Looking for the heroic in all the female places
My grandmother Mona was missing an index finger on her left hand because she cut it off with an ax when she was a little girl. The part of her hand that should have been a finger ended at its big round knuckle with not even a scar. That my straight-backed and elegant grandmother with her black shiny shoes and blue-and-white printed jersey dresses had ever been in proximity to firewood was a wonder to me. I was even more impressed after she explained the concept of firewood.
Mona lived in Portland at the end of her life and didn’t visit us very often, but the absent finger, which I noticed at about age four, set me on an entirely new course regarding my family. After that, when Mona came to visit, there was a whiff of old cowboy times around the house and enough silences to make her mysterious as well as loved.
Due to some fortunate indiscretion on the part of my grandfather, Harry, I had two grandmothers on my father’s side and cousins in descending ages all over the West. The old hurts had shrunk up to slight pauses in the stories told by the first and second generations, and the meaning of those hesitations was entirely lost upon me in the third. What I knew for sure was that I had two grandmothers who had known horses and wild Indians and cowboys. My other grandmother, Margie, lived close to us for years and was a grandmotherly figure in every way. She grew flowers and sewed aprons and upholstered her own chairs. She baked cookies and muffins. And when she was in her seventies and we’d bought an intractable Appaloosa mare named Candy who liked to throw herself over backward to squish the rider, Margie climbed on and taught the mare to behave.
Until I was a teenager, I never learned any names of plants in eastern Oregon where I grew up, except for the few plants that my parents talked me into tending in the garden and the weeds they showed me how to dig out of the yard. As a result, for years the only plants I could identify that grew where we lived were buttonweed and Russian thistle. When I got old enough to read Zane Grey’s novels about the west at Mona’s urging, I learned about a few of the desert plants. My favorite Zane Grey heroine was Sego Lily. Lovely words, I thought, and one day I found her namesake. I was riding a horse around the Owyhee Desert margins in spring, probably in dampish and still-green May, when I came up to a flower all by itself on a pale-green stalk. It was surrounded by nothing but the pebbly brown desert soil and a few clumps of sagebrush standing back in admiration. A frail tulip shape, a goblet for an elf—each delicate petal started out pink but reached upward to a nearly transparent white tip. It was like meeting an angel. There was not a doubt in my mind that I was looking at a sego lily, and also that she was a girl.
Some ranch families still needed their horses, but that wasn’t our story. We owned a small grocery store, and my father hadn’t ridden horses since he was young. In our family, I was the caboose and the only girl. With my grandmothers’ stories and in the company of a handful of young friends who had horses, I was doomed to be horse-crazy. By the time I was nine, over the worried objections of my mother and the annoyed bemusement of my older brothers—all three of them deeply engaged with the second half of the twentieth century—there was a roan pony in our pasture. Several horses would follow as my dad indulged my interest and explored his own affection for a ranch culture he’d never actually had much chance to enjoy when he was living in it.
Dad’s first order of business was the acquisition of the roan pony, Comet. Comet was rumored to be part Standardbred and part Welsh Pony. He’d sometimes pace, the classy smooth parallel gait of the Standardbred show horse. Dad had asked Rollie McKinley, who knew a lot about horses, to buy me a large pony, so Mr. McKinley brought the sturdy little horse all the way from a sale at Twin Falls, Idaho. He said Comet had been raised by the Blackfoot Indians, a fact that interested me greatly and excused Comet’s odd color. He was a red roan, a coat color of mixed sorrel and brown and white hairs, but he was also a pinto, with a normal brown eye on the roan side of his head and one blue eye on the white-patched other side. This was very much out of fashion at the time. Now you see pintos all over that country, and even pinto mules, but there were hardly any when I was a kid. None of my friends had one. The country around there was still getting over being a working West and was not yet aware of itself in flashy horses and cowboy poetry.
Comet didn’t like men to ride him. He’d evidently had some bad experiences, and he had some health problems too. He’d gotten into too much grain and was slightly foundered, which left his front hooves in terrible shape. He came to us with gigantic rope burns cut into the back of his hocks from being kept on a rope hobble. On someone’s advice, we rubbed bacon grease into these wounds every day until they closed. He was a gentle soul and allowed us to do this without fidgeting. We trimmed his hooves carefully for months until the spongy and sore red areas from the foundering worked themselves out. He was docile when I rode, but he was feisty with Dad and threw my brothers off his back at any chance they gave him. To tease me, they called him “Vomit.” One day my middle brother Cliff was going to “ride the kinks out of him” for me, but as soon as he swung onto Comet’s bare back, Comet took off down the hill toward the Snake River at a run. About eighty yards into the ride, Cliff didn’t make the same sudden ninety-degree left turn as the agile little horse. Comet ended up at Mrs. Williams’s house, and Cliff ended up in the ditch. After a while Cliff came back up the hill leading the horse. Giving me a leg up, he delivered a too-hard push that sent me clear over Comet’s back and piled me up in the gravel on the other side. “Whaddya do that for?” I asked him.
Comet and I explored the sagebrush hills and ditch banks around Adrian. There was Brown Butte, where the big letter A is painted white on the rocks, and little Rattlesnake Butte in front of it. Rattlesnake is just a pile of basalt boulders you can climb on, not more than a few hundred feet high, but there was a cave in it we called the “Indian Cave,” about which was told our local version of the story of how the guy from the university had found the Indian skeleton. I’d go to the cave with a playmate or two, however many it took to be brave. We’d gallop up bareback and throw our horses’ reins around sagebrush and scramble up the moss-eaten rocks and then pull ourselves on our bellies back into the acrid, thick dust of the cave. If we had a flashlight along, we’d go clear to the end, where the passageway widened into a “cavern” probably ten feet wide and three feet high. We’d cough until the sour-tasting dust settled so we could look around for Indian bones.
My dad let me join the 4-H horse club, and in the late summer I’d take Comet to the county fair. All of us kids would make our horses shiny with soaps and oils and then lead them or ride them around to be judged by the officials and admired by our parents. All of us got ribbons, blue or red or white. Other kids’ horses were bigger, with eyes both the same color, but Comet had become my friend. One morning I went down to the horse barns early, before anyone else was awake. I lay down in the straw next to Comet and went to sleep with my arms around his neck.
When I got older, I lobbied for a taller horse. This was a gigantic mistake, but of course I didn’t know that. Riding with my friends, I’d begun to feel silly on a pony. Dad said he’d buy a horse for himself, a horse he could ride when he rode to the hills with me. He said I could ride that horse when he wasn’t along. We went over by Meridian to a fellow who crossbred Appaloosas and Thoroughbreds, and Dad picked out a three-year-old, a light bay gelding with a vividly spotted rump blanket. Dad told me to take a ride around the corral, but as soon as I got in the saddle the young horse crow-hopped and knocked me off against the fence. Even before I got back on, I heard Dad tell the owner, “We’ll take him.”
I’m not sure what my father saw in that horse at that moment. I don’t think anything was ever really interesting to him unless it was a challenge to be overcome. All I knew in those days about my father’s interior life, if I supposed he had one, was that he always seemed to want me to do things he hadn’t been able to do—graduate from high school, be the best athlete, know the right word or answer. And whenever I didn’t, his disappointment in himself spread over me, too, all the more as I got older. I didn’t know about my mom’s family thinking that an uneducated, rootless young man might not be good enough for her. I don’t know if they really thought that, only I know now that he thought he might not be good enough, and now he wanted some turning point back again, maybe a time before his folks split up, the time when he had family all over the green creeks and the sunburnt hills. He had these pictures of perfect horses, perfect achievements and prizes, perfect families, of how it would be if he had them. Sometimes he’d forget that he’d grown up and done well, that he already had what he wanted.
Dad never rode his new horse much, which had the unfortunate effect of putting me in charge. I was only saved from Comanche’s sullen nature by his laziness. He threw his head and nearly knocked my teeth out. He reared, lay down in canals, and rolled on my saddle. Sometimes I couldn’t control him; other times I couldn’t wake him up. But the increase in altitude was exciting. Deciding one spring that I would be a barrel racer, I practiced every weekend—but not nearly enough—and then signed up to ride in one of the local rodeos. I remember my dad took me down to register for the race, and we were a few days too late, but Dad talked them into putting me on the list.
When we got to Nyssa for the rodeo, there’d been a big thunderstorm and the sky was still so dark that they turned on the stadium lights. Comanche got us around the first barrel, and we were on the way to the second when he noticed the lights. He stopped dead in his tracks, throwing me up over the saddle horn and against his neck. He stood and shook for endless seconds until I could get him headed out of the arena. My face was burning up with shame. I’d overheard one fellow by the gate tell his son, “Let’s watch this little girl on the spotted horse ride,” but they weren’t there when I rode out of the arena. When I got back to the stands I couldn’t look at anyone, especially my dad and my 4-H leader, Gladys, who’d come to the rodeo to cheer me on. My dad could barely talk to me after the rodeo, his mood as dark and stormy as the sky. A few days later, back at my practice barrels at Big Bend Park, I timed myself riding Comet and tied the race winner’s time.
Dad, born in 1912, sometimes blamed my mom for dragging him toward convention and dull middle-class values, which was pretty ironic given that he never stopped pushing us kids toward our own dull middle-class values. He loved my mom a lot and told my brother David at one point that Mom had been the difference between success and failure in his life, but at times he didn’t give her much credit. When he felt bad and had a couple of extra beers, he liked to use my mom as an example of the opposite of whatever quality he was trying to shore up in himself at the moment—intelligence, compassion, wisdom. At those Oly-pop-influenced moments, his descriptions of the lost Edens of who he might have been, minus my “mercenary” mother, were colorful and discouraging in an eastern Oregon, old Irish sort of way. If my dad was talking about a woman he respected, it was usually one of the grandmothers, those bastions of his lost youth, or often an outsider to us, like the mother of his old friend Clarence. In those descriptions, he pronounced woman with the letter o long and unfamiliar—the woe over the man, the word nearly too strange to say.
His occasional lascivious mentions of women made me uncomfortable too, sideways grinning comments about bosoms or butts made sotto voce to uncles or my now-adult brothers. When these were accidentally overheard by me, I was bothered and puzzled because I couldn’t really determine how he felt about women—my purported future identity. There were no grandfathers in my world, all having exited by one curtain or another before I was on scene, and my mom’s mom had died when I was very young. The surviving grandmothers on Dad’s side were loved and admired by him, but were part of a mysterious female past to which I had no easy access.
I liked my dad a lot, and when I was a child I took his general appraisal of the world without question. Since his attitude toward women seemed ambivalent, I struggled with this problematic fate of growing up female. Horses were emblems of his treasured early boyhood and of my capable tomboy present. Horses were possible.
As we got horsier and Dad gave more thought to the fact that he could actually claim to have lived in a cowboy family, the old connections and people started popping up around us. Gladys, the leader of the 4-H horse club, was someone Dad had known since his childhood. Although Dad hadn’t given Gladys much thought for forty years, he began to speak about her like she’d been one of his close friends, and they both seemed to enjoy suddenly having a cohort from the long ago. When we went over to her place, Gladys said, “Your dad is a pal of mine,” and my dad said, “Gladys is a good old girl.” I was intrigued by this cross-gender camaraderie—that a grown woman, an old woman, would have been a pal of my father’s. It contradicted what I knew about him. She fascinated me because she seemed to have devised a way to scoot around being female and get to the real stuff, which was horses.
From day one, Gladys was on my side. At the ill-fated barrel-racing event, Gladys acted like I hadn’t made a fool of myself in front of half of Malheur County. The day after the rodeo, she got her horse trailer and took me and the horses out to her ranchland above Succor Creek. She didn’t really have much to do out there, but we took care of a few of her horseback tasks—wonderful fun for me.
That day would be the sum total of my career as a working cowboy as we chased Gladys’s cows away from where they had collected themselves around little potholes of trampled water and up to where there was grass left for them to eat. We checked the fences, making sure none of Pete Bishop’s white Charolais cattle could get in and mix with Gladys’s Black Angus, causing ugly mottled-gray offspring. Pete was even older than Gladys and shared her early-century cowboy background, but he was an enemy as far as the fence line was concerned. She complained about him, how picky he was about his “precious white cows.”
After that pleasant work, which required no dismounting, we rode around the gullies admiring her now-placid cows and then made our way up onto the high basalt ridges where we could look over at the Owyhee Canyon and down on the water backed up by the Owyhee Dam. The water was a bright blue, in contrast to the yellow and red canyon that held it. I’d been down there fishing with my dad, and I knew the water was a milky green and that the blues were just an illusion of distance and sky.
Gladys showed me a place where a hillside had newly slipped down, a tear in the sagebrush fabric about a hundred yards long, fifteen or twenty feet deep. It was strange to learn that the ripped earth in ribboned layers of browns and reds was still moving, that the faces of ancient basalt and shales were whitecaps in a sea of stone. I have a picture of Gladys from that day, above the torn ground. She is turned sideways on her big mare Tahoe, made aware of herself as both myth and flesh by the picture taking. She is wearing her red shirt, only one shade brighter than the deep-red horse. She took a picture of me, too, a skinny kid in a stocking cap and an old green cowboy shirt with the sleeves torn off. I probably thought I could look like Gladys if I did that, or that having brown arms meant I deserved to be there.
Let me draw you a picture of Gladys when she was in my world. She was a tall woman for her generation, maybe five foot six. Not skinny or fat, she had a big stomach. It was not a beer belly, because she never touched alcohol, but a hay-bale-bucking belly, a horse-breaking strong belly. It was a bit old and folded up when I knew her, like a pile of towels.
She wore jeans—Wranglers, not the “Can’t Bust ’Em” Levi’s that were popular in the 1960s and which most real working people found too tight-legged. She used a thick leather belt with no tooling, no name on the back of it. She had a variety of plaid short-sleeved cotton cowboy shirts, but in the hot weather she usually wore just a turquoise tank top. You could see all of her large arms, sun-browned, darker than walnuts. Every hair on her head was either black or white, a kinky blueroan bush of hair that she cut off straight all the way around, a couple of inches above her shoulders. She parted her hair not quite in the middle and held it back with a barrette on the thick side. In the truck or outside she always wore a hat, not a cowboy hat exactly but a felt hat with a broad flat brim. It was a milk-chocolate-colored hat with the sides of the brim rolled up from years of being grabbed off the wall and pulled down on her head without thought as to how it looked. It had a narrow leather strap for a hat band and was sweat-stained around the band, but other than that it was a noticeably clean hat for a rancher.
Gladys would never have been dirty for effect, but only because she was doing dirty work and couldn’t clean up. Even out at camp in the trailer—which was not the pre-fabricated affair suggested by the term trailer but one of the old half-domed wooden boxes you used to see at sheep and cow camps all over that country—there was a metal basin and a jug of water for washing up. The inside smelled of bacon grease and coffee and unpainted wood and the wool blankets on the bunks, a good old smell. In the trailer, Gladys always kept a clean shirt to wear when she drove back to town. She wore boots, but not so highheeled and not so pointy-toed as the cowboy boots you see in the stores now. Gladys’s wire-rimmed glasses sat on high cheekbones in a wide face, and her black eyes darted around behind them, looking right at you, looking at everything far and near, and fitting it all into a sturdily fenced version of the world.
One strata deeper than the corn and sugar beet farmers were the old ranch people like Gladys and Pug, the Bishops and Skinners, the Camerons and Timmermans. These were the grandparents of the kids I went to school with. Nearly subterranean now, people of ancient trucks and auctions, owners of the old horses standing swaybacked in small fields, white spots bright on brown withers where the old saddles had rubbed. Mom’s and Dad’s parents and grandparents were of those same people, which miraculously made them my people too: Parkses and Looneys and Botts and Hendersons. They had all been part of this older country, friends and enemies of the Bannocks, miners, and ranchers. Now, though, we were band boosters, owners of a stereo and a Naugahyde couch. Vietnam was still happening, and Woodstock hadn’t happened yet. I wasn’t going to be a girl teenager for a couple of years, and Mom and Dad still had the grocery store, though they were getting tired and looking for a way out.
Dad and I were just trying to finish off my childhood and put off the next big changes. I think now that what Dad was getting out of palling around with Gladys was that he thought she’d let him return to the parts of the past he’d admired and missed out on and had therefore reinvented. He wanted to reclaim the little green valleys with broken gray homesteads in them, rebuild the broken corrals.
For Dad, hills and horses were a lump in his throat he couldn’t get over, so the way he talked about the old places and people was as if they were characters in medieval plays, standing for qualities of mind and heart, and as if the eastern Oregon hills were some great healing theater. He could have been a playwright, my father, and he’d have made the long ago turn out right. Standing out in the sun wearing one of the gray cowboy hats he bought when we started having horses again, looking down at the ground with his thumbs tucked into his belt, I could feel the deep contradictions grinding in him like the plates that split the earth and pushed up the hills. Like all good playwrights, he never finished getting out what he wanted to say. He’d see the remains of a rock corral or a broken cabin in some little gully and the tears would come down his cheeks. “You know what I mean, Mim,” he’d say.
Well, I did and I didn’t. The trails and springs had belonged to people he’d known before he got yanked out of childhood with his mom and then put back into the country with his Grandmother Parks. He had farmed for a few difficult years with his dad, where a cow kicked his leg and broke it, killing his baseball dreams. Now he felt like he should remember how to get to places that didn’t even exist anymore. He hated that the old ranches were gone, and he loved to find a ruined cabin poking out of the sagebrush in the bottom of a gully. Until he was very old, he’d drive to the Owyhee Dam the back way, over Cherry Creek Road (when was there ever a cherry tree in that country?) that had mostly washed off the side of the steep hill. I’d be so scared he was going to roll the Jeep that I’d get out and walk, which made him mad. There was always some challenge or contest he had with himself, and none of us ever knew how far he was going to take it.
From when I was small, I knew the best gift I could offer my father was to remember places in the hills, some of which I’d never been to, and say their names: Lone Willow Spring, the Rock Corral, North Fork of the Malheur. When I run my mind over the texture of those place names, I can feel my father’s deep regard for them. I learned that from him: to feel the buried stories beneath me wherever I go.
Apparently, Gladys had no such complications. She knew everybody would come out to go riding in the hills, out the old trails to Three-Fingered Jack, Rimrock, Round Top, Lone Willow Spring, and she knew how to get there. She knew where to cross the creek on a horse, to find a pretty view or a little seep of sweet water. She knew how to get to the bleached bones of a ranch community that was long gone, killed when the highway looped around it or the price of cows went down or the water from the dam came up over the top of it. She knew where there was a willow tree tall enough and shady enough to eat a sandwich under without even having to get off your horse. Gladys was on a first-name basis with all the geography of my parents’ past, like the trails in and out of the pocked and golden spires of Leslie Gulch, trails that used to run up and down the Owyhee River to ranches and old towns before the dam got built in the 1930s.
It surprised me whenever I ran into the fact that my parents’ distant past stories were Gladys’s present tense. My mother and my aunt were the last schoolteachers in tiny Owyhee ranch communities Watson and Hot Springs before the water came up in 1934, covering the house of the moonshiner with his same load of whiskey-hiding grain he hauled to Homedale and back up the canyon again. The water covered the house where my mom boarded, where the wife thought my pretty eighteen-year-old mom was after her ugly husband. Mom didn’t have any door to her room in the attic of their house. At the Watson schoolhouse in 1933, one of the Fisher kids told her the world wasn’t round ‘cause his daddy said it wasn’t. Mom cut sagebrush to heat the school, and no one helped her until the second year because they were just waiting for her to give up. But she never did give up until the water came up and they all had to leave—ranchers, moonshiner, teacher and kids, and all. I had these strong secondhand memories that came from my mother’s stories, all under thirty or so feet of water by the time I heard them, greenish milky water you can’t look down into. Standing on the Owyhee lakeshore, though, you can look up at the same redrock rims that have always been there. You can climb up there on foot, but you have to watch for snakes. Snakes are always present tense.
Gladys had always had cows running out on the Owyhee and always would have cows as long as she lived, so there wasn’t any past tense to it. I found that I liked to go with Gladys, instead of my dad, to the places my dad knew, because she was a cheerful encyclopedia of ways to “make a day of it,” getting from some old stone corral to a rimrock where you could sit and eat a candy bar and still get back to the truck and load the horses before dark. If she felt the names draining out of the country, it didn’t make her sad.
She never saw things in terms of the good old days. In the late 1960s she got a pre-fab trailer house and electricity and an indoor toilet, but those things didn’t make any difference to her. That new stuff was just what there was to replace the old stuff when it wore out. She never saw anything in terms of progress; it was only just whatever she wanted to do next. I can’t remember her ever telling me that electric lights were better or that it was nice to have a flush toilet or a new truck. What happened inside a house didn’t concern her much, and trucks were for getting horses from one trailhead to another, or to and from the auction house. She might have considered this last item to be a modern advantage.
Gladys didn’t see any contradiction between horses and jet airplanes, though she knew other people did. She just liked horses. She knew about and enjoyed her popularity as anomaly and western relic without really considering herself unusual, making a pretty clean division between what other people thought of her and what she knew about herself. There were cruel stories about her, like the rumor that she’d had her breasts cut off so they wouldn’t bounce when she rode a horse. When word got around the school that I was friends with Gladys, my schoolmates immediately told me those mean stories. I don’t know if she would have been puzzled or would have laughed. One or the other I think; she was good at disregarding petty attitudes.
This was an ability I fervently aspired to. Discovering Gladys was to deny expectation and fate. It was like finding out, in a canoe, that you got control by keeping yourself slower or faster than the current, as opposed to matching the speed of the water and being carried along helplessly on other people’s opinions, pouring over the rocks and whirling in the pools.
I didn’t just want to know what Gladys knew; I wanted to be like her, to take a form in present time like she seemed to be able to do. As I snuck up on puberty, I must have been curious why my father was not standing in front of me to supervise my advance in this direction. Finding Gladys was like discovering a mysterious tunnel in my own backyard, and I set out to explore how this woman might stretch the term woman out for me, make it something a girl could crawl into.
I liked almost everything Gladys said, and she said a lot. People said that after she died, Pug learned how to talk. That may be true, because I don’t remember the sound of his voice. He was busted up from ranching, and he hobbled around the chores at the home place. His face was bent into a smile, wrinkled and handsome from being outside all his life—the way you want to look when you get old. Gladys always said there was only one good man in the world, and that was Pug. They’d had no children, so it was just them and the horses and dogs. After Gladys died, Pug married again, which surprised everybody who knew him. We just thought the dogs and Pug would go into the grave with her like the attendants of a Chinese emperor.
Riding in the truck with Gladys made me feel that we could do anything. “Anything” was comprised of going to the hills on horses or to the auction in her old truck, but Gladys treated me like an old friend, not the daughter of an old friend.
Gladys went to the livestock auction in Caldwell every Sunday in the turquoise Chevy pickup, a fifty-something, with a metal rack around the bed for hauling livestock. Or it was a Ford. I can tell you it smelled like sunburnt rubber and gasoline when you crawled into the cab. I can see the Mexican blanket she kept on the bench seat for “the boys,” her little dogs. The black-and-white dog was some sort of boxer crossed with some kind of cow dog. Maybe his name was Tippy. The other dog was one of those noisy little scrub brushes that couldn’t do much but yap and curl up wherever you would have liked to sit. Gladys said she preferred them to most people, but there was room enough on the seat for me too.
“Let’s you and me go look at those horses,” she’d say on the phone, and pretty soon she’d pop in our door with her hat on, with some remarks of friendliness but little content for my parents, saving the real stuff for me, and we’d hurry out to her truck and scoot the dogs back into the middle of the seat: “C’mon now, little boys, let’s let Mary get in.” On the way to Caldwell, she’d tell me about what she was doing with the cows, or what Pug thought about some pasture project. Often we talked about which horse she wanted to trade in for another.
We sometimes took a horse with us to the sale, and we often brought one home. Because of this practice of Gladys’s, she and Pug were known to be “horse poor,” with a pasture full of varying horse shapes nibbling grass and twitching off flies. We’d try to get to the sale early so we could walk around out back in the corrals, climbing up on fences to look at the sale animals and to talk with all the people Gladys knew, which was everybody. We’d feel the legs of horses and look at their teeth, then go up and sit in the sale arena, where Gladys would chatter and consult with me about every horse that came through the ring, though she knew how little I knew. “Look at that ankle. That horse is a little down in that ankle, isn’t he? Sometimes you can’t tell till you get ’em walkin’. I looked at him, but we don’t want him.” She’d say we, like that.
The auction hall was a little amphitheater with plywood terraces for seats, smooth with many years’ applications of thick white enamel. A sweet, vinegary smell rose from the dry sawdust and old manure on the floor where the animals came through below us. The seat area bent around and above this little arena with a gate at either side. On the last Sunday of every month, a steady stream of Malheur and Canyon County livestock (one county was in Oregon and one was in Idaho, but that was only a paperwork detail) would pour in through one gate, be prodded around the ring to the auctioneer’s popcorn syllables, and head out the other. We’d wait until all the pigs and sheep and even cows had gone through before we went in to the hall to sit down. Gladys seldom bought cows, so she wasn’t much interested in the cow transactions unless she was selling.
Gladys was a smart bidder, too, a nodder, raising her hand only when the auctioneer wasn’t paying attention. She’d talk to the other bidders under her breath to me, “Now, you don’t want that horse. What would a big fat man like you want with a little mare like that?” It bothered me when she talked that way, or when she’d size up some man who looked at us, at me. She’d say, “I wouldn’t want something like that hanging around, would you?” With these comments, she alluded to the sexual and physical threat of the male-heavy world around us, as if she was accepting other people’s view of herself, a broken bone that’s gotten stronger than the bone around it, or a scar. But I didn’t want her strength to be a response to injury. I wanted Gladys to be a regular thing, an option that would solve the limitations I felt. I thought then that self-respect was like being saved—if you got it one time you were in forever. I hated those indications that Gladys, even with the truck and the horses and the ranch and the talk, still wasn’t powerful enough.
Sometimes she was outbid, and she always gave up if the bid went a dollar more than she had decided the horse was worth. She’d give up the bidding without much comment, and I’d feel disappointed that we weren’t going to have the excitement of that new horse. Money to Gladys was purely utilitarian, and she never talked about it—the lack of it or how much other people had. I never saw her spend a single non-horse penny she didn’t need to spend, though we always had a hamburger in the auction house café before we went home, with or without a horse.
She had a weakness for Appaloosa horses. At one sale we bought a little mare that was a speckled apricot color, some combination of Appaloosa, POA (Pony of America—a pony version of an Appaloosa), and grade stock. The mare tried to bite us while we were looking at her, but she had been bred to an Appaloosa stud and Gladys wanted to see what came out.
Gladys named her Chippy, and I remember the naming conversation because it played into my identity crisis about which Gladys had not a clue. She was an enthusiastic mentor in all things, including what could embarrass me, in the way that you can become embarrassed about things you’ve never thought of as embarrassing until someone else dances around a topic or uses a euphemism. Chippy was one. At some point in history the word referred to prostitutes who accepted company coupons earned on the job by miners or loggers in return for sex, but it was a word from my grandparents’ generation. When Gladys first used it in a description of someone, I’d never heard it before: “She’s a little bit chippy,” for promiscuous. Gladys wouldn’t tell me straight out what the word meant, except that it was just for “some women,” and that made me squirm because I was always trying to figure out what kind of a woman I was going to be. She got tremendous fun out of naming the Appaloosa mare Chippy because the mare was with foal. Then she would laugh whenever she said the mare’s name, “My Chippy is a little chippy.” Her voice and her laugh were a high music, sometimes insistent as an electric drill.
Then there was the term pee pee. Gladys had useful advice for a girl who had to pee when she was out driving cows with a bunch of men. “You just hang back a little,” Gladys told me, “then you find a sagebrush to pee pee behind. If a man’s any kind of gentleman, he knows not to look back at you.” I had been worried about this on trail rides and felt comforted by the advice, but I did wish she’d limit herself to one syllable.
Like those squirmy terms, most of Gladys’s observations on the world outside Pug and ranching were a little after the fact. She had already sorted out what mattered to her in the society and dismissed the rest as insignificant or trouble to be avoided, like a buzzing snake. She tried, for my sake, to be observant about what was going on so that she could be a friend and warn me. She’d say, “Men want you to drink wine, and then they think they can do whatever they want with us girls. But we’ll show them, won’t we?” And I’d say, “You bet,” though I was a bit intrigued at that time by the thought that drinking wine might turn me into something anyone would want.
Gladys and Pug lived less than a mile away from old Big Bend Park so it was easy for Gladys to hop on a horse and ride over to preside at the meetings and practices of the horse club. We’d taken over the old park because it was empty and it was there. Its ownership was so old and uncertain that none of the local farmers had cleared it for pasture or potatoes. A grove of huge elms stood at one end and at the other end was an open area where we had the barrels for racing.
There had been a dance hall at the park in the 1930s, and my mother met my father there at a dance. But the hall had fallen down years before, and the park was all gone to weeds and fallen branches. The park held a few older family stories I knew about. My own experiences there, of untangling brush piles and clearing space for horse games, would cause a strange little dust devil of an argument with my mother years later. After my father died I was talking to her about the park, which had become a potato field at last. Mom told me I could not have possibly known where the park had been, so we got in the car and I took her there. Her odd anger at me changed to puzzlement: “How did you know where it was?” She had known the place for sixty years, the dances and the giant elms that had guarded the grassy space where Big Bend school had stood. I remember my uncle Gaynor, my father’s older brother, describing those long-ago days when Mom and my aunt Anna had come down from the Owyhee and taught at Big Bend together, in 1935 and 1936. He said the sisters were so beautiful with their bobbed hair and dark eyes: “Those Henderson girls. You should have seen them.”
Mom could tell you the names of the children in that Big Bend school, and she kept track of them later, too: who they married, where they lived. She taught their grandchildren when she went back to teaching second grade in Adrian many years later. As far as she was concerned, by then, the park belonged to her past, not mine. My few summers there with Gladys had slipped through the sieve of her memory; I was my very own ghost.
With Gladys, we kids had wanted to clean up the park, maybe even build a club house. But that never got done. For one thing, we didn’t have the right kind of people. The kids in the club didn’t have Jaycee or Lion’s Club types of parents. Their parents had to work too hard or they drank too much. Some were “jack” Mormons, too rowdy and independent for the church so that no one from their wards ever came to help them. Instead of having horses because they had money to burn and it was fashionable, they had horses leftover from when horses were important—which is an indication of how lazy they were about moving forward with the world. They weren’t up to clearing the limbs and old boards in the park on Sundays. “Not exactly a ball of fire,” was how my mother described one of the dads.
In fact, the kids in the horse club were people I wouldn’t have been with if it weren’t for the horses. They were invisible at school, didn’t get good grades, and didn’t hang around for sports. If they weren’t mousy and quiet, they were in trouble. But to Gladys, any kid or horse who showed up was a good possibility. She never blinked an eye at what her western renaissance was digging up, and I never heard her complain that fixing up the park was a pipe dream.
Personally, Gladys had plenty of dreams, and she generously gave me a part in them. She wanted to ride the Pacific Crest Trail, from California up through Washington, on an organized ride with a club that only allowed Appaloosa horses. Since I had Comanche, Gladys intended that she and I would do the ride together, a plan that seemed wild and beyond hope to me, like being an astronaut. But Gladys was serious, and I watched with fascination someone who could methodically take all the steps to achieve something she wanted to do.
There was a kind of retro movement for ranch people starting up when I knew Gladys. The Oregon Trail Grange Hall hadn’t been used much for decades, but when the 4-H horse club started up with Gladys as the leader, we put on skits and parties there. The hall had an oak plank floor, soaked with the sharp, sweet smell of ancient cookies and coffee. I went to dances there, once with a boy from Nyssa who rode in the rodeos. I mostly danced with his dad, a Mormon bishop with a belly so big I had to dance a couple of feet away from him. After that, the son kept inviting me to go to church, but I didn’t want to go, so the dance invitations stopped. I was a full-blown teenager by this time and more likely to slow dance in a dark school auditorium to “Crimson and Clover,” over and over. It would take many years to realize I’d loved the “Little Foot Waltz,” an old fiddle tune.
The normal way the story goes at this point is that the old friend gets gray and drops out of the picture while the young person becomes an adult and launches out into the brave new world on her own, leaving the creaky old friend behind. But what happened was more wonderful. Gladys, at the age of sixty-something, had gotten notoriety for being a great 4-H horse club leader, and several of the still-agile ranch grandparents woke up from their naps. Gladys found even more old horse pals, mostly women, who were just as sturdy and determined as she was to enjoy the hills. They became the Oregon Trail Grange Hall Riders and rode all over the Owyhees together. And Gladys had Tahoe, her soul mate.
Gladys hadn’t ever been interested in the big-butted quarter horses with their short ears and even tempers. At all those auctions she was looking for something else, something around the scrap heap of expectations about mixed-breed horses—called grade horses—that might turn out to be good. Long before I met her, Gladys had found her Tahoe, an exceptionally tall mare with a deep, wide chest. Tahoe was a blood-red bay whose coat darkened into long brown legs, the hooves black and hard as flint. Tahoe wasn’t a friendly animal; she was more likely to strike at you with a front foot than to nuzzle you for a rub. By this a few will know her for a mare. She had big ears for a horse, ears that moved every which way, taking things in. Her owners hadn’t been able to train her, and because she was no breed in particular she wasn’t valuable as a brood mare. She ended up at the sale when she was about three years old, and that is where Gladys picked her up. I always stayed out of reach of Tahoe’s teeth and her front legs, but she liked Gladys, and Gladys could do anything with her.
Gladys had a way to get a horse to walk, really walk, that nobody else could follow. Gladys hated it when a horse would trot with her. “I hate that jigging,” she’d say, then she’d pull the horse down to a walk but just keep agitating or clucking her tongue a little bit—just loud enough for the horse to hear—and in a few days that horse would shift into a fast walk whenever Gladys wanted him to. She even taught Comanche to walk like that, though I could rarely get him to do it.
Walking races were just becoming popular when I was in high school. Tahoe and Gladys won every race they entered around our country, usually held out at Zerbel’s runway, and they did it for years. It got more difficult to squeeze in a Saturday or Sunday with Gladys. The races would be written up in the Nyssa paper, the Gate City Journal, and Dad would have the article cut out and on the kitchen table when I came home on break from college. Gladys got her long fifteen minutes of glory in a lesser known region of Malheur County.
I loved Gladys and I loved horses, but I was getting distracted by the rest of my life, and sometimes it was scary to be on a horse. There were dangerous lightning storms and flash floods in the desert. My dad and I were famous in our family for liking to watch thunderstorms, sitting together in the doorsill at the back room of the store. No words passed between us in those times, just the love of wild light and plentiful disorder. But it was one thing to watch the sky from the back door of the store with my dad and another to pick my way through boulders, alone on a horse in the bottom of a funnel of clay and sandstone while the sky was black and splitting overhead.
One day when it stormed, I was on a ride with Gladys and the kids and parents from the 4-H club. A summer storm came up out of the heat in the afternoon, and we knew we’d be caught in it. I expected Gladys to say something about riding up out of the flash-flood-inviting gully, but she just said, “Looks like we are going to get wet,” then kept on chattering to the parents. It got yellow out and started to hail, not the huge kind that knocks down the grain but on its way to that kind of destruction.
My mom would say of thunderstorms that thunder means “the devil is beating his wife.” Many years later I was listening to audio tapes of a Koyukon Athabaskan woman in Alaska, and she startled me by using nearly the same expression about thunder: “The devil is mad at his wife.” Words get around, or storms bring them. In eastern Oregon, you knew you were about to be in a storm when the sky would glint yellowish gray and the filmy veils of virga would start to descend. The rough ground, the hills, showed the violence of these storms in washed-out gullies and boulders planted in the trail and creek bottoms. There was nothing for the soil to hang onto when the water came down, nothing between the sagebrush and greasewood clumps but the barest, most fragile latticework of grasses and wildflowers. Running water cut like acid through the hills, cutting all the way down to the farms and into the cultivated fields of corn and alfalfa, busting through the big irrigation canals, driving the farmers and the ditch riders crazy.
That day I thought we were going to get it. Everything around us began to look bruised, booming and flashing, and after the hail a hard, cold rain came down. The horses couldn’t stand the electricity in the air, and we kids couldn’t either, so we let them run up a gully in the rain, over rocks and holes, not completely out of control but barely hanging on to it. We let the horses run until they were breathing in heaves, a stupid thing for us to do. We were breathing like that, too, soaked and glowing with heat. Gladys didn’t say a word to us when she rode up, which meant she was truly angry.
Despite what you see in the movies, horses can’t run all the time. Dad and Gladys would both say this and I paid attention, mostly. A fast walk was how we rode anywhere, and if we wanted to race the horses we had to be out of sight of the adults. One of the few times we did that, I ended up in a barbed wire fence, with trouble explaining the holes in my arm when I got home. Another time I knocked Rich Ocamica clear off his horse when we were chasing a coyote and both horses decided to meet on the same trail. There was always this real barbed wire and sharp rock world out there, beyond the cautions of my father, and whenever I came up against it I was surprised.
And there were the snakes. Gladys said she and Pug had killed thirty-five rattlesnakes a day when they ran their first cows out on the Owyhee. I’d never seen even one rattlesnake up close, except the one my brothers caught in the yard and put in a big jar in the back room of the store. My dad hated rattlesnakes, and “Watch for snakes” was a litany I’d absorbed from him.
I was probably a sophomore in high school when some other kids and I took hot dogs and cans of pop and stayed in the hills with our horses one night until the moon and the rattlesnakes were both out. On the way home, I came close to being thrown twice when snakes buzzed under Comanche and made him buck. The parents were frantic with worry and met us at midnight with trucks and cars where the paved road ended under the canal by Brown Butte. We all got a solid tongue lashing, especially me from Dad. Afterward I never admitted how scared I’d been on that ride because anytime it came up Dad immediately started in with how stupid I was—“What a knucklehead.” He was as hard to agree with as he was to have an argument with.
Later on that summer, Gladys took me on a ride with the Oregon Trail Club, her cronies. I expected this to be a tame affair with a bunch of old-timers telling stories, leaning over their saddle horns, and letting the horses eat grass down along the creeks. But that isn’t what we did. We rode up in the Owyhee Breaks on the far side of the reservoir, and those old codgers took their horses down the steep faces of bluffs a thousand feet above the dam, looking right down on the spillway. The Owyhee Dam was the highest in the world when it was built, and I could scare myself standing on my own two feet looking down at it just from the top of the dam itself. So I got off Comanche halfway down the hill and led him down the rest of the way. Like the other horses, he was scooting on his butt and working his hind legs on the pea gravel slope. It was hard to hold onto the reins and stay out of his way. All the other riders were still in their saddles, enjoying the view and their confidence in sure-footed mounts. Dad wasn’t with us, but I know he would have been as terrified as I was.
My friendship with Gladys never wore out, but the shine wore off it for my mom and dad. Gladys was too loud and “mannish” for my mom, and Dad had found out he couldn’t really talk to Gladys in the flesh, despite his being proud of having known her for so long and approving of her as a non-woman woman. He didn’t agree with anything she said, but he couldn’t get a word in edgewise to say so. They’d be in the same room or leaning on the same fence, and she wouldn’t stop talking long enough for him to get a run at the subject. If she did let him talk, she’d complain to me later, “He just wanted to talk about those old things.”
Gladys was still trying to guide me on the right path in life. We talked about the Pacific Crest ride off and on, but I was getting booked up. I’d gone backpacking with a church group, and I brought home some new enthusiasms to share: backpacking and becoming a preacher. These ideas raised winds of violent objection from her. People said Gladys wouldn’t walk to the outhouse if she could catch a horse, which wasn’t true, literally, because the outhouse was closer than the corral. But she didn’t understand that there could be any benefit in walking when there were horses in the world, or any benefit in preaching when people were just what they were going to be forever no matter what. She said, “You wanna spend your whole life pretending you’re better than everybody else and gettin’ the rest of ’em to pretend they’re better than everybody too?”
Dad went on a few rides with us, but his back hurt him, and he didn’t feel as at home on a horse as he thought he should feel. Working at Big Bend Park drove him crazy because it made him hurt and because we weren’t doing it right. He wasn’t much fun to have along on the rides either. He was more cautious than Gladys and would ride around a hill while she’d walk Tahoe right up its face. He was always telling me how to hold the reins and how to sit in the saddle, though by that time I thought I had spent as much time on a horse as he had when he was a kid. I’d enjoyed coming out with Gladys as an escape from this critical attention, so it grated on me.
I still loved driving out in the Owyhees with my dad. He’d stop the red-and-white Willies Jeep halfway down into a gulch and turn it off so we could look at a little grove of locust trees someone had planted to grow fence posts a hundred years ago when there was a ranch there, or a line of cottonwoods along a creek. “Isn’t that pretty, Mim?” he’d say. One time we saw a mountain lion jump from one rim to another; another time I caught a little trout in a creek and felt his pride on me like sunshine. There was always a six-pack of Olympia or Budweiser beer, and a half-full can rode on his knee or in the open window at the end of his sun-freckled arm, as we swayed up and down the rutted two-track trails. But then he’d throw the empty can out the window. One time I got out of the moving truck, teenage Puritan, and fetched the beer can and threw it in the bed of the Jeep with him screaming at me the whole way, “Goddamit, I said leave it there!” That was a quiet ride home.
All the extra strength Dad could muster was spent on an acreage we were trying to fix up in Big Bend, a few miles away from the park, where he thought he and Mom would retire after the store, raise a couple of calves every year. Dad and my brother David dug holes and built a corral and stock chute. I’d hold boards while Dad scratched pencil marks then scratched them out and measured again, swearing “Hell’s bells,” his favorite profanity. He was not happy with how the ground went up and down and how it made his fence look. He was a bugger to work for, so I kept my ear phone in and my little transistor radio tuned to the rock-and-roll station.
With all the hats and horses going on, Dad had begun to wear cowboy boots again. He’d always had a pair of nice ones in the closet, and by the last years of his life he wore them all the time. When he and Mom gave up on their retirement ideas for the Big Bend acreage and moved down the hill to the little house her parents had owned, he complained about cold feet in the winter. He couldn’t work out in the shop in the winter because of his feet. By then I’d lived in Montana and learned that you could have warm feet if you changed your footgear. So I came home with a big pair of shoepacs and liners for him and advised against the cowboy boots. He thanked me and said the new ‘pacs were just the thing he needed. He kept them on the porch for the next seven years, spider habitat. The only time he ever wore them was the first ten minutes after he opened the box, just to please me. The cowboy boots never left his feet unless he was sleeping, and one of the last things we did together, a week before he died, was to pick up his rebuilt cowboy boots at the shoemaker’s shop in Vale.
Gladys had given me an opening into the ranch world I admired and the unfairly subsumed tradition of tough women who have always inhabited it. I continued to pry it open with high school trips to my teacher Carol Shultz’s ranch. Shultz was born into a western Idaho ranch family and became the primary operator of her father Harold’s land and Forest Service grazing leases. She and partner Bev Martin packed salt for the Payette Valley Cattle Association with horses and mules for nine mildly famous years and then ran cows on the high mountain meadows for decades more, protecting the stream environments and the grazing lands. The anti-government ranch rebels beating on their chests these days could have learned civility from Carol and Bev’s professional relationships with both the U.S. Forest Service and the rancher organizations. With other girls from our high school, I made trips to Carol’s ranches and became a fence post and barbed wire packer as well as a huge fan of elk steaks. Later on I sought out tough women like Ma Hill from Trout Creek, Montana, who was notoriously as familiar with a D-8 road-building Cat as with her string of outfitter horses. These women had apparently always been in the world, without raising much dust about whether they had families or just partners, whether they were old maids or idiosyncratic loners. They were characters in a western landscape filled with unusual and admirable people. Grandma Mona told me that she had known a quiet and capable cowboy named Little Joe Monaghan when she was growing up in Jordan Valley, Oregon, before 1900. When Joe died, people found out he was a woman. This was no big deal to Mona, who told me she thought it was a pretty good trick.
Thanks to people like Gladys and Carol and my grandmothers, I learned there were all kinds of ways to be female, though it also became clear that the trails were a labyrinth. Gladys gave me a taste for self-motivated people who did what they liked and hadn’t given a great deal of thought toward what was considered regular. In a cable-TV culture of Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and Botox, that attitude has been a friend.
As he felt his control over me diminish, Dad pulled harder and I scrambled away from him, leaving behind obligations I see now as belonging to me, though his presence was all around them. Dad told me one day that he was going to let the neighbors take care of Comet. Their little girl, Annie, would ride him. Another day, he told me that he’d sold Comanche to Gladys. He’d tell me these things, how Gladys was winning races, how she said to tell me hello, and her passed-on greeting became an accusation about my neglect. But I couldn’t sort out who I was neglecting. Then one day he told me, “Annie really loves Comet. You kind of lost interest, didn’t you?” When Comet died, Annie was home from college. While Comet was dying, she spent the whole night in the barn with him, with her arms around his neck. When Dad told me that, I was glad to allow it a painful pull on my heart. I am very much like my father, and I never lose interest in anything, just save it in some subterranean place and go on.
Gladys would have thought my sensation of loss and separation was nonsense if I had tried to explain it to her. What I’d guess now is that Dad and I were wrangling over the hills and who they belonged to, as if it could only be one of us. We never did figure it out—where the one of us stopped and the other began. I still don’t know, but now I’d just like to lay all these things out, watch the storms come and blow them all around. Just sitting beside each other in that doorway would be all we need.
I didn’t spend much time with Gladys during my high school and college years. By the time I went off to college, Gladys had lots of friends I didn’t know anymore—from the races, from all the auctions I missed. She and Pug slowly drew down their population of black cows, giving her more time for walking races with Tahoe. Often I wouldn’t even see Gladys when I came home, but my sense of her life was that she was plenty busy without me. The auction house was in the same town where I was going to college, but it might as well have been on the other side of the moon.
Gladys died of a heart attack on a summer morning. One minute she was standing by her truck, talking to the guy from the hardware store, and the next minute she was dead is how the story was told. Hers was a consistent and enviable performance on earth it seems to me, but then we see most people from the outside—see the gullies but not the storms that made them. It’s usually only between parents and children that the troubles are palpable, that the separateness of our bodies and our will to remake ourselves can’t quite pull the bone and blood of our shared histories apart.
I’d never visited either of the horses after they weren’t mine any more, but one time I went up on the State Line Road where I could look down on Gladys and Pug’s place. I could see Comanche out in the field, swishing his long Thoroughbred tail. Later, when I saw Gladys in town, I asked her about him and she said, “Well, he’s a little lazy.”
She said she thought about taking him to the sale, but she never did. She kept him around their place for years. She might have been doing that for me or for Dad, but I doubt that very much. She just liked him because he was pretty with that bright white blanket and black spots, and because she could get him to pay attention.