New West Book Review
Home on the Range: Laurie Wagner Buyer’s “Spring’s Edge”
By Jenny Shank, 4-18-08
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Spring’s Edge: A Ranch Wife’s Chronicles
By Laurie Wagner Buyer
University of New Mexico Press
223 pages, $18.95
Here’s a job description for you. In Laurie Wagner Buyer‘s new memoir, Spring’s Edge, she describes her occupation in this way: “There are no days off, not even weekends. No sick leave. No benefits. No vacations. No retirement plan. No perks. No health insurance. No camaraderie of fellow workers…If you’re lucky, you manage to hang on to the home place and pass it on to your children.” Any takers? If so, head to the nearest mountain ranch and sign on for calving season.
In 1997, Laurie Wagner Buyer was married to the rancher Mick Buyer and living and working on a six-hundred-acre cattle ranch near Fairplay, Colorado. Buyer was already a successful regional poet (she’s since gone on to win the 2007 Spur Award for Best Poetry), and in February of that year, she began to keep a journal of her mundane daily activities. Except that the activities didn’t turn out to be so mundane: the Buyers were beset by a winter that wouldn’t quit, financial troubles, family health difficulties, developers buying up the nearby land, and the fraying of their own strained relationship.
As Spring’s Edge begins, Mick has just sold his main cattle herd to a neighbor to pay for his expenses, such as ever climbing feed bills and property taxes. All their hopes for keeping the ranch rest in the remaining pregnant heifers, which they must shepherd through labor and the rest of a hard winter to have a viable herd that will allow them to continue to make a living. This urgency infuses Buyer’s account with tension, and her detailed descriptions of her midwifery on the cows bring the reader right into the quickly disappearing world of independent Western ranchers.
For months, Buyer and her husband trade off checking on the pregnant heifers throughout the night in sub-zero temperatures, and occasionally assist with labor. Everything that can go wrong with a human birth can go wrong with a bovine one, except there’s no team of specialists to attend to the delivery: no matter what arises, from a prolapsed uterus to the necessity for a C-section, the rancher must do the stitching and doctoring himself. Like new parents, the Buyers wake instinctively in the middle of the night, knowing when something is wrong.
One day the 3:30 a.m. wake up leads them to discover that a cow named Freckles has birthed a calf outside in the subzero weather. “Freckles only had time to lick him partially clean before the frigid air turned the birth mucus to ice on his hide…His ears, which had been as stiff as cardboard, droop, drip melted ice, and turn transparent, a sure sign that they will fall off. Crop-eared, but alive.” Buyer works on the calf until he revives, then heads on to further chores. The constant sleep deprivation during calving season prompts Laurie and Mick to snap at each other, but as the book unfolds, Buyer reveals that there’s more than mere fatigue at the heart of their marital problems.
So what is the reward for all this incessant work and worry? Wagner describes skiing across the land: “I love moving across the winter landscape, not as an outsider, but as a part of the snow and sage, the seemingly touchable sky, the white-cloaked pines on the ridge.” It’s clear that Wagner loves the land and the lifestyle, and that despite its hardships, it’s inspiring to her, and as for Mick, as a lifelong rancher, he would be as incapable of doing anything else as a fish would be of suddenly walking and breathing on land.
Besides difficulties with weather, money, and the ranch, there are further ups and downs during the four months Buyer chronicles. Her father is diagnosed with cancer, and she frequently leaves the ranch to visit her parents and help them. But on a positive note, her poetry collection is named a finalist for a Colorado Book Award, and she receives several invitations to poetry gatherings, which serve as a refreshing reprieve from the burdens and isolation of the ranch.
Probably what makes the memoir most compelling, apart from Buyer’s incisive descriptions of life on a high altitude ranch, is her honest examination of her relationship with her husband. She admires him openly, berates herself instead of him when they have one of their numerous spats, and sees him as a romanticized figure: “During my fifteen years with Mick, I have never come across him outside when he isn’t working. He puts his boots on at dawn and leaves them on until he crawls into bed at night.” But he is almost always distant, cranky, and dismissive of her.
Every day she rises at 5:30 a.m. to cook Mick breakfast, and regularly prepares three-course dinners and suppers. She does her share of ranch work, all the cleaning, and all the accounting, figuring out taxes and budgets. She holds down an outside job managing the adjacent Arrowhead Ranch, which sells memberships to fly fishermen, and uses the income to buy them health insurance and pay their property taxes. And in return Mick grumbles about her occasionally venturing to writing conferences that she’s paid to attend as a speaker, calling them “those stupid bullshit conventions.” Buyer doesn’t complain about any of this, she merely describes her activities and Mick’s reactions.
Some of Mick’s behaviors are forgivable, I suppose, ascribable to an agreed-upon traditional division of labor, but one of his transgressions marks him as heel: He determines to leave the ranch, all his property, and his life insurance policy to his son, which is certain to leave Laurie (who is his second wife and 20 years his junior) penniless, homeless, and jobless upon his death. Buyer begs him to reconsider, but he won’t. When Buyer describes this standoff, I could just see Suze Orman shaking her head in disappointment.
As Buyer contemplates divorce throughout the book, I was rooting for her to leave this mentally abusive marriage while she still had a few years to get a job and save for her own retirement. But Buyer clings to her husband, loves him, forgives him, bakes him endless cakes, until as we learn in the epilogue, “After twenty years of living and working together, Mick sued me for divorce and I signed the papers on Valentine’s Day 2003.” No more cake for him. Oddly, on Buyer’s website, her bio says, “Born in Edinburgh, Scotland and raised on Air Force bases around the world, Laurie came west from Chicago as a mail order bride to live a homestead existence on the north fork of the Flathead River near Glacier National Park.” The mail-order aspect of this relationship is never mentioned in Spring’s Edge, which seems to be a missing, key detail that explains a lot of the mystery behind how they got together.
As marital troubles and financial hardships mount, Buyer asks herself, “If I’m ripped away from this place, will my roots refuse to be transplanted? Will I shrivel up and die?” By this point in the book the reader knows that Laurie Wagner Buyer is one tough lady, and it’s not surprising to find her at the end a bit roughed up and displaced from the ranch, but far from shriveled. On the contrary, she appears to be thriving.
Laurie Wagner Buyer will read from Spring’s Edge at the Tattered Cover LoDo on Saturday, April 19 at 2 p.m., and will host a poetry workshop at the Golden Public Library on April 24 at 6:30-8:30 p.m.
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