“Black Sheep” Finds Her Place as a Wyoming Shepherd

By Jenny Shank, 3-08-10

Claiming Ground
by Laura Bell
Knopf, 239 pages, $24.95

In her remarkable memoir, Claiming Ground, Cody’s Laura Bell offers up exquisite snapshots from her life spent working as a sheepherder, ranch hand, forest ranger, and masseuse.  Bell’s adventure began when she was a minister’s daughter just out of college, back home in Kentucky, and couldn’t think of what to do with herself but to pursue her “childhood’s private world blown larger than life, with a horse, two dogs, a rifle, a wilderness.” In 1977, she came west with her sister, whose husband was a paleontologist working on a dig in Wyoming, and she never left.

Claiming Ground begins with an account of Bell’s early days spent herding sheep in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, where she was one of the only women in this occupation.  At one point she and the sheep are restless in the heat, anxious to leave for the higher ground of their summer pasture.  The man who tends Bell’s camp tells her the road up to the pasture is “a son-of-a-gun” and it proves to be a difficult journey with her horse and sheep.  Bell writes, “We’d made it, though not without false starts and backtracks to find the single spot of grace that might let us through.”

In some ways this statement characterizes every aspect of Bell’s life, a search for that improbable “single spot of grace” that allows her to live as she wishes to.  Her writing is like this too, a careful search for the spot of grace in how best to capture the events of her life in this memoir that conceals as often as it reveals. 

Claiming Ground isn’t written in a confessional mode.  There are gaps in time.  Bell doesn’t discuss the relationship that results in a pregnancy she ends with an abortion, nor does she detail the procedure.  There are several love affairs that she doesn’t write much about.  Bell may have grown up in the South, but she writes like a Wyoming native, reluctant to share too much of her private pain.  Bell doesn’t take writing a memoir an excuse to blather on about her problems.  Rather, she makes it the opportunity to reveal the beauty that she has witnessed in a life spent closer to nature than most people of this century experience.  Her passages about the open landscape are often arresting:

“Antelope nibble on sage leaves, waiting delicately for the storm.  I’ve been watching it simmer in the western sky, steely gray closing in over Heart Mountain and swallowing the northern Absarokas.  The air is still, the sheep stunned quiet by the heat.  Then there’s a puff of breath from the east, and another, the feel that something’s happening.  This must be what war is like, nights spent quietly waiting for bombs to release this tension in the air.”

As a child Bell was a bookish loner, and she writes that among the sheepherders, with plenty of time alone, she finds where she belongs: “I had discovered a place where no one expected me to do or be much of anything.  My fellow coworkers were tender alcoholics, muttering derelicts, societal rejects, and I had found a certain delicious comfort in their company.”

Bell makes a natural semi-hermit, alone with her animals and books, attentive to the wilderness.  She even lists the plants that sparsely vegetate the desert land with reverence: “Sagebrush, four-wing saltbush, greasewood, saltsage, spare clumps of slender wheatgrass, Indian ricegrass with its panicles sprung open like fireworks.”

Eventually Bell comes down from the mountain, meets a man when she’s working as a ranch hand, marries him, and in doing so makes herself a family.  Her husband, Joe, lost his first wife to a horse riding accident a little more than a year before he marries Bell, and so she helps raise his two girls, Amy and Jenny, who were four and one when they met her. 

But Bell discovers Joe is plagued by the same disorder that beset many of the shepherds she worked with, who “lived this reclusive life to save themselves from the raging alcoholism that pursued them in town…Among the herders, I would see it again and again.  Someone fastidiously proud of his cooking or leatherwork one day could be barking like a dog or peeing in his pants the next.”

Some awful things happen to Bell in Claiming Ground, the worst of which is revealed at the outset of the memoir in its dedication to Jennifer Nicole Little (1981-1999).  Like the lives of all parents whose child dies, Bell’s is more characterized by sorrow and loss than joy.  But she writes of her pain with grace and flint, transmitting beauty and hard-won insights through her transfixing prose.  Early in the book, Bell wonders of another woman, “when it was that the small disappointments began to gain on the joy,” and we see this happen in turn to Bell as her life unfolds.  But as some of Bell’s relationships fall away, others grow stronger.  Her portraits of her evolving devotion to her parents are tender and touching.

The 17th-century French theologian Nicolas Malenbranche wrote, “Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.” If that is true, then the many hours Laura Bell passed in the wilderness have been a prayer, revealing her to be her preacher father’s daughter, however much she felt her personality and choice to reinvent herself as a shepherd made her the “black sheep” of the family.

Laura Bell will visit two-dozen bookstores in the region in her tour with Mark Spragg, including stops in Cody, Wyoming (March 9, The Thistle, 2 p.m.), Billings (Barnes & Noble, March 10, 7 p.m.), Red Lodge (Red Lodge Books, March 12, 3 p.m.), Boulder (Boulder Book Store, March 16, 7:30 p.m.), Bozeman (Country Bookshelf, April 20, 7 p.m.), Missoula (Fact & Fiction, April 21, 7 p.m.), and many more places in Montana, Utah, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and California.