Silhouette on a Wide Land

Though not an ambitious book, this account of a year spent on the plains of eastern Colorado vividly portrays the experience of isolation felt by the author and of his growing appreciation for the stark landscape and its wildlife. Taking a brief job with a ranch owner and wheat grower, Kesselheim finds the days turning into months as he eventually takes up residence in an empty and unfurnished ranch house, miles from the nearest hardtop road, a stranger in a widely scattered community, where besides his employer, he gets to know only two other men, one of them a weathered and taciturn cowboy, the other a small subsistence farmer with a young family. The long summer days are filled with making repairs, fencing, drilling wheat, and branding cattle. Then during a long wait for the owner to acquire a herd of feeder calves, the author deepens his awareness of this lonely environment and the impact of settlement over only two generations of farmers and ranchers. The winter ends with a cataclysmic blizzard that lasts for days and leaves behind a landscape of devastation. For readers interested in rural life on the Great Plains, this book is a small gem, well-written, poetic at times, and often compelling. In its appreciation for this flat, open land, where horizons reveal the curvature of the earth, it brings to mind Ian Frazier's "Great Plains," and its final chapters recall Wallace Stegner's powerful story, "Carrion Spring."