A Home on the Range

by Jenny Aaron, '07

I swear that I spent my entire childhood waiting for Ray and Mary-Beth Garson. I would rock back and forth on the plush golden chair to the right of my Grandpa's and look out towards the golden Wyoming hills and the hay stack, waiting for their trailer to come bouncing down into the yard of the Dodds Family Gatecreek Ranch. Once they were in sight, I would dash outside and pretend to be busying myself with the saddles or sprucing up the area around the barn. It was never clear how many horses they would bring, but they always brought April and that was all that mattered. She was my horse. When my mother would tell Ray how much I loved April, he would just look down at his feet, smile and say, "She's a good horse." This time, however, I was not waiting for Ray and Mary-Beth by the window. I actually was busy in the yard, preparing a barbeque on our new grill from Kmart. In summers long past, we would have gone up to the picnic grounds to have dinner, but this time because it was just my mother and I we decided to stay at the house. There were no cousins, aunts, uncles, or siblings milling about, making trips to and from the house with the food and friends. There were no horses in the now terribly overgrown and rundown corral and there were no cows in the meadow behind the house. An elaborate meal was not on deck; it was just burgers, salad, and a Dominos pizza that Mary-Beth brought from town. I had not been to the Ranch since the death of my grandmother, four years earlier. She died on the eve of the millennium, perhaps not wanting to embark into the 21st century, after living through three open-heart surgeries, and the loss of a child and two husbands. Her one true source of joy came from Roger, my mother's half brother, the product of her first marriage which ended when her husband's plane was shot down during World War II. Roger was her prince and she showered him with more love than my grandfather, Thomas Dodds, would ever experience. Tensions had always run high between Roger and the rest of the family, but they came to a climax after my grandmother's death. Kathleen, my mother's older sister, had had enough. And in June of 2000, she filed for a partition of the Ranch to be made between Roger, my mother, and herself. The litigation was drawn out for three years during which the relations between my mother and her two siblings became so strained that they would only communicate through their lawyers. There were no more family gatherings during the summer, no more birthday wishes. As hearings were held, motions were filed and appraisals of our invaluable ranch were made, I would often think back to the words of my grandfather. In his 1973 assessment of the Ranch, he wrote, "In my estimation, the ranch is to be enjoyed, and is not to become a burden for anyone. Owning a piece of the west is a haven from a fast world. Enjoy the sunrises, sunsets, rain, thunder, lightning, the dwindling wildlife, the wild flowers, and Strong Creek, in which this family has fished for the Brook Trout for over 80 years." I would think back to his words and a profound sense of failure would come over to me. The ranch was now a source of pain. The fast world that I found myself in provided a haven from the troubles brewing within my family. My mother and I had spent the day driving around to each section- 18, 19,20, 22, 28 and the quarter section of 29- reacquainting ourselves with the land. These are the square-mile plots that my great grandparents, Tom and Phyllis Dodds, gradually homesteaded from 1915 to 1945 under the various "Homestead Acts" passed by congress. With the help of some friends, they initially hauled over 500 fence posts and 48 hundred pounds of barbed wire in from town, meaning Laramie, which is about thirty miles away. In his memoirs, my great grandfather wrote, "I dug the post holes, while Tommy (my grandfather) played and slept; after each post hole, I would have to move Tommy, his blanket, and my tools to the next hole." When my great grandfather turned fifty-five, he was finally able to realize his lifelong dream of becoming a fulltime rancher after years of working full-time jobs in town as well as slowly "proving up" the ranch land. My mother likes to say that he had a long apprenticeship. We take epic drives at the Ranch, and that day's journey was no exception. Dirt roads with tall grass and rocks in the median guide the way through the various sections. We are always on the look out for places where the road is washing away and if it is fixable we work on it, and if it's not, we start to make a new road. Earlier in the day, my mother and I came across a cavernous ditch in the road that had formed due to a heavy spring rainfall. As we began shoveling dirt and rocks into it, we realized that the road was just a few signatures away from no longer being ours. It had been just a few weeks earlier while my mother was driving from Providence to New York that she received the call from her lawyer in Wyoming. Lots had been drawn and it had been determined who was getting what. My mother relayed the news to me immediately, tears in her voice. But it was no surprise to me. We had gotten "Jerusalem." Jerusalem is the home section. It is the heart and soul of the Gatecreek ranch. The plush haying meadows. The houses built by my grandfather and great-grandfather. The barn and the corral. The yard. Even the outhouses. When I was a young girl, I would spend hours sitting on the top of the haystack which rests on the small hill that looks over Jerusalem. Even then, I couldn't help but feel that there was something holy about this little plot of land. I see it, I feel it, in my thoughts, even now. I am not in the least a religious person, but I know that this land is special. It is the "choicest of valley lands" (according to a book of Wyoming's history) that my great-grandparents carved out for themselves, my grandparents, my mother, and me. There is a history here. And it was my destiny to inherit it. My mother says that the soul of her father served as our proxy that day when the lots were chosen. It was hard to believe that in a matter of months, it would be illegal for me to be on this road, on the land that my great grandfather had worked so hard to procure. We fixed the road anyhow. During each ride, we survey every last inch of that land and there is always more. The expanse is inconceivable. That day, I noticed that there weren't as many cows as there used to be. Naturally, we had gotten up early. When we are at the Ranch, everyone wakes up early. No matter what time I get up, my mother is on guard in the kitchen. She wears my grandmother's old robe and slippers, sits at the table sipping her coffee and listens to National Public Radio. In addition to turning on the heat, she turns on the stove burners to keep warm. That's one thing about the Dodds family, it is of paramount importance that we are toasty warm at all times. It is essential for functional behavior on our part. My mother will offer to make breakfast, something she would never do at home, and give a weather report. Usually, there has already been a weather oddity, such as a hailstorm preceding sunrise. However, I cannot remember a single morning that I woke up at the Ranch and the sun was not shining. It is pushed into the house by the never ending winds and you can't wait to get your "Ranch clothes" on and go out for a drive. Ranch clothes are the odds and ends of jackets, hats, gloves, and boots that fill the front porch so that you always have something warm to wear. The weather in Wyoming can turn on a dime. The old blue Nissan truck still lurched back and forth when we started out for the drive. That was the truck I learned to drive stick on. That was the truck I nearly flipped over when I was eleven. That was the truck I did flip out of when I was four. That was the truck I thought I would die in when our dog enraged the Clydesdales in the bull pasture and they nearly smashed that little Nissan to bits. And now it was the truck that Roger would buy from the Ranch for a mere three hundred dollars and I would never see it again. I made a mental note to take the empty jar of Grey Pouppon out of the glove compartment before I left. My Grandpa had always kept it there in case anyone he encountered on the Ranch asked for some. Whenever he would reach into the box to get out his chewing tobacco, he would see the jar and chuckle. My mother was inside making her salad when the Garsons arrived from town. As I watched over the grill, I could hear the familiar sound of their truck coming for a few minutes before it reached the yard. Their teal and white Ford towers over our little Nissan. Theirs is a real ranching truck. My mother came down from the house, arms wide open and the same glazed over eyes she has whenever she sees the Garsons. There is something about them that harkens back to the "good old days" of ranching. They are living artifacts from the ranching world that pervaded my mother's childhood. Ray stepped down from the truck, taking off his tattered baseball cap while Mary-Beth hopped out of the cab. The Garsons have three sons: Shan, Jimmy-Ray and Jack. Late in the summers, they would become permanent fixtures out on our meadows as they began the haying process. Haying used to be a Dodds family event. It was considered the highlight of the year, when everyone would come together to cut and stack the hay. Eventually, my great-grandparents got too old for the job and leased the land out to the Garsons for their cattle. In an effort to recreate the old days of haying, my mother would take great pains to make sure she got to each of the Garson boys around noon time to give them a sandwich and a soda. They would always thank her and continue to go about their work, but inevitably we would find the lunch sitting by the road, uneaten. To me, the boys always seemed like teenagers; but later that evening I realized that they were now forty year old men and Ray and Mary-Beth were racing towards seventy. When you grow up somewhere where the hills and fields don't age, it is hard to see the people around them doing so. Ray's hands are dark from working outside his whole life, but they look as soft and gentle as his voice. He runs two working cattle ranches which now encompass my mother's land. Mary-Beth has usually worked as a school teacher since ranching doesn't always make ends meet. Her skin and her hair are both a pearly white that always complement her turquoise ensembles (and the truck). They don't actually look older until we were all seated around the red-checkered table and the light illuminated their aging faces. When you first sit down with the Garsons, there are always the same sorts of questions like how my dad is doing, how old my little sister is, and other goings on in New York. Ray and Mary-Beth have never even been to New York City. To most people, it is incomprehensible that my tiny blonde mother grew up in the heart of the west, but to the Garsons it is inconceivable that she ever left. Very few people leave. All of my mother's childhood friends still live in town and all of her family members lived there until they died. My grandmother died in the very same room she was born in. My mother always says that even though her life is in New York, her heart is in Wyoming. On the surface, she has long lost the western mannerisms that define her side of the family, in exchange for more New York ones. She doesn't even ride on a western saddle anymore, although she always prefers to. It is the tiny details about my mother that reveal her western roots. To me, it is her smell. When I hug her, I can smell Laramie, Wyoming coming out of her heart because that is where she is. It is only in Wyoming that she is Jeannie Dodds. Not Jeannie Aaron. That night's conversation was no different except that when the small talk ended, we all knew we had to talk about the dissolution of the Ranch and how that would effect the Garson's lease on our land for their cattle. As my mother began to tell Ray and Mary-Beth that she wanted to maintain their lease on our parts of the land, my focus shifted towards the back wall of the living room. There was something new. Roger had arranged portraits of my grandparents and great-grandparents. There were beautiful black and white photos of everyone besides my grandmother. For her, Roger had chosen a color photo of her a few months before she died with a oxygen tank hooked up to her nose. While the other photos captured the beauty and vitality of my family members, my grandmother's photo was vibrantly saddening. "Enough already." She seemed to be saying. Enough of the past. Let's get on with it. Ray agreed to continue to lease our land, mainly for the hay. We never sign contracts with him or even shake on it. His word is all we need. He also said that he would like to help us fix up the barn as one of his winter projects. That poor barn. Earlier in the day, while my mother and I sought haven in one of the sheds during a momentary June hail storm, I had looked out towards the barn which had once had such vitality. Seeing that barn, with it's beautiful red hues, sink in like a little old lady with osteoporosis (who my mother swears I will become if I don't start taking calcium supplements) makes you want to weep. That was the barn where Grandpa Tom kept deer during the winter when it got too cold for them and where his eye glasses sit in the window to this day. I used to browse through the different sections for hours, always finding something a little gross, like an unidentifiable animal leg, always finding something special like notes on the hay supply from days long past. As the hail began to subside, my mother turned to me and whispered, "Grandma Phyllis and Grandpa Tom must be rolling over in their graves over the sight of this barn." She repeated this phrase again at dinner after Ray's offer. He and Mary-Beth nodded solemnly in agreement. A few months after the dinner with Ray and Mary Beth, it was time for the division of the personal property that remained in the various buildings at the ranch. Kathleen, as communicated by her lawyer, wanted nothing to do with it, so it was just between my mother and Roger. A list that included everything from linens to "grandma's horseshoe puzzle" to photos to "either (_) or (1/3) of the old nails in the new shed" was compiled and at a few minutes after noon, we began. Here we were, in New York City and on the other line was Roger, his lawyer and my mother's lawyer in Laramie and within four hours generations of belongings were allotted between the two sides. While my mother and I reviewed the list, I thought back to my great-grandmother's house and all of the memories it held. The dead owl that Kathleen had kept in the freezer (not on the list, mind you). The badgers that lived in the ceilings. The old fashioned telephone mounted on the wall. Her trunks full of hand stitched linens. The porcelain sink with the red, rusted water pump. The smells. Grandma Phyllis's porch always has the same smell, while the inside of the house has several scents. In the winter, it is usually sterile and clean. In the summer, the smells of my great-grandmother would come out. The cakes, and pies, and fudge that I experienced only through the tales of my mother's childhood seeped out of the walls. Whenever I walk into the house, I can picture the great-grandmother that I never met, peering out the window just as I did from the house on the other end of the yard. My mother always tells me how Grandma Phyllis would watch her like a hawk from that window. A grove of Aspen trees drapes over the house. As the hours passed and my mother got the rights to the cattle brand, the horse-hair chaps, and her grandmother's sewing machine, I couldn't help but think about the items that weren't on the list. For years, my mother and I had spent hours strategizing with various lawyers on how to get the choicest parts of the ranch and the material things that came along with it, but I had never considered the family I was losing as well. Over time, you expect to lose your grandparents, but not an entire side of your family. Back in June, my mother and I stopped by the restaurant where one of my cousins, Ody, works in Laramie. He was no longer the person I remembered. His youth had been lost since the last time I'd seen him. His face was growing old and his teeth were stained after years of smoking. He told us that he would probably be leaving Laramie for good over the summer to live with his latest girlfriend somewhere in Nebraska. That was it. There were no words that could make him familiar to me again. As my uncle proudly shouted his picks over the phone as if he were calling out his winning BINGO numbers, I wondered why he didn't want us. He has no other family, only an illegitimate daughter that we've never met who studies antelope stool samples in Montana. Now all he has left for a family is two square miles of land, some suitcases of old photos, and 2/3 of the nails. My mother used to be plagued by nightmares in which she would wake up at the Ranch and when she looked out the window, condo developments were going up in the meadow, a Starbucks was in place of the corral and a Target was opening down the road. The Ranch is her own private space where she truly feels at home. I'm not sure she feels quite the same anywhere else. When my aunt filed for an official partition of the Ranch to be made, the dreams became a nightly occurrence for my mother as she feared that her selfish siblings would inevitably sell off their portions to developers and her haven would be ruined. What she didn't realize is that the haven is stained anyhow. The fighting is over, but life is not. We will go back to the Ranch and enjoy it as we are meant to do, but it will never be the same. The road that once held the sections- 18, 19,20, 22, 28 and the quarter section of 29- together now serves as a dividing line between three siblings. A family. The expanse that was once inconceivable is now finite.