“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”. So opens Homer’s Odyssey. Cowboy Clay and I recently went to see the Christopher Nolan movie of the same name. I had just finished listening to the Robert Fagles translation of the poem narrated with great gusto by Sir Ian McKellen. At the very end of the poem, I was thunderstruck by a scene. It is a scene that spoke to me as a cattle rancher’s wife.
The scene I’m talking about is at the end of the tale It is when Odysseus, upon his return to his kingdom of Ithaka, slays the one hundred and four suitors who had been pillaging his lands and harassing his wife for twenty years. He, with his son Telemachus, then goes to see his father, Laertes, who is living in the country taking care of the cattle and crops. He proves to his father that he indeed is Odysseus by speaking with fond memory of those crops which include “thirteen pear trees, forty fig trees, ten apple trees…fifty rows of vines” and a herd of very fine cows.
In celebration of the return to his land and its people (or oikos which is Greek for household), they butcher a beef and share the feast with their loyal servants, the swineherd and the shepherd and their children. Today, it would be like John Dutton of the “Yellowstone” series celebrating with his ranch hands at the Dutton Ranch. But this scene is not in the Nolan movie.
Homer emphasizes the Greek notion of “nostos”. Nostos means “the return” from war and a journey filled with strife. Nostalgia comes from this word. It is also a person’s personal journey to define his place in the world. Through the trials and tribulations of life, a person defines what is important to them. But this theme is not the main one in Nolan’s adaptation. In one scene, Damon’s Odysseus says that he is not sure he even wants to go home.
There are two examples in Homer’s Odyssey that emphasize “nostos” that are also not in the film. Odysseus is offered pretty good deals not to return home to Ithaca. Calypso offers him immortality if he would stay with her forever on her lush island. After he leaves her and is washed on to the shores of Skyeria, the king of the Phaiekians, Alkinoos, offers him the hand of his young daughter, Nauskiaa, and a large, beautiful and peaceful kingdom to rule over. But Odysseus rejects the young and beautiful gals to return to his aging wife and his own herd of cows. He rejects Alkinoos’ vast herds and land ‘o plenty for that of his less lush but much cherished pile of rocks called home.
Cows play another part in Odysseus’ journey home. He is told by the prophet Teiresias when he goes to Hades that if he goes to the Sun god Helios’s island, he and his men cannot kill the cows there because Helios loves his cows. Of course, his men disobey and eat a cow. But Odysseus, honorably, minds the words of the prophet and does not eat the meat of the cow. He also, as a cattleman, knows that nobody should come between a man and his cows.
Our ranch was not the Dutton ranch. Our ranch house was smaller than the Dutton Ranch’s bunk house. Cowboy Clay had a herd of beautiful white-faced brown Hereford cows, one of the oldest Hereford herds in the state. Clay’s place in the world is defined by his neighbors who helped round up his cows, his good wife and family, and his grasslands for his cows.
Odysseus was indeed a man of “twists and turns”. Odysseus was also described as smart and wily but could also be tempted by drinking too much wine. Besides loyalty to his household, he was also described as a man of great cunning (metis). And boy howdy can Cowboy Clay fix almost anything with the right tools and a whole bunch of baling twine.
Like Ithaca, Montana is not a pretty place nor is it charming like the New England towns I’ve lived in. It’s vast and rocky and literally stunning. “High, Wide and Handsome” is what John Kinsey Howard calls it in the book by the same name. Arizona, where Clay and I have moved, also has a plainness with it sandy landscape and adobe homes. But with bursts of colorful flowers coming out of scraggly cactus, it is quite beautiful and much softer than Montana. The mountains are rounded and not the craggy miles high peaks of Big Sky country. It is where, like in Homer’s tale “Dawn touches the sky with her fingertips of rose” and the sunsets are mesmerizing. It is like the Mediterranean in a way, as it has a healing aspect to it.
Clay is retired now. Tequila has replaced bourbon and branch. Our irrigation system waters cactus not alfalfa. But Clay knows what his place in the world was. It was raising cattle to feed people and provide for his household. I once asked him with a bit of pouty face why he always said that “the cows come first”. He’d smile with that sly grin of his (another feature he shared with Odysseus) and say, “Happy cows…happy wife.”
This is where the two tales diverge a bit. King Odysseus is finally home with his cows and has memories of his wild adventures fighting Cyclops and Sirens and such. Clay never left home until now. And he’s not even a cattle baron, let alone a king. There is a pretty big similarity though. When asked what Clay misses about Montana, he always says, a bit wistfully,
“I miss my cows.”
I can imagine that might have also kept Odysseus from yielding to the seductresses, Circe and Kalypso. It wasn’t just Penelope. Those herds of females were waiting for him too.
Cowgirl Cassandra
Note: First Odyssey quote come from the Robert Fagles translation and the “the fingertips of rose” quote is from the Daniel Mendelsohn translation.
Cowboy Clay made this observation recently: “Montanans don’t get outraged. They get bothered.”
This was in response to my query about how I should feel about the latest documentary on the frontier called Kevin Costner’s ‘The West'”. The chapter on the Lewis and Clark expedition didn’t look like around here which is in the middle of Montana along the Yellowstone River. From the ranch, I can almost see where the expedition overnighted. They wrote that they had to use two trees to make one canoe, the trees being pretty scrawny and there weren’t that many of them. But in this retelling, the expedition seemed to be traveling through a lot of greenery and whole bunch of trees. It’s not like that here. So I tried to ask an AI where the locations were and couldn’t get an answer. I casually mentioned to rancher husband that I was rather outraged as a Montanan of thirty years that they didn’t get “where the plains meet the mountains” right. I was quite proud of my observation. That’s when he reminded me that Montanans are never outraged. They are bothered. And he added “Pilgrim” at the end to also remind me that I still had a bit of midwestern Puritan harumphing in me and that I had a ways to go to understand that Tao of Cow.
Daphne woke up with the coming light. She heard the train whistle but it was far away. Where was she? She wasn’t on the train or in New York. No, she was on the ranch in Montana and Clay was sound asleep.
She quietly slipped out of bed, threw on a shawl and tiptoed out of the bedroom. Like every morning, she made herself a latte and sat down to write her daily entry in her Corona Chronicles journal. But these were the Montana chapters.
Monday, July 14, 2020
4:30 am – robins start chirping and trilling as day begins to break.
4:35 am – curse birds and grope for earplugs
5:44 am – get up
5:45 – 9:30 am – read blogs, eat something and putter around
(7:50 – 8:50 am– Clay goes to town for coffee with friends. Then comes back and does stuff outside or in the shop.)
Noon – Watch local news and weather, check cattle prices and eat lunch.
12:30 pm – 5pm – Take a walk and listen to Jimmy Dore on iPhone with earbuds, write a little, read a little, do some laundry, straighten up.
5pm – 6:30 pm – Cocktails at The Grand with Clay. (Favorite time of the day when we philosophize and reminisce.)
6:30 – 9 pm – Eat dinner and watch something on TV. (Patriot, Mythic Quest, Get Shorty, Little America, something with Nazis, other thing with Nazis, yet another thing with Nazis, back to any comedy, dark or light like Avenue 5, The Great….)
9 pm – Go to sleep to The Garth Channel on Sirius.
12:49 am – wake up after nightmare of people coughing on me and thinking I have a sore throat.
“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm,” Colette
Heading South on Route 191 in Montana
Malta, Montana got its name from the spin of a globe and a finger that landed on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean, or so they say. Daphne and Clay swung south out of town on to Route 191. If they had kept going west on Route 2, they would continue on what is called the Hi-Line. It pretty much follows the tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railroad across northern Montana just south of the Canadian border. Daphne thought it might be nice someday to drive the Hi-Line west of here to Glacier National Park; but not today. This was not a road trip. They weren’t sightseeing. This was a hauling-ass-back-to-the-ranch-to-outrun-the-virus kind of trip.
Clay had filled up at the one gas station open in Malta so they could make it back with ease. But was she at ease? Was Clay? There were still a lot of unknowns. Could she be carrying the virus and give it to Clay. Highly unlikely, but she did come in contact with some people along the way. But they all looked pretty healthy, weren’t old, didn’t cough or sneeze once, and didn’t shout or whisper both of which would have spewed flu. And Clay had been quarantined for three weeks on the ranch; just him and the cows and the cat. He just went to the grocery store and didn’t see any strangers except for the gas station guy in Malta and the cashier at the Truck Stop where he got the sandwiches and water. Nobody coughed or sneezed or even spoke a word. No spew. No flu.
Early that morning at Devils Lake, Daphne had definitely felt like she was in an episode of “The Twilight Zone”. “Imagine you are on a road somewhere between science and superstition; things and ideas; reality and fantasy. Unlock this door to another dimension with the key of imagination…Nee, nee, nee, nee; nee, nee, nee, nee…”
But as they had pulled out of the rail station that afternoon, Daphne had thought about the last shot of “The Graduate“. And now another movie crept into Daphne’s malleable mind. Was she running away like Hoffman in “Marathon Man“? “Is it safe?” said the evil Nazi character played by Larry Olivier. “Would it really be safe here in Montana from the virus?” she worried. Montana, the fourth largest state in the Union with around a million people, had the fewest cases in the country and Phillips County, that they were leaving, had none and Sweet Grass County, where they were headed, had none. (For perspective, Sweet Grass County is about the size of Rhode Island and has about 3700 people and not one stoplight.) Yes, it was as safe a bet as one could make nowadays where every day felt like every other day and every night brought nightmares. Where a cough filled her with anxiety. Every sniffle brought fear. “It’s all in your head,” Clay would say if he knew she was ricocheting between fear and the thrill of freedom.
Fro…to and fro…and… Daphne slowly opened her eyes. She felt for her phone. It was 6:05 AM. She turned over and opened the curtains. The train had stopped at a station. It was still night but she could make out some one story buildings and little houses in a row. The houses were covered in ice and the ground with snow. Siberia? No, the sign read “Devils Lake, ND” with no apostrophe. Cold place for devils, she thought. Bet they leave for the winter and head south.
She laid back down and decided to wait until sunrise to get up and at ‘em. She had slept well and felt good. She took a deep breath and the air smelled… fresh. She remembered being sick the day before, but feeling better when she went to sleep. She remembered waking up around 10 PM and peering out at a city that must have been Minneapolis. She had tried to stay awake long enough to say a silent “Hello” to all her relatives both alive and buried there. Almost all her father’s family had lived, worked, and died in the Twin Cities. All except Aunt Hannah. And many summers were spent at the lakes north of the city with these aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. It’s where she learned to fish and to water ski a bit. She remembers the leeches that attached to her legs and her uncle burning them off with a cigarette lighter. That was when everybody carried a cigarette lighter. They ate a lot of hot dogs and hamburgers and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They got lots of mosquito bites.
I will be posting the final chapter of my/Daphne’s train ride from Albany, NY to Malta, Montana in a few. I’ve gone back and made some adjustments in the timeline so as to make this diary a bit less confusing. I’ve never really written this way before; in installments and especially using multiple personalities in installments. Made it much harder to keep track of who was talking or who was in my head from one day to the next. But I also realized that except for my essays, I have never completed anything in my life. And discovering that I am an ENTP and that psychological type, indeed, does not complete much, I am relieved that there is some sort of explanation. But still, a bit unrewarding. So my goal was to get this thing done and out of the way before I forgot it. Although the surreal aspect of being alone on a train is not easy to forget. The details are. So it isn’t perfect because I hurried. But it did get done.
Daphne fumbled around in her bag and pulled out her iPhone and IPad and was pleased that this newer car had an electric outlet near the door and across from the sink with it’s own little shelf.
Just then, Marilyn’s head appeared from around the corner and handed her a menu, “You’re getting off in Montana, right?
“Yes, Daphne smiled, “My husband’s picking me up in Havre. He’s got a long drive from the ranch. About 4 hours.”
“I heard from the crew coming from Seattle that the Montana National Guard is checking people’s temperatures at the station when they get off the train,” she said with a shrug.
“Ah, smart of them. The governor seems pretty serious about this flu. But, as I said, I’ve been self quarantined for 3 weeks, so I should be Okay.” Daphne said with as much confidence as she could muster with this bit of news. And then I’m just going to the ranch and self-quarantining again. So should work out just fine.”
Marilyn nodded and smiled and disappeared back around the corner.
Olya awoke as she heard a whistle blow. Ah, yes, as her eyes opened, she was on a train heading north. She furrowed her brow as she looked out the window of the train. It was not quite night. It was the time of day called “twilight” when the trees starting looking like large beasts with long arms and sharp nails; and cows became bears; and silos became turrets on castles. It was a time of day when things that had been quite real were now looking not so real. She felt quite groggy. Where was she? She suddenly realized that nobody even knew she was on a train except for her sister Irina who was safely ensconced in her home in the far north with the Ice Queen and her loyal dog Fred.
“Fred?” she queried.
“No, Sugar, it’s Marilyn,” said the beautiful dark woman standing in the doorway of the room. “Checking to see if there was anything else you need tonight.”
Daphne shook herself further awake and sighed. That’s right. She must have nodded off. And time to stop daydreaming that she was a Grand Duchess living in reduced circumstances. She was not the Grand Duchess Olya. She was not in Russia. She was not time traveling back to 1917. She was in the year 2020 and she was on “The Empire Builder” headed to Montana to hunker down on a cattle ranch until this whole thing blew over.
“A cup of hot water would be grand, I’m mean great,” she said with a bit of strained cheeriness.
“I’ll be right back. The pot is still hot!” said the woman and disappeared. Poof!
When the woman returned with the hot water moments later, Daphne sighed again, “Very kind. Thank you.”
“You have a good sleep,” said the woman and then she also let out a long sigh and was gone.
“I must write down some thoughts before bed,” Daphne said to herself as she dunked the tea bag into the hot water and plumped the pillows on her bed. It had been another strange day. And a bit foggy, but she would try to recall the highlights.
Bump…Bump…Sway and Bump…Rumble…Bump! That last bump was a doozy, Daphne thought. It made her open her eyes. She was in the dark, but she could feel a blanket wrapped around her neck and upper body. Her stocking feet were sticking out of the sheets. She was in a box. No, as she lifted her head. It’s a small room. Ah, she was starting to remember. She was pretty sure that she was on a train. Yes, I’m not dreaming, she said to herself. I’m on my way home! Home? It always surprised her to say that word. What and where is home really?
Enough of that and she shook her head to clear out the thoughts. She disentangled herself from the blanket and sheets; then yanked open the window curtains only to see nothing but dark shapes. The day too was pulling back the night’s shades but at a more leisurely pace more like gauze than the thick blue folded train curtains. She had slept okay. She remembers getting up at 12:40 am because the connecting door to the next room was rattling again. Sounded like a crazed woodpecker. Before going to bed, she had folded the Welcome to Amtrak safety brochure and stuck it in the door and the rattling had stopped. She felt very can-do gal at the time. Very proud of herself. But it had fallen to the ground, so she folded it once more and wedged it back in. She had woken up again at 2:40 am. But, by and large, it had been a good sleep albeit a rough one. The only thing that went “bump in the night” were the actual bumps of the rails on the tracks. If there were any ghosts, they must have been the friendly kind.
My Odysseus
My Odysseus
For the Love of Cows
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”. So opens Homer’s Odyssey. Cowboy Clay and I recently went to see the Christopher Nolan movie of the same name. I had just finished listening to the Robert Fagles translation of the poem narrated with great gusto by Sir Ian McKellen. At the very end of the poem, I was thunderstruck by a scene. It is a scene that spoke to me as a cattle rancher’s wife.
The scene I’m talking about is at the end of the tale It is when Odysseus, upon his return to his kingdom of Ithaka, slays the one hundred and four suitors who had been pillaging his lands and harassing his wife for twenty years. He, with his son Telemachus, then goes to see his father, Laertes, who is living in the country taking care of the cattle and crops. He proves to his father that he indeed is Odysseus by speaking with fond memory of those crops which include “thirteen pear trees, forty fig trees, ten apple trees…fifty rows of vines” and a herd of very fine cows.
In celebration of the return to his land and its people (or oikos which is Greek for household), they butcher a beef and share the feast with their loyal servants, the swineherd and the shepherd and their children. Today, it would be like John Dutton of the “Yellowstone” series celebrating with his ranch hands at the Dutton Ranch. But this scene is not in the Nolan movie.
Homer emphasizes the Greek notion of “nostos”. Nostos means “the return” from war and a journey filled with strife. Nostalgia comes from this word. It is also a person’s personal journey to define his place in the world. Through the trials and tribulations of life, a person defines what is important to them. But this theme is not the main one in Nolan’s adaptation. In one scene, Damon’s Odysseus says that he is not sure he even wants to go home.
There are two examples in Homer’s Odyssey that emphasize “nostos” that are also not in the film. Odysseus is offered pretty good deals not to return home to Ithaca. Calypso offers him immortality if he would stay with her forever on her lush island. After he leaves her and is washed on to the shores of Skyeria, the king of the Phaiekians, Alkinoos, offers him the hand of his young daughter, Nauskiaa, and a large, beautiful and peaceful kingdom to rule over. But Odysseus rejects the young and beautiful gals to return to his aging wife and his own herd of cows. He rejects Alkinoos’ vast herds and land ‘o plenty for that of his less lush but much cherished pile of rocks called home.
Cows play another part in Odysseus’ journey home. He is told by the prophet Teiresias when he goes to Hades that if he goes to the Sun god Helios’s island, he and his men cannot kill the cows there because Helios loves his cows. Of course, his men disobey and eat a cow. But Odysseus, honorably, minds the words of the prophet and does not eat the meat of the cow. He also, as a cattleman, knows that nobody should come between a man and his cows.
Our ranch was not the Dutton ranch. Our ranch house was smaller than the Dutton Ranch’s bunk house. Cowboy Clay had a herd of beautiful white-faced brown Hereford cows, one of the oldest Hereford herds in the state. Clay’s place in the world is defined by his neighbors who helped round up his cows, his good wife and family, and his grasslands for his cows.
Odysseus was indeed a man of “twists and turns”. Odysseus was also described as smart and wily but could also be tempted by drinking too much wine. Besides loyalty to his household, he was also described as a man of great cunning (metis). And boy howdy can Cowboy Clay fix almost anything with the right tools and a whole bunch of baling twine.
Like Ithaca, Montana is not a pretty place nor is it charming like the New England towns I’ve lived in. It’s vast and rocky and literally stunning. “High, Wide and Handsome” is what John Kinsey Howard calls it in the book by the same name. Arizona, where Clay and I have moved, also has a plainness with it sandy landscape and adobe homes. But with bursts of colorful flowers coming out of scraggly cactus, it is quite beautiful and much softer than Montana. The mountains are rounded and not the craggy miles high peaks of Big Sky country. It is where, like in Homer’s tale “Dawn touches the sky with her fingertips of rose” and the sunsets are mesmerizing. It is like the Mediterranean in a way, as it has a healing aspect to it.
Clay is retired now. Tequila has replaced bourbon and branch. Our irrigation system waters cactus not alfalfa. But Clay knows what his place in the world was. It was raising cattle to feed people and provide for his household. I once asked him with a bit of pouty face why he always said that “the cows come first”. He’d smile with that sly grin of his (another feature he shared with Odysseus) and say, “Happy cows…happy wife.”
This is where the two tales diverge a bit. King Odysseus is finally home with his cows and has memories of his wild adventures fighting Cyclops and Sirens and such. Clay never left home until now. And he’s not even a cattle baron, let alone a king. There is a pretty big similarity though. When asked what Clay misses about Montana, he always says, a bit wistfully,
“I miss my cows.”
I can imagine that might have also kept Odysseus from yielding to the seductresses, Circe and Kalypso. It wasn’t just Penelope. Those herds of females were waiting for him too.
Cowgirl Cassandra
Note: First Odyssey quote come from the Robert Fagles translation and the “the fingertips of rose” quote is from the Daniel Mendelsohn translation.
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