Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt Knopf, 320 pp., $24 ONE OF the most interesting literary genres of the contemporary American West is the ranch memoir. Unlike the pretty volumes that issue from the novelists who move to Montana for the fly fishing, or the delicate work of the poets who come seeking the metaphysical balm of the wilderness, ranch books tend to be realistic accounts written by actual westerners whose roots go back generations. Men have excelled at these memoirs–William Kittredge, Ivan Doig, and Ralph Beer come to mind–but the genre is increasingly dominated by women: Mary Clearman Blew, Linda Hasselstrom, Page Lambert, and, now, Judy Blunt, with her autobiography, “Breaking Clean.” Blunt was born in 1954 in the town of Malta, Montana (pop. 2,340), and it wasn’t long before she “could rope and ride and jockey a John Deere as well as my brothers.” Malta is on Montana’s “Hi Line,” where the two lanes of Route 2 and the tracks of the Northern Pacific Railroad run side by side across five hundred miles of prairie a few miles south of the Canadian border. Even for Montanans, the Hi Line seems an almost mythical place, a world of savage blizzards and withering droughts in a geography too vast to comprehend. It is sparsely inhabited by descendents of northern European homesteaders who stoically accept the boom-bust of agricultural economics as the given condition of life. Some of the towns scattershot along the Hi Line (Glasgow, Malta, Zurich, Havre, Harlem, Devon, Inverness, Dunkirk) started as railroad stops, arbitrarily named by a nineteenth-century Northern Pacific executive who closed his eyes and pointed a number of times to a map of Europe. Others were named reflecting local weather conditions (Chinook), topographic features (Cut Bank), or as a bow to earlier inhabitants (Blackfoot). Judy Blunt grew up on a ranch fifty miles down a dirt road south of Malta. The Hi Line was one of the last parts of America to receive rural electrification, and until she was seven years old, the author’s family got their water from a hand pump–heating it on the kitchen stove for the weekly bath. Laundry was washed the same way, put through a handwringer before being hung out on the frigid, wind-blasted clothesline. Blunt’s parents assumed that children were not boys and girls but “men and women in training.” Her mother and father worked long, hard days, and from the time she could walk, she was taught not only to work but to know the morality of work: It was “a small person,” she was told, “who bellied up to the table while his livestock stood hungry.” Even in winter the work didn’t stop, the snowswept landscape “a network of white veins against the wind-stripped hills.” That wind was an endless “urgent moaning under the eaves that rose in sustained shrieks, like a cat fight.” Her first school “squatted on the prairie within driving distance of three rural communities,” a “mouse-infested bungalow” that served a handful of students, all eight grades taught by one teacher in one room. She moved on to Malta for high school, boarding at the house of an elderly widow during the week and returning to the ranch on weekends and holidays. That Blunt is a feminist, of one stripe or another, is apparent throughout “Breaking Clean,” but it doesn’t affect too much her vividly rendered story. Unlike radicalized academic feminists, Blunt grew up actually doing physical work–everything from canning to calving–and “like my mother, like the ranch women who peopled my childhood, I would not spout ideology or argue theory.” Raymond Carver once said the primary influence on his life as a writer was his children: Being forced to accommodate a family, with the constraints of time and income that imposed, made him realize what the important things to write about were. Blunt is the same kind of writer. At eighteen, just after her high-school graduation, she married a man twelve years her senior, a Vietnam veteran and hardworking son of a neighboring ranch family. The large western ranches were quasi-feudal fiefdoms, and to make a good marriage contributed to the general prosperity. In Blunt’s case, it was a case of half wanting it for herself and half wanting it as an escape from her former life. As they say in Montana, John was “a good hand”–and Blunt insists he was also “a good man.” He was silent and strong, suited to the hard life required to make his living, and he was a stoic not capable of gushing about anything. Judy’s nearest neighbors were her new in-laws, Frank and Rose. Frank–a crusty old rancher who had turned over the sprawling 36,000 acre cow-calf operation to John while still working on the place–would lecture his daughter-in-law on how to keep house, rear children, and do the grocery shopping. He demanded that she quit smoking, not to promote good health, but because cigarettes were a frivolous expense. Rose was an unbearably constant presence in Blunt’s house, rearranging the closets and the pantry, and dispensing gratuitous advice about everything in John and Judy’s home. The last straw came when Frank took a sledgehammer to Blunt’s typewriter when she was late preparing lunch for the hired summer-haying crew. Blunt divorced her in-laws as much as she divorced her husband. In 1986 the thirty-one-year-old Blunt, after thirteen years of marriage, packed her three children, a few household belongings, and boxes of dog-eared paperbacks into an old car and headed for the big city, bright lights of Missoula. The following years would be filled with struggle as she juggled family and work, and pursued a college education. Her first semester, she noted that her fellow students in freshman composition class–tender, inexperienced eigh-teen-year-olds–were often at a loss to come up with subjects for their personal essays. Judy Blunt didn’t have that problem. After a life on the Hi Line, she would always have things to write about. Bill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming.
