WOMEN OF THE REAL WEST

Today the real Montana --  meaning what hasn't been invaded by Easterners that dominate the cities -- is best understood through blogs written by women living on ranches where they work family-style, a way of life that the current WH is destroying.  

These are three local women whom I follow on Twitter or as columnists in addition to buying their books:

KLDell Rodeo Romance

@kidell

Cowgirl, rancher, best-selling author of the Texas Rodeo series. Walk with me behind the chutes and into the real life of a cowboy.  Her column is called "Montana Musings."  The romances are lots of fun and thrills.  Website:  http://www.karilynndell.com/home.html

Cat Urbigkit

@CatUrbigkig

Award-winning author and photographer. Strolls the sagebrush rangelands of Wyoming with a herd of sheep and some really big dogs. http://caturbigkit.com.  Her books are extraordinary -- very beautiful.  

Lisa Schmidt

L.Schmidt@a-land-of-grass-ranch
Column is called "prairie ponderings."

Not on Twitter.  https://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/2018/11/01/prairie-ponderings-lisa-schmidt-reflects-good-world-year-after-husband-steve-hutton-death/1845214002/

https://westernagreporter.com/articles/category/prairie-ponderings/

These are modern women with modern storylines.  In the past women were featured in books as white homestead heroines or maybe indigenous sex objects or victims.  Dell, for instance, in addition to helping to operate the ranch that's nearly in Canada, also travels the West to compete in rodeo as a barrel racer.  Urbigkit has a world presence that comes from working in high Eurasia where big dogs are used to protect livestock against wolves.  Much of this writing appears as columns in local newspapers or regional ag publications.  Readers know what the writers are talking about. They were not chosen by computer algorithms.

Google "Montana Women Writers" for a photo lineup and blogs.  I don't know all of them and few of them know me.  I write for the pure pleasure of it and not for sales or publicity.  I do have boxes of sermons which I consider throwing out.  They are UU, not Christian, and more essay than sermon.  "Prairiemary" is my blog is my publishing.  Books on Amazon are compilations from this blog.

These are grasslands women in vast landscapes where physical challenges abound.  I come to them after reading Mary Clearman Blew, Linda Hasselstrom, Gretel Erlich, Terry Tempest Williams, Annie Dillard and all the other finely educated natural history writers who have formed a kind of genre of their own and developed a morality of the real, the ecologically entwined, and the need to protect what one loves.  

It is one source of a new religion that is forming without anyone noticing.  Neither about a big all-powerful white man nor about any historically religious theory made into an institution that tries to participate in government, this kind of thought is still related to an ancient Catholic strand of thought:  you can't grasp the Creator (now we say there is none) but natural theology demands the study of creation.  My mother had a plaque in her kitchen:  "This is the day the Lord has made.  Rejoice and be glad in it."  

If "religion" -- or what people are more likely to call "spirituality" these days -- is the personal pattern of structured belief that each of us tries to live by, then these women are in that ball park, but not organized.  They do not go by the morality of money or sex or power, but just get through the day while keeping everyone fed, both family and livestock.  Political "woke" has a funny ring to it for ranch and farm women who don't get enough sleep.  They write in their heads while they work, then put it on paper as soon as the supper dishes are cleared away.

A few of the older women in this town still carry the old standards of women who are queen of the house.  Cleanliness, order, rules of behavior that don't allow for change, and men who provide.  That hasn't always worked out so well, but contraception helps.  In the small towns women often run the insurance company, the post office, the café, the grocery store and do it well.  Few of them write.  Some of them don't read.  Reading is the seed for writing.

This writing by women is not sentimental.  These women know death and hunger, disease and being trapped.  They know losing a child or a partner.  They know the house burning and the banker evicting.  Yet they don't form selling mechanisms the way the cowboy painters did.  Maybe the romance writers do that.

The day outside is bright and heaped with snow.  It's supposed to blow and I wouldn't want to drive into a ground blizzard, but I don't need to go anywhere.  My theory about preventing the high drifts across the driveway by sawing off the lowest limbs on the evergreens alongside has worked.  But the town plow has bermed me in again.  

I'd meant to reinsert the glass pane in the storm door since the cats tore a hole the summer screen that I also meant to repair, but today it turns out to be just the right size to reach the little wood stove ash shovel out so I can knock away enough snow to push out with the proper snow shovel.  I'd better go do that.  

MARY O'HARA

When I took the shamanism books back to the library, I asked the librarian to photocopy the very long bibliography for me. While she did that, I browsed the reshelf cart -- the books that had been checked in but not put back in place. Here was “Wyoming Summer” by Mary O’Hara, the author of “My Friend Flicka,” “Thunderhead,” and “Green Grass of Wyoming.” I have a biography of her, but had not realized there were other books. This one is developed from a journal she kept on a horse ranch that started out to be a sheep ranch. Even as a horse ranch, it only survived because for two months in the summer it became a “boy ranch,” for boys from wealthy families back east. Mary herself was high class in the American way -- she was an Alsop whose father was an Episcopalian minister, she had written scripts in Hollywood for a decade, and she was a gifted composer who composed musicals. This ranch housed in the front room her fine grand piano, brought in a wagon. Her second husband, the one with her at this point, was a big handsome Swedish horseman with a military background. The feel of her writing is almost like Norman Maclean -- a Biblical ghost just under the surface.

I’d have to go back to reread the Flicka books -- I haven’t looked at them for fifty years -- to know how much of “Wyoming Summer” echoes. This is the raw material. I recognize it and it surprises me at the same time. I recognize the hillside spring and the horses and the cats. I do not remember the amount of mysticism, framed as nature. I was most startled by her account of what she called “Shinar,” a state of ecstatic dissociation in which she tapped otherwise unreachable creative forces. In fact, throughout it’s clear that one of her great strengths is her sensitivity to shifts of consciousness which she illuminates for the reader with sensory details. Prismatically she goes from concentration at the piano to a vigorous walk with the dogs to irritation over some small matter to glorying in landscape.

Here’s her clearest statement about Shinar:

“It has let me in! Yes, it is Shinar, so quickly gained today. Sometimes I enter as easily as one slides into a dream -- and I move through a mountain. The walls are held apart, not because I was making any effort of concentration, but because I am collected into a wholeness -- no part of me left behind (this in itself is bliss), I go forward to bathe in air that is purest joy -- how can music do this to me? I swing on the groundswells of it. I fall into troughs of anguish which are also delight. If I were sobbing I would not know it. It is all bliss and I am helpless.” When Shinar closes, putting her back out, she feels “the dry grief of dislocation. Loneliness.” This is quite a lot more intense than “flow.”

The female contemporary Western writers have become many: Mary Clearman Blew, Sharon Butala, Linda Hasselstrom, Molly Gloss, Judy Blunt, Teresa Jordan, Gretel Erlich . . . on and on and on. When I returned to the east slope, I thought I would make a place among those writers, but that’s not the way it’s happened. Along came computers and wiped out publishing. But I’ve changed, too.

As a child I read the works of an earlier generation: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Gene Stratton-Porter, Isak Dinesen, and Mary O’Hara. Huge range in skills, life experience, and popularity. None of them conscious feminists, though they never let being female stop them from anything. They were not trapped, abused, or victimized -- their hard times came from everyone’s hard times. I read them innocently, thinking this was the way the world really was.

Now I’ve split. Sometimes I write a little genre Western story. For fun. Other times I reach for Shinar. (Imagine a self-mocking tone here.) At last I begin to grasp the great paradigm shift that was deconstruction and realize how much I must tear apart and destroy among my own assumptions. My family was guided and limited by bourgeois class assumptions from Britain, both the sober Scots with their admiration for education and the howling Irish with their demand for reprisal. My family on both sides stayed within the canon, looked for conventional success. My father’s side bought the books but never read them. My mother’s side believed that money meant virtue.

So I read the books and ignored money in the search for some deeper virtue not based on convention. This pushed my focus from product to process. It’s not safer. It’s scarier. I lose people and feel cold-blooded about it. I gain people and that’s nice, but not crucial. I’m not local anymore, though I love this place, not least because one can reach out to the galaxies in night skies.

I’ve gone feral in some ways. I refuse to belong to anyone, which -- of course -- tempts some people to try to capture me. I distinguish between morality and ethics, morality being conventional good behavior and ethics being principles carefully thought through. Fortunately, most of the time they don’t contradict each other. Subtle pentimento from the University of Chicago remains, but my seminary there has folded and moved out of my concerns, regardless of their protests that they’re making progress. If one must be SOMETHING, Unitarian Universalist is not a bad choice, but I’m no longer institutional. I’ll always be fond of my former families.

Mary O’Hara had to struggle to finance and manage her ranch, though she had a formidable partner. In the end what brought them to their knees was a fire that wiped out a barnful of hay, the profit of a summer, and immolated their beloved workhorse team, screaming and then terribly quiet. Like Isak Dinesen’s coffee plantation in Africa, this fire ended their knife-edge existence. Except that both women could write and DID write and told us everything, or so it seemed. Books are mimesis only, artful. Maybe they aren’t for the reader at all -- maybe they open the gates to Shinar for the writer, a shamanic art practiced alone.