered by majestic splendor. I am interested in the coming and going of the meadowlarks, the bloom of the cactus, the slow change of color as cold weather sets upon the land. I am interested in how people haul their saddles or transport their coyote-hunting dogs. I ama fascinated by the intensity of a dedicated cowgirl, the trust of the cottontails that eat dandelions on my lawn.

This place has grown into me, and I have grown into it. After I had lived on my place in the country for a few years, I found myself preferring the nature tones of the surrounding world--not only for my house but also for my clothes. I quit buying checkered and striped shirts. Even a solid maroon shirt, as I see it, is the color of chokecherry juice; and my increasing inventory of tan, grey, and sage green shirts is a conscious response to my wanting to be in the landscape and not just on it. I know this shift in taste is apparent in my writing, also, because I am a fairly visual writer.

Sometimes I still miss the quail and the oak trees, but I have been able to transfer some of my interest to the meadowlark and the cottonwood. I am glad this place has grown into me, and I am glad I did not try to write about it too soon. I remember the example of a professor from the dreaded East who took a teaching job at UC Davis not long before I left that country. After he had been there a little while he wrote a detective novel in which he implied an understanding of the Sacramento Valley and the Bay Area. I didn't care for the smug tone or for the errors in detail. I came here with that lesson fresh in my head, and I have been content to take things in slowly, over and over.