Montgomery says Birdology is not a
book about ornithology, but rather a book
about understanding birds. Avid birder
though I am, I believe that definition
minimizes what she accomplishes. I’m
tempted to say Birdology makes us more
human. But it does something even better than that: it reminds us that we are an
inextricable part of the animal family.
— BK Loren
Claiming Ground
BY LAURA BELL
Knopf, 2010. $24.95, 256 pages.
IT IS FEbRuARy, snowy, and twenty degrees below zero when Laura Bell, recently graduated from college, takes up
residence in a sheep
wagon in northwest Wyoming. “I’d headed west to
find refuge in the empty
spaces of this land,” she
writes, recalling her decision to relocate from
Kentucky in the 1970s. “I
didn’t think I knew how
to live in the world.” In
this deeply felt memoir,
Bell traces the journey
she’s made — back and
forth across Wyoming’s
Bighorn Basin, to Utah,
and then back—in search of belonging
and home.
Her story begins “between timberline
and sky, [where] drifts of snow gave way
to pools of wild sweet arnica and sheep
spread across the earth like clouds run
to ground.” Seeking solitude, Bell takes
a job herding sheep, “an odd woman’s
vision of romantic life.” The experience
is bracing, and far from pastoral. During her first ride out with her flock of a
thousand she becomes lost and is forced
to spend the night curled up between her
dog and horse. Later, her horse runs off
to join a feral herd. “The bare-bones immensity of Wyoming can make you feel
like a sacrifice left on a slab for the gods
to pick clean,” she writes, and you wonder if she isn’t more sacrificial lamb than
shepherd.
After a few years herding, Bell turns to
ranching, and then to a job with the Forest Service. She gets married, becomes a
mother, divorces her alcoholic husband.
Ever restless, she travels to Utah to study
massage. But Wyoming’s sage and rocks
beckon her back, and she begins splitting
her time between the two states, until
eventually settling in Cody. Meanwhile,
accidents happen, friends get sick, and
funerals take place—each twist of the
story viscerally evoked by Bell’s wrenching, raw, and honest prose. Throughout
all the changes, Bell
takes solace in the land,
her family, her dogs, and
hard work done with care
and attention. And yet
she worries that her life
path has been “
haphazard,” and yearns for her
past to shape itself into a
narrative with a plot and
a happy ending.
At one point, Bell
hikes Heart Mountain,
just north of Cody, and
from its summit she
imagines she can see the tracks of her last
thirty years etched into the landscape. Just
about everything life can throw at a person — love, heartbreak, death —has happened to Bell within view of the constant
and steadying presence of Heart Mountain. “I want to be this mountain, but my
life feels more like a hall of trick mirrors
with a different view in each one,” she
confesses, and herein lies the beauty of
Claiming Ground. From out of her experiences, Bell doesn’t draw tidy realizations,
nor black-and-white morals, but rather
she discovers something more basic: an
20
10
AWARD
BOOK
The Orion Book Award is conferred annually
to an outstanding book that is ecological in
context and has its foundation in the human
relationship with the natural world. Go to
orionmagazine.org/oba to learn more about
the 2010 Orion Book Award and see
pictures from the award ceremony.
Announcing the 2010
Winner and Finalists
Winner
Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing:
Living in the Future
By Charles Bowden
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Finalists
The Wayfinders: Why Ancient
Wisdom Matters in a Modern World
By Wade Davis
(House of Anansi Press)
Rewilding the West:
Restoration in a Prairie Landscape
By Richard Manning
(University of California Press)
Reasons for and Advantages
of Breathing: Stories
By Lydia Peelle
(Harper Perennial)
The Barbaric Heart: Faith,
Money, and the Crisis of Nature
By Curtis White
(Polipoint Press)
