I was buying postcards in Bend, Oregon, and the woman behind the counter invited me to coffee. She delighted me abundantly, not least with this story. The wild open spaces of the American West hold some of the most remarkable women in the world: tough, funny, uncompromising, brilliant, capable.

A COUNTRY GIRL IN THE CITY CANYONS

Riata, raised in the high desert of the American West, was stunned when she moved to the city. Though she liked the hubbub and the irrevocable fevers, the savory hopefulness and irritable jubilation of city dwellers, she thought she saw one particular problem: The city thought it could concentrate the whole world within itself. All that was beautiful and fascinating could be incorporated within itself. It discussed itself, worked according to its own understanding, analyzed the world by its own rules and suppositions. It looked to the present and the future and took destiny into its hands. The city thought, in other words, that the world could be made familiar and human. And, as far as it went, this was all fine.

There was, though, an important problem: the world is not human. And so in their attempt to live as if the world could be made over in our own image, Riata and her city friends, however much fun they had, were playing out a glittering and useless lie.

Riata knew she had to take action. She returned to her home grounds; she walked through the high desert in the spring when the meadowlarks teased her with raucous suggestions. She visited once more the little bars in her hometown where she waited to drink her whiskey until the transcendent second when it was the warmth of her hand. She went out to see the mustangs come in noon light to the spring just below a limestone outcropping—the roan stallion, four mares, two little foals, circulating slowly there in dusty astonishment and satisfaction.

By these things, she recovered the old, commonplace gifts that in her girlhood had tricked her into hopefulness—gifts that recreated a woman beyond her personal ideas and preferences. But she understood the necessity of this: since the world is not human, the joke is on us—and there’s work to do.

This journey having been accomplished, she went back to the city, and studied how she might introduce these necessary visitations from a next world, which is this world. And so she did the obvious thing—she went to the phonebook and, choosing names at random, began writing postcards.

The postcards were usually one-liners, such things as:

You are the guardian of starlight, and so you’ve got to figure out how to work nights with good grace.

If you are not funny, it’s a lot harder to inherit the earth; for if you cannot laugh, how are you going to tell a story about the deadly serious work you are meant to do?

You want wisdom; but maybe you need pancakes.

If, say, on the sun, you join two atoms together, you can make light. What would happen if, say, on earth, you joined two souls?

Total eclipses of the sun are caused by the wink of a certain tropical songbird; the movements of the sun, moon, and earth are fortunately synchronized.

You are the one, here is the secret, now is the time, and perhaps you shouldn’t be so infernally proud just because you have the ability to pull off a suicide that takes seventy-five years.

Angels can cook with your thoughts and taste you with their smiles. Do you know what to do with them?

On the branch of your years, one day, the flower of what you say. Unless the frost of your ignorance kills it.

Disguise yourself wildly, madly, improbably; be the cement truck filled with honey.

Such were the messages received with regularity all around the city; Riata sent thousands of cards every year. And to what end, with what effect, by what justification?

These questions are easy to answer, and you might as well do so. Send her a postcard.

She would be delighted. For of those who have received postcards from her, so few, so very few, have replied.