JUST MARRIED

I met my husband at a John Wayne film festival in Cody, Wyoming. The film series was a rare midwinter entertainment to which people from all over the state came. A mutual friend, one of the speakers at the festival, introduced us, and the next morning when The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was shown, we sat next to each other by chance. The fact that he cried during sad scenes in the film made me want to talk to him so we stayed in town, had dinner together, and closed down the bars. Here was a man who could talk books as well as ranching, medieval history and the mountains, ideas and mules. Like me he was a culture straddler. Ten month’s later we were married.

He had planned to propose while we were crossing Cougar Pass—a bald, ten-thousand-foot dome—with twenty-two head of loose horses, but a front was moving through, and in the commotion, he forgot. Another day he loped up to me: “Want to get hitched?” he said. Before I could respond there was horse-trouble ahead and he loped away. To make up for the unceremonious interruption, he serenaded me that night with the wistful calls sandhill cranes make. A cow elk wandered into the meadow and mingled with the horses. It snowed and in the morning a choir of coyotes howled, “Yes.”

After signing for our license at the county courthouse we were given a complimentary “Care package,” a Pandora’s box of grotesqueries: Midol, Kotex, disposable razors, shaving cream, a bar of soap—a summing up, I suppose, of what in a marriage we could look forward to: blood, pain, unwanted hair, headaches, and dirt. “Hey, where’s the champagne and cigars?” I asked.

We had a spur-of-the-moment winter wedding. I called my parents and asked them what they were doing the following Saturday. They had a golf game. I told them to cancel it. “Instead of waiting, we’ve decided to get married while the bloom is still on,” I said.

It was a walk-in wedding. The road crew couldn’t get the snow plowed all the way to the isolated log cabin where the ceremony was to be held. We drove as far as we could in my pickup, chaining up on the way.

In the one hushed moment before the ceremony started, Rusty, my dog, walked through the small crowd of well wishers and lay down at my feet. On his wolfish-wise face was a look that said, “What about me?” So the three of us were married that day. Afterward we skated on the small pond in front of the house and drank from open bottles of champagne stuck in the snow.

“Here’s to the end of loneliness,” I toasted quietly, not believing such a thing could come true. But it did and nothing prepared me for the sense of peace I felt—of love gone deep into a friendship—so for a while I took it to be a premonition of death—the deathbed calm we’re supposed to feel after getting our affairs in order.

A year later while riding off a treeless mountain slope in a rainstorm I was struck by lightning. There was a white flash. It felt as though sequins had been poured down my legs, then an electrical charge thumped me at the base of my skull as if I’d been mugged. Afterward the crown of my head itched and the bottoms of my feet arched up and burned. “I can’t believe you’re still alive,” my husband said. The open spaces had cleansed me before. This was another kind of scouring, as when at the end of a painful appointment with the dentist he polishes your teeth.

Out across the Basin chips of light on waterponds mirrored the storm that passed us. Below was the end-of-the-road ranch my husband and I had just bought, bumped up against a nine-thousand-foot-high rockpile that looks like a Sung Dynasty painting. Set off from a series of narrow rambling hay fields which in summer are cataracts of green, is the 1913 poor-man’s Victorian house—uninsulated, crudely plumbed—that is now ours.

A Texan, Billy Hunt, homesteaded the place in 1903. Before starting up the almost vertical wagon trail he had to take over the Big Horns to get there, he married the hefty barmaid in the saloon where he stopped for a beer. “She was tough as a piece of rawhide,” one old-timer remembered. The ten-by-twenty cabin they built was papered with the editorial and classified pages of the day; the remnants are still visible. With a fresno and a team of horses, Hunt diverted two mountain creeks through a hundred acres of meadows cleared of sagebrush. Across the face of the mountain are the mossed-over stumps of cedar and pine trees cut down and axed into a set of corrals, sheds, gates, and hitchrails. With her first child clasped in front of the saddle, Mrs. Hunt rode over the mountains to the town of Dayton—a trip that must have taken fifteen hours—to buy supplies.

Gradually the whole drainage filled up with homesteaders. Twenty-eight children attended the one-room schoolhouse a mile down the road; there were a sawmill and blacksmith’s shop, and once-a-month mail service by saddle horse or sleigh. Now the town of Cloverly is no more; only three families live at the head of the creek. Curiously, our friends in the valley think it’s crazy to live in such an isolated place—thirty miles from a grocery store, seventy-five from a movie theater. When I asked one older resident what he thought, he said, “Hell almighty … God didn’t make ranchers to live close to town. Anyway, it was a better town when you had to ride the thirty miles to it.”

We moved here in February: books, tables, and a rack of clothes at one end of the stock truck, our horses tied at the back. There was a week of moonless nights but the Pleiades rose over the ridge like a piece of jewelry. Buying a ranch had sent us into spasms of soul-searching. It went against the bachelor lives we had grown used to: the bunkhouse-bedroll-barroom circuit; it meant our chronic vagrancy would come to an end. The proprietary impulse had dubious beginnings anyway—we had looked all that up before getting married: how ownership translates into possessiveness, protection into xenophobia, power into greed. Our idea was to rescue the ranch from the recent neglect it had seen.

As soon as the ground thawed we reset posts, restrung miles of barbed wire, and made the big ranch gates—hung eighty years ago between cedar posts as big around as my hips—swing again.

Above and around us steep canyons curve down in garlands of red and yellow rimrock: Pre-Cambrian, Madison, Chugwater formations, the porous parts of which have eroded into living-room-sized caves where mountain lions lounge and feast on does and snowshoe rabbits. Songbirds fly in and out of towering cottonwoods the way people throng office buildings. Mornings, a breeze fans up from the south; evenings, it reverses directions, so there is a streaming of life, a brushing back and forth like a massage. We go for walks. A friend told us the frosting of limestone that clings to the boulders we climb is all that’s left of the surface of the earth a few million years ago. Some kinds of impermanence take a long time.

The seasons are a Jacob’s ladder climbed by migrating elk and deer. Our ranch is one of their resting places. 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. Later in the year, feeding the bales of hay we’ve put up is a regurgitative act: thrown down from a high stack on chill days they break open in front of the horses like loaves of hot bread.