Claiming Ground: A Memoir by Laura Bell (English) Paperback Book

Description: Claiming Ground by Laura Bell In 1977, Laura Bell, at loose ends after graduating from college, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyomings Big Horn Basin. By turns cattle rancher, forest ranger, outfitter, masseuse, wife and mother, Bell vividly recounts her struggle to find solid earth in which to put down roots. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description A Providence Journal Best Book of the Year In 1977, Laura Bell left her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyomings Big Horn Basin. The only woman in a mans world, she nevertheless found a home among the strange community of drunks and eccentrics, as well as a shared passion for a life of solitude and hard work. By turns cattle rancher, forest ranger, outfitter, masseuse, wife and mother, Bell vividly recounts her struggle to find solid earth in a memoir thats as breathtaking as it is singular. Author Biography Laura Bells work has been published in several collections, and from the Wyoming Arts Council she has received two literature fellowships as well as the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Award and the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award. She lives in Cody, Wyoming, and since 2000 has worked there for the Nature Conservancy. Review "[Bell] writes so honestly and beautifully that I dared not skip a word for fear Id miss another moment of grace or insight. . . . This is a book to savor, and to read and reread." —Lois Atwood, Providence Journal "A fresh, wonderful piece of writing, about the isolated and attentive kind of life almost nobody lives nowadays, or ever did." —Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong "Remarkable. . . . Exquisite. . . . Bell may have grown up in the South, but she writes like a Wyoming native. . . . Tender and touching." —New West "The finest memoir Ive read." —Mark Spragg, author of An Unfinished Life "Beautiful, moving, and graceful." —The Boston Globe "The American West has asserted itself as a powerful muse for . . . a group of remarkable women writers that includes Annie Proulx [and] Terry Tempest Williams. . . . Claiming Ground, Bells debut, marks her elevation into that group. Bells metamorphosis slowly unfolds in prose that is both rustically piquant and lyrical." —The Christian Science Monitor "Luminous. . . . Can be savored for the lyricism of its language, its insight into a distinct American region and a meditation on physical work and the role it played in one womans life." —Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Part lyrical remembrance of a deeply intense relationship with nature in a sweepingly majestic landscape, part unswerving self-analysis, Claiming Ground delivers both beauty and unabashed reflection." —BookPage "Bell loves the solitude for its grandeur and for connecting her to the wildlife, all of which she renders in a luminous and flinty prose attuned to the country."—The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, VA) "Unique and engaging. . . . Well worth reading." —San Francisco Chronicle "If you couldnt put down Elizabeth Gilberts Eat, Pray, Love, you must go out right this minute and buy Laura Bells Claiming Ground. . . . Worth is rarely the measure of a books success, but if ever a memoir deserved to be a bestseller, Claiming Ground surely does. . . . Brave and honest. . . . Endlessly inventive." —Nashville Scene Weekly "Quietly powerful. . . . Bells writing elegantly balances pain and love, solitude and family ties, finding solace both in human relationships and in relationships to animals and the Western landscape. Big and open-hearted like the Wyoming sky, this memoir is a pleasure to read." —Sacramento Book Review "Brings a unique point of view—and tremendous writing talent—to [the America West]. . . . A portrait of the inextricable link between a person and a place." —Salt Lake City Weekly "Bell tenderly writes about the people in her life with grace and reverence, never sacrificing honesty." —The Billings Gazette "Has brought more than one reader to tears. . . . Vivid." —The Cody Enterprise "A heart-wrenching ode to the rough, enormous beauty of the Western landscape." —The Nature Conservancy "Bells gift for observation, generous analysis, and her ability to turn a place and people into words are uncommon—traits she shares with the likes of Normal McLean and Wallace Stegner, but few others. . . . [A] fine book." —Metro Pulse (Knoxville, TN) "Open, honest, strong and unflinching." —The Durango Herald "A wonderfully written, refreshing story." —William Kittredge "Intriguing and eloquent, by turns guarded then vulnerable, and always written with honesty and keen observation, Laura Bells Claiming Ground merges exquisitely the human condition of wonder, celebration, fear and longing with the western landscape that so arouses and nurtures these same senses." —Rick Bass "Deeply felt. . . . Each twist of the story [is] viscerally evoked by Bells wrenching, raw, and honest prose." —Orion magazine "[Bell] describes a world that most would have trouble imagining—what the inside of a sheepwagon looks like, how to spot a cow in labor, what little luxuries fit best inside saddlebags. . . . Bell watches the land with an attentiveness gained from years of scanning the horizon for wayward sheep, and she captures its sights and sounds with startling beauty." —High Country News Review Quote "Quietly powerful…Bells writing elegantly balances pain and love, solitude and family ties, finding solace both in human relationships and in relationships to animals and the Western landscape. Big and open-hearted like the Wyoming sky, this memoir is a pleasure to read." -Catherine Hollis,Sacramento Book Review "[Claiming Ground] can be savored for the lyricism of its language, its insight intoa distinct American region, and as a meditation on physical work and the role it played in one womans life." -Julie Foster,Minneapolis Star Tribune "Redolent of wide-open spaces and valley bottoms where beasts find water in reedy swamps sheltered by cottonwoods…[Bell] writes so honestly and beautifully that I dared not skip a word for fear Id miss another moment of grace or insight. This is a book to savor, and to read and reread." -Lois Atwood,The Providence Journal "Open, honest, strong and unflinching." -Leslie Doran,The Durango Herald "Part lyrical remembrance of a deeply intense relationship with nature in a sweepingly majestic landscape, part unswerving self-analysis,Claiming Grounddelivers both beauty and unabashed reflection….But it is not only a looking back; it is a guidepost to the possibilities ahead-the surprises that await us down our own trails." -Linda Stankard,BookPage "Claiming Groundmore than holds its own against any survivor narrative of failed love and misplaced ambition, against any epic quest for understanding and mercy and in language so tempered, spare and beautiful that it rivals any poems. Worth is rarely the measure of a books success, but if ever a memoir deserved to be a bestseller,Claiming Groundsurely does." -Margaret Renkl,Nashville Scene "Bells extraordinary ability to impart a true sense of place on each page reveals a stark and stunning landscape populated with a playbill of peculiar personalities attracted to a life of solitude and hard physical work, and her life within this remarkable world." -Publishers Weekly, starred review "A work of descriptive virtuosity and a hard, honest pull through rough emotional terrain-an exemplary memoir." -Kirkus Reviews, starred review "I LOVEDClaiming Ground! It is absolutely wonderful! Generally Im not a huge fan of memoirs, but I AM a huge fan of nature, animals, Wyoming and matters of the heart. Laura Bell enhanced all of these for me with her tender and graceful prose. Her story of living a mostly solitary life as a sheep herder in back country Wyoming, while searching for inner peace and a place and family of her own, touched me personally in so many ways. I loved her descriptions of the Wyoming mountains and wilderness, the seasons, the wildlife; but the lessons she learned as an instant mother to two young girls who had recently lost their biological mother, that is what grabbed my heart and squeezed. The last paragraph, particularly the last three sentences are amazing! I just cannot wait to tell others of her incredible story and especially to share this with book clubs." -Linda Grana, Lafayette Books (Lafayette, CA) "I began reading Laura BellsClaiming Groundthinking Id read a book about a woman living in those mysterious, gypsy-like sheep trailers that dot the Western basin and range. Instead, I found the beautiful and moving story of a woman searching for place, a home, in the Intermountain West. Excerpt from Book MIGRATION The sheepwagon door stands open to the early dawn. There are times when sleeping inside feels little different than sleeping out like the dogs curled in their scratched beds or the sheep planted against one another across the rise. Theres a blanket, a curve of metal roof, a shelf of books above the bed. From up in the McCullough Peaks a lone coyote yips, sharp and high. There comes an answer, closer, the voices halting at first, then unraveling slowly into a mad chorus of wavering howls. Through the doorway, I see the dogs appear and settle their haunches into the dirt. They watch out over the land, their ears shifting to the cries like antennae. When silence returns, they lower themselves to the ground, still listening. Under the covers, my hands are still against my bones, the edge of longing too great to name or call up. I wish for a fire to be lit in the iron stove by the door. I wish for the smell of coffee, a cup warm in my hands, a voice to say my name. A dawn wind rustles loose tin and whispers through stiff sprigs of sage, their seedheads quivering against the wind for as far as I can see into the murky light and beyond, into the empty miles. East, across the Big Horn Basin, the horizon of mountains bears up the salmon wash of morning. There were nine men herding for the ranch, each with at least a thousand head of sheep in his care. Red, Grady, Murdi, Maurice, Rudy, Ed, Doug, Albert and others that came and went, all crossing the days, one by one, from their calendars. They smelled of sheep tallow, woodsmoke and kerosene, and sometimes of whiskey seeping through their pores. Some of them brought a rare beauty and grace to their work. Others, psychotic or drunk, herded because they couldnt find a place among people. In the three years I herded, I came to understand they were often one and the same. They wove the line between sacred and profane, never staying much to center. I came to them the observer, the adventurer, thinking myself different and holding myself apart. I came to them a young woman among old men, but what we had in common was that line. . . . Across the rangelands of northwest Wyoming, they herded, headed slowly for higher ground, for tender grass and air that held some scrap of moisture. Through brief summer months they hung suspended at the top of the Big Horns. Between timberline and sky, drifts of snow gave way to pools of wild sweet arnica and sheep spread across the earth like clouds run to ground. Beneath early snows of September, the herders retreated, following the sheep down to where the range was more dirt than grass and the slanting sun would give them a brief reprieve on winter. For ten months of every year the sheep and the herders moved across this corner of the map, rising and falling, their tracks a waltz driven by time and weather and the sureness of both. The men were cared for by John Lewis Hopkin, the grandson of the ranchs original owner, and Sterling, the man who helped him during the years I herded. They tended the camps and nursed the mens eccentricities, becoming for them the one line of communication with the outside world. Once a week, theyd drive out to each camp, hauling horse oats, groceries, water, mail, rifle shells, and gossip from town. The herders would try to make this visit last as long as possible. Rudy would offer up Dutch-oven biscuits and a long list of complaints, Maurice, a pot of pinto beans with ham and tortillas rolled by hand on top of the wood stove. Some would string it out with a search for some phantom sick lamb or ewe. Grady would have coffee, sometimes an excellent mutton stew, and, in the months he was sober, good conversation and a quick wit. As for me, I was a listener and a woman among men. This alone was often enough. Once a week the camps would be tended. After the grind of the pickup engine faded in the distance, thered be only the sound of sheep, of wind, of our own voices speaking out loud. The ranch was sprawling, reaching seventy miles across the Big Horn Basin and spilling up into the high sagebrush benches of southern Montana. It was called the Lewis Ranch and had been established by Claude Lewis, the grandson of Mormon pioneers, from the misfortunes of homesteaders during the destitute thirties. At its peak it had run twenty thousand ewes in twenty bands, but over the years half the sheep were replaced with cattle and cowboys who demanded less patience and attention. All the sheep would have been sold but for the tenaciousness of John, the only sheepman in the family once his grandfather was gone. The skeleton of the ranch was stitched together from smaller farms and ranches along the Shoshone River and the Big Horn, with their headwaters high in the Wind and Absaroka Ranges, and the meager creeks--Crooked, Gypsum, Dry, Whistle and Pryor--that channeled spring melts and infrequent rains. These places held the lambing sheds, the calving corrals, the plowed fields, and they had machinery and telephones, hot showers, and kitchen tables with the imprints of forearms worn into their vinyl coverings. These were tired places with faded paint, and they worked hard for a living, but still they were connected to the tangled life of the small towns of Lovell, Cowley, Deaver and Byron. And to the Mormon Church and to bars, to Saturday night dances, to the string of human interactions on any given day that a person can take for granted. For just two months a year, the sheepherders would be exposed to the edges of this life, and even that exacted a heavy toll. In early February, the sheep would be trailed in from their winter ranges to the Lovell lambing sheds, where they were sheared in preparation for the lambing season. The herders wagons would be lined up side by side along the east edge of the pens, backed up to the fence and facing the cottonwood bottom of the Big Horn River. With neighbors only feet away and without miles to buffer them from towns ragged temptations, many of those quiet men unraveled. It might begin with a swig of wine offered by the Mexican shearing crew or a half pint of whiskey pulled from a ranch hands pocket. Otherwise quiet men would grow loud and then disappear. Some, the younger of the old men, planned for it with enthusiasm, counting the days until they were free to go, slicking their hair back and believing that love might be found on a barstool. Days or weeks later, a rattling car would drop them off, stumbling, at their wagon, or theyd walk the highway home in the late night. A years wages could be lost in that brief, bright sparkling. The Medicine Wheel Bar, the Cactus, the Oasis, the Shoshone, the Waterhole. Drinks were bought for the bar, money given away to strangers, saddles and rifles hocked or sold. When they reached hard bottom, out of money or health or both, they would return as quiet men again, content with the peculiar confines of their lives. The ranchs spring ranges pushed west to the McCullough Peaks and the foothills of the volcanic Absaroka Range, north along the Polecat Bench and up into the Pryor Gap country of the Dryhead Ranch, east to the uplifted limestone slabs of the Big Horn Mountains. Straight out of the sheds, the lambs too young to trail, the sheep were loaded into semis and trucked out to the spring ranges. Days before, John and Sterling would haul the herders and wagons out into the hills, miles apart from one another, and leave them to wait alone and afoot for their sheep and horse to arrive. There, the spare rangelands are brightening with new growth: Wyoming big sage, blue gramma, needle and thread, Indian ricegrass, and, scattered among the grasses, delicate evening primrose, copper mallow, and Indian paintbrush in clumps of red, fluorescent pink, and magenta. For some, these are days of sobering up, of nursing the alcoholic shakes with strong coffee, a six-pack of beer, and the company of their dogs. For all, this time seems a true reflection of the distance between them and the world. . . . Sheepwagons are set and leveled where the view of the country is long and generous and includes a pond or creek where the sheep can water. Like tiny ships at sea, the wagons are built to provide sturdy shelter from the elements and to hold its contents securely in place across the miles. Their rounded roofs are metal or canvas stretched across wooden bows. Above the wagon tongue is a door, split, and through it to either side a wood cookstove and cabinets. Benches run along the sides with storage beneath, and reaching across the back is a bed with more cabinets beneath and a small window behind. From the framework of the bed, a bit of plywood can be pulled out like a kitchen cutting board to serve as the table. On this first trip out in the spring, the tender leaves the herder with a well-stocked camp and drives away. A few days, maybe a week later, the rumbling of trucks breaks the silence and along with the rumbling the rising, bleating clamor of ewes and lambs. When the trucks stop and the dust settles, metal ramps are pulled down and the ewes and lambs spill to the ground and spread and roil through the tender new grass. For the rest of that day, the herder will walk the edges of this chaos with dogs and horse, bumping strays back to center until the reunions between ewes and lambs eventually bring quiet to the waning light. The sheep give the herders purpose again, placing them back in a world where they belong. But for those few days without sheep, their world is made up of thin air and silence, a blank slate that had sent more than one new man walking back to town. Details ISBN030747464X Author Laura Bell Short Title CLAIMING GROUND Series Vintage Language English ISBN-10 030747464X ISBN-13 9780307474643 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 978.7033092 Birth 1954 Year 2011 Publication Date 2011-04-19 Subtitle A Memoir Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2011-04-19 NZ Release Date 2011-04-19 US Release Date 2011-04-19 UK Release Date 2011-04-19 Pages 256 Publisher Random House USA Inc Imprint Vintage Books Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:36414381;

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