Houston - A Little More About Me

ALSO BY PAM HOUSTON

Contents May Have Shifted

Sight Hound

Waltzing the Cat

Cowboys Are My Weakness

A

Little

More

about

Me

Pam Houston

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON

Copyright 1999 by Pam Houston

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First published as a Norton paperback 2013

Line from Poem VII of Twenty-One Love Poems and lines from

Origins and History of Consciousness, from The Dream of a Common

Language: Poems 19741977 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright 1978 by
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author

and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Lines from Part I, A dark woman,

head bent, listening for something, from An Atlas of the Difficult

World, from An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 19981991 by
Adrienne Rich. Copyright 1991 by Adrienne Rich. Reprinted
by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this

book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

The text of this book is composed in Granjon
with the display set in Democratica

Desktop composition by Gina Webster

Manufacturing by Quebecor Printing, Fairfield, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Houston, Pam.

A little more about me / Pam Houston.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-393-04805-5

1. Houston, Pam. 2. Women authors, American20th
centurybiography. 3. Voyages and travels. I. Title.

PS3558.08725Z468 1999

814.54dc21 99-25336

CIP

ISBN 978-0-393-34347-5 pbk.

ISBN 978-0-393-07336-2 ebook

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

Acknowledgments

S ome of the essays in this collection appeared, sometimes in slightly different form, in the following publications: Allure : The Morality of Fat; Cond Nast Sports for Women : A Man Wholl Freeze His Eyelashes for You and Pregnancy and Other Natural Disasters; Elle : In the Company of Fishermen and Redefining Success; Mirabella : African Nights; the New York Times : A River Runs Through Them; Outside : Powerhouse by the Book; Park City Magazine : The Bad Dogs of Park City and The Pit Bull and the Mountain Goat; Ski : On (Not) Climbing the Grand Teton and Growing Apart: Leaving Park City, which has been combined with The Pit Bull and the Mountain Goat in this volume; Travel & Leisure : Waves Every Color of Harvest and Soul of the Andes; Vogue : Eight Days in the Brooks Range with April and the Boys; Whitefish Magazine : Looking for Abbeys Lion.

Out of Habit, I Start Apologizing first appeared in the anthology Minding the Body ; and The Blood of Fine and Wild Animals first appeared in the anthology Women on Hunting . In the Company of Fishermen was anthologized in A Different Angle and Gifts of the Wild ; Eight Days in the Brooks Range with April and the Boys was anthologized in The Writing Path 2 ; A River Runs Through Them was anthologized in Walking the Twilight 2 ; and On (Not) Climbing the Grand Teton was anthologized in Wild Places.

I am grateful to all the editors who helped bring these essays to their present form, especially Karen Marta for her irreverence and Pat Towers for hearing the rhythm of my sentences and making me smarter than I am. I thank Kerry Tessaro for her last-minute expertise. As always, I am grateful to Carol Houck Smith. No one on earth loves books more.

This book is for
Marilyn Shannahan
Sarah Phipps
and
Betsy Marino

And in memory of

Sally Quinters

Eventually I realized that wanting to go where I hadnt been might be as fruitful as going there; but for the repose of my soul I had to do both.

Seamus OBanion

And I wake up, and I ask myself what state Im in,

And I say well Im lucky cause I am like East Berlin,

I had this wall, and what I knew of the free world

Was that I could see their fireworks and I could hear their radio....

Dar Williams

Contents

The

Long Way

to Safety

The Long Way
to Safety

E arly this summer, I paid $4,500 for a horse. Hes beautiful: a quarter-horse gelding nearly seventeen hands high, the grandson of the nationally famous Two-Eyed Jack, a blue roan with rust-colored markings on his face who in the sunlight looks like hes sculpted out of Oreo cookie ice cream. His name is Roany, evidence of a slight lack of imagination on the part of the cowboy named Skip who sold him to me. Skip is good at being a cowboy though, and if Roanys anything to go on, even better at training a horse.

Ive been driving to New Mexico to ride Roany once a week for the last couple of months, testing him in every circumstance that I can think of to see how he responds to trouble on the trail. Weve crossed rivers, negotiated highways, hurried across slippery blacktop parking lots, and chased off a whole pack of snarling Doberman-mix dogs. Weve ridden through culverts under interstate highways where I had less than two inches clearance between my head and the structural concrete above me, and weve sidled up to barbed-wire gates so I could lean over and open them without getting off.

In eight four-hour rides the only time I felt Roanys body tense was when an Air Force bomber executed an alarmingly low flyby in the middle of a spring thunderstorm, and even then he got over his minor panic before I had time to get scared. The words I keep using to describe Roany to my friends are centered and balanced . Being on his back, being in his presence, is a little like being in the presence of a Zen master. Its not just that he doesnt make me nervous, its that he makes me calm beyond my wildest dreams. Skip says it even more simply: he calls Roany the horse with the heart of gold.

I have always owned psychotic horses. Savannah, my Morgan mare, had a thing about scraping me off on tree branches and flying into bucking frenzies whenever she got bored. Willy, a thoroughbred quarter-horse mix, had been drugged to make him faster on the track when he was younger. He seemed perfectly calm until one day he had a flashback and shattered my forearm so badly the doctors had to remove nineteen pieces of bone. Deseo, who is a perfect gentleman around the barn and a star in any ring or arena, works himself up into such a fear frenzy whenever we go out on the trail that there is often nothing for me to do but get off him, try to calm him, and lead him quietly back to the barn.

There are no problem horses , say the equine gurus of the day, and I am 100 percent sure the fault in all of these cases is mine. When I bought each of these horses they were young, untrained, and inexpensive (except Savannah, who was free; I should have known she might have some problems when her owner said hed pay me to get her out of his sight for good). And hard as I might try, however much book and clinic knowledge I can put behind me, I am simply not connected securely enough to myself to train young horses properly. I believe Im getting closer, but Im not there yet.

For the last twenty years, I had everyone convinced I wasnt afraid of anything; but try telling that story to a horse when you are sitting on his back. Horses know the truth about how you are feeling faster than you have time to think it, no matter how hard you try to appear confident and calm. Horses are perfect mirrors of the psyche, seeing through manipulation and deceit and then acting out whatever fear picture youve shown them.