“Wyoming is Haunted” wins the QWF Carte Blanche Quebec Prize

Last night at the annual Quebec Writers’ Federation Awards Gala at the Lion d’Or in Montreal my recent non-fiction story, Wyoming is Haunted, was awarded the Carte Blanche Quebec Prize. Carte Blanche, the literary review of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, is published online twice a year. The Carte Blanche Quebec prize is awarded once a year in recognition of an outstanding submission by a Quebec writer. The prize is sponsored by The Quebec Writers’ Federation.

Wyoming is Haunted is a nonfiction narrative of some of the adventures fellow fiction-writer Karen Russell and I had while in residence at the Ucross Foundation, an artist in residence program located on a 22,000 acre ranch in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. The piece first appeared Carte Blanche 7 earlier this year. Two other of my short stories have also appeared in earlier issues: Aerial Photograph & Wasn’t One Ocean.

Thanks QWF and Carte Blanche, for all you do for English writing in Quebec, even when it’s from Wyoming. Thanks CALQ for helping me get out way out west. Thanks Ucross for accepting me and Karen Russell at the same time. And thanks Wyoming for scaring the heck out of us. As this photo clearly indicates, Wyoming is pretty damn haunted.

“As we walked we invented fictional colour-names for things, with Flannery O’Connor’s rat-coloured car as our model, though, as Karen noted, makeup colour-names would also be a great source of inspiration. The road was a rawhide strap. The fauns were faun coloured! The Angus cows were so black they looked hollow.”

Excerpted from: Wyoming is Haunted, J. R. Carpenter
Winner of the 2008 Carte Blanche Quebec prize

. . . . .

Wyoming is Still Haunted

Late in 2006 I spent six weeks in residence at the Ucross Foundation in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. I was supposed to be working on a collection of short stories set mostly in rural Nova Scotia, but in no time Wyoming’s big sky and high plains were demanding most of my writing attention. It didn’t help that the deeply funny Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised by Wolves, was in the studio down the hall from mine. Every few days we’d go for a walk, which sounds harmless enough, but all of our walks turned into epic adventures. Whenever something happened to us out there in the wild Karen would say: Man, I can’t wait to read about this tomorrow on your blog! I’ve never had such a dedicated audience before.

Now, finally, at long last, the Amazing But True Real Life Wild West Adventures of J. R. Carpenter and Karen Russell have been published for all the world to read. Published somewhere other than on my blog, that is. Carte Blanche, the literary review of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, has included a condensed version of our adventures in their latest issue: Wyoming is Haunted.


. . . . .

Home Home Off The Range

[ or, Farewell Home on the Range]

Why does all the best whiskey drinking happen the night before leaving?

In the aftermath of our last Taffy-cooked meal, we downed the last of our last bottles. Alison and Jerome gave me these parting gifts: 1) a piece of petrified tree, 2) a piece of fence post. In a million years the piece of fence post will look just like the piece of petrified tree, they said. They know me so well.

We woke puffy-eyed and head-sore and swore we’d keep in touch and see each other again and soon. Sharon drove us into Sheridan a back way. A dirt road way. A sun on the snow in the shady hollows way. We were indignant at never having been driven that way before. On the other hand, the new old road way lulled us into feeling like we were going somewhere, distracted us from of the awful truth of going back.

“Oh, deer,” I said. It sounded like: “Oh dear!” but I meant: “Oh, deer.” As in, don’t hit that deer in the road. A buck bounded off the dirt shoulder, off into the morning.

Security is no joke at the Sheridan airport, but it is a comedy routine. The check-in counter computer system scoffed at my Canadian Passport. My suitcases were selected for a random rifle through. Once we were all checked in, the security staff moved over twenty feet to begin the perusal of our carryon baggage. We fumbled with our coats and boots, laptops, hand cream and perfume bottles. A construction worker offered to help me take off my belt. Feel any safer America? I don’t.

All that to board the same Beech 1900 we came up on. Twenty seats or so. We sat together, schoolbus style. We took pictures of each other. We took up half the plane.

Denver was sad – terminally so – as we found our terminals, airlines, gates and parted ways. Denver to Chicago I sat next to two jive-talking white wannabe hip-hop boys. They were sweet, but exhausting. After the seat-belt sign was switched off I transferred up a few rows to have more space. There I sat next to a gigantic wilderness hunter / linebacker type, also sweet, in a “he could kill you with his bare hands but wouldn’t think of it” kind of way. My favourite thing about him was that he didn’t speak.

By Chicago I was feeling parenthetical [on account of reading Sebald]. Chicago O’Hare was a complete bordel. [Bordel is the French word for brothel; in this context it means a big mess.] Every flight was late. The Montréal departure gate number kept changing. Elusive as a portal in the time-space continuum, I followed it around the airport – me, half the Austrian telemark ski team and a family of habitants. [Habitant is French for inhabitant, or dweller. Under the monsignorial system in Québec, the peasant settlers who farmed the land for the absentee landowners were called habitants. We still call someone recently of the rural regions habitant. It’s like hick – sort of an insult but can also affectionate. Case in point: We also call our beloved Montréal Canadiens nos habitants, Habs for short. The Habs are 4th in the Eastern Conference and 8th over all.]

My flight out of Chicago was 45 minutes late. I sat next to a total bitch of a man who wouldn’t turn off his cell phone because he was busy berating some poor travel agent re: the lack of direct flights from Montréal to Dubai. Have mercy!

In Montréal at last at the end of a long journey I stood in customs clearing limbo at the edge of the baggage carousel and watched the same bags go round and round, mine not among them. A misery of line-ups, forms to fill out in duplicate, rubber stamps to retrieve and the collection of many the-same-looking red-ink signature squiggles ensued. Bureaucracy is also a French word. It means “I would kill you with my bare hands if I could but sadly I’m in a weakened state due to all this red tape.”

It was nearing midnight by the time the last rubber stamp declared me officially in Canada and I was reunited with my husband, dog, and mother-in-law, who had been waiting semi-patiently throughout this ordeal. I didn’t know they let dogs into the airport. And, at that hour, there was hardly any traffic. Every cloud of red tape has a silver lining.

That was Friday. The suitcases finally showed up, somewhat late for dinner, Saturday evening. Sunday I ventured out into my neighbourhood. There are so many people in this city! So few of them speak English. I took my film to the drug store where, out of some blue-collar perversity, I’ve been taking my film for over a decade. The photo counter woman knows me. When I handed over my seven rolls she said: And where have you been? Wyoming. It’s a remarkably beautiful place, I assured her. I’m sure it is, she assured me.

And there it is, the malaise of travel: the despondency of long distance only sinks in when one encounters the odd ontology of a sudden return.

“No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine… If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I though, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea.” W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
. . . . .

Wyoming IS Haunted!

The ice path across the Clear Creek went soft before we had a chance to cross it. So we set out on one of our hills walks, but shorter. We cut through Deb’s yard, said soft hellos to her yellow Lab – some guard dog – asleep in the sunroom window.

We set our path up a twisted sage bush hill, set our hearts on the clinker red top. Feet sinking into the Eocene, we comb the volcano-ash-soft beach sand for seashells and find plenty. Snails mostly, not yet agatized, not yet fossilized, their epochs old shells empty curlicue recesses in the sedimentary rock. Some things are very difficult to photograph: in the grainy twilight, a slab of snail shell stone split and gripped by a thick grey gnarled sage bush trunk. And some gifts are very difficult to explain. “I’m already planning my defence,” Karen says, her fists full of snail shell stone Christmas presents.

We slip and slid up a steep slope, setting off loose red rock showers, saying: Be careful! You be careful too. Okay. Ack. Perhaps this isn’t the best route. Switchback!

Funny how it’s only once you’re at the top that you see the easy route up. And that you haven’t taken it.

Just when we thought we’d seen it all, hill-wise, the hill behind Deb’s house instantly becomes our newest most favourite hill, with our newest best vista ever. Karen says, “Like how every new thing we see makes all the other stuff we’ve seen look like crap.”

The sun’s setting in every direction. I’m changing film fast, squeezing off iffy, high-contrast shots. We know better than to linger, what with Nora’s jogging adventure fresh in our minds: It was getting dark so she took a short cut that seemed like a straight line but then there was a creek to cross, some fences to climb, so many obstacles between Nora and the road. Plus, we’ve been reading and rereading Donna Tartt’s Secret History; we know what happens to scholars when time speeds up during late night back woods bacchanals. We don’t know any ancient Greek, but still, we’d hate to wind up killing a Vermont farmer on our way back to the ranch.

Instead of going back the way we came, we decide to follow the ridgeline home. Our sightline runs right down Big Red Lane to the Big Red barn. There’s a trail. “That’ll be our excuse,” I say. “When some rancher come out of nowhere with a shotgun… we say: But there was a trail!” Karen’s been reading Hemingway’s safari stories. She warns me not to sleep with the white hunter guide: “Like how in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, I kill you way out here were there are no witnesses and then pretend it was an accident?” She says this in a singsong little kid voice which makes it sound all that much more sinister. “Remind me to take that Hemingway away from you.”

We come down off the ridge into a wide shallow flat that slopes down toward Ucross. The sky’s quite dark now, with only an orange rind of light left along the western ridges. Grateful for the flattening terrain and the rising moon, we lope along talking Donna Tartt again. My favourite thing about the bacchanal is how barely it’s described, how none of the characters will talk about it after. Karen says, in the horror movies the scariest parts are before you even see the monsters, when they’re just alluded to.

We stop short. There’s a pelvis bone in our pathway. Robert Johnson sings: “I’ve got stones in my pathway and my road seems dark as night.” But a pelvis in our pathway? We pick it up; hold it high, big, clean, and white against the dark night hills. We’ve seen plenty of small animal bones on our walks, but nothing like this. What do you think? Deer? Or cow? Seems big for deer. The mule deer are bigger than the whitetail. I don’t know. Maybe cow. Karen says: See, if this were a horror movie this one bone would be the stand in for all kinds of terrifying things.

At that moment we turn. Out of some dumb animal premonition. We turn our heads to the right and see, glimmering dull white amid the twisted night-black sagebrush, a field of bones. And, I’ll never forget this, the hulking massive back of some downed beast.

I grab Karen’s wrist. She drops the pelvis. We scream! And start running. And keep screaming and keep running. Until finally our editorializing instincts kick in: Okay, did you see that too? Yes!!! Wait, what did you see? Bones! Oh my god me too. Did you see the carcass? What carcass? Never mind, there was no carcass. Was it a deer or a cow? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure I saw duplicate bones. Like there’s more than one animal. Way more. How long does it take for bones to get all white like that? Those bones have been there a while. But the carcass is fresh. Was it… all in one piece? The head was… at an angle. But if animals had killed it they would have eaten it, right? Right. Why would multiple large animals keep dying in the same place? Did they trip? Is there a sinkhole? A portal? Clearly that field is haunted. Well, it is a bone field after all.

By now we’ve slowed to a winded trot. We keep looking over our shoulders.

Isn’t it ominous how that event perfectly dovetailed with our conversation?

Notice how it appeared so suddenly, just like in the movies.

Notice how it’s the full moon and everything.

Even these bails of hay look creepy.

Yeah! How come we never noticed the hay’s haunted before?

We’re coming up to the road, right where we intended to, when I step on something; it sticks to the bottom of my shoe. I try shaking it off, scrapping it off, thinking it’s a clod of dirt or dried shit or something, but it won’t come off. Oh man, now my shoe is haunted! I stop to examine this latest development. It’s some kind of saddle decoration – a silver circle attached to a leather circle. It’s a haunted cowboy thing! It found you! By sticking itself into my shoe. With a nail! I like how it stuck itself into your shoe but not into your foot. Yeah, I like how it didn’t give me tetanus!

The short stretch of US14 from Big Red Lane to the schoolhouse is a bewildering sequence of orange, yellow, red lights; high-speed passing gusts, gearshifts, and tires whining past us. All haunted.

A last low swath of fuchsia sky sets up shop behind the cottonwoods.

The trees are taller than usual, wouldn’t you say?

How are we going to explain this to the others?

The first thing we have to do is wash the haunt off our hands.

I hope there’s no red meat for dinner.

There’s buffalo meat for dinner. Not the best night for it. Luckily Deb’s there; she knows all about the bone field. It’s a dump, she says. That makes sense. A cow dies in the field and the rancher has to put it somewhere. Or else the other cows become demoralized. I imagine. This perfectly reasonable explanation does allow one to sleep at night. But it doesn’t mean the bone field isn’t haunted. It totally is.

Some stories have, in their retelling, diminishing returns. Karen and I keep telling the story of the bone field to each other because we know how scary it is.

She came into my studio for lunch today, saw my spread of snail shell rocks and said: “A museum of yesterday!”

I read her a paragraph from The Snows of Kilimanjaro. She just read that story, but still she said: “Did you just write that?” See why Karen’s my favourite? Hemingway wrote this in 1927, but it’s obviously about haunted yesterday:

“What about the ranch and the silvered grey of the sage brush, the quick, clear water in the irrigation ditches, and the heavy green of the alfalfa. The trail went up into the hills and the cattle in the summer were shy as deer. The bawling and the steady noise and slow moving mass raising a dust as you brought them down in the fall. And behind the mountains, the clear sharpness of the peaks in the evening light and, riding down along the trail in the moonlight, bright across the valley. Now he remembered coming down through the timber in the dark holding the horse’s tail when he could not see and all the stories that he meant to write.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1927
. . . . .

Field Trip

Ucross is too good to us. We don’t ever want to leave. Unless there’s a field trip. Then we’re up bright and early dressed in our warmest clothing and packing our own lunches.

On Wednesday Reed drove us to the Devils Tower National Monument. Reed’s a Wyoming native. He hadn’t been to Devils Tower since he was a kid. Jerome hadn’t been in seven years. The rest of us just hadn’t been.

We were eight people in one Suburban. We refrained from singing car songs. It’s a two and a half hour drive each way.

Flushed like pheasants from our Big Horn Mountain foothill hidey-hole, we flowed down the Clear Creek valley and out into the Coal Bed Methane Lands of Powder River Basin. On either side of the wide-open traffic-empty I-90, willy-nilly dirt roads spilled over drought-kaki slopes scared with wellheads, compressing stations, derricks, tailings ponds and open pit coalmines. All this mess and only 5% of the methane in the Powder River Basin have been developed. Mean and ugly things are being done to these high plains in order to obtain, at most, a year’s supply of natural gas.

I read somewhere that there are more mobile homes in Wyoming than in any other state. I don’t know if that’s per capita or otherwise. The suburbs of Gillette certainly are thick with them. Subdivisions sprawl down and out like varicose veins.

We push on, like the French fur traders did in the 1850s, into the Belle Fourche River Valley. The Black Hills is a whole other Wyoming. North of Moorcroft we see pine trees – lodge pole, ponderosa – after a month of leafless cottonwoods and bowed box elder this many pine trees boggle the mind.

Plenty has been written about Devils Tower elsewhere. Here’s a a brief synopsis: 60 million years ago a mass of molten magma forced its way upward through layers of Jurassic era sedimentary rocks. As the igneous rock cooled underground it contracted and fractured into polygonal columns measuring 6 to 8 feet in diameter at their base and tapering gradually upward to about 4 feet at the top. Over millions of years the surrounding layers of softer sedimentary rock eroded, exposing the tower of hard igneous rock. At present, the tower towers 1,270 feet above the Belle Fourche River, at an altitude of 5,117 feet.

Archaeological investigations indicate that native peoples have visited the tower since prehistoric times. Many continue to value it as an important sacred place. The Lakota call the tower Mato Tipila, Bear Lodge. In 1875 one Col. Dodge of the US Geological society insisted the native name was Bad God’s Tower, which he twisted into Devils Tower. Some people just don’t listen. The name Devils Tower is an affront to the generations of Lakota, Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Eastern Shoshone who continue to return to the tower and its surrounding landscape to carry out traditional rituals and ceremonies.

President Theodore Roosevelt designated Devils Tower the first US national monument on September 24, 1906, under the newly created Antiquities Act. Naming a 60 million year old rock an antiquity? Naming a first nations’ sacred sight a monument to conquering America? I don’t know where to begin.

We arrived two months and five days late for the hundredth anniversary celebrations. Reed says the site hasn’t changed since he was a kid. We had the 2km Tower Trail to ourselves; hiked heads flung back, the tower rising so steeply, it felt at times like we might topple over backward. It was a moving experience. People say that and I think: Yeah, sure, right. But it was. I’ll leave it at that.

The drive home was even more beautiful than the drive out. Reed let me hold the map. Everyone knows I love a map. The sun low we rose back up into the Big Horn foothills. A huge half moon hung over the Red Hills. Power lines raced along the road. Having gone so far out, returning, the Clear Creek ranches looked like home to us, looked familiar-dear to us. A Bald Eagle paused low over the creek beside US16 north of Buffalo. So close to us. Our avatar. It passed a heartbeat at eye level with us, feeling for its next updraft, wingspan wide as the Suburban. And then it was gone. Or we were. We all agreed that this was an omen, but had different ideas about what it might signify. Sermin will buy a ranch. Dinner will be good. We will never have to leave this place.
. . . . .

Head For the Hills

Sunday, the sky hosting a cloud convention, we set out into the wind.

Two hawks ducking and diving down around the Coal Creek’s dry bends, “There’s bird us,” Karen says.

The more altitude we gain, the colder we get under the collar. The more insistent the wind, the more the doomed Donner Party of 1846 comes up in conversation. 487 miles of the old Oregon Trail passed through what is now Wyoming; much of it still intact, all of it well south of here.

Animals that we are, we scan the ridgelines for easy passes; an eye out always for a wave of black dots to crest and gallop forward. We walk on warpaths, on blood trails; we follow deer tracks, fence lines, wind tunnels and draws. Wait. On these high plains, still so empty and yet so changed, it’s not hard to hear the hoof clatter and thud of bison falling.

“Isn’t it amazing how we can change the size of stuff just by moving our feet!,” Karen says.

The wind freezes our faces, cuts though our conversation. I’m not saying we stopped talking, I’m saying it got harder. My lips went to the dentist, I Novocain-lisp. Karen can’t control her cheeks: I’ve developed a foreign accent!

We power-walk home, clocking Olympic speeds.

“There’s our super model shadows,” Karen says.

Heads down into the wind we simultaneously spot a milky white rock glowing in the late light – one rock broken into two. We coax our cold stiff fingers to pick up the pieces, to fit them together. An exact fit. We lift them apart. Let’s do it again! Back together. Apart. Together. A best friend rock.

Back in the schoolhouse, Jerome witnesses our unthawing. We show him the rock: together, apart, together, apart. We show him our sausage red fingers. Is your face pins and needles? Yes! Phew. We numb-bumble around the kitchen groping for food. Karen pulls a drawer open smack into my leg. We laugh our cheeks to pieces. The thaw hits our thighs in burning waves. I need to take my pants off right now, I say. I’ll avert my eyes, Jerome says. I need a bathtub! Tea! To never go outside again! Plates piled high with leftover Thanksgiving leftovers we made our exit. Jerome held the door. You’ve been a great audience, we tell him. Thanks, he says. We’re here all week.
. . . . .

A Turn for the Cold

Wind whipped snow at the window all through dinner. Then it stilled. Then it got really cold. We walked out across pitch-black pasture, waving our puny flashlight at invisible black cow. Miraculously, no one tripped to death on frozen dung. We made a bonfire. Fire is so photogenic, we all agreed. No one knew where to look. Down at the near heat, or up at the far fire stars.

Karen’s reading Dante’s Inferno & offers this addendum:

Not yet had Nessus reached the other side
when we were on our way into a forest
that was not marked by any path at all.

No green leaves, but rather black in colour,
no smooth branches, but twisted and entangled,
no fruit, but thorns of poison bloomed instead.

No thick, rough scrubby home like this exists –
not even between Cecina and Corneto –
for those wild beasts that hate the run of farmlands.

Dante, Inferno CANTO XIII
. . . .

nature-present-shopping

Yesterday afternoon Karen and I set out on a pre-emptive power walk – we figured we’d burn off Thanksgiving dinner before we ate it. And also, we had some nature-present-shopping to do. Alex is leaving us; the Girl’s Dorm will never be the same. We set out in search of a small beige good luck gift for her.

Karen picked up one rock, and I said: That’s conglomerate stone; small stones fused together by sedimentary pressure. How uncomfortable! she said, and tossed it aside. She picked another rock. I said: No, that one’s too plain. But then felt badly, because who died and made me the expert on small beige lucky things? So I said: I mean, it’s all right. She said: We could have had this conversation on a playground twenty years ago… That rock’s stupid. Is not! Is too. I’m telling…

I got so out of breath walking up one hill that I had to ask: Is this hill steep? Yeah, it’s steep. We leaned into a ferocious wind, leaving a string of unsuitable unlucky stones in our wake, stopping every now and then to take photographs of the insane things the sky was doing: low rain erased the Big Horns, high slabs of granite grey let stray god rays through, bruise black-blue blanketed Powder Basin and all the rest was bright sun.

We could see the cold and rain heading our way; we turned down slope toward home. Fifty feet below the ridgeline we spotted a string of long thin parallel lines of stone running out like musical notation – a treble clef – perpendicular to the trail. It took a moment to recognize this as a mostly buried petrified tree, its top most layer barely above ground.

Here’s what we found for Alex: A Small Square of Petrified Wood with One Thin Line of Quartz Crystal Inclusions. A piece of a tree turned to stone and trimmed with rhinestone symbolizes long life and good fortune, we decided. Certain small beige things are lucky; you just know when you see them.

Here’s a photograph Alex took of eerie trees near Piney Creek:

Happy trails Alex. People actually say happy trails in Wyoming.

“All those verbs: to leave, to travel, to depart, to flee. Snow has refused to let Paul drive; it’s her car after all, and aged Rabbit with the ‘t’ cracked off in back. She calls it The Rabbi and steers it over the secondary highways of the Midwest, the Rockies, the far West, pretty much only alert to one thing, the imperative of movement. She keeps her mind on the going and the radio, and plans strategies for the ingestion of coffee. Stopping seems like a very bad idea.” Stacey Richter, “Goodnight” in My Date with Satan, NY: Scribner, 1999, page 186.
. . . . .

the day before Thanksgiving

Most Americans don’t seem to like the idea that Canada has Thanksgiving early. Actually, they don’t seem to like it that we have Thanksgiving at all. I gather the American Thanksgiving commemorates a specific historical dinner in which the Indians saved the Pilgrims from starving to death. I’m hazy on the details, but it seems to me that this mythical dinner happened long before America existed. Canada’s First Nations likewise saved countless colonists from scurvy and starvation. Had they been less forth coming with their culinary acumen things might have turned out differently for all parties.

All I know is, avoid air travel on Thanksgiving long weekend. Everybody’s going home to see their families and nobody’s happy about it. Somebody asked me the other night if Canadian Thanksgiving was about the Indians, or was it just a harvest festival. I said: We eat a lot and then a horrific family drama ensues. She said: Oh, so then it’s the same as here.

Holiday meals exacerbate family tensions. Everybody wants something – cranberry sauce, tofurkey. And everybody doesn’t want something – dark meat, prayer. Half the table is busily engaged in warding off conflict with gaiety. A futile endeavour as the other half was pissed off before it even sat down. Someone says the wrong thing. Someone else explains something badly. Someone else wasn’t listening. Someone else lashes out. Someone else takes it personally. One new hurt sets an old hurt hurting until, right around the table, all the hurts are going off like car alarms in a thunderstorm.

I know it’s very wrong of me, but I’m thankful this region is in a drought. Thunderstorms during thanksgiving dinner seem unlikely. I hope there aren’t any incidents of tofurkey or prayer either. Surely sighting a herd of wild turkeys the day before Thanksgiving is a good omen…

Karen and I were checking our email in her studio this morning when a herd of wild turkeys waltzed past, inches from the full-length window in her deck door. We’d never seen them this close up before. They’re fantastically ugly. Do you think any of these are girl turkeys? I’d hate to think that they are. But maybe that’s just species bias. Maybe these are super model turkeys and we just can’t tell.

The turkeys don’t seem to see us staring at them through the glass, or hear us talking about them. Next time I’m tempted to call someone a turkey I’ll know what an insult it is.

I grabbed my camera and followed the turkeys around the yard for a while, stealthily, with slippers on. Nora emerged from Buck’s Cabin with her camera (she had proper shoes on). They don’t see to have any idea what day it is, Nora said. The cook came out and threw them some pieces of apple. Trying to fatten them up? The cook says if you gobble at the turkeys they’ll gobble back. Isn’t it weird that people gobble up animals that make gobbling sounds?

I found a turkey feather for Karen’s collections of small beige things. Nora said: I’m going to tell her you wrestled that turkey to the ground! When I gave the feather to Karen I said: I wrestled that turkey to the ground! She believed me for .08 seconds. Then Nora came over and told Karen: JR wrestled that turkey to the ground. Now we know what happens when three fiction writers cross paths with a herd of wild turkeys.
. . . . .

a three hill day

I committing long walk adultery this weekend. My wilderness adventure companion Karen Russell was away at the Miami Book Fair and I went out on a four and a half hour hike without her. At least I went alone.

I set out at noon, the scoria-surfaced road and a power line for company. Closer inspection of a topographical atlas over breakfast this morning revealed that the 195 is also known at the Coal Creek Road, though the Coal Creek is dry at the moment.

In four and a half hours I saw two vehicles. One I saw twice – heading out, and then heading back. The other one slowed up. A high-cheeked man in a flat brimmed hat and a handlebar moustache leaned over his shotgun and shell case to roll down the passenger-side window:

“Need a ride anywhere or are you alright.”

“No, I’m walking on purpose. Thanks.”

No one walks anywhere here. If you’re local, you stop and offer a lift. Not local? You drive 85 and don’t stop for anything.

A few miles in I turned off the Coal Creek Road onto an even smaller road that headed straight up toward the ridgeline. Where that road veered left I veered right and struck out across grass and sagebrush. I spent the rest of my afternoon on three hills:

The Castle Hill: two turrets towering over a string of sage green hills, massive circular stacks built from square blocks of red rock covered with sea foam green lichen.

The Lava Hill: a pocket park of porous globs of amorphous volcanic debris – sulphur yellow, oil-slick purple and black as Agnes cows in parts – burrowed under by rabbits and the only sound: the repeated report-pop of far off gunshot.

The Boulder Hill: a steep jumble of gigantic sandstone boulders the size of camping trailers the colour of a day at the beach, because they used to be beach, sand; suction cup shaped holes hold the shape of long gone abalone shells, petrified tree trunks protruding from the ashy slope, treacherously steep and soft slippery to climb but I did.

When I finally crested the ridgeline, guess what was on the other side. More of the same. A herd of pronghorn ran like white water rapids across the plain far, far below.

I walked home in the low sun shadow. On the still sun side, a bald eagle circled intently; whatever prey it had its eye on didn’t stand a chance. I was tired enough to get in the pickup truck of the next handsome hunter to offer me a lift. I was hungry enough to eat my arm. Back at the ranch, I shovelled down a plate of leftovers at 5PM, conked out on the sofa in my studio, crawled upstairs to bed at 9 and slept for almost 12 hours.

The telling of this walk comes across dryer than others without Karen there to generate dialogue. I talked to myself plenty, but that’s between me and the wind.

“It seems like we have a full and rich life here, but not all our stories translate well on the phone.” Karen Russell, the day after the alternator bunny incident.
. . . . .