In Hveragerdi, Iceland, there are no cemeteries, because there is so much hydrothermal energy in the ground that the bodies would boil. They also grow a lot of cherry tomatoes here, in geothermally heated greenhouses that glow a warm amber on the hillsides in the cold, dark January mornings when we first ride out with the horses. Icelanders are very proud of their hothouse produce, grown in this valley, which sits an hour south and west of ReykjavĂ­k and gets significantly (and relatively) more sun. The lettuce and tomatoes are specially labeled on menus and in grocery stores with the Icelandic flag, and are, in fact, delicious.

This morning is the third day of gale warnings in a row, the wind a steady 45 miles per hour, occasionally gusting to 60. (In Iceland, they measure the wind by meters per second. Those numbers in translation—20.1, gusting to 26.8—don’t sound as bad.) The horses stood in this wind all night, and in the accompanying sleet, snow, and rain that churned up out of the ocean one atmospheric wave at a time. But now they are here, underneath us, giving us their all, their strength, their courage, their loyalty—and we lower our heads against the wind and sleet, riding across refrozen streets toward the mountain.

The horses are wearing metal shoes with studs, to keep them from slipping on the ice. It seems like magic that they do not slide or trip or fall and break us and themselves, especially considering how many of us got blown backwards across the parking-lot ice just trying to walk from the guesthouse to the barn.

Anna, our German guide, tall, strong, magnificently beautiful in her muck boots and men’s overalls, her thick blond hair tied in a mane-ish knot atop her head, is the horse girl we all wish we’d had the courage to be. She gathers us, says yes, that in spite of the gale and the worsening prediction (50 mph, gusting to 75), we need to saddle up and get ready to go.

The nine other women who signed up for this week are German, six twentysomething students of competitive dressage, one lady cop from Berlin who’s closer to 40, and two old friends who might be approaching my age (61) and who ride together in a different country every year. There is no hesitation, there’s not even any eye contact; we grab our saddles and headstalls and hoof picks and curry combs and go to look for our horses in the dark.

Today I’m riding Salka, a mare who was at one time a five-gait equitation champion in the show ring. She is bossy and brave, as fierce and finely tuned a horse as I have ever had the pleasure to ride. I am at school, and she is the teacher, which suits me perfectly. My jobs are to keep my seat calm and quiet, my hands a little higher than I am used to, and ask with my legs again for the łŮö±ôłŮ, the four-beated gait for which Icelandics are famous. When I can feel her gait becoming a little pacey, I have to deliver a series of quick half halts—none long enough to start a fight, which she will win—every time she threatens to run away.

An hour into the ride, I am covered in ice that has been falling from the sky so thickly that when I bend my arms, I can hear my sleeves cracking. My helmet is completely ice-encrusted and weighs an extra couple pounds. I have to squint my eyes almost to closing, because they can’t handle the needles of sleet that keep coming. If there were going to be any sun today, it would be rising right about now.

No matter the weather, Salka doesn’t miss a stride, would gallop off into forever if I let her. At one point, on a moderately icy gravel straightaway, Anna calls over her shoulder, “It’s time for speed!” As the horses in front of me break into a gallop, there is nothing for it but to close my eyes, grip with my thighs, and trust the studded horseshoes and Salka’s true heart. After the ride, Anna looks us over, says she likes the way I am able to bring Salka back down after a long run, and the outside temperature becomes irrelevant because my whole body warms electrically with pride.

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Last summer, I put my old in the ground.

But there’s way more to the story than that.ĚýThirty-nine years on the planet, 25 of those with me. I bought Roany the same year I moved to a ranch in Creede, Colorado, because Deseo, my alarmist Paso Fino, who had lived outside Fresno, California, most of his young life, was deciding that Colorado was the scariest place he’d ever been. First off, there was snow—a whole damn lot of it. The predator-to-livestock ratio was not to his liking, and the pasture was surrounded by hundred-foot spruce trees that often sang in the wind.

The first thing I noticed about Roany was that he had a kind eye; the second was his size—just under 17 hands at the shoulder. The Santa Fe cowboy who sold him didn’t tell me much apart from his age, which likely had a year or two shaved off, and that he went better away from the barn if you wore spurs. Within days, I came to understand Roany’s intensely good nature. Each morning when I went out to feed him, he greeted me with a just-happy-to-be-here chortle.

He was as solid a trail horse as I’ve ever ridden, never flinching in big wind, or while crossing water, or when mule deer twins who’d been stashed by their mother in some willows leaped to their feet right in front of him. He was so bombproof that the county search and rescue team enlisted his help a few times a year to find and deliver a wayward hiker. Because I grew up in an unpredictably violent household, my temperament ran a little closer to Deseo’s. I counted on Roany to keep the whole barnyard calm, not just Deseo and the mini donkeys, but also the ewes and lambs, the recalcitrant rams, the aging chickens, and me.

I called Roany “the horse of a different color.” In the dead of winter, he was burgundy wine with tiny white flecks. In March, he would shed to a dappled gray with rust highlights. By midsummer he was red again, but not such a rich red as in wintertime, and when his heavy coat grew back in October, he was solid gray for most of a month.

For two and a half decades at the ranch, Roany’s coat marked the changing of the seasons. I stopped riding him when he turned 33, because I thought he deserved a lengthy retirement, though he stayed well muscled and strong until a few months before his death. He had a bout of lameness in April and a longer one in May, and by late June he was limping more often than not. When Doc Howard came for a ranch call he said, “There’s a number associated with this lameness, Pam, and it’s 39.”

I did the thingsĚýthere are to do: supplements, an ice boot, DMSO, Adequan shots, even phenylbutazone on the most painful days. We’d had very little snow and no spring rain, and for the first time the pasture stayed dormant all summer, the ground extra-hard on sore hooves. Roany loved nothing more than the return of the spring grass, and it seemed radically unfair that, in what was looking to be his last year, there wouldn’t be any. I watered, daily, a thin strip of ground between the corral and the chicken coop and named it Roany’s golf course. He had some good days there, even some when he ambled over toward the house to eat the grass that grew over the septic tank, but mostly he hung around the corral.

The downside of Roany having the best head on his shoulders of any animal I’d ever owned was that he never got the bulk of my attention. But last summer, between me, my fiancé, Mike, and my ranch helpers, Kyle and Emma, he hardly had a moment’s peace. We iced his legs and groomed him twice daily, mixed canola oil into his grain to help keep weight on him, and hugged him constantly. We carried five-gallon buckets of water to him eight times a day, though on all but the very worst days he could have made it to the trough himself. He seemed bemused, maybe even touched, by all the attention. Every time we set the water in front of him, he took a giant drink, and I suspect it was more for our sake than his. One day, Kyle, not knowing I was out there, set a bucket down next to Roany not three minutes after he had drunk three-fourths of a fresh bucket for me. Roany looked at Kyle for a minute, glanced over at me, then lowered his head to drink again.

My biggest fear was that he would fall and break something during one of the weeks I was away from the ranch and would have to be put down immediately. This was accompanied by a lesser, but still palpable, fear that the same thing would happen on a day when I was there all alone. As his condition deteriorated, I worried that we would pass the point where we could ask him to walk far enough across the pasture to a burial site where his grave wouldn’t invite all kinds of trouble to the remaining animals who lived in and around the barn. I had made difficult decisions a dozen times in my life with beloved dogs, but the length of a horse’s life and the sheer size of its body made the timing even trickier. I knew I didn’t want Roany rendered with a chainsaw. I knew that if we had to drag his body across the pasture behind a piece of heavy equipment, it would tear him all to hell.

Roany was stoicism defined. As his condition worsened, he learned to pivot on his good front leg—and would, for an apple or a carrot or to sneak into the barn to get at the winter’s stash of alfalfa. He blew bubbles in his water bucket because it made me laugh, and he would sometimes even give himself a bird bath by splashing his still mighty head. I also knew that just because he could handle the discomfort didn’t mean he should. He had been so strong so recently, such a force of nature thundering back and forth across the pasture. There was no chance I was going to ask him to make another winter, but as long as he was hobbling to his golf course and chortling to me each morning, it seemed too early to end his life.

That summer, I was getting ready to marry Mike, a U.S. Forest Service lifer who was teaching me, in my 56th year, what it meant for a man to show up in a relationship. More than one of my friends suggested that Roany had held on so long to deliver me safely to Mike, and I had no reason to argue. Among Mike’s other gifts is a deep intuition about the suffering of people and animals, so I paid attention when he said, on a Monday night in mid-August, less than two weeks before the wedding, “This is entirely your decision, but if you want to put Roany down this week, I could take Wednesday afternoon off.”

I was not surprised, on Tuesday morning, to see a slight downturn in Roany’s condition. He ate his food, drank his water, stood for his treatments, but there was something a little lost in that kind eye, in the way he held his body up over his aching feet. I called Doc and made the appointment for Wednesday afternoon, with the caveat that I could cancel if Roany’s condition improved or I lost my nerve.

By Tuesday night, Roany was swaying just slightly over his feet. He ate his gruel of Equine Senior, bute powder, and oil, but with a little less enthusiasm than usual. I went out to check on him at 8 P.M. and then at ten. The moon was bright and the coyotes were singing; there was a tinge in the air that suggested a light morning frost. Even by moonlight I could see that Roany was holding his body like he didn’t feel right inside of it.

I woke at 4:30 with the kind of start that always means something has happened. The moon had set by then, so I grabbed a flashlight and rushed to the corral, but Roany wasn’t there, nor on his golf course, nor in the yard. I called his name and heard hoofbeats coming hard across the pasture, and I allowed myself to indulge the fantasy, just for a moment, that after all these weeks of suffering he was miraculously cured. Then I heard Deseo’s high whinny. My hot-blooded alarmist, my early-warning system, my tsunami siren. Deseo skidded to a stop in front of me and butted his head against my chest, seeming to say: About time you got here.

The flashlight batteries were already dying, but my eyes were adjusting to the dark. I started out across the pasture with Deseo beside me, heading for one of Roany’s favorite spots—the wetland (though dry this year) at the back of the property. When I turned at the quarter pole, Deseo whinnied again: Not that way, human. By this time, Mike was dressed and crossing the pasture to meet me. Deseo whinnied again, and we followed him to another favorite spot—a shady stand of blue spruce at the base of the hill where the ranch’s original homesteaders are buried. It was the first time since last summer Roany had been out that far.

He was still standing when I got there. But the minute he saw me he went to the ground with relief. He curled up like a fawn, and I could hear that his breathing wasn’t right. Mike and I sat beside him and petted his handsome neck. Above us, stragglers from the Perseid meteor shower, which had peaked over the weekend, streaked the blackness. Directly overhead, Pegasus, the biggest horse of all, galloped across the sky, carrying Princess Andromeda away from her mother, Queen Cassiopeia, whose bragging about Andromeda’s beauty invoked the wrath of the sea monster, and her father, King Cepheus, who promised that whoever rescued his daughter from the monster could have his daughter’s hand. Andromeda married Perseus, Pegasus’s creator, and they rode off into the forever of the night sky.

Eventually, a lighter blue tinted the eastern horizon. Deseo stood nearby, head lowered. We listened to Roany’s breathing and the coming of dawn. In the distance, the hoot of a great horned owl, the sheep stirring in their pen clear across the pasture; even farther away, tires crossing a cattle guard. In the gathering light, Roany stretched out his long legs and put his head in my lap. I thanked him for taking good care of the ranch animals, including the humans, including me. I told him I’d be OK, that we’d all be OK, and he could go whenever he needed to, but he went on taking one slow breath after another.

On one ofĚýRoany’s first bad days, back in May, a bank teller in town, a compassionate horse woman named Debbie Lagan, had quite innocently asked me how I was. My answer was no doubt more than she bargained for, but on that day she became my adviser and advocate in horse eldercare and pain relief. She also promised that, when the time came, she would send her husband out on his track hoe to dig the hole, never mind that they lived off the grid more than 20 miles away.

It was finally daylight, but the sun hadn’t risen, and Mike and I were shivering hard, so he slid into my place to hold Roany’s head and I ran back to the house to get sleeping bags. I called Debbie to say I thought we were close and Doc to say I thought we might not need him. When I got back across the pasture, Roany’s head was still in Mike’s lap, but now he was struggling for breath.

“Touch him,” Mike said. I knelt and put my hand on his big red neck, and he took one breath and then another and then the last breath he would take forever.

“I was helping him go,” Mike said. “I was with him in that place, you know?” I nodded. I did know. I had been in that place with several dogs and more than one human. Mike said, “I think he was waiting until you got back.”

A moment later, the first rays of sun came over the hill, turning the sky electric. I crossed the pasture one more time to get Roany’s brushes to groom him up for burial. I grabbed a flake of hay for Deseo so that if he wanted an excuse to stay near his old friend for a while, he would have one.

Debbie’s husband, Billy Joe Dilley, had a dozen things to do that morning, but he arrived at the ranch before the first vulture (or even fly) made its appearance. I don’t know Debbie very well, and Billy Joe hardly at all, but as much as anything else this is a story about them and about the way people in my town care for each other. When I tried to pay Billy Joe for his time, or even for gas, he shook his head and said, “An old cowboy doesn’t take money to bury an old horse.” He buried Roany respectfully and efficiently, the cowboy way, with his tail to the wind.

If there is such a thing in the world as a good death, Roany had one. It was almost as if he had heard Mike’s offer, looked at his watch, and said, Alright then, Wednesday, and how about in that stand of spruce on the other side of the hill? What I’ve always said about Roany is that he was a horse who never wanted to cause anybody trouble, and he remained that horse till the last second of his life and beyond.

Late that night, I watched the Perseids burn past my bedroom window, and imagined my old Roany up there, muscles ­restored to their prime and shining, burgundy coat alongside the white of Pegasus, both of them with their heads held high, and galloping.

Pam Houston’s new collection of essays,Ěý,Ěýwas published in January by W.W. Norton.Ěý

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Last fall, I met a Forest Service lifer named Mike, a long and lean natural athlete who, like me, chose southwestern Colo­rado’s high country as the place to spend his life, and who, also like me, loves more than anything to hike long distances and sleep on the ground. On our first date, he made me ahi steaks and roasted butternut squash. On our second, we sat upon a downed cottonwood log behind his house on the banks of the Rio Grande, and he asked if I thought I could love all the way, really give and receive, drop the ego, drop the walls, and take the leap. I was 55 years old, and it was the first time anyone had asked me such a question. My answer was, God, I hope so.

But in truth, I had never come close. I had my excuses, one being that my father broke my femur, among other things (my confidence, my trust), when I was a little girl. I had loved some men over the course of my life, but not all the way, nor without walls, and I knew I sucked at receiving. Unsurprisingly, I’d become good at finding men who had little to give, until I ran into Mike. The first time I put my hand on his leg, I could feel his energy running right into the ground like a tree. When I told my friend Becky about him, she said, “Oh, Pam, he sounds wonderful, in the same way a mountain is wonderful.”

Mike called when he said he would, showed up on time, bought me gluten-free crackers and Smokey Bear earrings and offered to go to the feed store with me before I’d even said I was due for a restock. Every time I tried to whirl up some kind of trouble to see if I could shake him (no, I’m not proud of that), he would tell me not to water the weeds of unhappiness, and when that made me even madder, he’d say, “Pam, I’m patient, I’m happy, and I’m present,” and who could ask for more than that?

A couple of weeks ago, Mike and I were hiking along the top of a formation called Long Ridge, a spine of igneous rock and mixed conifer forest dotted with grassy parks—prime winter forage for our resident elk. What I love most is watching him watch the landscape and feeling him watching me watch the landscape, feeling our love for each other get all mixed up in the ways we love this ridgeline, those spruce trees, that serpentine river below.

Until recently, I’ve called my relationship to the mountain-meadow ranch that is my home the one truly successful love story of my life. It feels miraculous, if not entirely surprising, that one love story gave rise to another. When Mike asks how I know I won’t get tired of him, I say, “I’ve been looking at Red Mountain out my kitchen window for a quarter century and have never loved it more than I do right now.” It’s taken me a lifetime to understand that my limitation is an old tale I no longer need to tell myself. I am learning to love a man the way I love a mountain, and that requires learning to love myself the way I love a cliff.

Pam Houston is the author of several books, including and .

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When I look out my kitchen window, I see a horseshoe of snow-covered peaks, all of them higher than 12,000 feet. I see my old barn—old enough to have started to lean a little—and the homesteaders’ cabin, which has so much space between the logs now that the mice don’t even have to duck to crawl through. I see the big standĚýof aspen ready to leaf out at the back of the property, ringing the small but reliable wetland, and the pasture, greening in earnest, and the bluebirds, just returned, flitting from post to post. I see Isaac and Simon, my bonded pair of young donkey jacks, pulling on opposite ends of a tricolor lead rope I got in Patagonia. I see Jordan and Natasha, my Icelandic ewes, nibbling on the grass inside the goose pen, keeping their eyes on Lance and L.C., this year’s lambs. I see two elderly horses glad for the warm spring day, glad to have made it through another winter of 30 below zero, of whiteout blizzards, of 60-mile-per-hour winds, of short days and long frozen nights and coyotes made fearless by hunger. Deseo is 22 and Roany must be closer to 30, and one of the things that means is that I’ve been here a very long time.

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It’s hard for anybody to put their finger onĚýthe moment when life changes from being something that is nearly all in front of you to something that happened while yourĚýattention was elsewhere. I bought this ranch in 1993. I was 31, and it seems to me now that I knew practically nothing about anything. My first book, , had just come out, and for the first time ever I had a little bit of money. When I say a little bit, I mean it, and yet it was more money than I had ever imagined having: $21,000. My agent said, “Don’t spend it all on hiking boots,” and I took her advice as seriously as any I have ever received.

I had no job, no place to live except my —which was my preferred housing anyhow—and nine-tenths of a Ph.D. All I knew about ownership was that it was good if all your belongings fit into the back of your vehicle, which in my case they did. A lemon yellow Toyota Corolla.ĚýEverything, including the dog.

I drove the whole American West that summer, giving readings in small mountain towns and looking for a place to call home. I started in San Francisco and headed north—Point Reyes Station, Tomales, Elk, Mendocino. I crossed into Oregon and looked at property in Ashland, Eugene, and Corvallis. All I knew about real estate was that you were supposed to put 20 percent down, which set my spending ceiling at exactly $105,000. I had no idea that people often lied to real ­estate agents about their circumstances, and that sometimes the agents lied back. I had $21,000, a book that had been unexpectedly successful, and not threeĚýpages of a new one. I understand now that, in a certain way, I was as free as I had ever been and would ever be again. I came absolutely clean with everybody.

I checked out Bellingham, Washington, and all the little towns on the road to Mount Rainier, and then headed over the pass into the eastern Cascades, where I put a little earnest money down on a place in Winthrop. Forty-four acres on a gentle hill with an old apple orchard and a small cabin. I worked my way over to Sandpoint, Idaho, and Bozeman, Montana, sill looking, still unsure.

Eventually, I drove through Colorado, a place where I had ski-bummed betweenĚýcollege and grad school, and I remembered how much I’d loved it. In those days, I lived in the Fraser Valley, at a kind of commune ofĚýtar-paper shacks and converted school buses called Grandma Miller’s New Horizons. I lived for three winters in a sheepherder’s trailer named the African Queen. The 20 or so alternatives who lived there shared an outhouse, a composting toilet, and a bathhouse. From late December to early February, it often got down to 35 below. I was driving a tourist bus byĚýday and washing dishes at Fred and Sophie’s Steakhouse by night. I would put every strip of steak fat the diners left on their plates in a giant white Tupperware container next to my station. When I got off work, I would go home and feed all that steak fat to my dog, Jackson. If I packed the little woodstove just right, it would burn for exactly two and a half hours. I would don my union suit, my snow pants, and my down coat, hat, and mittens, and get into my five-below North Face sleeping bag. I would invite Jackson up on top of the pile that had me at the bottom of it, and he would metabolize steak fat all night, emitting a not ­insignificant number of BTUs.

The writers Robert Boswell and AntonyaĚýNelson told me about Creede. When you drive into town, the sign at the outskirts boasts “586 Nice Folks and 17 Soreheads.” It was—and still is—the kind of place where, if you happen to be in town for a couple of days poking around, someone will invite you to a wedding. That September, the guy who owned the hardware store was getting ready to marry his longtime sweetheart, and instead of sending out invitations they justĚýput an ad in the weekly , so everybody would know to come by.

The morning after the wedding, a real estate lady named Kathleen, who I’d met in the buffet line, showed me an empty lot of approximately five acres and a couple of houses in town that had been built by silver miners using paper and string. She said, “I really ought to take you out to see the Blair Ranch,” and I said, “Sure,” and she said, “But it wouldn’t be right. A single woman living out there all by herself,” and I said, “How far?” and she said, “Twelve miles,” and I said, “Maybe I should see it,” and she said, “I’m afraid it’s out of your price range.”

For that I had no argument.

I was sitting in my car, studying the Rand McNally, contemplating the next potential future home. Lake City? Gunnison? Ridgway? I was just that close to driving out of Creede forever when a tall, rodeo-buckle-wearing cowboy named Dale Pizel knocked on the window. “I hear you want to see the Blair Ranch,” he said. I got out of my car. “This is Mark Richter,” he said, indicating his equally tall, handsome friend. “He’s the selling agent, and he is going to take you out there right now.”

If you can'tĚýfall in love with the San Juans during the third week of September, you can’t fall in love. The mountainsides are covered with some of the world’s largestĚýaspen forests, and they are changing in vast, undulating swaths: yellow, golden, orange, vermilion. The sky is a headstrong, break-your-heart blue, the air is so clear you can see a hundred miles on a straight horizon, and the river is cold and crisp and possibly even clearer than the air. The coyotes sing, all night sometimes, and the elk bugle in the misty dawn along the river.

And there was the Blair Ranch, with the best view of it all I’d ever seen. One hundred and twenty acres of high-mountain meadow in the middle of the larger Antelope Park, at 9,000 feet, with the Upper Rio Grande cutting serpentine turns through the center of it, surrounded on three sides by the 12,000-foot granite peaks of the Continental Divide, the lower slopes carpeted in Engelmann spruce and aspen.

The house was a simple two-bedroom log structure that seemed to apologize for itself in the middle of all that beauty. It hunkered down behind a little hill, just enough to miss the worst of the wind and the weather. At the top of the hill, Mark told me, the original homesteaders, who were called the Pinckleys, were buried in shallow graves. Their tiny cabins were still standing behind weathered fences, along with some outhouses and a pen where old man Pinckley had bred Canada geese. But the real prize was the barn—raised by Pinckley himself in 1920 and built from hand-hewn spruce logs, silhouetted against Red Mountain to the south, and leaning now, just slightly, to the west. I had no way to imagine, in that first moment of seeing it, that the view out the kitchen window—of the barn and the corral and the Divide behind it—would become the backdrop for the rest of my life. That I would take thousands of photographs of that same scene, in every kind of light, in every kind of weather. That I would write five more books (and counting) sitting at that kitchen table (never at my desk), looking, intermittently, out at that barn. That it would become the solace, for decades, for whatever ailed me, and that whenever it was threatened—and it would be threatened, by fire, flood, cellphone-tower installation, greedy housesitters, and careless drunks—I would fight for it as though I had cut down the trees and stripped the logs myself.

The price was just shy of $400,000. IĚýtold Mark the same things I had told every real estate agent from Mendocino to Casper. My $21,000 would represent just over 5 percent down.

Mark rubbed the back of his hand against his chin for a minute and said, “I believe that Dona Blair is going to like the idea of you. Dale knows her pretty well, and between the two of us… Why don’t you give me your 5 percent down and a signed copy of Cowboys Are My Weakness and I will see what I can do.” He snapped a picture of me sitting on the split-rail fence like a girl who already owned the place.

Dona Blair sold me the ranch for 5 percent down and a signed hardcover of Cowboys, and she carried the note herself because any bank would have laughed in my face. I bought the ranch for its unspeakable beauty, and if I am completely honest, for the adrenaline rush that buying it brought on. I nearly killed myself the first few years making the payments. I wrote anything for anyone who would hire me, including an insert for an ant farm, which I turned into a little communist ant manifesto that I imagined some enlightened but bored parent discovering with pleasure when they helped little Johnny open the box. I wrote a magazine article called “Why Clint Eastwood Is My Hero.” (He isn’t.) I wrote an article about twentysomething women who were getting plastic surgery to combat signs of aging. (Who cares?) I’ve been told by several locals that Dona tries to hide her surprise when she tells them how, for all these years, I never missed a payment.

The people in town, mostly miners and ranchers, didn’t understand or much care what I did for a living, but they respected the fact that I had to work hard to keep the place and that I was willing to. I began to get looked out for by the locals who matter: the postmistress, the banker, the judge, the owner of the hardware store, the cops.Ěý

There was the night my first winter when sheriff Phil Leggitt came barreling up my driveway at three in the morning and ran up to my house yelling, “Pam, Pam, are you alright?” Because, in an attempt to get my apparently dead phone to work, I had dialed 911 and then hung up fast when it beganĚýto ring. There was the time the presidentĚýof the Creede bank intervened to keep one of my early housesitters from taking the ranch right out from under my nose in a kind of old-fashioned Wild West land grab. There was the time the postmistress, knowing I was snowed in, brought all my Christmas packages to her house, close enough that I could ski over there and drag them home on a utility sled.

In 25 years at the ranch, I have learned a few things: to turn the outside water spigots off by mid-September, to have four cords of wood on the porch and 200 bales of hay in the barn no later than October 1. I’ve learned not to do more than one load of laundry per week in a drought year, and that if I set the thermostat at 60 and bring the place up to 68 using the woodstove in the living room, the heater doesn’t do that horrible banging thing that sounds one tick shy of an explosion. I’ve learned that barn swallows carry bed bugs, and the only way to kill the bugs is to wait until it is 30 below and drag theĚýmattress out onto the snow and leave it for 48 hours. I have learned to hire a cowboy every spring to come walk the fence line, because much as I would like to believe that I could learn to be handy with a fencing tool, I have proven to myself that I cannot. I know that eventually the power always comes back on, that “guaranteed overnight” is a euphemism, that for a person who flies 100,000 miles most years, choosing a place five hours from the Denver airport was something I might have given a little more thought.

Right from the beginning, I’ve felt responsible for these 120 acres; for years I’ve painted myself as both savior and protector of this tiny parcel of the American West. And this much is true: as long as I am in charge of it, this land will not turn into condos, it will not be mined or forested, it will not have its water stolen. No one will be able to put a cell tower in the middle of my pasture and pay me $3,000 a year for the space.

One of the gifts of age, though, is the way it gently dispels all of our heroic notions. The whole time that I thought I was busy taking care of the ranch, the ranch was busy taking care of me.

All my life I have been happiest in motion—on a plane, in a boat, on a dogsled, in a car, on the back of a horse, in a bus, on a pair of skis, in a cabbage wagon, hoofing it down a trail in my well-worn hiking boots. Motion improves any day for me; the farther, the faster, the better. Stillness, on the other hand, makes me very nervous.

My childhood home did not have any safe places. My parents were sophisticated, worldly, both brilliant in their own way, and they drank to distraction every single night. The consequences of getting underfoot in that house often involved violence, and sometimes there was violence for no discernible reason at all. One thing I was looking for when I bought the ranch was a place where I might be comfortable sitting still. I also wanted something that no one could take away from me, but my upbringing left me addicted to danger. So I put 5 percent down on a property that cost four times more than I could afford, one that required so much maintenance that the tasks fell into two categories: things I didn’t know how to do yet, and things I didn’t even know I didn’t know how to do yet.

That I survived, and that the ranch did, suggests something good about my karma. That when I thought I could go to Denver for New Year’s Eve and keep the pipes from bursting by dripping the faucet, it was only the mudroom floor that got flooded. (It went down to 38 below that night.) That when I thought it would be really cool to paint my propane tank to look like a watermelon, the dark green paint did not, in fact, absorb enough 9,000-foot solar heat to explode. That someone always came along in the nick of time to say, “When was the last time you had your chimney swept?” or “How often do you coat your logs with that UV protector?” and then I’d know what I was supposed to have been doing all along.

This is the only real home I have ever had—this log cabin with its tilted horse barn, leaking propane tank, and resident pack rat that has a weakness for raspberry soap. The house isn’t piped for a clothes dryer, so in the winter I string lines in the kitchen, in theĚýmudroom, and around the woodstove inĚýthe living room. The 50-year-old furnace can keep up with the regular subzero temperatures only if the woodstove is burning all the time. As a result, when I go out into the world in a public way in the winter, I smell as if I have just come from a Grateful Dead concert. All the window screens are frayed because my little coydog, Sally, who came to me from some traumatic puppyhood that landed her in the Flagstaff, Arizona, pound, could predict a lightning storm at 50 miles, and at the first rumble would make a neat little X-shaped slice with her toenail and then power her body through the window to her place of choice, under the porch.

It doesn't seem like 25 years have gone by since that girl who lived in her North Face tent, whose belongings all fit into the back of her Toyota Corolla, first sat on the split-rail fence that stands in front of the aging barn. That girl who dared herself to buy this ranch, dared herself to keep still, to dig in and care for it, to work hard enough to pay for it, to figure out what other people meant when they used the word home.

Blink your eyes and that girl is a 55-year-old woman who has lived here five times longer than she has lived anywhere else, in this meadow of lupine and fescue, surrounded by spruce and pine. Every ­penny that has gone toward the mortgage payments I have earned with my writing, and that fact matters so much to me that when my father died five years ago and what was left of his money fell to me, I bought a used Prius and a trip to Istanbul. Sometime in the past 25 years, the ranch changed from being the thing I always had to figure out how to pay for to the place I have spent my life.Ěý

Four years ago, during southwestern Colorado’s largest wildfire ever—110,000 acres burning less than a mile from the ranch, treetops exploding into flaming rockets down one arm of that horseshoe of mountains that for 20 years had kept me safe—I drove under an apocalyptic sky through lung-searing smoke past two fire-department roadblocks to take Dona Blair my final ranch payment, my mind unable to decide whether this gesture would make it more or less likely that the ranch would be engulfed in flames. When I got to her driveway, I saw that all the giant spruce trees that her husband had carefully designed the house to fit among had orange flagging tied in the branches. These would be the first ones the Forest Service firefighters would cut if the blaze got too close.Ěý

We’d been on standby to evacuate for weeks, and I’d decided that the only thing I really wanted to save (other than the ani­mals, who were enjoying a smoke-free vaca­tion 100 miles away in Gunnison) was the barn, which wouldn’t fit in the back of my 4Runner. But our summer monsoon arrived with the tourists on the Fourth of July, just in time to save us, as it has all the years I’ve been here, and now it looks as if I will get to spend the rest of my life watching the charred mountainside to the west of me regerminate, revitalize, regrow.Ěý

Sometimes, when I’m driving back out Mid­dle Creek Road after a week in Majorca, Spain, or Ames, Iowa, and I round the corner where Antelope Park stretches out huge and empty and magnificent in front of me, I am open-mouthed with astonishment that this is the place I have lived the largest part of my life.Ěý

It’s a full-time job lining up ranch sitters for the significant chunks of time I need to be away, and even if it is someone more competent with a fencing tool than I am, it makes me nervous to leave so often. Some days I think I would like to live near the ocean, or a sushi bar, or a movie theater, or my friends, who by and large lead vibrant lives in sophisticated cities. But a low-level panic that feels downright primal always stops this kind of thinking in its tracks. A quiet certainty that if I gave up the ranch, there would be no more safe home, no place of refuge, no olly olly oxen free.Ěý

And there is one more thing. The summer before I drove all over the West looking for a home was the summer I lost my mother. I am only telling you now because I had never realized the coincidence of it, had never thought about the cause and effect relationship of it—until I began to write the story of the ranch.Ěý

I am only a little better at giving in than I used to be, at slowing down, at sitting still. But progress is progress, and any amount of it I have made I owe entirely to these 120 acres of tall grass and blue sage, with a simple log house, a sagging barn, and a couple of equine senior citizens.

And when the chores are all done, the ranch is a meditation in stillness. It says, Here, sit in this chair. For the rest of the after­noon, let’s watch the way the light lays itself across the mountain. Let’s be real quiet and see if the 300 head of elk who live up the mountainĚýdecide to come through the pasture on their way to the river to drink.Ěý

How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea of what the answer will be.Ěý

It might have been fate or some kind of calling. It could have been random, but it doesn’t feel random. Sometimes a few pieces of the puzzle click into place, and the world seems to spin a little more freely.

In other words, maybe I didn’t choose this ranch at all. Maybe this ranch chose me.

Pam Houston () is the author of ĚýandĚý.ĚýShe is the founder of the literary nonprofit .Ěý is anĚýşÚÁĎłÔąĎÍřĚýcontributing artist.

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