lapsus linguae

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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