Women of Wyoming

In actuality the book has more short stories about Wyoming men than women. Wyoming is the kind of place where men ride the horses, tend the cattle, mend the fences, shoot the trespassers, and do a lot of other things that haven’t been done in more civilized parts of the country in a long time. The women are there, not providing a colorful background to the man’s shortcomings and idiosyncrasies, but standing firm against the nearly overwhelming masculine image of a man atop his favorite horse, an animal sometimes thought of in better terms than the person who warms his bed at night.

I finished reading Annie Proulx’s Close Range last night, completing the second half of the last short story, “Brokeback Mountain,” a nearly impossible love story between two men over the span of twenty years. The movie version, directed by Ang Lee (Hulk, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Sense and Sensibility, and others), screenplay by Pulitzer Prize winning author Larry McMurtry, and starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, was recently completed, whether it lives up to its original remains to be seen. Personally, I doubt we’ll see any of the short story’s sex scenes between the lead characters. Yes, dear readers, the two men have a physical relationship that exists within the mores of cowboy culture where men may fuck with one another, but they certainly don’t fuck each other; and, those who do are often subject to a cowboy “justice” that does not tolerate queers. The story has a philosophical ending with one character learning to live with the loss of a lifetime of impossible love.

Having never read any of Annie Proulx’s work prior to this book, I was in for a shock evidenced by the first sentence of the lead story “The Half-Skinned Steer”: In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns. Whew! And, the second sentence has more words and doesn’t end until the end of the paragraph.

This is literary writing at its best. This is the kind of writing I wish would come out instead of the mediocre stuff telling the stories my mind conceives. And, yet, I keep writing, keep focusing on writing better, writing the kind of words that will live on once this mass of flesh is reduced to ash and flung out upon the open sea.