Bobbi Phelps - Sky Ranch: Living on a Remote Ranch in Idaho

Copyright 2020 by Barbara Phelps Chapman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Paul Qualcom and Bob Ballard.

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-5107-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-5109-5

Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to
Georgina and Don Wolverton
Nancy and Doug Strand

Without them I could not have survived the rigors of rural life, the challenges and confrontations of Sky Ranch.
They brought love and happiness to me when I felt as if I couldnt go on.
They were my rocks.
My champions.

Table of Contents

Disclaimer

Sky Ranch reflects the recollections of my Idaho ranch experiences between 1980 and 1996: the adventures in a time before camera phones, GPS technology, and social media.

The conversations written on the following pages have been recreated to evoke the substance of what was said. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed. Sky Ranch is the fictional name for the Wolvertons family ranch: Golden Valley Land and Cattle Company.

While all the incidents described in this book are true to the best of my memory, certain events have been compressed, consolidated, or rearranged to aid in the narrative flow. Sky Ranch is not intended to be an exact duplication but an effective representation of a city girls time at a remote ranch in Idaho.

Bobbi Phelps

Foreword

Sky Ranch by Bobbi Phelps is a series of kindly, authentic, and sensitive profiles of finding herself on a remote Southern Idaho ranch, in love with the cowboy-owner she later marries. As is said, all is not sweetness and light.

If youre not from the West and not familiar with this part of the country, it might be tempting to see ranch life through an idyllic hazy glow of romanticism and fantasy. Phelps brings us to the place as it really was, and as it remains today.

This is a woman whobefore her time in Idahohad never ridden in a pickup truck, watched an animal die, touched (only once) an electric cattle fence, survived a howling ground blizzard, duck hunted, or bore and raised a son whom she and her husband nearly lost in a later farm incident.

Brought up in a tony suburb in Connecticut, Phelps graduated from UC Berkeley and had an early career in the airline industry. Phelps then took a job as an advertising sales representative for Southern Idahos area newspaper in 1980. She was in her late thirties, but as the rookie, she was handed sales accounts no one else wanted, including a rendering plant that processed dead animals. (Yep, they advertised.) She was indeed a spunky woman, learning to live in and love Western ranch life.

Phelps writes with a fine eye for detail, place, and remembrance. Shes particularly good at describing the people around her, miles away on gravel roads yet the closest neighbors. Her accounts are tight and brisk with the clipped definitive of Western common speech. Although shes no longer in Idaho, Phelps has retained our dialect and phrasing in both her memory and in the vignettes of Sky Ranch .

This is no fictionalized account, nor is it an exact memoir. Sky Ranch is populated with real people whom Phelps names and quotes. Though she says some conversations are reconstructed, they have the cadence and pace of overheard and yet remembered incidents.

As the Rockies were settled, there were many accounts, some written years later, of the challenges faced by those early pioneers. Its a genre of Western writing which has somewhat gone out of style but shouldnt have. Phelpss form is conversational and seemingly a bit wistful, as if she is relating how fortunate she was to have been there at that moment. Sky Ranch conveys a crisp late summer evening with a languid harvest moon and the golden wheat and barley shimmering in the gathering dark.

Her remembrances of ranch life are in and of the region. Theyll remind readers of the genre of Western literature of Lonesome Dove, O Pioneers!, Little House on the Prairie, and English Creek . These are all set in a past time, but the Rocky Mountain life is still extant in regions like Southern Idahos windswept high plains and among the hardy, resilient people who live there. Phelpss challenges seem no less real.

Sky Ranch puts Phelps clearly in two groups of Western life: those who have lived it, and those who have told its story well.

Rep. Stephen Hartgen, ret.
Idaho House of Representatives

Preface

A ll I could see in any direction was sagebrush and prairie grass. In the far distance rose the mountains surrounding Golden Valley, a large section of South Central Idaho. It was August 1980. Somewhere on the endless expanse, Sky Ranch spread over the rough grassland, four thousand acres zigzagging across six by ten miles, almost the size of my hometown in the Northeast. Although I had traveled the globe as a flight attendant, this was a world I had never experienced. In my late thirties, I enjoyed life to its fullest. I gained information about farm and ranch life from a good-looking cowboy, a man who later became my husband.

Raised near New York City, my life appeared typical of those living in American suburbs. But it was not. My life was only typical of many of us living on Connecticuts gold coast, a land of movie stars and business executives. My mother stayed home and enjoyed the trappings of a successful husband. She played tennis and bridge, became president of our towns garden association, and chaired my schools annual fair. My father worked in New York Citys real estate industry, belonged to the University Club in Manhattan, volunteered at the local fire department, and was a charter member of the Darien Country Club. He lived the classic, corporate lifestyle.

Before I started kindergarten, my mother enrolled me in piano, horseback riding, and gymnastics. During summers, my family vacationed on Cape Cod where we swam in the warm Atlantic Ocean and collected colorful shells on white sandy beaches. My sisters and I attended camp in New Hampshire, beach parties on Long Island Sound, and debutante galas at elaborate homes throughout Fairfield County.

I was lucky to have two wildly different but loving parents. My father kept me somewhat grounded and my mother encouraged me to be curious, to challenge, and to explore. I identified more with my exuberant mother, oscillating between elation and fear. In my early twenties, my feelings of fear dissipated. I became an international flight attendant, taking troops in and out of Vietnam during the height of the war.