Category: Ucross

The Ucross info packet warns to be prepared for mud and inclement weather. I have been agonizing over what boots to bring.

My favourite pair of boots are British. I’ve had them since 1999. They’ve been to residencies at The Banff Centre and The Vermont Studio Center, as well as to Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, Florence and Rome. I don’t want to destroy them any further. My second favourite boots are French. I’ve had them since 1997. They are entirely plastic and yet somehow not waterproof. I don’t care what happens to them, but they have a bit too much heal for traipsing down the dirt roads of Ucross in the dark. My newest boots are Spanish. They have too much heal for traipsing down the sidewalk in broad daylight – what was I thinking? And, Montréalaise that I am, I have Sorel snow boots for sub-zero winters and Italian knee-high leather boots for thigh-high skirts, but neither of those seems quite right for autumn wind-swept ranch roads either.

I can’t afford new boots and even if I could, what kind of boots suit dirt roads and the endless airports I will have to travel through to get to them? What kind of boots can be worn indoors and outdoors alike, are tall enough to keep wind away from ankles but loose enough to be not too hot on those occasional warmish fall days, and won’t show the dirt? Last week it finally dawned on me that cowboy boots were invented for ranch conditions. Duh. And I already have a pair, bought used 1994 or so. I keep forgetting about them, so they’ve lasted well. The past few years they’ve badly needed repairs. This week I had them resoled. They look better now than they did when I bought them for a song a dozen years ago at a Jeanne Mance Street yard sale from a girl who was both leaving town and turning vegan.

Is it the height of cliché to show up in Wyoming wearing cowboy boots? Is it any better if we call them western boots? Does it matter that my western boots were made in Spain? Need I remind everyone that I was born and raised on a farm? Yes, apparently. Our farm was in eastern Canada but I still wanted western boots. My back-to-the-land father balked at the cowboy boot cliché. What did they know? Let me tell you, riding a horse in sneakers really sucks. You get no purchase in the stirrup. Which is a big problem when you’re six and weigh in under 60 pounds. My best friend in the first grade was a boy named Craig. He wore cowboy boots. His father was a truck driver. Go figure. Craig hated his boots and I hated my sneakers so we traded footwear every morning. I wonder what ever happened to him. Converse One Stars?

These, the niggling concerns of a fiction writer, will not dissuade me from wearing my western boots westward. If the boots fit wear ‘em. Now there’s a proper cliché.
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At the end of October I head west for a six-week writing residency at the Ucross Foundation: http://www.ucrossfoundation.org Ucross is located on a 22,000-acre ranch in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains near Sheridan Wyoming. The artists-in-residence program operates out of the fully restored Clear Fork headquarters of the Pratt and Ferris Cattle Company, built in 1882. Only four writers and four studio artists are granted residence at one time. Some of my more urban friends shudder at the thought of such a rustic and isolated setting. I can’t wait. Preparations so far include: the purchase of a wind-proof/water-proof jacket and reading up on high-country geology. John McPhee says of Wyoming’s topography: every scene is temporary, and is composed of fragments from other scenes. A perfect setting for fiction writing.

“Wyoming, at first, glance, would appear to be an arbitrary segment of the country. Wyoming and Colorado are the only states whose borders consist of four straight lines. That could be looked upon as an affront to nature, an utterly political conception, an ignoring of the outlines of physiographic worlds, in disregard of rivers and divides. Rivers and divides, however, are in some ways unworthy as boundaries, which are meant to imply a durability that is belied by the function of rivers and divides. They move, they change, and they go away. Rivers, almost by definition, are young. The oldest river in the United States is called the New River. It has existed (in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia) for a little more than one and a half per cent of the history of the world. In epochs and eras before there ever was a Colorado River, the formations of the Grand Canyon were crossed and crisscrossed, scoured and dissolved, deposited and moved by innumerable rivers. The Colorado River, which has only recently appeared on earth, has excavated the Grand Canyon in very little time. From its beginning, human beings could have watched the Grand Canyon being made. The Green River has cut down through the Uinta Mountains in the last few million years, the Wind River through the Owl Creek Mountains, the Laramie River through the Laramie Range. The mountains themselves came up and moved. Several thousand feet of basin fill has recently disappeared. As the rock around Rawlins amply shows, the face of the country has frequently changed. Wyoming suggests with emphasis the page-one principle of reading in rock the record of the earth: Surface appearances are only that; topography grows, shrinks, compresses, spreads, disintegrates, and disappears; every scene is temporary, and is composed of fragments from other scenes. Four straight lines – like a plug cut in the side of a watermelon – should do as well as any to frame Wyoming and its former worlds.”

John McPhee, Rising from the Plains, NY: FSG, 1986, pages 28-29.
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