The Blind Corral

Gib: A Contemporary Western "The Blind Corral" is that rarity, a Western written by a Westerner who knows the culture and can write a heartfelt story about it. He is not a "John Cheever in Wranglers" like Tom McGuane; Beers is a rancher and a Viet vet like the hero of his book. He is also a graduate of the University of Montana MFA writing program so he has the chops in every department. However, most telling is that he still chooses to work the family ranch where he raises cows and kids instead of pursuing fame. He has a book of essays and stories out "In These Hills" which is also authentic Western writing.

A couple months ago I had never heard of Ralph Beer. Now I have read both of his books - one non-fiction collection of essays (In These Hills) and this novel, The Blind Corral. And I wish there were more. It seems like such a tiny output for such a hugely talented writer. Beer writes about the vanishing West, Montana in particular, in a way that simply tugs at your heartstrings as he describes a few small-time ranchers who are trying desperately to hang onto a world they love. They are trapped by a world they cannot understand. "And what had trapped them was so simple, so clear. Change. Change accelerating beyond their wildest dreams ..." In addition to the beautiful prose, I was delighted to recognize a secondary character in The Blind Corral. It was a very thinly disguised version of writer James Crumley, rendered here as a hard-drinking writer named Duncan Carlisle. Beer even references a Crumley PI novel, calling it The Wrong Ace (vs its real title, The Wrong Case). It's a tip of the hat from one writer to another, made that much more poignant to me, knowing that Crumley died in September 2008. This books was written in 1986. Otherwise I just don't know what else to say. This is simply a beautiful book, an eloquent elegy to a West that is nearly gone. I wish it weren't true, but ... Thanks for the memories, Ralph, and I hope you are still writing and we can look for another book soon. - Tim Bazzett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

I read it ten or twelve years ago, never forgot it. In recommending it to a good friend whose cutting horses are using horses on his own ranch, I began to remember, and relish, the poetic language and rhythm of this remarkable book. So, I'll dig it out and read it for perhaps the 5th time. McGuane, Didion, McCarthy and Ralph Beer. Hall of famers in my opinion. And, tonight, when I feed and fly-spray my own horses, I will see them, my dogs and the land in a little different light. A bit more appreciative.

I had no expectations when I picked up this novel, except that I'd read a nonfiction piece by the author, a Montana writer, enjoyed his point of view, and marveled at his gift of language. As a novelist, he offers up a story and characters that are vivid and real, and the language that describes their world is close to poetry. There's a wonderful precision in the detail and the word choice that makes you just slow down and relish each sentence as it evokes the experience of being alive under this big sky through the roll of the seasons. The story is told through the perspective of a young man returning home to his father and grandfather, outside Helena, Montana. He's had some hard luck, an accident on a firing range that has put him in a military hospital, and before that a rodeo career that has gone nowhere. The stopover is meant to be temporary, but like wild horses drawn unwittingly into the blind corral of the title, he is unable to leave, spending a bitter winter with his dying grandfather, an aging rancher, instead of returning to Canada as planned and a woman he has taken up with. There is an aching melancholy throughout the novel that fills the scenes with a sense of loss. The ranchland, which no longer supports the cattle business, is being bought up by developers. The generation that grew up there and made a living from it, through good years and bad, is now passing on. They have little to leave their descendants but the land itself, worth little more than what it can be sold for. And there is irony in how losing the land mirrors the same loss by the Indians who preceded them a century earlier. But it's also a personal story, of the young hero's return from adventures that have left him empty and without direction. His fate is played out in a man's world where women, if they figure at all, are as tough and independent as the men. The toughness is both a strength that protects them and a tragic flaw that leads them into lives of emotional isolation. When an old man dies, the best that can be said of him is that "he was hard on horses; he never forgot a grudge; he either liked you or he didn't." On the downbeat side, yes, but there is also a quiet beauty in this novel. The land, though scarred and abused, still consoles the soul. And the reader is left on the cusp of both sorrow and admiration for these characters who can tough it out, each a surviving fragment of the old West, clinging to a kind of dignity in a new West that is tawdry and shallow by comparison.

I read this more than a decade ago, and have never forgotten it. It's a beautifully written novel about what one must lose to retain a traditional life in America. Find it, buy it, read it.