By the time I came to live with him, Peter was alternating between living on the ranch and on the hay farm. He was at the hay farm not only when the cattle were there, but also in the spring and summer, as I’ve said, to irrigate (a twenty-four-hour-a-day job for two weeks usually twice each summer), and he had to be there for the weeks it took to hay. This seasonal migration Peter and I continued to do, moving back and forth between the hay farm with its log house built in 1912 and the ranch with its simple settler’s house. During the third year of our marriage, we built a much-needed house, a simple three-bedroom bungalow that looked to us like a palace after living in bathroom-less, central-heating-less, mouse-riddled homes for such a long time. We built it at the hay farm because Peter wouldn’t hear of building it at the ranch, saying that in the worst months of the winter the wind never stopped blowing there, that the roads were mostly closed — he had once been stuck there in winter for six full weeks all by himself — and that it was generally just too uncomfortable for cattle, horses, or, given the living accommodations, humans.
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, inadvertently 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.
I decided to write about a kidnapping — I suspect I’d been reading Nancy Drew books, although I’ve no memory of doing so — and I chose to take my imaginary family, one much like my own, on a driving trip. Only a day or so into the holiday, one of the children, a girl my own age, is kidnapped, but why or by whom is never explained. I don’t recall even thinking about that part. The family decides they might as well keep on with their holiday, and when they arrive at the next town, they receive a note from the kidnappers. How I wish I could remember that note. In any case, within the ten pages that made up the entire novel, the child is returned to her family, no harm has been done, and that is the end of that story.
Most of us remember such childhood exploits with a certain amount of sentimental self-love and some tenderness, me included. Chiefly, I remember my tremendous excitement, how hard my heart beat in my chest and how fiercely I concentrated on gripping that pencil, how miraculous my wonderful new endeavour felt. My greatest regret is that, although my mother was equally excited by my initiative and found some red cardboard to make a cover and tied it together with blue wool from her knitting basket, neither of us had any idea what the next step should be. She told me to show it to my teacher, who showed next to no interest, didn’t even want to look at it as I held it out to her — it was 1949 in Melfort, Saskatchewan; we had three grades in the room; my teacher was very young, with only a high school education and some bare-bones teacher training. I could only conclude that whatever I had felt, I had been wrong about its significance. After the novel, when I was between ten and twelve, I spent a lot of time walking around with a cheap ruled notebook and a pencil, writing mostly plays, or attempts at plays, as the only ones I’d ever seen were our school Christmas pageants. From then on, aside from my efforts at playwriting that didn’t last long, I wrote only what I was asked in school to write. Instead, I turned my efforts to drawing and to visual art. I did not think of being a writer again until I married Peter and went to the ranch to live.
I discovered early on that after having not painted for so many years, a dozen at least, I no longer could. It was not only that I had lost so much craft, but more that I no longer had the desire, that I had lost the ability to give myself completely over to whatever I was working on: a drawing, a painting. Part of my life seemed to have died. I mourned for a while, but then I began to think about writing down all that I was seeing in this fascinating new universe I had moved to. First, I thought about the possibility of writing magazine articles about ranch life and rural culture, not in order to be a journalist — I never thought that far ahead — but because the creative part of my being had been awakened by ranch and country life and being in nature again. I didn’t dare think that I might be a writer, someone who wrote novels, and I certainly never thought of writing non-fiction books, because they had never interested me much, and at that period in my life, when so much change was going on, they especially didn’t interest me.
By this time it was 1978 and I had long since come to the end of that first year of being constantly with Peter, learning every second of every day. I was now spending many hours by myself. When I discovered there wouldn’t be enough housework to keep me busy more than an hour or two every morning, I began to go outside. At the hay farm, I wanted to know what was at the top of the hills to the north and south of us, and what swam in the river, and what a certain bird was that I saw every day, and why the rocks scattered down the hillsides were of so many different kinds. The distances at the ranch were much longer, and sometimes the cattle kept me from certain fields, but I was as curious there as I was in the valley at the hay farm. The atmosphere was different at the ranch, though, no less surprising and pleasurable, but somehow more spacious. I began to walk the fields, and to think as I walked.
It was only when I began to not-think as I walked, that I began to discover a new dimension in nature, a dimension that, for lack of a better name, I call visionary; I began to feel the presence of spirit all around me. In my first year of this new life, my great dreaming had begun. The vast presence and mystery of nature, that endless, star-pricked sky, the great fields of grass melding into the far horizon, the dreams that took me into another space, the small, educative visions, plus Peter’s teachings about the land, the plants and animals, the way of life, most of this extended by my own extensive reading and my pondering on this, together made me into a writer. I wanted to understand this new world, to find a place for it in my understanding of human life, and writing about it was the best way. Understanding it, of course, involved understanding myself.
Strangely, I never thought to try to draw a line between my notion to write a novel at age nine and the excitement that idea engendered in me, and this extraordinary, trans-worldly experience that was filling me, at the age of thirty-eight, with the desire to be a writer. I wouldn’t have seen them as connected. It is only now, nearly forty years after my second attempt at writing, that I see the connection. Perhaps, as a mystic would say, there is no line, there is only a state, and surely that state is, at least in part, one of wonderment at the world, and the place of humans in it.
Article-writing paled very quickly. I wrote in longhand, until one day Peter in his riding boots clomped into the front room of the old frame house at the ranch, shoving open the permanently stuck door, and said to me, “Here.” I was sitting on the sofa absorbed in a book and only then noticed he had come in. I looked up: He had brought me a typewriter. Although understanding perfectly well that a pioneer society such as the one I was born into can’t do much better in the way of educating its children, I constantly decry the lack of love in that education, and the attitude that either a child could do the work or couldn’t. But this was one time my education, which bored me to death a lot of the time (though for two of my four high school years I had a wonderful English teacher, Mr. Harms, and in my fourth year the very fine Mr. Smythe), did me one favour. I had been forced, for reasons I still don’t know, as I was in the so-called “academic” stream, to take a course called “business practice” and also typing. Hence, when Peter handed over that typewriter, I could already type like a wiz. This ability that I had heretofore loathed put me miles ahead of many of my fellow novice writers.
I had a world to write about, I was constantly reading the best literature I could find so that I had models and a goal, I knew how to type, I had loads of time as long as Sean was in school and no pressure other than the pressure I put on myself, but that pressure was — well, it’s hard to say how immense it was. I was thirty-eight and thirty-nine and forty; I had no time to lose and so very much to learn. Trying to think how one began a career as a writer, I supposed that a novel was the place to start. I started writing one, long since destroyed, and finished it and knew it was terrible. (My subject was the self-destructiveness of some of the young people of the town near where I lived: drug taking, alcoholism in the very young, sexual profligacy — or so I was told. What a bad idea that was for a novel. In the end, my heroine rides her horse off out of the town heading to Palermo, which she thinks is in South America.)
I recall, after that, trying to think what I should write about next and toying with the idea of writing a novel about university life with a single-mom-academic protagonist, completing about fifty pages before I realized that I couldn’t solve the big problem: How could a novelist manage to give the reader the impression that she knew all about the life of the protagonist, when only small selected sections of it were actually written down? How did a writer manage a sense of continuity? Clearly, I thought, I needed some instruction. And equally clear to me was the fact that starting out with a novel was asking far too much of myself. I needed to be writing short stories — not that I had the faintest idea how to do that, either.
So I read the new writers everybody was raving about then: Atwood, Munro. I studied their stories so hard that I could predict where either writer would go next at a certain juncture in their story, and how very different they were. I read dozens of other short-story collections written by the “greats,” and I began to get a feel for how a short story worked. Our doctor’s wife at that time was an Oxford graduate in literature and she gave a one-night-a-week class for a few weeks to a few of us would-be writers, and I began to get the idea that maybe — just maybe — I could write. Then the community college (a process then, not a building or an institution of the sort we have today) agreed to bring a creative writing teacher down to us. Through the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild (which, I hasten to point out, was the first writers’ guild in Canada), Caroline Heath, an incisive, super-smart, highly esteemed critic and editor, arrived to teach a full-day workshop on short-story writing. That was the beginning of our relationship that lasted until her too-early death at only forty-eight. She was my first mentor, teacher, guide, and eventually, when she began her own publishing house called Fifth House, my first publisher. Early in those days, maybe around 1979, when I would have been thirty-nine, her interest in my work (and that of a few other writers she had identified as particularly talented) and her intense support and guidance were a lifeline. Sometimes I felt like a drowning creature that she hauled out of the sea with her own efforts and brought back to life with her nurturing.
Over the next couple of years, I wrote something like two dozen short stories; I laboured over them, and rewrote, sometimes as many as thirty-five times, until they felt right. I doubt I was doing much to improve the story in question after maybe the tenth rewrite, but I was learning every minute how to write. Then one morning as I sat at my (now electric) typewriter to begin a new short story, a voice said to me, “This is a novel,” and even though I told the voice that it was crazy, that I was not ready yet to write a novel, it simply insisted, and would not shut up until I acquiesced. That is how my first novel, Country of the Heart, came about. By this time, Caroline Heath had started her publishing company, although she wasn’t ready to publish this novel until 1984. In 1985 my short stories were published as Queen of the Headaches by Coteau Books, and, astonishingly, were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. I say “astonishingly,” because they were the first stories I had written and I couldn’t convince myself they were worthy of such an honour.
How very driven I was to write, and this did not improve until Peter’s death in 2007, when I was sixty-six, although after the first few years I had at least the grace to question my priorities. When in the mid-nineties I was shortlisted for something like three major prizes and won none of them (I did win other, less significant prizes), I could only think that I must have offended the gods with my overweening ambition. But my losses, chastening as they were, only spurred me to try harder, part of me arguing that I should try to live by what I knew to be true, which was that prizes didn’t matter. In rare moments I felt the truth of this.
The stages of my education as a writer are very clear to me, although the order in which they came is not. More likely they were all growing at once. I even realized that I needed a subject that I could know intimately. With some reluctance, having imagined a more glamorous universe open to me, I realized that my subject had to be the rural agricultural world of the Great Plains of Canada, and in particular, the women of that world. When I think about this hard-won choice now, I see it as not a choice at all, but as inevitable. It is this subject matter that people think of when they think of my work — this and nature. Probably such choices for writers are always inevitable, whether they think so or not.
As I mentioned earlier, the Nobelist J. M. Coetzee, in a letter to the American writer Paul Auster, noted this about his art:
One can think of a life in art, schematically, in two or perhaps three stages. In the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question. In the second you labor away at answering it. And then, if you live long enough, you come to the third stage, when the aforesaid great question begins to bore you, and you need to look elsewhere.
David Atwell suggests that Coetzee’s “great question” “would be something like, What script has my history written for me, and how can I rewrite it?” My own “great question” had to be, What is a human life worth? And in particular, What is a woman’s life worth? My question referred especially to the lives of people in the rural, agricultural world that I was coming to know so well.
My ambition, my willingness to give over my entire life to learning to be a writer, and then a better writer, and a better one after that, was plaited into my life as a housewife, a ranch wife, Peter’s wife. I carried a notebook with me everywhere I went, and whenever Peter got out of the truck or the tractor or off the baler or the feed wagon, I whipped it out and started making note of how certain plants looked in winter and what animals had been around, judging by their scat and their prints in the snow or mud. I tried to look for similes to describe what a herd of Herefords looked like flowing over a broad hill, or antelope skimming the grass; I often carried a well-thumbed book on prairie plants so as to tell one from another and make note of how they changed with the seasons. I watched horses being broken in the corral — pre-horse-whisperer days — and wrote down what I saw; I studied the bulls, mesmerized by their lazy, heavy power, and I studied the men for their unassuming courage in situations that scared the heck out of me, and the women for their brand of courage to keep going day after day in a world that, aside from their children and housekeeping skills, was never built for them. I often thought that my heart would break for the women (who absolutely did not want my empathy, pity, or compassion). Once or twice I felt the same for the men, how they were bound to their lives on the land and with their animals, hard and unrelenting taskmasters as they were. They appeared to accept this preordained life. This world I lived in though seemed to me to be the true world, or the real world in microcosm, and I yearned to grasp it wholly, although, in all my thirty-three years there, I never felt that I did.
From the time I made the conscious decision to write about this world, I knew my real challenge would be to make the subject matter interesting to urban people, because that’s who the bulk of readers are. Sadly, most urban people have little interest in the lives of rural people. And I was no longer young, and in touch with whatever it was twenty- and thirty-year-olds cared about, and that worried me too. Still, classic novels about the lives of women — Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina and Hardy’s Tess — lived on because the work was so true psychologically. I would have to learn to write that well if I wanted an audience.
I mourned my isolation from other writers and from the writing world. But in the end, I know it was my very isolation that made me into the writer I’ve become, because I wasn’t influenced by whatever other writers were talking to each other about, whatever the literary fashions were. I was forced to create my own path. I wasn’t distracted by readings or literary events unless I chose to take a few days to drive to the city for them. I was pretty much on my own — nobody dropping in for coffee or a glass of wine, or for a long, chatty walk. Nor did I have a clue what the current gossip was in the writing world, and so lost no time over even the greatest scandals, hearing about them only years later, if at all. I just wrote and read and thought and walked alone, and wrote some more. As a side effect of my isolation, I began to get a reputation as prolific. But the truth is that I wasn’t an especially fast writer or an unusually creative one. Despite ranch work and housework and some small work I did in the community, I was fortunate in being able to put in more hours each day, day after day, year after year, than almost any other writer I knew.
When I think back to those days in the late seventies and the eighties, even the nineties of the twentieth century, I wonder how else I might have lived my life. Could I have had a better life if I hadn’t been so driven to be a writer? But I know that the work was so tightly interwoven with my own drive to know who I was and who I might be, fed as it was by my encounters in nature, that there was no possible “other” life.
Thus, I read a stream of books, usually four and even (rarely) five at a time, putting one down when I was tiring and picking up another, putting that one down when Peter called me to come and help, either by driving a truck, or by riding with him to bring in a sick cow, or to sort out calves, or to check fences, or to open and close gates in the corral, or else to make coffee and a snack for the few men who were giving him a hand that day. At first I left my writing without looking back, believing that my duty to Peter should always come first, but later I might reply, “Just a minute!” and delay a few minutes. Eventually, I would reply that I’d come as soon as I finished whatever I was doing. Writing had taken over. Peter would often reply, “You keep on with what you’re doing. I’ll get so-and-so to help me,” but, although he never said a word of complaint, I am sure that eventually there was a level where he resented my preoccupation. I can hardly blame him.
For the most part, though, these strands of my life — the writing, the housekeeping, the ranch work — worked together rhythmically, each giving me a break from the other, and each feeding the other. Struggles in my writing life only brought me closer to my spiritual life, which was fed so profoundly by relentless sky, the nightly crowd of unknowable stars, constellations, and galaxies, and the smell of prairie on the ceaseless wind.