Whenever I think back to Montana, I remember the image of driving along US Route 93 and coming over the ridge of the hill from the town of Stevensville when I visited my Aunt Penny and Uncle Andrew those summers starting when I was twelve. It was a two-lane highway through rolling hills of ranch land until you got to the valley of the Bitterroot river, where streams supported farmland. Once the roadway crested, the hillside puffs of cotton that were sheep working their way to the fresh grazing dotted both sides of the valley The farmland on the floor of the valley had been growing crops or hay for about six weeks before I had gotten out of school in New York, so everything there was in various shades of green. Hayfields were separated from the grazing fields open to the horses, and my attention always went to seeing how many horses were in which fields.
My feelings about Stevensville are mixed these days. When I was a kid I could fly to Seattle with my mother and take the Northern Pacific Railroad east to Missoula, and Aunt Penny would meet us at the station to drive us to the ranch. Almost as soon as we got out of the station, the aroma of the farmland filled my nostrils, and I knew I was in Montana. Those summers were a paradise for a kid from Connecticut, and Uncle Andrew and Aunt Penny anchored me to the land and the animals on their ranch in ways that started me on life. I’ve always remembered Uncle Andrew saying that other ranchers might sell their calves or lambs for slaughter but that he felt it was too cruel to their mothers to tear a young child away before it was weaned, so he wasn’t going to do that. Let someone else sell veal or lamb chops.
Maybe that’s what sensitized me to the agony of veterans who’ve felt the trauma of their experiences at war.
Aunt Penny had to sell the ranch after Uncle Andrew died, and it’s now an equine facility that offers horse boarding, riding lessons and horse training, as well as open riding excursions for visitors from around the country and southeast Asia. She’s settled into an active retirement community in Missoula, and she’s happy there, but it’s unsettling for me to visit and think about the world of the ranch I shared with her twenty-five years ago.
Uncle Andrew got me mucking out the horse stalls the first morning I was at the ranch. I always remember his words. “You’re not here as a guest, boy. Your parents wanted you to come here so you’d see what life on the range is like. That food in the supermarkets in Manhattan doesn’t fall out of the sky in plastic-wrapped packages. A hundred hands get it there, and some of those hands are mucking out the stalls where horses round up the sheep and cattle that feed and clothe you, so you might as well start by doing some of that yourself.” His eyes weren’t harsh, but they looked right through me, and I sure wasn’t in prep-school any more.
The thing about brushing down the flank of a horse that’s different from petting a dog is that in doing it you have to lean one hand on the horse’s flank. When you pet a dog, you feel the softness of its fur, but when you lean an open palm on a horse’s flank you feel the warmth and the firmness of its body. Somehow, taking care of a horse had taught me to caress a lover, although I hadn’t understood that until my mid-twenties.
A horse can look back at you over its shoulder when you’re brushing it down, and its wide eye is looking right at you, but you have no idea of what that animal is thinking. I was twenty-six when I had the brains to spit out the simple question of asking a lover “What?” when he looked at me wide-eyed. He was twenty-two, and he was too uncertain to be able to formulate an answer, but it was the horses who had taught me the power of the question that has become an anchor in both my personal life and my professional career. If only a horse could have answered me back!
In the book Soothing Your Heart… has unlocked mine, it was Kevin who gave me that look when I stopped at the hillside where Simon had read Proust to me in the original French. He had been the one who asked the “What?” question, and I was the one who laid my relationship to Simon to rest as if Kevin had been the therapist in my life. That had been the switch in our relationship; that had been the first unlocking of my heart.
