Bearlodge Writers

Gaydell Collier

Get To Know Gaydell

Quote:

"It is in the appreciation of beauty that our lives are ultimately expressed. This can come in the formation of a perfect balepile, the creation of an attractive casserole, the exquisite coordination of horse and rider, or the writing of a precise poem, a polished phrase."

Maxie Quote:

“Never miss a chance to share laughs with those you love. Life will give you enough time to share tears.” –Trixie Koontz, dog

Gaydell Collier Bio

I grew up surrounded by books, fascinated by stories—especially of horses and dogs—and dreaming of Wyoming. Roy and I met at the University of Wyoming and soon were living on Wyoming ranches, first near Laramie, and finally on our own small horse ranch in Wyoming’s Black Hills. We raised four kids and have eight grandchildren.

My love affair with books continues: I’ve read them, bought them, collected them, sold them (established a mail-order bookshop on the ranch), edited them, reviewed them, catalogued and loaned them (was Crook County Library Director for many years), and written them.

Over the years my love of ranch life and the land itself has burgeoned. My dog, Maxie, and I walk over our fields and hills every morning at sunrise (yes, darn near every morning, rain, shine, sleet, or 30-below), and rejoice in the beauty that unfolds around us. What finer combination can there be than to sit on a windy Wyoming hilltop (not in 30-below) with dog, pen, and journal? It’s where I do my best writing.

Maxie Collier Bio

I’m fan of Trixie Koontz, who is dog. I, Maxie, am dog like Trixie (mostly golden). Trixie writes good books with help of her dad, Dean (see Life is Good!: lessons in joyful living and Christmas is Good! Yorkville Press, N.Y, 2004 and 2005). I, Maxie (dog), hope to write some day. For now, listen to Bearlodge Writers read and critique (learn lots). Also, Mom says we rejoice in beauty on our walks. True, especially beauty of good smells (but Mom won’t let me off leash so I can chase deer, bunnies, coyotes—very annoying).

Publication Credits

Books:

Co-edited with Linda Hasselstrom and Nancy Curtis:

Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite the American West, Houghton Mifflin, 2004

Woven on the Wind: Women Write about Friendship in the Sagebrush West, Houghton Mifflin, 2001

Leaning Into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West, Houghton Mifflin, 1997

Co-authored with Eleanor F. Prince:

Basic Horsemanship: English and Western, Doubleday, 1974, rev. 1993

Basic Training for Horses: English and Western, Doubleday, 1979, 1989

Basic Horse Care, Doubleday, 1986, 1989; German translation, Müller Rüschlikon, 1992

Poems, essays, reviews, and articles in periodicals and anthologies, including:

Owen Wister Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Westering, Farm & Ranch Living, Smithsonian, National Wildlife, Library Journal, Wyoming Library Roundup 

Wyoming Fence Lines: an Anthology of Prose and Poetry, David Romtvedt, ed., Wyoming Humanities Council and Wyoming Arts Council, 2007

Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West, Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson, eds., Ghost Road Press, 2007

In the Shadow of the Bear Lodge, Bearlodge Writers, Pat Frolander, ed., Many Kites Press, 2006

Wyoming Writers poetry chapbooks, 2007, 2000, 1998, 1995

Western Horse Tales, Don Worcester, ed., Republic of Texas Press 1994

Wyoming Governor’s Arts Award for Literature 2004

Consultant: Encyclopaedia Britannica on horses and horsemanship 2000

Numerous workshops, programs, and presentations (including radio) on writing, journaling, memoir, horses, and women’s writing in the West, 1997-present

Excerpt of Writing

Wild Licorice

I think now it was the borders that I had to get away from. Velvet lawns bound by concrete sidewalks and trimmed hedges. Pansy-dotted flower beds edged with corrugated metal. Sky framed by phone and electric wires. Days compartmentalized by engagement calendars, fractured into hours, half-hours, minutes. Lives contained and predictable. Spontaneity a devil. Some called it comfortable. Safe.
When had wildness become an enemy?

I found Wyoming by looking inward and following the vision west. It’s not that borders don’t exist here, but that for me they defy definition. Every day, I follow the path downhill to the creek. The temperature cools, birdsong fills the air, and at the crossing I enter a new dimension.

Sometimes I linger here. I might lean against a bur oak, or shed foot gear and wade into the creek, sit on a rock, let the erosion begin. Mundanity wears away, swept downstream by the current, and I’m left soaking in discovery. I expect to take something home with me—I always do—not in the sense of plucking it away, but of letting it rest in thought, hoarding an image until a new experience splashes over it. I gather these impressions of sound and color until they form an undercurrent of understanding and give me a clearer glimpse of the beauty of life.

Beyond the crossing, the bank rises steeply to different levels: the meadow, the bench, the hills. Today I’ll head west, climb through buffaloberries, hawthorns, and baby pines, and follow the cliff trail into the ponderosas. The trail cuts naturally through rock, and I have to pay attention as I step along uneven ledges and climb over the tangles of exposed roots. I carry a walking stick—an old broom handle worn smooth by my hand—for balance and confidence. To my right, the land drops away a hundred feet or more, and I look over the tops of pines, oaks, and ash, down to the creek winding below.

On my left, tan sandstone and gray-brown bark form a background for accents of sage-green and orange lichens, snowberry—bright green in spring, brilliant crimson in fall—a sego lily, and tiny five-petaled wildflowers tucked into the crevices. Here nature’s collage of textures and design creates a serendipitous art exhibit that nearly takes my breath away.

On a point of rock just before the cliff trail curves south into the pines, I look west. The creek meanders through a widening valley filled with serviceberry and willows, golden currants and chokecherries, until it reaches a large pond that harbors Canada geese, mallards, and wood ducks in the migration seasons. A blue heron stands one-legged at its edge. Above it all, the hills lift into “The Bear Lodge”—the Bear Lodge Mountains, Wyoming’s portion of the Black Hills Uplift—silhouetted against the sky. This is a place for sunsets.

As I follow the trail into the ponderosas, I expect something to happen—a coyote running through the trees, a wild turkey feather drifting down in my path, a sudden rush of pine scent that closes my eyes in delight. Once, as I slogged my way here in depression, I looked up as a bald eagle sailed over the ridge. She saw me just as I saw her. Slowly she circled directly overhead, her message to me as clear as if spelled out: There is always freedom of thought. So often we set up our own inner boundaries, not even knowing we’re doing so. Nature helps free us from these. My depression gave way to rejoicing.

I sink for a moment into the softness of beige-gray pine needles, then lie back and look up. The patterns of pine needles on sky are a study of contrasts—spiky and stark against blue silk or the cottony billow of clouds, green-black against luminescence. Glints of light become filaments of silver—spiders sailing on their single-strand webs to a new tree, a new home. A white dandelion tuft rises from somewhere, drifting up ever higher on invisible air currents until it disappears.
I breathe deeply the scent of pine and then realize that it blends with another lovely scent, that of sagebrush. Not the big sagebrush of open country—here we have Artemisia frigida, low-growing, fringed sagewort, known to the Lakota and other tribes as “woman sage.” I run my fingers gently over its fine leaves and multiple florets and wonder at its softness. Indian women ingested it for menstrual irregularities, chewed the leaves for heartburn, wove the stems into mats, and used the soft foliage for toilet paper and diapers. I feel a kinship with them, though I have done none of these things. Something intrinsic about this plant begs for connection, demands a relationship.

My attention is called away by a ruckus in the tree-limbs—squirrels playing, chasing each other, working the pine seeds out of cones. A quiet, steady rustling announces a skunk hunting her way through the brush. Tinier, closer scratching alerts me to a pair of dung-beetles working on their Herculean project of rolling a dung ball larger than themselves uphill. Some days when the wind is right, a whitetail doe and fawns may trail down toward water, not noticing me.

Wind is the adventure. Wind—truly boundless—demands attention. Even when the air seems still and breathless, you have only to wait a few minutes for the wind to announce itself from far away, then travel in waves, surging from hill to hill, rushing closer until it breaks over you, drowning out all other sounds, rocking the trees and shaking limbs, plucking at your shirt, grabbing you up in its wildness, and then dropping you, leaving you at once relieved and saddened and yearning for the next gust.

Climbing out of the pines, I reach a hilltop where, looking east, I can see far into the prairielands of South Dakota. There’s a state boundary there somewhere, no more visible to me here than to the butterflies that drift over it. I spin 360 degrees beneath this huge bowl of sky. Its blue brilliance shocks my eyes. Racing cloud-ponies send shadow-patterns loping over rangeland and hills. Today isolated, high-mushroomed thunderstorms, separated by unveiled sunlight, flash their excitement as they ride the horizon.

From the hilltops, vision expands from the minutiae of seeds and petals to the larger aspects of design—the quilt-like patterns of fields and rangelands feather-stitched by tree-lined draws, the interplay of color, the varied textures of ocean-wave grasslands, tweedy woodlands, and rock ledges. Are there fences here? A few, sliding along the contours of the landscape, going with the flow, inconspicuous or invisible, conforming rather than defining. Even those that follow surveyors’ lines are unobtrusive, dipping into the draws, hiding behind trees, apologizing for their existence.

Individual calls of meadowlarks, robins, jays and chickadees, redwings and killdeers, blend into symphony. In the evening, I watch nighthawks flutter and peenk and then dive with a throaty boom for insects. And best of all, if I’m here at just the right time, I hear from these hilltops the emotion-packed music of the migratory birds. The sound arrows deep to a primal place within me. Who can remain unmoved by the high, distant garble of wild geese on the wing—hundreds of them in pattern, changing leadership, knowing their intent, pulling our hearts along with them?

I swing back down the hill and across the pasture. Already the grasses roll with the wind like waves on the sea. I pluck a stem of western wheatgrass, known to the Lakota as the “real or true grass,” and suck out the juice, tasting freshness and summer. Wildflowers everywhere—prairie violets and pointed phlox, daisies, pasqueflowers, penstemon, clovers and wild onions, yarrow and dandelions. Wildflowers are the perennials of inspiration. Many, on opening, turn toward the sun and follow its brightness, as if following spiritual light into an awareness of the oneness, timelessness, and the beauty of life.

Stinging nettles and thistles thrive as well, as does wild licorice with its sticky seeds, even worse than burdocks, that can turn a horse’s mane and tail into impenetrable mats. And here are the horses. The mares lift their soft noses to sniff my face in greeting. We exchange breath, and they learn more about me, read my story, and know that I, as they, find the sweet taste of fresh grass to be delicious.

I’ve reached the creek again, and follow it back toward the crossing, watching for a stray stalk of wild asparagus—but I’ve already gathered most of it. Here’s one—I bite off the tip and chew it raw to savor the true flavor. Scars mark the creek banks, hinting at high water or drought, changes of current because of a fallen log, fine roots sweeping like hair where a chunk of earth has fallen away. Nature’s borders ebb and flow like the stream-bed, shifting sometimes subtly, sometimes violently. They allow passage. They celebrate serendipity. They insist on story.

I study the tracks at the water’s edge. The horses have been here, and the deer (the incredibly tiny print of a fawn), the wild turkeys if they haven’t left yet to summer in the Bear Lodge, the coyotes, the long-fingered raccoons, skunks, cottontails, squirrels, porcupines, beaver, muskrat. How many of us share this little patch of earth? Each set of tracks, overlying the others, tells its own story—just as the tuft of fur over there, and the spots of blood, speak of tragedy and survival. The layers of prints suggest the progression of time, stories going back hundreds, thousands of years, and stretching forward into the future. My print stays here too, takes its place in time and earth-space, because concrete and asphalt barriers don’t interfere to separate me from the roots of reality.

Back at the crossing, I linger a few moments more and pop into my mouth a few leaves of the watercress that sways in clusters around the creek boulders—fresh, astringent, cool. In the water, fingerlings and minnows dart and hide in the shade of rocks, while bubbles drift and form into eddied patterns. Water-skimming insects dash across the surface. Do I merely see those glints of sunlight in the water, or can I actually hear the sparkle? Is it possible for the darting dragonfly to be so brilliant and iridescent?

The deep-earth smell of mud, the scent of chokecherry, wild plum, and pine, the cool dampness, the wet-slick rock, the sun-warmed rock, the crusty rock, the occasional wind-gusts in the pines . . . the senses mingle and gather and become a taste on the back of my tongue.
The cornucopia of experience overflows. I fill my arms and take home as much as I can hold, with no regret for all that falls away. The land—unmoved by the boundaries I accept or construct for myself—waits for me to return.

[published in Wyoming Fence Lines: an anthology of prose & poetry, edited by David Romtvedt, Wyoming Humanities Council and Wyoming Arts Council, 2007]