Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999)
Annie Proulx (1935)
283 pages
In Annie Proulx’s collection of short stories Close Range: Wyoming Stories, the state’s rugged rangelands not only provide the setting, but also play a central role in events. The farmstead owners and ranch hands in these stories find themselves in an often bitter struggle against a land prone to extremes; and, those who escape to the city or the far-flung rodeo circuit fair little better, indelibly connected to the land they have left behind.
Proulx (/ˈpruː/, I had to look it up...) characterizes the unremitting force of this land at the heart of all of these stories in the powerful opening lines of People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water, a tale of two families who arrive to Wyoming from elsewhere in the country looking for a fresh start, and who, through inscrutable twists of fate, come to cross paths in a violent reckoning of frontier justice:
You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country – indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky – provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.
Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti’d celebration of athletic victory on bride overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that. (97)
The opening story of the collection, The Half-Skinned Steer, features an octogenarian who left Wyoming as a young man, escaping his father’s struggling ranch and never going back. Learning of the death of his brother, who had remained home and taken over the ranch, he decides to drive for the funeral, from his east coast home. The trip leaves plenty of time for his thoughts to drift into a morass of recollections about his last days on the ranch; but, as he at last approaches his boyhood home, his dark reminiscences become manifest in a natural world that seems to rise up to greet him.
Many readers will recognize the final story in the collection from the well-known film it spawned of the same title: Brokeback Mountain. Two down-on-their-luck ranch hands in their late teens hire on “as herder and camp tender” (254) for a sheep operation; the pair are tasked with herding the sheep up into the summer grazing lands on the eponymous range while keeping their charges safe from predators. Having first met when they hired in, they come to find each other welcome companions, and as the summer goes on the isolated meadows allow their intimacy to grow in ways that surprise both of them, and that leaves them profoundly connected well beyond that summer. They struggle to adapt to their subsequent lives off the mountain, however, in a society that would violently react to knowledge of their relationship.
The tension between the pair’s relationship and the expectations of the community they live in highlights a theme that runs through many of the stories in this collection. As Proulx writes in Pair a Spurs, Wyoming’s stark and unpredictable landscape has bred a stubbornly resilient populace, one that has adopted an “unwritten motto, take care a your own damn self” (149). But this celebrated independent streak only goes so far – stray outside the bounds of expected behavior and the community will all too quickly engage aggressively in your business, your independence be damned.
Other notes and information:
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
No comments:
Post a Comment