Learning to Steer

I had an interesting encounter with a bull yesterday, or I suppose the correct term is steer. He was standing in the road as I drove up to the house and I stopped to have a good long look at him from the safety of my automotive carapace. He moved slowly and drew very near as I stared at him through the window on the driver’s side. I was oddly transfixed -- I guess I never really looked face to face at a steer before. His head was enormous and vaguely prehistoric, his wide-set eyes were vacant, and a string of saliva hung from his mouth.

Now and then he uttered a deep repetitious sound, sort of a baritone moo, but sluggish and world-weary. "I suppose you expect some sort of noise from me," he seemed to say, "but don’t think you’re going to get any inspired vocalizing."

His body was splattered with mud and shit but he had the sad dignity of a retired old warrior and he moved along in no hurry at all. He seemed remarkably big and powerful and at the same time pathetic and doomed. I want to say that we shared a moment, but we were completely inexplicable to each other and no connection was made. I did not, however, care for steak that night.

I do like living on a cattle ranch, though, especially since I don't do the real work of it; I just skirt around the periphery of the actual operation and get to enjoy the visuals. The other day several cowboys (and girl) on horseback were coming over the rise as I walked. A couple of frisky border collies ran ahead of them, and it was one of those moments when I wished I had been carrying my camera, because it would have made a great photograph -- a full-color digital image of a nineteenth century scene, but crisp as daylight, green as grass.

Another time I watched from the bluff as a group of cowboys rode along the beach at sunset, their silhouettes black against a glowing red sky. My own little dog had run into the brush and picked up the foot of a dead deer, and I couldn’t get her to drop it. That's when John McCarty, the head cowboy, approached. He graciously dismounted, pulled open her jaw, reached into her mouth, and removed the thing. It was a downright courtly gesture. "Thank you," I said.

"Don’t thank me," was his response, "apologize to your dog -- she don’t know where these hands have been!"

Crazy. I'm a time traveling ranch girl from Brooklyn, New York, and the sweet improbability of my life makes me giddy. Suddenly I'm remembering a time in my childhood when my brother Eddie came home all excited because he was sure he had glimpsed Hopalong Cassidy in the drugstore on Coney Island Avenue. If William Boyd really did stop in for aspirin at our neighborhood Rexall that day, I suppose that was as near to our orbit any cowboy, even a fake one, ever got.

And now I'm here.

So, yes, I like encountering cowboys and cows. And I like living in a place where I can smell the sea and see the contours of the land and where the sky is a real presence. The other night I saw what I could of that lunar eclipse, watching earth’s shadow make its gradual crossing, enjoying my ride through the solar system. Then I celebrated with vanilla meringue cookies that melted in my mouth like clouds of pure sugar.

Now the wind is howling and a storm is blowing in and I’m sitting at my computer contemplating the fact that we had an online audio-chat with Miranda and Xander in England this morning, and our daughter’s giggles filled the room just like old times, and we made plans for our visit, barely two weeks away.

And lest you think my life is one big bliss, I also got a phone call about my mother being hospitalized and my nephew being jailed.

I have had to develop a kind of triage system, you see. Three piles: good constructive things that I am and should be a part of; problems I can help to alleviate; and then, the danger zone: the overwhelming and insoluble. Enter the latter territory at your own risk. It can deplete you terribly, and no one is any better off in the end.

"You don’t own those problems," my husband reminds me protectively. Unfortunately, I have a hard time finding the balance sometimes between healthy compassionate involvement and neurotically porous borders. I’m speaking cryptically here, but my bet is that anyone who has dealt with these kinds of issues understands what I mean. It’s something I struggle with daily.

But we learn somehow to partition, to tamp down the disturbing realities that don't immediately affect us, to accept contradictions and ambiguities, to recognize what we can change and what will only exhaust us. I have inhaled a great deal of sadness and it stays with me, as frothy as I sound, but it is essential to embrace life's other experiences as well.

"You're such a Pollyanna," Eddie told me once. But I'm not. I'm just trying to survive. Otherwise, I'd be as slow and doomed as that old steer, but painfully aware of it.

So I'm listening to the howling wind and hoping the phone doesn't ring. And suddenly it rings, and my stomach lurches, and I'm braced for bad news. But it's someone from the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation? Yikes. Conservative right-wing scary sort of think tank thing. As often happens, they have confused my husband and his father; both have the same name, but I assure you this call is meant for the elder. With a sigh of relief, I disabuse the woman of the notion that there is anyone here who is even remotely interested in supporting the Heritage Foundation.

Meanwhile the winds are still howling and the rain is starting to come and the sky is beautiful and terrible all at once and disparate realities swirl and collide and I absorb them all in the uneasy balance I have learned to accept as my life.

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Top photo by John Kiewit (The steer I saw didn't look like this one; mine was a black angus, I think. But it seemed a good opportunity to use one of John's beautiful photographs. Click on his name and follow the links to see more.)

Shadow photo by Xander Cansell