A clean break

Blunt recounts a ranch wife's struggle and triumph

Steve Galpern, Special to the News

Published February 8, 2002 at midnight

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Judy Blunt's memoir about Montana ranch life starts with the end and works its way backward. Rather than waiting to explain that after 12 years of marriage and 30 of living on the prairie, she left her husband and took her three children to Missoula to go to college, she hints at this bombshell in the opening paragraph.

The rest of the first chapter completes her description of "breaking clean" from the familial, cultural and gender ties that held her to the land.

These sudden revelations have an effect that's the literary equivalent of the winter wind whipping across the Montana plains at 30 degrees below zero. They demand your attention and compel you to read on to find out how the author ended up where she is.

Such is the nature of Breaking Clean, a book that startles with frank but beautiful writing. Even before publication, prominent authors were using phrases like a magnificent achievement and heartbreaking, mesmerizing, dramatic to describe the story. While it would be hard for any work to live up to these accolades, Blunt's book demonstrates the wonderful reading that results when a published poet devotes her energy to telling a story through prose.

"I rarely go back to the ranch where I was born or to the neighboring land where I bore the fourth generation of a ranching family," Blunt begins. "My people live where hardpan and sagebrush flats give way to the Missouri River Breaks, a country so harsh and wild and distant that it must grow its own replacements, as it grows its own food, or it will die."

This description sets the stage for her story of the struggles she faced growing up in a man's ranching world and the harsh landscape in which she lived. The first chapter ends with the sharp bite of wind with which the memoir began, as Blunt describes a marriage-counseling session she attended before her divorce. Responding to the accusation that he had only once, on their wedding day, said that he loved her, her husband replied, "I never took it back, did I?"

The author has an amazing ability to re-create her childhood and early years as a ranch wife while admitting that her interpretation of events may be colored by time. Recalling the occasion when she and her siblings had to pick out their own paddling devices, she writes: "Although my memories are real, my interpretation of them is less trustworthy. Mine is a child's view of the walk to the woodpile, the four of us sent to select our own sticks." Few writers are as honest about the way in which they have interpreted their own memories, making her story all the more believable.

Blunt first senses the secondary role she would play after one of her grandfathers died. A dispute between his children over his estate led the author's parents to vow to avoid a similar fate when they die. Kenny, the eldest son, would inherit the ranch. "Memories of my grandfather's death were tied to another small death, the day I discovered that as a girl, I would never own my childhood ranch."

As she grows older, her sense of being a second-class citizen increases. Because it's too far to travel to the closest high school every day, at 14 she moves to town and lives with her brother and other boarders in a local widow's house. As the rumblings of the women's liberation movement reach the small Montana community of Malta, Blunt gives a much-ridiculed speech in high school about the importance of sexual equality. Feelings of being trapped in her gender grow.

As a ranch wife, Blunt is hit with the full effect of her second-class citizenship. Although her in-laws move out of the main house, they still control the operation, scrutinizing her shopping receipts, banning her from smoking and banishing her from the calving process, in the belief that women's knowledge of the human birthing process doesn't extend to that of cows.

" 'Got a good catch on those heifers,' John's father would say. I grinned around the last inch of Marlboro. What can anyone say to a man who takes personal credit for a cow's heat cycle and a bull's virility?"

The most interesting aspect of Blunt's feminism is that it's personal, not political. It's not until the end of the book that she mentions finding other women in similar circumstances after she left the ranch.

Much of this has to do with her isolation, but even in hindsight, she mostly focuses inwardly, rather than on the way women are treated outside ranch life. Furthermore, Blunt's feminism doesn't lead her completely astray from the conservative politics of others in the region. Returning to her childhood ranch, she notes with sadness and frustration the effect that the environmentalist movement and recent migration of newcomers to the "inland west" has had on the region. Public lands used for decades by ranchers who considered them their own are now slated for "multiple use," and conflict erupts between newer residents and older cowboys.

Rather than diluting her argument, however, Blunt's individual focus makes it even stronger. Struggling against 30-degree-below-zero winters, sick children and animals, isolation and discrimination, she tells a story that's powerful because, rather than rejecting the way of life into which she was born, she fought for her place in it.

After 30 years, she realized that the wind blowing against her was too strong and the only way to win was to leave. Her prose, sturdy and striking at the same time, leaves little doubt that she has triumphed.

Steve Galpern is a free-lance writer living in Denver.

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