When I was in my late twenties, I lived on the side of the mountains in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana where my mountain man partner and I kept a few goats and lived off of the largess of the land. Because there was no electricity and no refrigeration, I kept things cool in the steeply flowing waters of the stream, including the goat’s milk that I acquired every day from our three nannies. Some of the milk of course, went to their kids, and some we drank ourselves. The rest, however, I carried down the mountain in gallon glass jars suspended in the milk buckets to make carrying them easier going the miles to the junction of the dirt road with the highway where an old ranch woman named Peggy lived. Peggy kept hens and, therefore, when I arrived with the milk she gave me a dozen eggs for each gallon in exchange. Plus, we had the added good fortune of getting in a visit. Because I lived with a stoic, mostly silent man, having another chatty female with whom to engage always gave me great joy and made the trek up and down the mountain worthwhile.
One of the things that Peggy repeatedly told me whenever I would tell her tales of bucking bales or hefting waterlogged deer hides to a fleshing and graining beam was that I would “live to regret” doing such heavy work because those chores took a terrible toll on one’s body, especially that of the female frame. She said she was living evidence of someone who had been “rode hard and put away wet” during her years alongside her rancher husband. Of course, she had outlived him by twenty years and was still going, then in her early 80s, but there was not a place on her body that did not ache from overexposure to the cold and repeatedly lifting and moving heavy objects like saddles, anvils, salt blocks, hay bales, fence posts, sick calves…well, the list went on and on.
Needless to say, I paid no heed to Peggy’s warning and I went on to live the next twenty-five years doing all of the things that she had warned me against. What choice was there, really, when one wished passionately to live on the land. There were sacrifices to make and austerities to observe. The body would not hold up forever; it never did, no matter how much special care and attention it received. Still, I carried her words with me through each year of ranch life that I went on to experience in Montana, Wyoming and Colorado.
Today, feeling the ache of fingers that do not wish to move and a neck that objects constantly, and various muscle groups that protest if I walk too far, engage in too long a yoga practice, or even spend too much time sitting at the computer with my writing obsession, I do not feel regret for the life I chose to live as much as I deeply respect all of the other women and men who are still engaged in a life on the land. From the tea I am drinking, to the flour and maple syrup that I used to make this morning’s einkorn muffins, there is a human being out there somewhere who is working hard to provide the products I now use to maintain my well being. As I sip and nibble, I am pondering what the opposite of regret might be…and I raise a thoughtful toast to Peggy for the months of companionship she gave to a lonely and often frightened young woman. From one generation to the next, we pass on our stories and our wisdom.
~LJ