Absurdity, Allegory and China

In April 1980, on the verge of turning thirty, I’d decided that I needed a new setting. In the latter part of 1978 I’d met a woman, the sister of a co-worker, who had come to Kentucky to spend the winter from her seasonal job in northern Wyoming where she worked for a large ranch as a sheepherder. Laura Bell and I became fast friends. I’d passed through northern Wyoming and the Bighorn Basin a couple of years before, and the landscape had deeply impressed me, reminding me of times spent on a stormy ocean, though in that terrain – a thousand miles from the sea and in defiance of gravity – the waves of tumbling earth were breaking at a much slower, geologic rate. I had not been able to shake the images of a stark and seemingly barren country. Meeting and listening to Laura speak of a place that I’d seen and, for some odd reason, deeply remembered, rattled the emptiness that was too comfortably settling in. At the time I had no idea that she would play such an instrumental role in how my next page would be written.

When it became absolutely clear that moving on was the only option (there were no broken marriages, no secret crimes, just a low, hollow tone that filled each day), I, of course, looked west. A friend in Lexington, originally from Utah, had an uncle who ran sheep and cattle in northern Utah, and he suggested that I contact him to see if he might be hiring. I phoned in February and asked him if he needed an extra hand. He said he didn’t, though he knew a rancher in Kemerrer, WY who might, and he passed along his phone number. After locating Kemerrer on a map, I called and asked the same question, and the man said, yes, he’d need someone, later, mid-April. “Did I ride?” he asked, and I answered, “Yes,” though I’d never in my life been on a horse.

In my last two months in Lexington I took horseback riding lessons twice a week from a young woman who, as soon as she learned that I was heading to Wyoming to work on a ranch, put me on her largest horse and wouldn’t let me use a saddle. She said, “You’ll learn a lot quicker this way.” I won’t go into particulars, though I will say that I spent a lot of time remounting and, in the evenings, eating Tylenol. She was, of course, right.

I sold what little I had, bought a battered ‘72 Datsun pickup and headed west to Wyoming. I’d given myself a few extra days to head up into the Bighorn Basin and visit with Laura before continuing on to Kemerrer. I arrived after midnight on a cold, clear April night and found Laura ‘picking night drop’ at the Lewis Estates’ lambing sheds north of Lovell on the road to Cowley. Thousands of ewes were huddled in and around the large central shed waiting to birth their lambs. It was Laura’s job to attend to the lambing ewes, ensure that the newborns were mothered up and settled into ‘jugs,’ small 3’ x 3’ bonding pens where the first two days of a lamb’s life were spent in relative isolation with its mother. After getting a little sleep I returned to the sheds at sunrise, and Laura introduced me to John Hopkin, a tall, lanky, tough-talking, very funny man who, I would soon learn, was like no other I had or have since ever met. He asked me if I needed a job. And so I never made it to Kemerrer, and two weeks later found myself alone with a horse, two dogs and 950 ‘dries’ – barren ewes – out in the windswept badlands of Dry Creek, several miles west of the Lovell-Greybull highway. Change and Wyoming had grabbed me. And they shook.

But this is not about me. This is about Laura Bell and her brilliant memoir, Claiming Ground (Knopf). You can take the above four paragraphs as my disclosure statement, the acknowledgment of my personal bias. That said, I also immodestly admit that I know good words when I read them.
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By the late 1970’s the sheep business in Wyoming was in serious decline, driven hard to the wall by a dwindling, cheap work force, natural predation, and the unwillingness of a newer generation, many of whom had grown up on ranches, to choose ranching and ranch work as a career. There was always the constant complaint of the ranchers: “You can’t find good help anymore.” Too often ‘good help’ meant a near-total commitment to constant work and low pay. The adage among ranch hands was, “The ranch I work for has the best retirement package there is: they work you to death.” Many of those who had once looked to ranching as a vocational choice had found greener pastures elsewhere, often in the oil and mineral fields of Wyoming, as well as more lucrative opportunities in other industries elsewhere. Getting a college education had also become more of an option, and many of those who left for school had no appetite for the demands of ranching, choosing instead to find higher paying work in distant places. By then many of the large sheep outfits had already sold out or had changed completely over to cattle that could be managed by hard working families and the community of ranchers who did their best to minimize their dependence on a diminishing labor market. If they kept sheep at all, they chose instead to run smaller farm flocks that could be more easily managed in fenced pastures close to home, minimizing predator damage and sidestepping the constantly growing labor shortage.

In northern Wyoming the days of trailing large bands of sheep between isolated seasonal ranges, mostly on government allotted lands (BLM and U.S. Forest Service), was quickly becoming a memory, though there were some outfits that were still scraping by as land-rich and cash-poor businesses. The Lewis Estates of Cowley, Wyoming was one that was still hanging on to their sheep by a thread, though, I suspect, more from inertia than a business commitment to the industry. It still ran 8,000 sheep along with 2,000 cattle, though the possibility of a sustainable profit favored the beef. The sheep side of their business was, in fact, in it’s death throes, and by 1983 there wouldn’t be a single band left.

There are few jobs as solitary as herding sheep on the rangelands of the American West. Though some sheep outfits had two persons per band – one to cook, the other to herd – often a single herder would be responsible for all duties. (At the time I worked for the Lewis Estates there was one married couple that worked together and lived in a camper trailer, though all the other bands were single men living in sheep wagons.)

The world of sheepherding (never “shepherding”) is nearly totally male. In 1977 Laura Bell, fresh from college, entered that world and so begins her story, one that spans the next thirty years, the first three of which were spent in her sheepwagon in the dry Bighorn Basin in the springs and autumns, and the lush Bighorn Mountains in the summers, which accounts for the first nine chapters of the book.

From a completely selfish perspective I am very happy that she spent a good amount of time describing her life in places that I know, in feelings that I felt, with people, now gone, who I miss. As I read I could smell the sheep and horses, the rush of sage that filled the wide open world on a cool spring morning. And I could feel the moonless dark and the impenetrable white light of fog and snow closing in while still too far from camp, when the only way to get back home was to trust a horse’s sense of knowing that the oats were in a trash can close beside the sheepwagon.

But there is much more here than just the hardships, beauty and painful isolation of a sheepherding life, of being a young woman in the company of old men, most of whom were hopeless alcoholics. There is, inevitably, the return to a more social and socializing life, of working and living each day with people as a ranch hand on the Diamond Tail Ranch in the Shell Valley.

Later there is marriage and, eventually, its fragmentation, the heartbreaking death of a child. And through it all Laura tells it in a language pared of all fat, and with honesty that is, at times, disconcerting. She doesn’t sidestep some very personal difficulties, nor does she spare herself in the telling.

Memoirs can be terribly tricky terrains to navigate, much akin to picking your way across a field of scree: it’s hard not to lose your footing, setting off a slide and injuring someone farther down the slope. And the harder the story is that’s being told, the greater the chance of damage. Although Laura and I have only seen each other a handful of times over the last twenty-five years – though we have stayed in touch – I knew enough of her life to approach the book with a bit of apprehension. This is the first time I’ve read a work where I’ve known nearly everyone who appears on its pages, and it was unsettling taking the first step in. I was not sure what to expect and what might happen “farther down the slope.”

In the Acknowledgements at the end of the book Laura thanks her ex-husband: “I thank Joe Little for giving his blessing to the manuscript, an act of love and courage.” I too am thankful for Joe’s act of love and courage, an understanding that most would not have had. It is clear that Laura has found a path through the scree without disturbing a stone.

This is a brave work of renewal on several different levels. There are two constants throughout her narrative. First, the Wyoming landscape, the contrast between the brutally chiseled midday sharp edges and the rounded-over grace of those very same edges at sunset. Nothing is ever just one thing. When one spends substantive time in places like the McCullough Peaks, a judgment at high noon is not the same as one might have watching the sun drop behind them in the evening.

Secondly, and what is clearly most important, is Laura’s developing relationship with her parents over the thirty-year course of the book, of understanding herself as a part of a family, which is the crown jewel many never get a chance to wear.

There is much more here than the story of living in isolation, trailing sheep and cows, wandering the backroads of Wyoming, and plotting a true course through her own as well as others’ lives. This is more like an elegant ship’s log of what, at first, seems to be an expedition into the unknown that evolves into an inspiring voyage of life carefully observed and, through care and observation, realized.
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My good friend Chris Barrett filmed Laura Bell reading from Claiming Ground at Carpe Librum in Knoxville, TN on March 29, 2010.
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For more on sheepherding from the NYT (2009): In Loneliness, Immigrants Tend the Flock