Claiming Ground

Starred review from February 1, 2010
For 22-year-old Bell, the summer of 1977 fulfilled a childhood dream, a time that she narrates in this wonderfully written, if understated, memoir. Living in a remote Wyoming cabin, she spent days perched atop a 16-hand red roan gelding, exploring the harsh, rugged beauty of the Big Horn Basin. That fall she accepted a winter job in the lambing sheds of Whistle Creek Ranch. “I'd gone because I was drawn to this nomadic life of horses and sheep and dogs. I'd gone because I was young and lost and had no idea where else to go. I arrived in the snows of February, twenty degrees below zero, and made my home in a sheep wagon parked under the bare-branched cottonwoods of the Whistle Creek Ranch.” Over the years Bell worked as a sheep herder, cattle hand, forest ranger, outfitter, masseuse, wife, and mother. Bell's extraordinary ability to impart a true sense of place on each page reveals a stark and stunning landscape populated with a playbill of peculiar personalities attracted to a life of solitude and hard physical work, and her life within this remarkable world.

Starred review from January 1, 2010
An elegant, deep-running chronicle of Bell's 30 years living in the mountain West.

It begins as an encomium of place—the Lewis Ranch in northwestern Wyoming, up in the Bighorn Mountains, where the author took a job herding sheep, far indeed from her native Kentucky. She was fresh out of college, clueless but lucky to stumble into these parts, and she found herself a young woman among old male sheepherders—"tender alcoholics, muttering derelicts, societal rejects, and I had found a certain delicious comfort in their company." When she could get it, that is, for the job was full of silence and space, tending to a knot of a thousand sheep,"a luminous, drifting mass that spills in rivulets through gulleys and rises up hillsides, conforming intricately to the imperfect shape of earth." If the"bare-bones immensity of Wyoming can make you feel like a sacrifice left on a slab for the gods to pick clean," all the better when it revealed its beauties, which Bell tenders with restrained grace. A few years later she was herding cattle and falling in love and marrying the wrong man, though her love of land and kin, particularly her parents and stepdaughters—drawn in intricate, emotionally charged portraits—helps get her through. She closes with a crushing death in the family, recounted with scalding vulnerability and sadness:"When I think the ash of every sorrow has burned cold, I'm mistaken." The episode speaks volumes about fragility, impermanence and transformation. Slowly she made her way back to solid ground, in the same landscape she started with, and it can only be hoped that the next 30 years find her in the same state of raptness, but with an earned measure of serenity.

A work of descriptive virtuosity and a hard, honest pull through rough emotional terrain—an exemplary memoir.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 15, 2009
After college, a Kentucky girl spends a summer in Wyoming to find herself and regroup. Thirty years later, she's still there. In this memoir, Bell vividly depicts her life out West, starting with her first job herding sheepan occupation usually done by men. She goes on to write about her life as a ranch hand, masseuse, housewife, stepmother, and forest ranger, mixing work experiences with touching and poignant accounts of family and friends. She also describes the Wyoming landscape in brilliant detail, revealing her love for the place. In reliving some of the sadder moments of her life, Bell uses a simple writing style that strengthens this memoir while giving it a raw poignancy to which anyone can relate. VERDICT An award-winning author for her short pieces, Bell here turns in satisfying reading for ranching enthusiasts, memoir fanatics, and anyone who likes to get lost in stories about rural life and nature's beauty. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 11/1/09.]Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll., Media, PA

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2010
A Kentucky ministers daughter and a pretty college grad, Bell didnt seem destined to live alone in the high, lonesome hills of Wyoming, herding sheep and cattle. But all she could conceive of doing was to feed her hunger for horses, dogs, and open space. Writing with the restraint and precision of someone who both cherishes and distrusts language, Bell recounts her Bighorn Basin sojourn, beginning with her brash arrival in 1977, on through long, grueling horseback days of epic heat and cold, rain and snow, and bracing nights in a small sheep wagon beneath the stars. The only woman among older male herders, many bedeviled by alcohol, Bell holds her own with tenacity and grace through punishing work and annealing solitude, love, and tragedy. In finely tooled, indelible prose, Bell moves through the decades, lovingly portraying her intrepid parents, damaged husband, beautiful stepdaughters, and all the animals that opened and healed her battered heart. Now working for the Nature Conservancy, Bell has created an exquisite yet humble praise song to a wild-knit life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)