Blame it on Mrs. Moon

Well she started it. I haven't done a damn thing all day but sit here at my laptop getting a numb ass. I've had worse uses of my time, but I wanted to give credit. Mrs. Moon blogged about Annie Proulx's new book, about building her house, Bird Cloud, in Wyoming, where we all know it is too damn cold to live in the winter. Where I know that in the mountains, it can snow in the summer, because I spent the most formative summer of my misspent youth in the Bighorn Mountains and have a major soft spot for Wyoming. I used to imagine I'd live in a cabin on a stream someday, like Annie, but different. I had to know MORE. So off I went a-googling, and a-reading, hence my numb butt.

One rabbit hole led to another, because Ms. Proulx has a fondness for the band The Gourds, and I've been listening to them all day for free, and you can too, right here:

Radio Free Gourds

If you want extra connectedness, listen to this youtube clip of them singing Dying in the Pines in Asheville, NC. Small world. Better yet, click the first link and let the popup turntable spin while you read. Song number 5, Last Letter, reminds me of Traffic and the 60's a bit, moodwise and number 11, Steeple full of Swallows, sounds like the Band, and makes me so melancholy I can hardly take it, but in a good way. I'm smitten. This bloggy day will cost me more than time, in books and music.

So, Annie Proulx.  After I read this article in the LA Times and this one in the NYTimes, I was unable to stop thinking about her and her Wyoming adventure. Her house. Her books. The view out her window.

For one, I can't imagine living alone up there, so isolated, especially in my 70's. I sense there is a distance between her and her family, as she said she's never talked about her writing with her kids. I try to wrap my head around that. Mom's a famous writer but we don't mention it. Ever.

And for two, if I was going to live alone in the hinterlands of Wyoming, I would sure as heck make a few friends in the town where I'd have to go for supplies. I get that the point of moving up there is to be a loner, and after 30 years of Vermont I guess Wyoming made some sense. Slightly lower sparse population of rugged individualists spread across ten times the acreage - from 67 to 5 people per square mile, actually. I looked it up. I guess she wanted to be ALONE. But I would have mingled, sat at the corner coffee store or bar and soaked it in, the culture, the connection to the land. I met some of the best people I've ever known out there, it's so stripped down and real. They look out for each other, or at least they did in 1981.

And the scenery. Good lord. Mount St. Helens blew that year, and the sunsets were unreal. I dream of going back there all the time. I mean I have real dreams, dozens of them, where I drive back up that mountain and let the thin air clear my head. I always wake both happy and sad. I could fill my own short story book with the tales I collected and the things I saw and did. A few bad, mostly good. Maybe someday. Anyway, I think maybe Annie missed out on the best stuff, but what do I know.

I know I will always remember this man, and this view.

My favorite cowboy, and personal superhero, John Kukuchka. He let me drive that jeep all over the mountain. He also let me ride horses and round up cows and fix fence and he gave me my very own shit stained Stetson, one of my prized possessions. He rescued me when I had nowhere to go and he told me his stories. I never thanked him enough.

One of the twin buttes. I hiked to the top and sat and dangled my feet from the edge. It was heaven, or as close as I imagine I'll ever get, 2 miles up in the sky.

 

My favorite Wyoming memory has no picture, because it was at night, and my friend and I slept under the stars on the ground to watch for meteors. I never felt so small and amazed and part of everything any more than I did that night.

I remember everything.... the smell of the pines, the rocks strewn like handfuls of dice in the streams, the taste of fresh trout grilled for breakfast, the sound of a moose snorting in the willows, the sight of a dead pronghorn caught on a barbed wire fence, frost in July, chokecherry syrup on my pancakes, the sound of a porcupine shooting it's needles, Willie singing whiskey river on the jukebox, the easy camaraderie of the unlikeliest of people - loggers, ranchers, hippies, tourists, locals - the look in the eyes of a scarred man who had one two many beer and whiskey's and told me his life story..... I remember it all.

So I'm sad that Annie went there to be alone. It can be a lonely place even if you're not alone. And I'm not surprised that it didn't turn out to be what she expected. Nothing ever really is, at least in my experience.

Anyway, thanks, Mary for the numb butt and the trip down both Annie's mushy lane and my own mushy memory lane. And thanks for songs number 5 & 11, for giving these memories a soundtrack.