Chronicling a Life of Harsh Conditions and Rigid Gender Roles

BREAKING CLEAN

By Judy Blunt

Alfred A. Knopf

320 pages; $24

Like her parents and grandparents before her, Judy Blunt was raised to live amid the austere terrain of eastern Montana. “I could rope and ride and jockey a John Deere as well as my brothers,” she writes of her childhood in “Breaking Clean,” a spare, sharp-eyed memoir, “but being female, I also learned to bake bread and can vegetables and reserve my opinion when the men were talking.”

Blunt’s account, punctuated by storytelling ability as vast as the Montana sky, recounts her rustic upbringing and life as a rancher’s wife on a land where the hardpan and sagebrush flats give way to the Missouri River Breaks, “a country so harsh and wild and distant that it must grow its own replacements, as it grows its own food, or it will die.” Hers is a panoramic tale of the American West, of backbreaking work and simple pleasures, of the teeth-gritting determination necessary in the face of terrible odds and the blessings and curses of nature.

Ultimately, it is the story of being defined by one’s environment up to a point, and then refusing to be defined by those constraints any further. In Blunt’s case, that means eventually leaving this life for the big-city life of Missoula.

Though Blunt was born in 1954, the memoir she limns might as well be from the 1800s. Her first home offered no electricity and no running water; the two-room shanty was “20 from the outhouse and a dozen miles from a telephone.” The childhood she describes comes together as a luminous mosaic of horses and cattle, ranch dogs and chickens, family roles and expectations defined by gender, and responsibility hoisted onto slender shoulders.

The stultifying limitation of “women’s work,” which for years harnessed her roaming imagination and superb ranch-hand abilities, is the thread throughout the memoir. Though Blunt was diligent at birthing calves, for example, the men often sent her away, preferring to pull the “calves in the early stages of labor rather than lose sleep or daylight.” Even the smallest token of self-realization was suspect. She saved for three years to buy a typewriter on which she composed when the family was asleep and all the chores done--until the day she was late putting lunch on the table for the hay crew, and her father-in-law “took my warm, green typewriter to the shop and killed it with a sledgehammer.” It is the utter lack of blame that makes the tale come alive.

Following these gender roles was how families survived, Blunt tells us. When nature threatens from every side, there’s no room for attention to one’s personal needs. The family and community must work together--or perish.

This ethos is most clearly seen when Blunt’s 19-month-old daughter was overcome one night by a quickly rising fever. The rains had turned the roads to “gumbo,” making the two-hour-plus journey over muddied landscape to medical care an enormous risk in itself. When the child’s temperature hit 106 and convulsions began, the couple had no choice but to travel. Reading this account, one is struck by the abiding sense of community, the pulling together that made survival possible.

The young couple bounced on their precarious way, their daughter clenched in the throes of febrile contortions, encouraged by neighbors spread over the miles who had come out to show support. The ranchers stood in the dark amid lashing rain, their truck lights illuminating the next section of the road the young couple was to navigate. “Word had gotten out,” Blunt writes in her distinctively understated tone. “The lights blinked once, like a nod. Good luck. Safe journey....They stood silhouetted, one in front of each pickup.” Yet, after a time, this pull-together-or-perish way of life can drain even the most hearty. A female college professor who lodged with Blunt was perplexed as to how she managed. Could she go to town for a movie or a dinner if she wanted to, the guest wondered, or get some quiet time without her children? The woman clearly didn’t understand ranch life--it was never a matter of what one wanted. The visiting woman’s ideas of self-care, Blunt realized, were like those found in ladies’ magazines. “Take Care of Yourself First” articles applied to her about as much as “Office Wear--How to Dress for Power.” In “Breaking Clean,” Blunt strikes a delightfully tense, unsteady balance and yet masterfully maintains it throughout a wild-ride of a memoir. Like an accomplished bucking bronco rider, she gives us untenable flashes of equilibrium even as they evaporate--the stability of communal life one moment, the price such a way of life extracts the next--never allowing readers to forget that on an eastern Montana ranch, the advantages of one are based in the restrictions of the other.