Julene Bair's Blog, page 9

The Women Who Saw Me Through to the End

(L to R) Gail, Marilyn, Lisa, Me, Elisabeth

Almost every Thursday night for five years, these women and I shared our work and the truth–no matter how hard it was to say it or hear it. The result: Gail Storey’s I Promise Not to Suffer, Lisa Jones’ Broken: A Love Story, Elisabeth Hyde’s In the Heart of the Canyon, Marilyn Krysl’s Dinner with Osama, and now my Ogallala Road. I cannot thank these beautiful, strong, funny, honest, and compassionate women enough.

Ogallala Aquifer Spring on Little Beaver

“I found the pond lying still and innocent, a receptive, vulnerable reflection of the sky. This wasn’t rainwater. It hadn’t rained in weeks. My brother Bruce had … told me he was worried that the ground would be too parched to plant dry-land winter wheat this September. No. This pond was what the pioneers and early settlers had called ‘live water.’ It had found the surface by itself without the aid of rain, or today, a rancher’s pump. It came from the aquifer, exhaling into the bed of the Little Beaver.”

The Sound of Water in My Childhood

“The windmill’s fan whirred and the well rods creaked up and down, making a tinny, lonely sound. Water spurted from the pipe into a tank. These, not the growl of irrigation engines, were the sounds I equated with water while growing up. The rhythm was systolic, soothing.”

 

High on a Knoll

From Part I, A Rare Find

“My grandfather Carlson had built the house high on a knoll. With stately trees and a huge red barn beside it, it had been a landmark, visible for miles around. Now it was as if all evidence of our existence had been erased by the wandlike arm of the center-pivot irrigation sprinkler I’d parked beside.”

From Part I, A Rare Find“My grandfather Carlson had built...

From Part I, A Rare Find

“My grandfather Carlson had built the house high on a knoll. With stately trees and a huge red barn beside it, it had been a landmark, visible for miles around. Now it was as if all evidence of our existence had been erased by the wandlike arm of the center-pivot irrigation sprinkler I’d parked beside.”

The Canyon Pasture

As The Ogallala Road begins, I have returned to Kansas to research the watershed where I was born and raised. I begin in what we called “the canyon pasture.” A canyon in that part of the country is not quite as dramatic as a canyon in say Utah. On a trip to Kansas this summer, I took this picture of a place that reminded me of what it looked like.

From the book, a Canyon flashback:

Once, we heard a buzzing sound and jumped back from the bush I’d been about to reach beneath. A tongue-flicking, tail-rattling snake lay coiled at our feet. Its vibrant, diamond-shaped head bobbed in the air, mouth open, fangs bared. 

“Why is it wiggling its tongue at us?” I asked.

“That’s how it smells you,” said Bruce. Also my elder, but closer to my age than Clark, he loved nothing more than goading me. 

“It can’t strike this far though,” Clark said. “We’re safe.”

Raising Jake Alone

 

 

Mom & Son on the Farm

From Part 1, “A Rare Find”

“As we approached the Kansas border, alll I could tune in on the radio was a moralizing talk-show hostess. ‘What did you think would happen when you married an alcoholic? Alcoholism is a disease, Emily, a disease. Do you remember your vows? In sickness and in—.’ I cut her power off midsentence.

‘Amen,’ Jake said. Noise from the Subaru’s leaking windows filled the silence.”

***
Fortunately Jake was sixteen when we heard that radio broadcast, old enough to know that there were worse things than being the only child of an only mom. But the social scientists and the news media still have a ways to go in reaching that realization. I heard another report recently about how children in single parent (read “single mom”) homes are not as upwardly mobile as children with two parents.

That type of report used to drive me crazy when I was raising Jake alone.  So what about the fact that single parents, read “moms,” are likely  to live in poverty because Dad is not paying his half of child support? And how do they decide what a single parent home is anyway? If custody is shared, is the child living in two single parent homes? She or he must be twice as at risk for: 1) dropping out of school, 2) doing drugs, 3) going to jail, 4) staying in the presumably lower economic class he/she was born in. Right?

The message to moms is that we are bound to fail our children because we are inadequate as women. We don’t have that special ingredient that only a father can bring to a child’s life. More often than not the only truly special missing ingredient is cash.

 

 

 

The Stigma of Single Motherhood or Why I’m So Lucky My Son Didn’t Grow Up to be a Serial Killer

Heard another news report recently about how children in single parent (read “single mom”) homes are not as upwardly mobile as children with two parents. This type of report used to drive me crazy when I was raising my son alone.  So what about the fact that single parents, read “moms,” are likely  to live in poverty because Dad is not paying his half of child support? And how do they decide what a single parent home is anyway? If custody is shared, is the child living in two single parent homes? She or he must be twice as at risk for: 1) dropping out of school, 2) doing drugs, 3) going to jail, 4) staying in the presumably lower economic class he/she was born in. Right?

Single motherhood is one of the themes in my book. Although I’d proven that I could do most things men could do, I kept reading these news stories about how I was bound to fail. The message came at me from every direction that I would have been better off staying married to my angry alcoholic husband. Here’s an example from the book.

***

“As we approached the Kansas border, alll I could tune in on the radio was a moralizing talk-show hostess. “What did you think would happen when you married an alcoholic? Alcoholism is a disease, Emily, a disease. Do you remember your vows? In sickness and in—.” I cut her power off midsentence.

‘Amen,’ Jake said. Noise from the Subaru’s leaking windows filled the silence.”

***

Jake was sixteen when that scene took place, old enough to know there were some fates worse than being an only child of only Mom.

 

Opening Lines

“These were called the High Plains because they were four thousand feet above sea level. I could feel the altitude in the way the sun sheeted my skin.”


This beautiful photo by Damon Tighe perfectly illustrates these opening lines from The Ogallala Road. “Western Kansas in a Nutshell,” he calls it.

Altitude Adjustment: A Quest for Love, Home, and Meaning in the Tetons

I was asked to read this book for the purpose of supplying a jacket endorsement. While that task can sometimes be a chore, in this case it proved to be an honor and a joy. Here is my “blurb”:

“Altitude Adjustment gives honest, inspiring testimony to the inexorable power of the human will when seized by a grand dream. We cannot help but root for Mary Beth Baptiste as she risks all to live more freely and meaningfully. With her combined skills as both poet and naturalist, she brings every character she encounters on her journey-whether surly moose cow, grizzly bear, or surly, grizzled ranger-to exuberant life.”

To “risk all” in this case meant leaving a comfortable if boring marriage and life among extended family in Massachusetts,a life everyone else around Mary Beth accepted without question, to pursue her dream of becoming a wildlife biologist at Grand Teton National Park.

I was impressed by Baptiste’s considerable descriptive powers. Take, for instance, New Year’s eve among her Teton Park friends: ”We’re one ragtag group, standing in our skis by the Chapel of the Transfiguration, taking turns pulling on the bell rope. As we count to ninety-five, cold-metal clangs jar the snow-muffled night. All that’s visible lies in the thin columns of light from our headlamps; they tangle through the darkness in complex webs, illuminating falling medallions of snow and shafts of body parts. There’s a black ponytail polka-dotted with snowflakes, blue parka arms holding the rope, a glint off someone’s glasses.”

You can advance order this book now. Read it for the writing or for the inspiration. But regardless of why you read it, beware: you will feel the stirrings of your own dreams, and they will be hard to ignore.