Utah Looked Like This To Me

Liz Stephens

Utah looked like this to me, when I drove in: first, sage breaking out of the desert, and then pine trees breaking out of the rocks, mountains embraced by the sky at the top, where the clouds reached down and threw themselves around the peaks. Sheep grazing where it seemed there must be nothing to be had—only sage, again, and a prehistoric- looking tall plant which began green and ended towering in the blackest brown imaginable, in a lethal looking tassel. Sheep, and then cattle, that would have appeared lonely and lost on so wide a horizon except that each was utterly grounded and, if possible, unconcerned.

When we drove through the towns in which we knew we would live—one of them would win us, transplants they didn’t want, by being charming and scenic this day, and holding out a cheap house—before we spoke to anyone, before we’d left the car, still on our sweeping momentum, I saw this: a yard I read as haphazard (later I would know better) contained a dog pen, a goat pen, and a trampoline set flush against the back door. Covering the stoop, its lip the very threshold of almost certainly the kitchen, anyone could just step out—you could almost see it, Atget’s photograph of a man stepping off a dock so calmly onto water—and have a quick utilitarian bounce or two.

Around each curve a convex curve matched it, the driveways of farmyards dropping back from the road to the privacy of the side door and then back to the business of getting out on the road. I craned my neck for every one (I would lay my head, my neck, gently onto my hotel room pillow later, demanding not to be asked to look at anything on the television), sure that the secret to the whole place would be there. Proust’s Madeline, Citizen Kane’s Rosebud, an instant key to the meaning of my life in the immediate future. A dachshund running to meet her boys from off the school bus nearly put me in tears, I was looking so hard for home. I owned dachshunds too; later I would know how impractical they were, bellies dragging in the snow, feet hurt easily, always nearly being trampled by horses, rolled by horns of goats, hateful of barn cats, useless at keeping up when hunting, barking, skittery, hot house flowers of dogs I kept inside (and loved on with ferocity, knowing I can’t get the breed again now till I’m ancient and not going anywhere outside, barking, mad, and skittery myself).

A last detail before we moved here, on that first exploratory drive: a boy running down his crescent of a driveway, into a holler where a house waits. I see him hightail it down from one angle—we drive past a crowd of cottonwoods—and craning my neck back I see him met at the door by a little sister and, at best, half a dozen sheep, milling on the porch. Sister’s hand resting idly on a warm wooly back as it coasts by. This may mean nothing to you, local as you are. Everything in me reached out for that. Cottonwoods, curved road, boy, girl, sheep, dog, home, running. It must have been about three o’clock, if he was just getting home. The light was gold like that. It lit up the inside of my brain, my mind’s eye I guess, for days.

The first time I saw a horse pawing the snow (months after I moved in, after, in quick succession: lilacs blooming and dying, trees yellowing and fading, a brief, transitory snow, and then a permanent one, as in a forever snow), I felt some essential thing fall into place. I could examine the existential sense of the beast, pawing stoically at the deep snow, a cyclical harshness, a sense of the way horses have moved across the plains for eons, pawing through snow for any grass they can get, a tribal memory. But maybe it’s just something I’d seen in the movies. It’s not for nothing I’ve seen “High Noon” a zillion times; I see what I’ve got here in this landscape. I won’t be trying to change it like some other transplanted (read “city”) people: the woman that moved in down the road from me, and immediately alerted the city that her neighbor had an illegal buffalo in his pasture – he returned the favor and remedied the problem by shooting the buffalo as it

stood in the pasture, just outside the woman’s window—I want it to stay forlorn out here. I want a keening wind off a mountain unobstructed. I want my horses to have to paw for grass through snow. I look up the foothills for a cemetery, set at a discrete distance, ready with plots for the victims of Main Street shoot-outs and sick babies.

Naturally, we attend rodeos with the fervor of converts, zealots who now know every rule of calf roping (three legs doesn’t count), bronc riding (keep your heels up on her neck), mutton busting (crying’s allowed in this event only), and that what the English call scones is not what you get at the state fair rodeo, where scones means Navaho fry bread. We go to a rodeo on the Wyoming state line, the arena set in a bowl of earth part way up a mountain. Not a single person there who’s playing cowboy, wearing the outfit in hopes that someone will see them being Western—they just are, hundreds of people standing in this bowl of light that the sunset hits, where dark spills out the bottom edge to cover the entire plain below. People carry their toddlers like sacks of flour over their shoulders to the car for the long sleepy drive home; I am exquisitely aware that I am not a visitor now. I am only driving a few miles home, not the thousands of miles in my life it took to get here.

My house, so far, in spite of our mortgage payments, belongs to the neighborhood. It’s more than one hundred years old and apparently in that time everyone has got a piece of it. Folks out strolling past at night ask each other in the still, carrying air, “Wonder if they’ll paint this place finally?” and, until we got horses onto the pastures, “Hope they use this space. Be a shame not to see it put to use.” More than a few people have told us they considered buying our place for the land, and there are a couple implicit messages in that. One, they had their shot at it, and allowed us to have it. Two, they’ve seen the inside of our house. Three, the land is worth more than the house. And four, if we don’t use the outbuildings and pastures, they may just take it all back.

One neighbor tells us he used to milk cows in the milk house at the back of our property, when he was a boy, with a kid named Tater. My husband’s boss’s wife grew up in this house; her name is in the concrete of our front stoop. They are unsurprised at this coincidence, one which makes us feel as if the stars have lined up.

When we start work on the inside of the barn, our neighbor Bob only shakes his head and laughs when we discover caches of empty beer cans, and does not tell us the story. We did not buy the rights to the old resident’s stories, after all. We just bought the house. Everything else we have to earn.

I know I have fundamentally changed, finally, when I watch a man open up a bird with his bare hands. It takes both seeing it and living with it to understand that I don’t feel horror at the image of it, after it has had time to fossilize into part of my experience—I feel a bone deep sense of process, of connection, of cycles, of nature’s absolute dominion over man, because nature doesn’t care. She has thousands of birds just in the field where we stood, where our friend pulled apart this bird with the knowledgeable precision of an ornithologist, which he is. After watching him walk through the gold field of sharp drying safflowers with his rifle cracked open and cocked over his shoulder, after watching his dog careen through the high grass, in synchronicity with the falcon that flew above, after seeing the dog from the ground and the falcon from the air look at each other to communicate their plan, I just let go of whatever defunct morality I was trying to apply to the situation and knew I was in the presence of a process I was not qualified to assess.

The gut-wrenching rightness of watching the dog bring the bird to us with his head high and his tail frantically waving in joy, watching any creature do what it does best, put my newly minted Westerness in perspective. In other words, I ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Our friend kneels to take the bird from the dog’s mouth and holds it loosely in his hand while we watch the small bird close its eyes, and die. (I tell myself we had this moment and I’m almost certain we did. Still, an impression of the bird blinking from between the talons of the falcon also stays with me.) The falcon watches from a few feet away, near the panting mouth of the dog. In the time it takes for the man to tell us what he’s about to do, he’s done it—tossed the head of the bird to the dog, and the body to the falcon.

She messes with it briefly before our friend takes it back. And I’ve already told you what happens next. He opens it up from the hole she’s begun. He gives her the heart. His hands are covered in blood and all I can think is, “I see. I see.”

A day comes when I sit on the back of my horse while he eats, next to the young son of our neighbor, who sits on the back of his horse while she eats, and who gave me the idea. We are equal parts supremely relaxed from our contact with the big wide backs of such contented chewing horses, and giddy with having stolen an opportunity to be on them in the dead of winter. We are as silent as if our own mouths were full.

I see that through the snow I still recognize the highest field on the mountain by its hay bales, never gathered and now covered on their high side by snow. I recognize the difficulty of getting there—I’ve been there only by snowmobile, it’s incredibly high—to till it, harvest it, gather it. That man has made it so far up the mountain with his machines, well, I don’t know yet if it surprises me or not.

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