Paradise at Pocket Creek

I was sure that I had written about Pocket Creek when we went there for weekends, but I can’t find it.

My friend Ellen and her husband live in Custer MT, about 40 miles north of the Custer Battlefield, on the east side of the Bighorn River. There they have 40,000 acres of rough, dry country used mostly as summer cattle range, along with several hundred acres of irrigated bottomland.

Ellen’s mother, a graduate of Bryn Mawr from Illinois, came out west, loved it, bought a ranch in Montana (Lodge Grass) and married Ellen’s father, Wailes Wolfe. He was a handsome charming man, a cowboy, an airline pilot, and polo player. They mostly lived at a small and lovely ranch in Wolf, WY, close to Sheridan and civilization. Pocket Creek Ranch in those days was all dry, and so isolated that a trip to town took 3 hours on rough dirt roads. The ranch foreman’s children had to move to town for school.

Ellen was send back east to Concord Academy by her mother, in hopes that culture travel, and education would broaden her horizons and keep her from becoming “just” a ranch wife. College was next, but as we can see, Ellen had her sights on being a ranch wife, and here she is. Someday I should write more of Ellen’s life, the parts I know anyway.

I met Ellen in 1958 at Concord Academy where my mother had sent me in hopes I would amount to something. We lived on a working dairy farm then and had horses, and barbed wire fences. Ellen had said in a response to a welcome letter that she would miss both of those, so I was very intrigued, and invited her to visit me. She thought there were way too many trees, and roads and fences, but we had a good time anyway, and she got to escape dormitory life.

Concord Academy was a very good school, we both got an excellent education and were directed to go do something besides find a husband. But Ellen and I, along with Penny and several others felt we did not fit in with the sophisticated, well-turned-out upper crust girls there. After revisiting some of my classmates, I guess most teenagers feel kind of hopeless and out of place, but with two long pigtails, spots, glasses, a big mouth and few social skills, I felt like a miserable disaster. As it was a girl’s school, boys were a mystery, and my few contacts with them were discouraging to abysmal.

Ellen invited me to visit her out west that next summer. That was the beginning of a wonderful friendship, the beginning of my love of the west, and the beginning of my personal journey to becoming a grown-up who is pretty comfortable in her own skin, if not always properly behaved.

The social standards for girls at Concord Academy were impossible for me to even get near, but out here on the ranch, I discovered to my great joy and relief that riding well, working hard without complaint, and having a sense of humor were all anyone cared about. Here at last I felt like I was OK, and that what was eccentric and tiresome back in Massachusetts, was actually an asset.

I came out nearly every summer for a month or so from 1958 until 1963, riding, branding, moving cattle around, and actually going on dates with boys !!. We had many adventures, got into some very minor trouble, and I felt as though this wide open, dry, windy treeless place was where I belonged. I had a few moments when marrying the nearest willing cowboy looked like a great idea, but saw that would lead to a kitchen full of hungry people, not riding the wide open.

College, city life, family came along, but I never forgot. Sometime in the ‘80’s my kids and I went on a train ride and visited Ellen, she was living in Sheridan then, but we did a ranch tour, and I remember being overwhelmed by the sight of it all and the smell of sagebrush.

Now, after a summer on Pocket Creek, I have even more love for this place and these people. Ellen and her wonderful husband Harry have been great to live with and work for, the guys that come in for lunch think I am hilarious, and once again as long as I work hard, don’t complain and am amusing, that is all there is. I can be me, in the way that is most comfortable. It is a clean, and a safe place emotionally. Some of this feeling is just plain nostalgia, age will do that to you, and since I am far away from the more recent turbulence of my history, that has all retreated into the far distance.

There is a knoll against the sand rocks south of the main barn area where there was once a trailer. There is power, a well and a sewer system, and a view of the river and the bottomlands. My heart longs to put the Airstream there and just leave the real world. All a fantasy of course, we have commitments waiting for us, and Don is not cut out for ranch life. And there is lots of stuff to see and do down the road.

All well and sensible, but I found myself brimming with tears for the last two or three days before we left, still do. When we drove away in the rain, when we crossed Harry’s engineering triumph bridge, when we pulled out onto the main road, and even when we crossed the state line out of Montana, I had waves of sadness catch me.

This is really the first time I haven’t been ready to move on, to hit the road with all the possibilities and freedom out there. I know I would not be happy here in the winter where it gets cold, and snow blows, and everyone just sort of hibernates, at least not in a trailer. I also know that my sort of ad hoc assistant grandmother and colorful character roles might wear thin after a while. But Lordy, I do love this country.