No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life

Prologue: A ’54 Chevy Named Beulah

Prologue: A ’54 Chevy Named Beulah No matter how far you have gone on a wrong road, turn back. —Turkish proverb I’ve lived in western communities most of my life. During my practice marriage , I dutifully accompanied my first husband to central Missouri, eventually escaping from that swampy region pursued by hairy spiders larger than my hand. In the three decades since, I’ve stayed in the high western plains, writing about the quirks of humans, animals, and plants of this arid region. My mother was also escaping an unsuccessful marriage when she jumped on a midnight train in Edinburg, Texas, worried because, at age four, I spoke Spanish better than I spoke English. Whenever I woke from a nap, I heard thrumming of the train wheels and her voice lecturing me about the dangers of a drinking habit like my daddy’s. She found refuge briefly with relatives in Wyoming, then dropped me off with her mother on a ranch in southwestern South Dakota while she looked for a house and job in the nearest sizable town. In Craven Canyon, my grandmother Cora Belle taught me how to use the outhouse and wood-burning stove; I helped feed her chickens and carry water into the house to heat in the kettle when we washed dishes. Each evening I cleaned and lit the kerosene lamps so we could read. Mother found work as an executive secretary and settled me into a little house on Fifth Street in Rapid City just in time for the legendary Blizzard of 1949. When I was nine years old, mother married John Hasselstrom, and we moved to his ranch near Hermosa, where I was 2 Nn n o p la c e li ke h ome able to grow up in the kind of community that causes bouts of nostalgia, especially among people who have never lived in one. The Hermosa grade school contained the first through fourth grades in one room, the fifth through eighth in another. My fellow students had known each other since birth; even their grandparents had grown up together in the same county, so they formed a tight clique. Henry Bale, the janitor in the basement, became my best friend. He kept the ancient furnace burning, cleaned the bathrooms, and told me stories about Hermosa characters, including the grandparents of the kids who wouldn’t talk to me. Sometime during that first year in the country I started carrying tiny notebooks in the hip pocket of my jeans and writing down my thoughts and questions. Everywhere I’ve gone since then, for almost sixty years, I’ve carried some kind of notebook, and I’m still writing down more questions than answers. My mother drove me six miles to school on a gravel road unless the weather was bad enough for my father to drive, or keep me home to help him feed the cattle from a hayrack pulled by a team of Belgians, Bud and Beauty. We finally got a telephone when I was in high school, connecting with several other families on the local party line, and soon knew each other ’s voices so well that raising the receiver for a couple of seconds provided enough information to start or confirm a rumor. As we talked, our voices gradually faded. Finally one person bellowed, “I can’t hear you with all those rubberneckers on the line!” The clatter of receivers being replaced echoed down the lines, mile after mile. Accepting a date or whispering a confidence was as public as, and faster than, the weekly county newspaper. Our town and county were mostly Republican, Protestant, and Caucasian , but other differences didn’t matter when men, women, and children fought prairie fires or gathered for the annual county fair where everyone bid on the quilts made by the church ladies. By the time I entered high school, I was steeped in country pursuits: demonstrations for the Buttons and Bows 4-h Club, horseback tricks for a precision drill team, showing cattle at the fair, and working on the ranch when I wasn’t studying. naturally, I wanted to go to college as far away from home as possible, but my parents wouldn’t let me leave the state, so I attended the Univer- Prologue Nn 3 sity of South Dakota in the eastern corner. Married to a divorced Baptist minister the year after graduation against my...