Temperance Creek. Pamela Royes

“but if you want me to, I’ll stop here.” “I guess it kind of says it all. You and me, workin’ things through. Collaborating.” “Yes,” I say, “but it looks like I get the last word.”

      Contents

foreword

prologue

      River Rising—Spring 2015

part one

      daughter of the plains

Daughter of the Plains

Mare’s Tails

What We Don’t Say

When I Ran Away

Christmas 1975

part two

      no country for fools

Wallowa Country

Knight Creek

Confluence

Junctions

Hittin’ the Trail

      Making Camp

      What I Learned About Skip

      Rastling

      Battle Creek

      Falling into Place

      Temperance Creek

      Marking Corrals

      Minding the Starter

      No Country for Fools

      Haying and a River Crossing

       part three

      mixed blessings

      Idaho

      The Horse Ranch

      Snowed In

      The High Mountains

      Travels with John Daniels

      The Murmur of Small Things

      Duck Creek

      Something to Do with Trust

      Cowboys and Sheepherders

      A Visit Home

      Counting Sheep

      Bum Count

      Mixed Blessings

      A Letter from Home

      Campfire Stories

      Christmas on Pony Bar

       part four

      finding home

      Winter Camp

      Use It or Lose It

      Hand Rolled

      Apple Cider Blues

      Matters of Survival

      Hitched

      Round Two

      Good Medicine

      Caught Out in the Dark

      A Tentative Embrace

      Unfamiliar Country

      Sodbusters

      Bridge Building

      Every Other Darn Thing

       epilogue

      Down to the River—Fall 2015

      Acknowledgments

       I shall ride my heart thundering across the plain

       Outdistance you all and leave myself behind—

       Who am I on this high proud beast

       Who knows where I should ride better than I do?

       Oh I do not like to look back at myself there

       Little among the stay-at-homes, the restabeds.

       No, sting my self-content to hunger

       Till up I ride my heart to the high lands

       Leaving myself behind

       Teach me to love my hunger,

       Send me hard winds off the sands.

      —DORIS LESSING FROM THE MARRIAGES BETWEEN ZONES THREE, FOUR, AND FIVE

       Foreword for Pam Royes’s Temperance Creek

       by Teresa Jordan

      During her junior year of college, Pam Royes made a decision that everyone who knew her thought disastrous. She rode off into the wilderness—literally, not metaphorically—with a Vietnam vet named Skip she had met only days before. Within weeks, she had suffered a bullet wound and watched her mare fall off a mountain. The story goes on from there, itself a cliffhanger, the sort of thriller where you find yourself saying over and over, “Don’t go into the barn. Don’t go into the barn.” But go into the barn she does, repeatedly, and this is the story of the fallout of those many decisions. Wherever you think this might lead, I suspect you will be surprised, and I won’t spoil it here. The story is a thriller but not a usual one, and among its many distinctions is the beauty of its prose, which renders the sensuality of a life lived in the wild and on the edge with tender amazement.

      As a form, the memoir has been around since Augustine wrote his confessions in the fourth century AD. It has ebbed and flowed in popularity and answered various purposes, from confession to redemption to excitement to exhibitionism to revenge. At its best, it is provocative and illuminating, and Temperance Creek is both.

      The field of evolutionary psychology posits that the ability to tell stories is an evolutionary advantage and may be one reason Homo sapiens have survived where other hominids have not. Stories provide a way to learn from others’ experiences and transmit information over distance and time. We remember information embedded in stories more accurately and in much greater detail than when we receive it simply as fact. As we throw ourselves into a story, we can try on other identities and experiment in an infinite number of environments within the relative safety of our own imaginations. Stories are so central to the human experience that Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, suggests that our species could as accurately be called Homo fictus. The neuroscientist David Eagleman proposes that stories are as essential to our survival as our DNA.

      In other words, stories provide a user’s manual for the world. This may be one reason that memoir has enjoyed ascendancy in the past three decades, a period of economic, social, political, and environmental upheaval during which everything from gender identity to the weather has been in flux.

      It is said that fiction tells a truth while nonfiction tells the truth. As we know, truth is problematical. Memoir depends on memory and anyone who has ever told a story in the presence of a sibling or a spouse knows that memory is plastic and subjective. But as we try to find our sea legs on turbulent waters, we hunger to hear from those we sense we can trust who have returned from the storm.

      Trust is the key word. Over the past several years, the genre has suffered its share of scandals and embarrassments that have left devotees of the form feeling lied to, manipulated, and wary. But then a story comes along that is earnest and fresh, an act of generosity rather than of ego, and we fall under its spell. It is not a spoiler to tell you that things turned out well for Pam Royes; the pleasure of her story comes in the unexpected turns