American Cowgirl

Dear Miss Williams,

I have just browsed your images on the American Cowgirl site; to me they are moments, pieces of essences staring back at me, asking me what do you see? They challenge me to look deeper than the photo and find the soul behind it.

I have some moments, some photos of my own. My pictures reveal a nature I think that you understand. They are images of a woman’s dream.

The first is of a young woman standing by a solitary heifer, she is smiling. It is a beginning for both she and the animal, a sort of marriage that is not fully conveyed in this image, not yet. There is only a happy, carefree air about this picture, all brightness and green grass.

Many years later she is standing amongst a herd, her face concentrating on the count, sweat trickling down her bronzed face, a young cow is standing near, a shadow of the past.

And then there are the moments in between.

I see this woman standing waist deep in the swollen creek, trying to restring the wire that has washed out. I gaze at her and I can see that she knows the snakes are stirred up but there is a look of determination about her that says to me that this concern is irrelevant.

In the distance there is an image of a women far away in the pasture, her back to me, the winter wind, pushing against her thin body as the moon shines above her. She carries a bucket of water from the creek, where she has chopped the ice, and where she will chop it again in the morning. Before her is a mama cow lying half paralyzed from bearing a calf too big for her and what I cannot  know is that a few hours earlier and a few hours earlier than that, the woman had struggled to turn the cow over on her other side. I cannot know how she accomplished this. The woman probably does not know herself. She just did it. The woman feeds the calf his bottle containing nourishment she has milked from his mother as the cow lies moaning, trying unsuccessfully to get up. She speaks to them both telling them to fight. I do not know that the coyotes are howling close by and the wild pigs are rutting around in the brush behind her. What I see is a woman with her head bowed against the elements bent to one side with the weight of the water staggering on toward a moment in her life. As she always is.

Amongst a back drop of dust clouds, cracked earth, straggling weeds, a woman is cranking down the bale of hay from the hauler, her old pickup idling, her slender arms belying the strength that has to be there as this is the third bale she has hauled this morning, in the summer, when there should be grass but there isn’t.  Looking intently at this image I do not know that she owes the hay man thirteen thousand dollars. That she’s going to have to sell forty heifers to pay for it. That the banker will have to agree to lend her back the money to do this, that there is the annual note due in October, and that there will not be enough calves to cover it. What I see is a tireless resolve to keep this herd fed and to keep this herd.

I have a collection of moments in my mind. A portfolio of a 65 year old woman working two jobs, sleeping a couple of hours before frying herself an egg and going out to the pasture. A women favoring a broken leg as she unloads a barrel of lick and attempts to feed cattle cake with the herd milling heavily around her. A woman standing in wonder and fury after loosing cattle to thieves, a woman thankful to the board member that puts in a good word for her at note time every year, a woman coping with a broken windmill, bad fences, and a rental house falling down around her, a woman gathering on foot when her horse has gone lame, a woman laughing at her calves playing, a woman who has received  kind gestures, over the years, from good people, though they did not understand her stubborn resolve to pursue her chosen life. A woman who dreamed of a ranch where she could work along side of a man, where her grandchildren would want to live and work on, a home of her own, all of which have not come about. A woman who informs me on a daily basis with a feverish resolve, that as long as her cows are in the pasture and she can feed them, there is hope. This is a woman who is on the verge of losing her herd to the bank.

A woman, my mother, who is now struggling to adjust her vision to her reality, thinking and attempting to believe, that there may be a place out there somewhere, where someone likeminded needs some help. A place where she can live, work and have her cattle. A place for her and what is left of her vision.

My mother’s stories, my images, are to me, metaphors for sheer will, determination, integrity, and a personal bliss. These are, to me, the qualities that make a cowgirl, the qualities I see in your images and I just wanted somebody out there to know that she exists.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,
Angel Lucas
Port Angeles, WA