Читать книгу Tomboy Bride, 50th Anniversary Edition - Harriet Fish Backus - Страница 8

FOREWORD

These vertebrae of the monster included the giants Uncompahgre, Wetterhorn, Red Cloud, Sneffles, Wilson, Sunshine, and Lizard Head, each one higher than fourteen thousand feet, soaring to heaven like spires, and surrounded by peaks of eleven, twelve and thirteen thousand feet. They held our gaze through the snow falling in large soft flakes, fuzzing our faces, whitening the robes.

When I wrote the first foreword to Tomboy Bride, back in 1996, I was relatively new to the San Juan Mountains. Three years prior, I had dared myself to buy a 120-acre homestead very near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, less than 50 miles as the crow flies, (but more than 200 as the car drives) from the Tomboy Mine above Telluride where Harriet Fish Backus spent the most memorable days of her life. Memories of the mining days are all around us on my side of the mountain too, in the ruined ore houses and caved-in shafts, in the names of the town’s businesses: Kentucky Belle Market, Tommyknockers Tavern, and Amethyst Emporium, and in the stories of the miners, who are descendents of other miners, and who still worked the mines here until they closed in 1985. In my first foreword I confessed to a fantasy that one day, while cleaning out the barn or digging in the garden, I might uncover a diary or a bundle of letters, some written message left from the past that neither time nor weather nor packrats had carried away.

My ranch was homesteaded by a man named John Pinckley, who left it to his son Bob. Bob lived on the ranch from the time he was a young boy until his death in 1966. Bob’s cabin was in decent shape when I bought the place, but over the years it began to rise up from its own center and eventually threatened to split at the top like an over-baked cupcake. I traded my 1964 F100 truck to a local contractor named RJ Mann for a new foundation. When RJ pulled up the floorboards, he found the treasure trove I’d been hoping for: messages from the past in the form of an old harmonica, a pipe, a pair of scissors, a pocket watch, empty tins of tobacco, several glass marbles, each of them a different shade of green. There was a well-preserved insert from a package of Super Anahist Antihistamine Cough Syrup with Vitamin C, several yellowed card stock receipts from a company in Minneapolis where Pinckley shipped the furs from his trapping business (including one for the sale of a house cat), a label from Prince Albert Crimp Cut in a can, and two beautifully rendered drawings of belted kingfishers, one that had graced a 25-yard container of Martin’s Highest Quality Enameled fishing line: (test 21 pounds), and the other a “collectable” insert from a box of Arm and Hammer Baking Soda. Objects from the past hold the energy of their owners, and finding them feels like getting a letter from a long-lost friend. Buying the ranch had always felt less like a decision and more like a calling. For as long as I can remember, belted kingfishers have been my favorite bird.

The last time I read Tomboy Bride I was still in the honeymoon stage of owning my ranch, in love with the star-filled nights and silent mornings, with the sun making diamonds on snow-covered pastures, with soft September days when the hills are bursting with color, with the cleanest air you have ever tasted, and the hypnotizing motion of a hundred acres of gamma grass in the wind. A couple of decades later I know the other side of the story: the 30-below-zero-not-counting-the-wind-chill mornings, frozen pipes and dead batteries, soul-crushing drought years with no pasture to speak of, sick horses in the middle of the night, a bear who came for my lambs and then came again, the ashes of a few good dogs scattered across the pasture. I also know that the ranch has sunk so much deeper under my skin, not in spite of but because of how hard it can be to live here. As the list of challenges and heartaches lengthen, I grow even more committed to the place.

This must have been how it was for Harriet Fish Backus, whose love of her time living at the Tomboy Mine borders on the ecstatic, even though the delivery mule showed up only once a month and then without any fruits or vegetables, and the fire went out more often than not leaving the food to freeze to ice blocks, and there was something called the Elephant Slide between her and town, between her pregnant self and her doctor, and each time she passed under it, it could have buried her in tons of snow in the blink of an eye. Couple those adventures with the satisfaction of putting a Thanksgiving meal on the table for a gang of hungry miners, with the stupefying beauty of the morning after a storm when the world is all azure and sun-spangled snow, with the deep pleasure of a cup of good tea on a rare becalmed afternoon, with the good company of a husband she loved and a pack of robust girlfriends who, among other things, started the world’s highest branch of the YMCA. It wouldn’t have been the right life for everyone, but it was exactly the right life for Harriet Fish Backus.

Of the 203 homesteaders who staked claims in my valley—the Upper Rio Grande—in the late 1800s, 25 were women. John Pinckley may have filled out the paperwork to stake the claim on my ranch, but since he was often distracted by alcohol and women, it was his daughter Myrtle, Bob’s big sister, who did the hard physical labor of proving up on the place enough to secure the deed. The fact that her father’s name remained on the title makes a person question the accuracy of that number 25. I’ll never meet Myrtle, and there is no one left alive who even knew her, but I can feel her winking at me from between the pages of Tomboy Bride.

Living the joys and challenges on my own homestead for 26 years has left me more in awe of Harriet Fish Backus than ever. She stood strong and optimistic in relentlessly dire circumstances, and was driven by love for her husband and her compassion for others in all things. I hope I am not merely projecting when I say I believe it was her love of the land, her love of the Rocky Mountains in general and the high San Juans in particular, where she found strength and solace and, maybe above all, a constant and ever-expanding wonder. I understand now, on a cellular level, how the tragedies that befell her in her perilous perch on the side of that mountain only served to intensify her love for it. I share with her an unending love for these most magnificent mountains, and understand that I am lucky beyond all reason to call them my long-term home.

PAM HOUSTON