"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.
. . . . .

town trip

Ucross administrative assistant Kate Johnston used to work as a wrangler. Friday morning she rounded a heard of us up and drove us into town. Between the five of us we needed: a flight to Denver, a tube of blue paint, a pair of cuticle clippers, five rolls of colour film, six rolls of slide film, one pair of sunglasses, one pair of snow boots, an unknown quantity of postcards, a padded envelope, a book on Wyoming, a bag of corn chips, a bottle of whisky and ten bottles of wine.

I ran into Alison at the Cigar Store. I ran into Michael at the Drug Store. Nora ran into me in the back of a Western Wear store where I furtively caressed a two hundred and fifty dollar pair of pale green cowboy boots.

“They match your coat,” she said thoughtlessly.

“Thanks a lot!” I cried, aghast.

“Danger, danger!” I cried, fleeing the store.



Main Street Sheridan during the Sheridan Stampede of 1914.
It looks pretty much the same today.
. . . . .

The Alternator Bunny

First thing this morning I found Alex in the Depot kitchen making coffee with no socks on. “Not a good idea,” she said, the floor a mess of box elder carcasses. “Are you going over to the other side soon?” I asked, hoping for a lift to Big Red. Alex thought I was asking if she was dying.

“I’m thinking of going into Clearmont,” she said. Not quite heaven, but ten miles down the road, population one-fifteen and we’ve heard rumours there’s a liquor store there.

Ten minutes later, I’m on my way out the front door and Alex’s on her way in to get me. Boom. Comedic confusions and almost collisions – that’s how our day began.

Off-road trekking across the snow-melting lawn, we saw two rabbits chased each other around and around Alex’s car. “Ever since I got here,” she said. “Rabbits flock to my Subaru like it’s the mother ship and they’re waiting to be beamed up.”

The snow-covered hills east of Ucross rolled out pale blue-beige in a repeating pattern: same, different, familiar, new, same.

There’s no liquor store in Clearmont, only the Red Dawg Bar. To get the Red Dawg and the water tower into the same photo I had to step out into US 14 a bit. “Alert me of any oncoming traffic.” A freight train rolled through smelling of coal.

Alex took a picture of the Claremont Historical Jail sign.

“Shouldn’t that read Historic?”



A stiff-legged woman with lots of earrings and no teeth came out of the Red Dawg to find out who we were and what we were doing taking pictures. “Such a great sign,” Alex said. “With the water tower behind it,” I added unhelpfully. The woman’s caved in face made her look extra sceptical. “Where’s the Historical Jail,” Alex asked. Brilliant move! Distract her with tourism.

Take a right on New York Avenue. The Historical Jail is under the water tower. To get out of town, take another right at the elementary school Drug Free Zone sign.

Back on US 14 Alex said she found people in Wyoming to be a suspicious lot. I’d only met friendly folks up until the toothless woman. I guess if I were an inhabitant of a town of a hundred and fifteen people and/or a Red Dawg regular I’d want to know why two never-before-seen women were taking pictures of my bar.

A few miles out of Clearmont a huge metal cross atop a small hill reminded Alex of Brazil and me of Montréal. I wondered if it was a memorial for a fatal car crash near there. A few minutes later, Alex said: “My car has lost power,” calm as anything, and steered us over to the shoulder. What happened? No idea. The owner’s manual was no help. We didn’t know what to look up. Ignition? How about Stopped? Well, at least the view is nice. Maybe we should get out of the car, take some photos. What an absurd day.

We stood on the side of the road and ogled the Big Horns and the mule deer and waved at passing pickups. They all waved back, but otherwise gave us a wide berth.

“Maybe we should pop the hood, that always works.” And a good thing we did too.

“A rabbit sabotaged my car!” Alex cried. The bright copper ends of chewed through wire glinted in the noonday sun.

“Now lets not be too hasty to lay blame. We don’t know the rabbits did it.”

“There’s rabbit hair.”

“Hmm… I guess that would be rabbit poop then.”

Alex rolled a cigarette and flipped through her owner’s manual some more. I attempted to twist the wire-ends back together but there wasn’t enough exposed copper to work with and, anyway, I didn’t really think it would work.



Alex stuck her head under the hood again but pulled it out in a hurry: “It’s still in there!”

“What?”

“The rabbit, it’s still in my car!”

“No way.” I did not believe her. “I don’t see any rabbit.”

“I saw its fur. Look straight down.”

Then I saw it!

“You should have seen the look on your face,” Alex was laughing so hard.

“I just saw that look on your face!”

“This is so awful!” she said, but we couldn’t stop laughing.

“Do you think it’s gone over to the other side?”

The mule deer glared at us, like: You two are so hopeless. Will you please keep it down.

We knew where we were, and that we were less than ten miles from where we wanted to be. There was a rabbit in Alex’s car, dead or otherwise. The car had Massachusetts plates. And brand spanking new pickup trucks passed us at speeds exceeding the sound barrier. We didn’t have a cell phone – not that it’d work in Wyoming’s hills and holes. We set in to discussing the options. Well. We could walk it. Or one of us could. How long would it take? I don’t mind doing it, just depends if you want to leave your car or not. What happens when you leave your car on the side of the road in Wyoming?

“Maybe we should push it further off the road.”

“Toward that post?”

More gales of laughter, more glares from the deer.

Right around when we were getting ready to set out on foot, an ancient boxy two-tone pick up rounded the bend, coming straight out of the Pleistocene and headed our way. It slowed. It stopped for us! Yeah!

Norma Mally is our new favourite person in all of Wyoming. We said, “We’re so glad you stopped for us. No one else would.” She said, “I’m local. They’re all up here working the methane.” Norma used to dry ranch eight miles east of somewhere out by Recluse. “I’m too old now,” she said. “Now we run cattle.” She had nothing good to say about rabbits. “The rabbits is bad out by us,” she said. “They got my neighbour,” she said, meaning they got her neighbour’s truck.

“I’m a peaceful person,” said Alex. “I’ve been swerving to miss them.”

“You’ll be going the other way now I bet.”

“Like a video game.”

Norma Mally drove us right up to the Big Red Ranch House. “Where are you from?” she asked. New York. Montréal. “I was stationed over in Washington five years in the Air Force,” she said. There go the suspicious theories. Wyoming rancher Norma Mally offering us up an east coast connection may have been even more generous than offering us a ride.

Alex’s version of the story told so far diverges from mine in a number of ways:

While I could hardly concentrate on a word the toothless woman was saying because a) her sunken face made her expression so hard to read and b) she wasn’t exactly toothless – she had the turned in gums and chalky yellow stumps of heavy and prolonged crystal-meth use, Alex didn’t notice because was understandably distracted by her abnormally enormous and erratically pieced ears.

Ironic considering when Norma Mally said those guys who didn’t stop to help us weren’t local, they were here working methane; Alex understood that they were all on crystal-meth. Some of them could well have been, but methane gas is one of the biggest industries in Wyoming and those were damn expensive pickup trucks passing us, so it’s more than likely those guys were out-of-state workers without an ounce of neighbourly feeling. The methane industry is notoriously shortsighted. The drilling pollutes and depletes the water table. There’s so much methane in our tap water we can’t drink it.

I’m sure there are other discrepancies besides. I think we got off lucky considering our day began with confusion over whether “the other side” meant the other side of the pasture or life after death.

Alex spent the rest of the afternoon chasing after insurance, towing, garages and mechanics. For more about these details read her post, number 154, on this website: http://wombatnation.com/2005/01/mice-ate-my-car

At dinner that night she said, “So guess what, the rabbit was still in the car.” I was confused, having not yet heard about how, when Reed gave Alex a lift back out to her car, the rabbit appeared to be gone. Reed spliced the chewed wires together so Alex could to drive to the garage in Buffalo. Man I would’ve felt like a hero if I’d made that work. The mechanic found the rabbit again, very much alive, hiding in a different spot. It took four people to get it out.

It turns out the precise reason we lost power is, the rabbit chewed the wire to the alternator. I could make us both sound a lot smarter about cars by going back and inserting that detail mid-story, but I’m not going to. Not just yet.

"Out on the lawn the rabbits were perfectly still. Then they sprang up in the air, turning and dropping and landing and then freezing again. Catherine stood at the window of the bathroom, towelling her hair. She turned the bathroom light off, so that she could see them better. The moonlight picked out their shining eyes, their moon-coloured fur, each hair tipped in paint. They were playing some rabbit game like leapfrog. Or they were dancing the quadrille. Fighting a rabbit way. Did rabbits fight wars? Catherine didn’t know. They ran at each other and then turned and darted back, jumping and crouching and rising up on their back legs. A pair of rabbits took off in tandem, like racehorses, sailing through the air."

Kelly Link, "Stone Animals," in The Best American Short Stories 2005, ed. Michael Chabon, Boston, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005, pages 96-97.
. . . . .

our friendly neighbourhood super volcano

Photographer and Ucross residency coordinator Deborah Ford confirmed all the wild geological theories I came up with on Sunday at dinner tonight. Yes, those were volcanic rocks. Yes, those were petrified trees! I had a pretty clear idea of how the trees got petrified, but where did those lava boulders come from?

Well. It turns out that one of the largest super volcanoes in the world is sitting about 200 miles from here underneath Yellowstone National Park. A massive eruption there 2.1 million years ago left a gigantic caldera larger than the state of Rhode Island and hundreds of meters deep. Ground-hugging flows of hot volcanic ash, pumice, and gases swept across an area of more than 3,000 square miles and volume of about 1,000 cubic kilometres, enough material to cover Wyoming with a layer 13 feet thick. The eruption also shot a column of volcanic ash and gases high into Earth's stratosphere. This volcanic cloud circled the globe many times and affected Earth's climate by reducing the intensity of solar radiation reaching the lower atmosphere and surface. The fine volcanic ash that fell downwind from the eruption site blanketed much of North America and is still preserved in deposits as far away as Iowa, where it is a few inches thick, and the Gulf of Mexico, where it is recognizable in drill cores from the sea floor.

Subsequent smaller lava flows have since buried and obscured most of the caldera, but the underlying processes responsible for Yellowstone's tremendous volcanic eruptions are still at work. Volcanologists tracking the movement of magma under the park have calculated that in parts of Yellowstone the ground has risen over seventy centimetres the past century. The Yellowstone super volcano has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago. The next is overdue. But I leave Wyoming December 8, so I'll probably miss it. In Montréal all we'll still see is fallout, toxic gas and ash.


. . . . .

a landscape never before seen

If, when you wake up in Wyoming, it’s overcast out one window, look out another.

By mid-day Sunday blue sky had eclipsed grey. The intrepid Karen Russell and I made, and kept, a pact to work till 2PM. Then we donned hunting orange and headed for the hills.

When in Wyoming, wave at passing cars. Most cars that pass are trucks. One finger lifted off the steering wheel counts as a wave back. On the graded gravel route 195 to Sheridan a pickup truck slowed. Creepy anywhere else, but this driver was altruistic: I assume you’re walking cause you want to? We were. But if we had been broken down somewhere he would have been our saviour.

We walked along inventing 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 a rawhide strap, the cows so black they look hollow. We also thought up potentially ominous first sentences, after which anything could happen: Is that a deer in the road ahead? They turned off onto a smaller road. Their feet sank into the muck.

We turned off onto truck path that trailed up into the sway-backed hills. For a while I couldn’t remember this word, but it’s the bentonite in Wyoming’s black soil that makes it swell, when wet, into what the locals call gumbo, a muck so slippery that roughnecks use it to lubricate mining drill bits.

Gumbo glomming onto our sneakers we passed through a prairie dog kingdom, an eerie plain pockmarked by pyramidal mounds of dug up earth. “Inland gator holes,” said alligator savvy Miami native Karen Russell. An oddly perspicacious remark as, through its Palaeozoic and most of its Mesozoic history, Wyoming lay on the east coast of a broad sea. During most of Eocene time, palms, fig trees, cypress and magnolias grew in abundance and primitive mammals flourished in the tropical climate. Long before deer and antelope, flamingos and crocodiles once roamed this range.

For two weeks I’ve been dragging the serrated edges of these far distant hills into focus through a telephoto lens. Up close the high world forces a wide angle, too much view for one viewfinder, and a polarizing filter helps rein in the massive blue. The sun slanting one way and the hill slopping another, our shadows spilled out ahead of us so long that I lay down on the ground to keep mine out of more than one east-facing picture.

Up a last burst of steep slope, the grasses, every colour but green, ended at a stack of wind-raw red rock. We felt alone on the planet, and glad to have each other as witnesses: to how high up we were, to how far away everything was, to the wind, sun, sky, lichens, fossils and small animal bones. After a while Karen pointed out that I was swearing at Mother Nature: This is crazy. This is ridiculous. Can you believe this? It’s disgusting. It’s frightening. I assured her that these curses are all praises in French.

Happily, neither Karen nor I suffer from the disease of needing to be right. Theories abounded. Are those bones from a bird? The Indians must have been so cold. Maybe these are fossils. Magnolia leaves, perhaps? Look, there’re more over there. There’s so much shit up here! Is this deer shit or cow shit? It’s pretty big. I guess we shouldn’t be stepping on these gazillion year old lichens. They remind me of the Great Barrier Reef. I swear to god that log shaped rock is a petrified tree. No way. Well it looks like a tree, concentric rings and everything. Wait, yeah, this could totally be a tree. Did you hear a shotgun? Uh-oh.

On the way down we passed four semi-massive deeply black and bubble-pocked stones. They stood alone in the sparse grass looking quite unlike anything around them, in a weird Easter Island Head way. I don’t know how it’s possible but I’m pretty sure they’re volcanic. We stood in silence, our noses running in the wind. We stroked those glossy smooth surfaces and allowed ourselves to believe that once they were liquid molten lava.

Backtracking across the prairie dog kingdom we heard the racing high chatter of the guard dog barking out an intruder alert. “That’s our names over and over again in Prairie Dog,” Karen said. “I don’t know, maybe they’re trying to come up with new words for colours,” I said. We didn’t get to see them up close but their paw-prints scampered through the bentonite rich truck path mud.

Just past the last house before the main road we stopped to watch a dozen mule deer graze behind a No Hunting sign. “Just act natural,” I said. They stood stock-still not twenty feet from us - their tall oval ears outlined in black - listening to us. We all stared at each other. The intimacy was so prolonged and unnerving that when one turned and then the rest instantly disappeared after it, it was almost a relief. Karen said, “I’ve never had so many animals stare at me in one day.”

Back at the ranch, the sun set over the lumbering black cattle we now think of as our own. An owl conversed with some far off lowing that sounded quite tragic, but we were so hungry! We ate in a hurry and scurried off to our rooms. I, for one, felt incapable of conversation. Who knows what to say about a day like that?

Well, Annie Proulx does:

"He felt as though he had stumbled into a landscape never before seen on the earth and at the same time that he had been transported to the ur-landscape before human beginnings. The mountains crouched at every horizon like dark sleeping animals, their backs whitened by snow. He trod on wildflowers, glistening quartz crystals, on agate and jade, brilliant lichens. The unfamiliar grasses vibrated with light, their incandescent stalks lighting the huge ground. His heart squeezed in, and he wished for a celestial eraser to remove the fences… Even the sinewy, braided currents of the wind… pleased him." Annie Proulx, "Man Crawling Out of Trees", Bad Dirt, NY: Scribner, 2004, page 106.
. . . . .

chimerical: a fawn coloured fawn

Deer race across Ucross’s no hunting fields. Dipsy-doodling like left-wingers up over the blue line, they out manoeuvre the slow moving cattle traffic. Yesterday a family settled in to graze the field behind the Depot - a doe, two fawns and a buck. The two fawns move, mirror images of each other, grazing chimerical in the fawn coloured grass [1]. I’m a little worried about the buck. His is the first set of antlers I’ve seen walking around, as opposed to hanging from the walls of Buck’s Cabin and Trading Post. Now here’s a real live rack. Not such a big buck, maybe no prize at all, maybe not the stuff of hunting fiction legend, which I admit I’ve read perhaps a little too much of lately, but he's able to leap four-foot fences in a single bound. I hope he’s faster than a speeding bullet.

[1] After a brief arm wrestle over who gets the dictionary today, Karen and I perused the illustrated American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language together for a while this morning. Staring at fawns all day you start to wonder if it’s just your imagination or are fawns fawn coloured. They are indeed. The colour is named after the deer. Fawn comes from the old French foun, young animal, which comes from the vulgar Latin, feto, offspring. Chimerical may seem like an excessive word, but how else to describe it? You’re working away, writing about driving down an ancient Roman road, or trying to channel the point of view of a young man just drafted to fight in Vietnam, or editing a story that you can’t remember writing though apparently the word document has been languishing in your computer for over two years, and for no reason at all you glance out the window and a fawn coloured fawn flits across the fawn coloured grass, and then another one, and then, as if he hears you watching, a youn buck lifts his antlered head.

chimerical: 1. created by or as if by a wildly fanciful imagination; highly improbably.
2. given to unrealistic fantasies; fanciful.
. . . . .

badland red country

Rain does strange things to sky in high dry country. Cloud settles so low the hills disappear. And then we miss them. We’ve gown fond of them, plain as they are, their homely twisted humps land-marking horizon in this forest-free beige prairie.

We do have some trees around here, but that’s just because we have a creek. Piney Creek. Small, but it gives us a whole lot more to look at than if it weren’t there.

Rain comes in after a string of blue days and obliterates the big sky. There go the shifting shades of morning, noon, and dusk blue; there go the highflying curlicues of dry cloud, the horizon-tracing streaks, the shadow racers, and the sunset makers. Rain settles in and the whole world blanches opaque opal. Except for that thin strip of field that never goes away no matter what you do. The blacker than usual cattle bend to the brighter yellow-green than usual grass.

I stay in. Through this hundred-year-old train depot’s small-paned windows I watch the rain get wetter and the air get colder. The brighter-than-bright grey trunks of the leafless creek-fed trees turn first a slicker darker grey with rain, and then fade to a TV static fuzz; snow falls in front of them, fat and white, the same colour as the sky.

There’s no point in going anywhere anyway. In the rain Wyoming’s red and black roads turn to gumbo. A four-wheel drive won’t do you one bit of good. If you’re waiting for rain you’re glad when it comes. Ten days of itching scratching flaking static and I was about ready to trade in my hair and lips, and forearms and shins for all new parts. If you’re not crazy about snow, come out back behind the depot and take a look at these slouching box elders half drawn in hard pencil lines and half encased in sticky white confection.

"With the lapping subtlety of incoming tide the shape of the ranch began to gather in his mind; he could recall the intimate fences he’d made, taut wire and perfect corners, the draws and rock outcrops, the water course valley steepening, cliffs like bones with shreds of meat on them rising and rising, and the stream plunging suddenly underground, disappearing into subterranean darkness of blind fish, shooting out of the mountain ten miles west on a neighbor’s place, but leaving their ranch the same badland red country as dry as a cracker." Annie Proulx, "The Half-Skinned Steer", Close Range, NY: Scribner, 1999, pages 33-34.
. . . . .

A Wyoming Sisyphus

There was snow on the ground when we first arrived in Wyoming. Late in the first week we slipped into a November heat wave: sun and in the seventies, no wind. Looks like those days are over.

Last evening the sun set down across the road in a furl of fuchsia and a slash of orange fury. We all ran out to photograph to photograph it. Our crashing camera-clutching footsteps disappeared whole families of deer. Dinnertime homebound traffic sped past ignoring us, tires high-whining, headlights blackening the cottonwood limbs.

Chill gusts came up in the night, blowing disturbed sleep and strange dreams through The Depot. In the morning we compared notes and confirmed multiple instances of synchronized waking, serial bathroom visits, strange noises, overhead lights left on. Even so, we agreed, The Depot isn’t haunted. But Buck’s Cabin sure is.

In Buck’s Cabin the wireless Internet modem blinks tiny green lights into the low log cabin cobweb gloom, its two stubby blue antennae communing with Buck’s hunting trophy skulls and horns. The Internet connection is tenuous today. Are these gusts of wind enough to interrupt a wireless signal? Or is Buck’s ghost out there, re-hunting the headless ghosts of his trophy kills.

All morning Sandy’s been out in the yard raking leaves in high wind and hunting orange, the poor woman. "A Wyoming Sisyphus," Karen Russell, quote of the day.

Buy Karen's book, by the way: St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, her debut collection of stories, was published by Knopf in September 2006, and, we just found out, it's going to be translated into Italian soon. We're all reading it at Ucross. The story "Z.Z.’s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers" may have something to do with our increasingly synchronous sleep paterns.
. . . . .

living a long way out

In Wyoming one of the deadly sins is leaving a closed gate open. If there's a closed gate in this wide-open place, it's closed for a reason. Another deadly sin is going for a walk without hunting orange on. Dun-coloured clothing is a death warrant in these racing deer-season hills.

Annie Proulx is a former Ucross resident. Some of her Wyoming stories were written here. I’m reading the Close Range collection and the other fiction writer resident is reading Bad Dirt. We discuss Annie’s character development and dialogue in hushed tones in The Depot hallway, in case she’s still lurking near, and then we skulk back to our computers. Hardly intimidating or emasculating at all, to write from a desk that maybe the prolific giant Annie Proulx sat at.

Other Ucross alumni: http://ucrossfoundation.org/alumni.html

To not write about cows is an increasingly futile endeavour. In a whole field of black cows, why is there one brown cow? Why is it that the one brown cow wears the bell? Whither the brown cow goes, all the other cows follow.

"When you live a long way out you make your own fun." Annie Proulx, "55 Miles to the Gas Pump," Close Range, NY: Scribner, 1999.
. . . . .

I've died and gone to Ucross

Today the deeply funny Karen Russell and I set out to find the tepee rings we’ve been hearing about ever since we got to Ucross. Not the sportiest of girls, we set out in pink and green when really hunting season dictates florescent orange fashion. We had no map, not enough film and only one bottle of water between us, but we’d both got work done this morning and it was such a beautiful afternoon that we figured even if we didn’t find the tepee rings we’d still come out ahead.

Wyoming is not you’re your typical Vermont rolling green hill and fall foliage pretty. It’s not Rocky Mountain majestic either. “It’s ugly sister beautiful,” Karen Russell TM. The hills around Ucross are washed out wind worn treeless protuberances so adamantly whatever it is that they are that who could argue with them? Today’s brilliant blue skies contained just enough cloud in just the right places to make the sun turn the hills on and off at whim. Grey-green, yellow-beige, red tinges, black shadows, and then back to bright again. It helped that we didn’t know where we were going. We really had to look around. Could be this road? I think we missed it. Maybe it’s that one? Does that look like a dome house to you? Left here? Is this a road? I see what you mean. Don’t go toward the granite pile, that’s all I know. That’s gravel, not granite. Oh.

One thing I should mention is that all this time we’re yakking our heads off we were 4100 feet above sea level and heading further and further up hill. Putting the foot in foothills, if you know what I mean. We didn’t follow the directions we’d been given so much as let ourselves be lead along by the view. Through an assiduous process of stopping to catch our breath a lot and taking lots of photos, somehow we found the tepee rings. Are these tepee rings? I don’t know. They look pretty primordial. These are totally rings. How could they not be? If I had a tepee I’d put it right here.

We sat down cross-legged, not in deer dung, and watched deer crossing the Clear Creek far below. Patches of sunlight came and went over eerily flat patches of far off ranch lands punctuated by inexplicably regularly spaced pitch-black cattle. It’s a good thing there’re more cows than people in Wyoming - if those were people standing around in the fields down there it would be pretty weird.

On the way back down to the ranch we recognized a deer print sunk deep in the truck path mud and boy did we get excited. We tracked something! By four fifteen the hills behind us were cold, the hills in front of us were gold, and the almost-harvest-moon hung low and lace-white in the steel-blue sky.
. . . . .

the flooding-in of the real

In Montréal, the man who affixed the baggage-claim stickers to my suitcase handles said, "You’re checking these through to Sheridan?" This worried me. I thought perhaps I ought to ask him that same question.

On the flight from Montréal to Denver I watched Tickets, an Italian movie about three unrelated sets of characters traveling by train from Germany to Rome. This encouraged me - a traveling movie whilst traveling - what a good idea.

The Denver airport boasts a French Bistro. The view from Terminal C is colour-coordinated – tarmac-grey, rain-shadow parched grass, mile high cold blue sky and a thin strip of mountain – the perfect pallet for a Gore-Tex jacket. Two hours waiting for Big Sky Airlines flight 2593 to Sheridan is plenty of time to notice that tumbleweed are tossed about by the wind the same way empty Styrofoam cups are.

On the Beech 1900D every seat is a window seat. Every seat is also an isle seat. The co-pilot is also the flight attendant. There is no restroom or legroom on this plane.

There are more cattle in Wyoming than there are people. The drive from Sheridan to Ucross takes us through 27 miles of snow-dusted hills. S-curves on red-shouldered roads. It’s deer hunting season, but we see them everywhere. It’s adjective hunting season, but we can’t find enough words to describe where we are. Instead we talk about other places we’ve been, places this place reminds us of. This place reminds me of Tuscany west of Voltera. The hills there are called Poggi; they are similarly treeless and pubescent-breast shaped.

The population of Ucross is 25. The elevation is 4085. The Big Red Barn is an art gallery. The Ranch House is home to offices. We eat in the schoolhouse. We sleep in the Depot. We wake to Venetian blind sunlight lines and wonder for a moment if any of it is real. Whitetail deer graze in grasses the same green as our goose down duvets. A heard of wild turkeys forages in the cottonwoods. Perhaps we have died and gone to heaven. "Only, there must be some mistake… This appears to be the heaven for turkeys," says Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Knopf 2006.

"This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock. Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothings shakes the heart so much as meeting – far, far away – what you last met at home. Some say that travelers are informal anthropologists. But it is ontology – the investigation of the nature of being – that travelers do. Call it the flooding-in of the real." Cynthia Ozick, "The Shock of Teapots," in Metaphor & Memory, NY: Vintage, 1991, p144.
. . . . .

if the boots fit

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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Exited thoughts now long to travel

We had a flurry of out of town visitors this fall. All those folks who said they were coming Montréal this summer left it to the last minute. And they all came at once. We didn’t quite get to spend time with everyone who passed through town in the past few weeks. But we really enjoyed those we did see. The spare futon is folded up for winter now. In less than a week I hitch up the horses and head west to Wyoming.

iam mens praetrepidans auet uagari,
iam laeti studio pedes uigescunt.

Exited thoughts now long to travel;
Glad feet now tap in expectation.

Catullus, XLVI

I pulled my suitcase from the closet so my dog would get used to seeing it around. But so far I’ve put nothing in it. It’s hard to pack for six weeks in a place you’ve never been before. What to wear in Wyoming in November? Correspondence with the Ucross Foundation indicates that the weather will be highly unpredictable save in this one fact: there will be wind, lots of wind.

Where is Ucross? People keep asking me. It’s in Wyoming, in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. Where’s that? You know in the movies, when the wagon trains are slowly advancing westward across the plains and then finally some mountains appear in the near distance? That's my idea of where Ucross is: on the ranch just before the mountains begin.

USGS Topographical map of Ucross, WY

Aerial Photograph of Ucross, WY

The Ucross Foundation website offers up this historical narrative:

The Ucross Foundation occupies a cluster of buildings collectively known as Big Red. The Ranch House is one of the oldest standing houses in the area and tepee rings on the hills hint at a much earlier history as first nation hunting grounds. Built in 1882, the Big Red Barn was a former Pony Express stop, and was on the stagecoach route that serviced Buffalo to Clearmont from 1891-1911. Having missed the last coach by 95 years, I’ll fly into Sheridan on Big Sky Airlines out of Denver. And now that the Internet has put the Pony Express out of business, I’ll rely on wi-fi for communication with the outside world.

The village that grew up around Big Red went through several name changes, eventually settling on Ucross, named after the original Pratt & Ferris brand. Here is a photograph of ranch hands taking a break at the Big Red Ranch in 1898:


American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

So far, this is the only photographic indication I have of what to wear in Wyoming. See the seated guy with the beard on the bottom right? That's the look I'm going for. Minus the beard though.
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Ucross Preparations

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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