It’s easy to trace the far-back beginning. I can clearly remember the boots my dad bought for me when I was nine, that they were black with white stitching, and the boots I bought myself all those years later, in a Western apparel store in Lander, Wyoming: hot pink tops with pull holes and riding heels. I still own both pairs of boots—can’t toss the first for nostalgic reasons, and the pink pair are still solid, almost twenty years later.
I grew up riding in a large Southern California horse facility, a maze of pipstalls and rubber mats, cross ties, lunge whips, and passing left-shoulder-to-left-shoulder in the arena, which always had perfect footing. At eighteen, I was riding a palomino quarter horse who was every Breyer horse I’d ever coveted in a toy store—his body was golden brown, like perfectly baked cookies, and he had a lush, creamy mane and tail. He was kind, simple-minded, didn’t quite understand the dressage moves my trainer and I were trying to get him to do. I once jumped on him for a cool down and a man, a Western rider, stopped to watch us walk by. “What are you doing in a dressage saddle on that quarter horse?” he asked me, and I just laughed, not sure at all what he meant, not knowing I was soon to have my whole notion of the horse world blown to pieces.
My mother planned a family trip to Wyoming, a place that meant nothing to me at the time, but was soon going to mean a great deal. We flew into Jackson where the airport sits beneath the Tetons, craggy, abrupt towers of mountains that took my breath away. I hadn’t yet seen the Owls or the Absarokas or the Winds or the Bitterroots. For the next few days of driving around Yellowstone and looking at herds of bison, I kept commenting about how blue the sky was. How could it be so deeply big and blue? I’d never seen such open country, or seen so much sky without the marine layer, or the haze of nearby L.A.. The last leg of the trip was on a dude ranch an hour from Jackson, and as it turned out, a whole lot more disruption was waiting for me there.
Looking back, the ranch was so much more romantic before I knew the names of all the trails and horses and crew. A gallop across a long mesa called Tabletop ripped something to shreds in me, throwing my dressage riding aside in a heap. It felt like great hand reached down from the clouds and muddied up my insides, and they stayed muddied for years and still aren’t quite settled. I’d visit the ranch with my family that year and return to work there four years later.
The summers I was there still loom on the fringes of my adult life, collapsed into one singular experience I refer to as “The Ranch.” What I’d like to get at here, and perhaps undo the knot for myself, is how I couldn’t sit astride a quarter horse the same way after that, how my body knew a saddle in a different way, how Wyoming, at least for those of us (and it was most of us) who weren’t from there, squeezed and challenged and wrung us through. It was, effectively, our New York City.
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I remember once, on a dark morning in May, I left my cabin to find snow falling. I suggested to a fellow wrangler, with all the conviction of a Californian, that we should, obviously, delay the morning’s duties until the snow stopped. He could not have scoffed more gutterally at my ridiculousness, and I heard him repeating the phrase “delay until the snow stops” to our fellow wranglers all morning, who all had saddled up without a question before riding up a ridge into a near-whiteout. “Did the snow stop yet, California?” he asked me through the wind as we wrangled the horses into the corral, and I tried to smile through the numbing pain of my ungloved hands clutching my reins. It would take a lot more wrangling before I learned the lesson I’d been given that morning.
It would take me so long because I was unraveling a whole lifetime of the hired help picking up the horseshit at the barn, and I was the hired help now. Snow was for ski trips. But by the summer’s end I’d fallen for the place entirely, and would return to California with so much excess energy that I went for two bike rides and a run everyday just to fill the time I’d usually have been throwing saddles or fixing fence.
“I’ll only go for one season,” I had told my parents, while really telling myself, because I had the suspicion that Wyoming was going to take hold of me, distract me from life’s greater purpose, whatever that was. Of course, the purpose of one’s twenties might be to just cast around for an identity, and for that the ranch would certainly do as a backdrop. I stayed three seasons, which, for the sheer volume of vivid memory I still possess of that time, doesn’t seem nearly long enough.
I still believed in destiny then, still had the sense that I could, to use a ranch image, ride off into the sunset of my future while pretending to live in another time period if I followed the signs. I was making $700 a month plus room and board (“Some rich guests tip up to $100, if you can believe that!” the manager told me, which at the time felt like an obscene amount of money), and I spent most of my paychecks on six packs of Sierra Nevada or new leather chaps. The whole lifestyle felt like being in a play to me, with required costumes and language (I never did live down calling a cinch a girth or a lope a canter). Except for moments when I met people who were from Wyoming, like once in a snowstorm coming upon a middle-aged couple atop two beautiful roans thawing ice for their herd of two hundred cattle, I felt I belonged there, had always belonged there more than back in that pipe-stall paradise back home. Every day presented a new serving of challenges and things to tuck under my belt: tagging a calf’s ear with a giant hole-punch or learning to tie a pack saddle.
There was always some bizarre or old-timey experience to be had in Wyoming. I could go to an unsanctioned horserace on top of a butte where seemingly any old person could lead their horse to the starting line. I could hike to a glacier-fed lake, realize I wanted to swim, and do so naked with only the occasional magpie around to complain about it. I could go out to the land owned by our farrier and get high on a Saturday afternoon, giggling around his front yard as his goats—their heads level with mine on their long necks—tried to charge at me. I could sit next to an old man at the Rustic Pine Tavern Bar and have him say the most horrible, homophobic thing I’d ever heard, thereby exploding whatever level of enlightened I believed Americans had achieved in the Obama years. I could buy a ten-week-old lab puppy or be sleeping with two different men or take a drag off a yellow-pack American Spirit and it was all tucked neatly into my cinematic existence up there in the wild west.
It was a strange way to live—on the dude ranch I was like a showgirl, working long hours in some getup, in my case pearl-snap shirts, Rustler jeans, and Ariats. It never felt like a real job, leading vacationing dudes on rides. Real life existed everywhere beyond the mountains, mostly south and West of us in my mind, back where I’d come from. Each time I went back to California after a season at the ranch, I couldn’t believe how many cars existed in Los Angeles, let alone people.
The people I knew in Wyoming were mostly transplants, too. There was a pipeline of young people, for some reason, from preppy East Coast colleges, avoiding the same kind of world as I was but with different, more eastern trappings. They were only in Wyoming for the season, like I was, and they often came back for more seasons, like I did, having not found something to sustain them year-round round back home, or simply avoiding a future of stagnancy. I get the feeling we all knew the life we lived out there was special, transient, and not-quite-real.
Which is the prevailing feeling of some parts of the West, as anyone raised there will tell you. Hiking with a friend, she yells out “Fake!” when we see a waterfall, and again when we spot a bald eagle. The West is the simulacra, the map that covers the region, and it always gives an eerie feeling of having been stolen and paved over, which of course it has been. In the next town over, there was a plaque describing a struggle between two native tribes, at the end of which the victors’ leader put the opponent’s heart on a spear and danced around. It’s hard to fathom that these events actually occurred in that very place, and not all that long ago either, just a few hundred years.
I’m sure the West appeals differently to someone from the East—represents everything it is in movies and books—aggressively casual and new in comparison to the older dignity of the East. Donning a cowboy hat and mounting a horse is just about the most Western thing a person can do. Wyoming was that grit and ruggedness, all that was tattered and whiskey-sour and leather. It wasn’t a place. It was a way of being.
As I said, I never had a real relationship—not really—or owned my own horse or even paid rent while I lived in Wyoming. This added to the impermanence. There were mice that lived in my cabin that ran across my bed at night, but I never was living there long enough to care enough to do anything about it besides move to the next bed over or, if I really got motivated, a different cabin. At the end of one season I left my black pea coat on a peg to languish all winter in my absence—as I had gathered my things, I’m sure it just didn’t look like something that was mine anymore.
Those three summers, when I was twenty-one to twenty-three, were when I was discovering that playacting cowgirls and cowboys was only fun until someone got hurt. And someone always gets hurt, don’t they? While it’s true that I didn’t have a real relationship, I was still deeply betrayed by a man I cared for. I was thrown from a four-year-old filly and nearly shattered my leg, a wreck that put me on crutches for several days. The fact of my womanhood was always bobbing to the surface of ranch life—I once started my period without so much as a wad of toilet paper to stuff in my jeans, twelve miles into the backcountry. The whiskey bottles that emptied and sat in my window each had a story to tell—of poor, midnight choices, but also midnight rides under a spray of mountain stars. To this day, when I smell Armani Mania cologne, I am immediately in the arms of a scruffy wrangler named Chad from Texas, doubly astride his bay quarter horse, Jericho. The scent of sagebrush, of any variety growing in any high desert around the country, is enough to send my eyes to the horizon, lost in memory. Linseed oil for cleaning bridles. Bad coffee burning on a too-hot plate. And of course, more than anything, the nutty smell of horses—but that one has followed me through many of life’s chapters. Artifacts, too: my pink-top boots with pullholes that still slouch in my shoerack; a bright turquoise silk neckscarf; wirecutters; cigarette smoke in the glow of the evening.
I suppose all the young, seasonal workers from that time have common memories of those wild times. The night rodeo, the campfires at the “beach,” a small clearing by the creek with enough space for a small round of camping chairs. One time a friend came to visit me at the ranch and she was so taken by the romance of the place that she, quite uncharacteristically, went home with one of the wranglers. She’d only slept with one person before then. I remember every horse that was in my string, and pine still for the complete trust I had in a jet-black gelding named Smokey, like no horse I’ve met since. I recall sitting on the edge of a lake and being unable to look at it due to the mosquitoes that blanketed my vision. The heft of an eighty-pound saddle swung up on a high-withered mare, my boot heels on the hollow porch, the blue eyes of Notch, the Catahoula leopard dog who had a fondness for me and would nose his way into my sleeping bag, much to the annoyance of his grumpy owner. On Sundays, I could sleep for hours and hours—the dream-filled, hot slumber of youth.
I did leave after my heart was broken, but I didn’t lose my attachment to the place. When I left, I missed the loneliness of Wyoming, the sense that I was solo on the land with the animals and the wind. It was only much later that I began to understand the lesson of that snowy morning—that life, the world, keeps going, even if you hide out from it. And that if I didn’t eject myself from the valley I would be barbed into staying for longer than I meant to, till it was too late and possibly not cute anymore to play pretend. You only have one first rodeo, after all.
Things were bad when I left. Everyone seemed to make poor choices all at once, and at last, the ranch manager shot his family horse, who was over thirty-five years old and had helped him raise three girls. Then he got into his pickup, and began driving to Georgia to shack up with his secret lover of two years. All the playing pretend had real implications, and I couldn’t do it any longer. Couldn’t stand the smoking indoors, couldn’t take another dude on another trail ride or point out another native plant. Couldn’t wear boots for one more day, plus my sweaty, soggy socks I wore day after day had given me a plantar’s wart that I somehow endured without treatment for an entire month. I realized that I was really more than just a cowgirl, and had a hunger for bookstores and anything but diner food—sushi, or a good dhal. So I quit, and drove home with such a sagging hole in my middle that it took me months to recover. I was twenty-three, so I had never been in love before.
It’s been nearly two decades since those summers disrupted my existence. Some memory or other occurs to me frequently—sometimes as often as daily. My husband listens to me tell the same stories—about finding a dead bear carcass, finding a gun, finding a horse skeleton—over and over with such grace. He has his own ranch—a YMCA camp he worked at during and after college, where he snuffed skunks out of bunkhouses and ate disgusting things on a dare. He understands the way my life is haunted—mostly happily—by those years.
After my daughter was born, we drove from my parents-in-law’s house in Idaho across the state line and into Wyoming. We stopped at the Tetons and held her up for a picture, like a christening. We drove out to the ranch where the wrangler who bedded my friend still worked. He let me out on the land on a horse named Yahoo—two precious hours of reminiscing, and I returned very chafed and very happy. It felt like a pilgrimage, like bringing my child to meet one of the places that birthed me.
Everyone else I knew in Wyoming has since moved on. Some took longer than others, but they eventually all left, leaving room for more young people to come make their own mistakes. That leaves just the land as the witness.
