Perfection of the Morning (10 page)

Eventually, too, I became exasperated with the Zen Buddhists. I found them in love with their own rhetoric and their silly stories; the very complexity with which they chose to present what turned out to be simple ideas struck me as typically male; their humility seemed filled with male arrogance. The more I read them, the more I felt they were out of touch with the simple needs of the female being, a common person such as the world is filled with, trying to find a way to live her life within the given social structures and among other ordinary people.

I had come into this new life in the country and then into this period of mental anguish armed with only one dictum. I clung to it as well as I could; it was that no one would ever again tell me what I thought. If I was tumbling and tossing in a sea of misunderstanding and bad ideas, I was finally, in my forties, determined that they would be, at the very least, my own. I would never again accept anybody’s word about anything having to do with my life unless, having examined it from every angle, matched it against how it felt in my heart, my gut, my head, I knew it fit my own real feelings, how I viewed life and my own real experiences. I, and nobody else, would determine what my own real experiences were and had been. I might be wrong, but against whose standard? If I was absolutely, ruthlessly honest with myself, stripped away all self-pity, examined all the evidence I could locate, then concluded something—even if it was that I couldn’t conclude anything—then
that conclusion would be the rock on which I would found my life from then on. The possibility for error was clear to me, but I thought, over and over again, such is the nature of being a human being. If I am wrong, and to the extent that I am, so is everybody else. One can only do what one can do, and I was giving my life, my body, my intellect over to the effort. I would accept the responsibility for more mistakes, for from now on they would be my own and nobody else’s.

The more sense I made of my own truncated, incoherent and casual ideas about life, the more I put them into the context of accepted thought on the subject, of the Great Ideas, all this going on against a background of loneliness, solitude and the struggle to understand myself, ironically, the more despairing I grew.

One morning after seven years here, I awoke and remembered that I had had a strange dream. I couldn’t remember what had happened before or after; all I could remember was a word which I saw clearly printed across a pale dream sky. It was “anomie.”

I hadn’t a clue what the word meant; I was not even sure that it was a word. But in the dream and as I awakened I was filled with such penetrating loneliness, such absolute coldness and emptiness, that my very soul was chilled.

I told myself with a grim determination rather characteristic of me, If I dreamt it, I must know what it means. At the ranch there was only an elementary school dictionary. The word was not in it. At the hay farm I had an old Funk and Wagnall’s College Dictionary. It was not in there either. I pondered, a sense of the word’s familiarity growing stronger. I thought I knew the word was a technical term, and from sociology in which my first husband had once been a graduate student.

Slowly over the next few weeks it came back to me: it meant, I was sure, a profound alienation from the surrounding culture. This
was hardly news. But during my waking hours I tried to fight it off with all my strength, kept it well buried, so that I wouldn’t consciously feel what seemed to be the hopelessness of my situation. Now I was frightened by the almost unbearable depth of the sorrow and loneliness that had been brought to the surface by the dream, so that I could no longer deny it.

I was in constant pain, tumult roared inside me. I had waited for the moment when I would awaken, and when it came, slowly, not in the flash most thinkers claimed it would, it was worse, not better. I thought only dying made sense, for without illusion it seemed to me that not only was life unbearable, it was purposeless, ugly and desolate.

Feeling myself about to implode with all that ceaseless mental activity churning around, endlessly chasing itself without an outlet, I had begun to talk to myself. If people had heard me, they’d have thought I was crazy, but it saved me from worse: screaming to the sky or banging my head against fence posts.

The house was empty and quiet. Sometimes I put on records and danced to them as I had in clubs and at parties with all my dear old friends: the Pointer Sisters, Janis Joplin, Bette Midler, “When a Man Loves a Woman,” Carly Simon, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder, and going far back to the Mamas and the Papas, “Dancing in the Street.” It was small comfort; it was no comfort at all.

I didn’t turn to Peter. This was my own struggle, and it was too profound, too wholly and intimately mine, to turn to anyone else. Had I been in a city, I might have sought out an analyst, but I wasn’t in the city, and as it was I knew this was a labor I had to complete myself, in my own way and on my own terms. It was not something Peter had ever gone through; I suspected that if I told him, he wouldn’t be able to understand because his own life was so clear, so satisfying and psychically untroubled. Possibly I was a little ashamed
of my own pain, which was taking place in the midst of the abundantly good life that I had been fortunate to find but with which I wasn’t satisfied, because I was too inadequate a human being.

Day after day, as long as the weather allowed and I was well, I walked the roads and the fields, searching for clues in the susuration of the wind in the grass and in the boundless layers of sky. Hawks, eagles, gophers, antelope, the occasional badger, small garter snakes, coyotes running the line between earth and sky, river carp drifting with a kind of ease filled with unleashed power, the beaver and the muskrat—I waited for them to speak to me; I was looking for hints, for clues, for explanations, above all, for consolation.

During all of this I never considered leaving, or rather I considered leaving every second of every day and always found such a departure unimaginable. Returning to my old life was no longer possible, but when I looked around and told myself, This is my home; this is my home till I die, that, too, seemed equally unimaginable.

And yet, in the midst of all this turmoil and misery, I was writing novels and short stories, all of them informed by my personal struggle and conversely informing me, as I worked to give shape to my experiences so I could write them down. And if I walked every day and studied the landscape, the weather, the animals, trying to fit them into a life-scheme I could live with, I was also learning about Nature and, thus, about rural life.

Some years later, when I was an established author, I said to a Toronto reporter who had asked me a question about him, “My husband is a true rural man.”

“What does that mean?” the reporter asked, his voice full of skepticism.

“It means,” I said, “that he understands the world in terms of wild things.” I was a little surprised myself at my answer, having been called upon to explain something that until that moment had seemed self-evident, and realizing that, caught off guard, I had hit on the heart of the matter.

The reporter’s pencil stopped moving, his eyes shifted away from me, he reflected, his eyes shifted back to me, and without writing anything down he changed the subject. When I told this story to a writer-naturalist friend, he said, laughing, that for the reporter my answer “does not compute.”

A true rural person must be somebody born and raised on the land, outside of towns, and far from most other people. That being a given, then it follows that such life experience must result in an intrinsic understanding of the world different from that of someone raised in
the cement, asphalt, glass and crowds of the city. Peter’s thinking about the world was different from mine in ways that went beyond our different sexes or our different lifestyles. Where I had been trained to understand human nature from Freud and pop psychology, and the functioning of the world from classes in political economy and in history, that is, from formal education, Peter’s starting point was what he had all his life lived in the midst of—it was Nature.

As years on the ranch passed, though, I began to learn from Nature too; I began to catch a glimpse of the world as he saw it through my own life in Nature. When that began to happen, a new understanding slowly, very slowly, began to dawn on me about what a life in Nature teaches one. I began to see that there might be more at the root of this difference in understanding of how the world works than I had guessed at, thinking it had to do only with simple, surface matters, like understanding cattle behavior well enough to predict their next move, or knowing the habits of antelope, or reading the sky with accuracy. I didn’t yet have any idea what this deeper knowledge might be, but I watched Peter closely and tried to see what he saw.

While he was doing the spring irrigation at the hay farm, he would sometimes come across fawns only a few days old lying in the hay where they’d been left by their mothers who had gone off to forage. More than once he came to the house to get me so I could see the little spotted creature for myself.

“Watch,” he would say. “When they’re this young they don’t even move when you come near them.” Then he would bend down, pick up the trusting fawn in his arms, carry it to the closest grass-covered dike, and place it gently down where the irrigation water couldn’t reach it. I worried about the mother locating her baby, but he said, with the confidence born of experience, “Don’t
worry. It won’t take her a minute to find him.” When we went back hours later the fawn would always be gone. These and other incidents reminded me over and over again that Peter, and other rural people who knew no other landscape, had formed his attitude to the prairie and his understanding of its weather, its growth patterns and its animals by a lifetime of immersion in it.

In my reading and occasionally in conversation with urban visitors, I read or hear people either saying directly or implying indirectly that
true rural
people don’t notice or appreciate the beauty in which they live. Although I don’t say so, the arrogance and ignorance of such remarks always makes me angry, implying as it does that rural people lack humanity, are somehow an inferior branch of the human species, that beauty is beyond their ken. It is one thing to come from the city and be overwhelmed by the beauty of Nature and to speak of it, and another thing entirely to have lived in it so long that it has seeped into your bones and your blood and is inseparable from your own being, so that it is part of you and requires no mention or hymns of praise.

Peter preferred to do our annual spring and fall cattle drives on horseback, a trek which took three days. Bringing the cattle down to the valley around Christmastime could be very unpleasant and then it was often hard to get help, so that we sometimes made that move with only Peter, me and one other person. But three days out on the prairie during a warm spring were paradise; we never had any trouble rounding up enough riders then. If the spring move was usually a joy, the best part of it was the eight to ten miles of unbroken prairie without even any true roads through it that we used to cross each time.

I knew the first time Peter took me across those miles of prairie that I loved to be there far from towns or even houses, on native
shortgrass that had never been broken, where the grass hadn’t been overgrazed and was full of birds’ nests in the spring, and long-eared jackrabbits as big as small dogs, antelope in the distance, and coyotes that often followed us singing all the way.

Of course, unless she’s a dyed-in-the-wool, bona fide horse-and-cattlewoman herself, when it’s time to move cattle, and especially if there are adolescent sons on the place, the rancher’s wife usually gets stuck driving the truck. The rancher is the one with the understanding of the cattle, knowledge of the route, and the cattle-management skills. As boss and owner, he has to ride. If there are adolescents along, it’s taken for granted that they’ll ride because they have to learn, which has a high priority on Saskatchewan ranches, and because it’s so much fun and nobody wants to deprive kids of a little harmless fun.

The rancher’s wife packs the meals, stows them in the truck, serves them when the time comes and packs up after. She carries drinking water and coffee and the extra jackets or the ones taken off when the day gets too warm. She carries tack, fencing pliers and other tools, and sometimes, if the move is just before calving begins, she’ll have a newborn in the back of the truck and often several of them, each one marked in some way—maybe a colored string around its neck—so it can be returned to the right mother every few hours. As the drive wears on, she’s likely to have exhausted adolescents in the cab with her, while their horses are either driven ahead or led by one of the men from his own horse. Usually, at some point, somebody will take pity on her and spell her off for an hour or so, so that she can get out into the fresh air and ride a little herself.

When you move cattle you move, depending on the weather, at the leisurely pace of about two miles an hour. For long stretches
you don’t need to speak at all, and you can ride a mile or more away from any other rider if you want to. As you ride, the prairie slowly seeps into you. I have never felt such pure, unadulterated joy in simple existence as I have felt at moments out on the prairie during the spring move.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t get to ride until we were close to the ranch and our helpers went home. Then Peter and I changed our head-quarters from the hay farm to the ranch house and we’d ride horses out to the cattle to bring them the rest of the way home. Occasionally, he’d have someone along who didn’t ride and who would drive the truck so that I could ride. Most of the time, though, I reluctantly drove the truck and kept my fingers crossed for a chance either to ride or, as I sometimes did, to walk leading Peter’s horse—for me to ride him was unthinkable, the very thought making my stomach turn over and my knees quake—while Peter spelled me off in the driver’s seat.

Nowadays we calve at the hay farm instead of at the ranch, mostly because it’s easier to keep an eye on the cows, but also because there’s shelter for them here during the inevitable calf-killing spring storms. Often, too, in spring there is no water in the ditches or fields along the way and, of course, the cattle must have water each day, moving or not. If we calve at the hay farm—Peter not being a believer in early calving—by the time we’re ready to move in late April most of the farmers along the route have seeded their crops. The traditional mistrust between farmers and ranchers being what it is, it would be dangerous if one cow strayed one foot from the road allowances, those which, usually without bothering to get permission from the municipality, farmers haven’t plowed up and seeded to wheat. And cows being what they are, you never know when one might take it into her head to head out, calf at her
side, racing for Alaska or Mexico across a newly seeded field with a couple of cowboys in hot pursuit. Guns have been pointed on such occasions. Nowadays, it hardly seems worth the risk.

During one of the last spring moves we made, Peter had had more people along than he’d expected and before we’d gone very far he’d given one of the kids my horse, which he’d been leading, to ride. Not long after that, he’d put my saddle—the only one with stirrups that could be shortened enough for small people—to another teenager to use. I had reconciled myself to not being able to ride on this move. I could still look at the landscape, I could roll down the window and smell the sweet air and feel the breeze and the sun on my face, and occasionally I could stop, get out, and stroll around a bit in the grass.

We always made it a practice to stop for a meal when we reached that stretch of pure unbroken prairie. The riders would dismount and hobble their horses or tie them to the fence, I’d park the truck, Peter would throw down a couple of hay bales for a table or for people to sit on, and I’d put out the lunch. We’d sit in the sun and eat sandwiches, and his mother’s baked beans, the pot wrapped in layers of newspapers to keep it warm, and drink coffee from thermoses. Long before we reached there I’d have begun to look forward to that moment.

I discovered what the annual day spent crossing these acres of prairie meant to me when, as we were about to begin that part of the trip, a circumstance arose—I don’t even remember what it was—that meant somebody had to drive one of the men the twenty or so miles around the fields, down the roads and wait with him there at the corrals for the riders and cattle to arrive. Since Peter could hardly order anybody else to do it, and nobody volunteered, it was taken for granted that as his wife I would leave the drive and take this man where he needed to go.

I wanted to protest, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it in front of so many people, especially since arguing or complaining are just not done on a trip like that. It would be a little like a sailor telling the captain of a ship that he didn’t feel like taking the watch that night. My true feelings were too private to speak out loud, and I couldn’t come up with any practical reason why I shouldn’t have to that didn’t hint of adolescent pique or, not knowing how the others felt about the prairie—but the fact that nobody volunteered to go should have given me a hint—that I could be sure anybody but Peter would understand. And everyone else was a volunteer; I was official staff. I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back and catch up with the drive, either. For me, for that year, the drive was over.

I got back in the truck and started driving, trying to smile, trying to make conversation, while all the time I was fighting back tears. I wanted so badly to spend that last few hours on the prairie, the only time we ever went through those fields, that I had an actual pain in my chest as I drove away and that stayed with me till I went to bed that night.

I said about that incident much later to a friend, “If everything happens to teach you something, why was that taken away from me? What was I supposed to learn from that?” and answered myself, “To teach me how much the wild prairie means to me.” Years later, I was able to go further: to understand how precious it is, how unique, how deeply it might affect one, changing even one’s understanding of life.

Sometimes I think I’m still not over that loss. Especially since, during the good times, farmers bought all that land the rest of the gang traveled over on horseback that day, and plowed it up to turn it into a farm. Now, ten years later, the farming operation is failing, but you can’t turn plowed-up shortgrass prairie back into
the original terrain. It’s gone forever, or given a human life span, as good as forever, along with the wildlife that lived on it.

It occurs to me now to wonder if perhaps the very real—and surprising even to me—sorrow I felt that day as I drove away, and all the rest of the day and for days afterward, wasn’t perhaps intuitive, if perhaps a part of me knew that I would never again experience the sweetness of that air, the sun warm on my face and hands, the view so vast the soul felt free, because by the next spring or the spring after that it would be gone forever.

As the years passed, I felt more and more that the best comfort I had was in being in the landscape. I was only mildly curious about how the prairie was formed, and when and how it was evolving, and I certainly had none of the interests of ecologists or environmentalists. I was merely looking at the prairie as a human being, savoring it for its beauty which engaged all the senses and brought with it a feeling of well-being, contentment and often even joy.

My approach was to simply wander in it with no particular destination, to lie in the sun and bury my nose in the sweet-smelling grasses and forbs such as sage, to admire the colors and textures of the sedges, shrubs and succulents which make up the mixed grass prairie, or to sit on a slope looking out across miles of prairie to the horizon, watching the shifting of shadows and light across it, thinking no thoughts that, a moment later, I would remember. I was there only to enjoy the prairie. I asked for nothing more, not thinking there was anything more.

I had only the most cursory interest in the names of the plants, although Peter’s mother taught me a few of those which flowered: scarlet mallow, three-flowered avens, gumbo primrose, golden bean, which she called “buffalo bean,” and which someone else
told me she knew as the wild sweet pea. I could hardly miss the wild rose or the prairie sunflower, and I knew a few others such as the wild licorice and the wild morning glory and anemones which grow along the riverbank, from my childhood in the north. Peter showed me the greasewood, badger bush and club moss and pointed out the two species of cactus—the prickly pear and the pincushion—and much later I learned from a rancher’s wife (herself a rancher and also a poet) that if you had the patience to gather the berries, you could make cactus-berry jelly. I taught myself a few: the many types of cinquefoil and sage, and milkweed, and the Canada thistle with its purple flower that a saddle horse—“Watch this,” Peter said—would clip tidily off with its bared teeth, never touching a barb. I longed to see a field of wild prairie lilies as I had in my childhood in the north, but I never have, not even a single flower growing wild in the grass.