What happens in Wyoming, honey
Digby Durrant
BAD DIRT by Annie Proulx Fourth Estate, £12.99, pp. 219, ISBN 000719691 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Many very strange things apparently happen in Wyoming, some so strange as to be completely unbelievable. But then Annie Proulx’s sharp eye for quirky character and gift for apt and comic exaggeration more than compensates for laying our critical faculties aside though often sorely tempted not to do so. Listen up. A phoney clergyman is arrested by Creel Zmundinski, a game warden, after he’s illegally shot a cow moose and having stowed its hindquarters in the back of his trailer is burying its guts. Cree, an orphan himself, is moved to silent rage by the piteous cries of the cow’s abandoned calf while the clergyman furiously demands that his cloth be respected. At the very moment when this man of God tells Creel he will burn in hell the ground beneath his feet opens, dropping him on top of an enormous molten pipe and within five seconds closes back over him. Most writers would think this impossible happening was as far as they could go, but Proulx hasn’t finished yet. A week later Creel arrests a party of three more poachers, makes them dance on the same spot as the clergyman and watches them vanish in the same way. The news spreads. More and more wardens take poachers to the same place to meet the same fate. It saves paperwork, they say. But eventually long queues of wardens’ trailers with their victims force the authorities to turn the area into a car park and the hellhole vanishes along with the smell of sulphur.
Proulx doesn’t mind whether you believe this preposterous story for a moment but she does ask you to accept that if the impossible can happen anywhere it will be happen in Wyoming. Obviously the terrible winds and the heavy rains of winter, the droughts of boiling summers, the loneliness and lack of social life can drive some inhabitants crazy and capable of doing or believing anything. Eighty of these lost souls live in Elk Tooth, but they are blessed with three bars, Pee Wee, Silvertip, and Muddy’s Hole, to fortify their stoicism and stiffen their resolution to resist the pull of civilised society. One of them, Deb Sipple, gave up looking for the solace open spaces are supposed to bring and built up a powerful drinking habit instead. He knew Elk Tooth was bad, but anywhere else would be worse. One day he’s hired to fetch a load of hay from Wisconsin. He yelps in horror, ‘It’s almost in New York!’ But he goes. Driving like the wind and sustained by cigarettes and booze, he loads the hay and drives back desperate for home. He doesn’t notice that the 14 half-smoked, still burning cigarettes he’d flung out of the window had set light to the hay as he roars into town, ‘the closest thing to a meteor ever seen in Elk Tooth’. His cargo is cinders. Why isn’t he? Proulx would shrug her shoulders if she were asked how Deb could possibly have escaped the same fate as the clergyman and say, ‘it’s just what happens in Wyoming, honey’.
The pair of romantic day-dreamers who leave the busy East are at first bowled over by the beauty of their surroundings though shocked when they are asked if their teeth are sharp enough to castrate lambs. The wife soon flies back to New York but the husband remains to drive all day long over the uncluttered roads playing classical music in a permanent trance. His wife, looking down from the plane, sees her husband’s obsession as ‘the diminution of self, a physical reduction to a single gnat isolated from the greater swarm of gnats’. Proulx gives Wyoming such a rich and unique flavour that its inhabitants know in their bones if they were to leave a biting homesickness would drive them back again. Love-hate is better than permanent displacement. Proulx’s exuberant reliance on exaggeration and caricature is her way to draw attention to serious matters, which is perhaps why A. N. Wilson is quoted on the cover as saying she is one of the very few writers fit to be mentioned ‘in the same breath as Dickens’. An exaggeration in itself but an unexpectedly enlightening one.
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