Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains

Although I grew up in the city and have had no exposure to ranchers, I read this on a recommendation from a fellow nature/animal lover. The author describes her daily life with crisp and matter-of-fact - yet warm and insightful - prose that is difficult to put down. I agree with the previous poster in that I, too, read through the glossary at the end just because I didn't want the book to finish. By the end, I felt that I knew the author, her family and friends well enough to want to know what's happened to them since. This book made me think about what the future holds for the author and the dwindling number of privately-owned ranches and farms that continue to persevere in the face of Corporate America.

As I approached the end I thought, "If I have to read about feeding cattle or fixing fences one more time, I'm going to scream!" But these are major elements in ranching and, and this is a diary of one year in a rancher's life, so they must be included.Hasselstrom keeps a candid diary of a year in her life as a woman rancher and spares nothing from castrating steers and the dead pile to doctor visits and a fur-trader rendezvous re-enactment vacation. This is a family ranch owned by her father who lives just down the hill, but by now he sees his daughter as an equal partner. During the winter, her father heads to Arizona. She and her husband wonder if they will have enough feed for the winter, they struggle through snow to feed the cattle, they worry about the cattle not on the home farm, and are saddened to see the toll that a winter takes. In spring, calving dominates their lives which is complicated when a late April snowstorm catches them without cattle feed. During the spring they mend fences, sort cattle, and watch coyotes play with mice. However, her life is not all ranching. She is constantly writing about her struggle to maintain her writing work which flares and sputters but never completely stops. She also gives writing workshops and campaigns for environmental causes. Hasselstrom is also very open about her past, a failed marriage, her step-children, her decision not to have children, and her relationship with her husband. She allows us to follow the ebb and flow of her marital relationship from the claustrophobia of back to back snowstorms and the fears of a looming surgery, to planting the garden together and the anxiety she experiences when she can't help her husband outside. Although it contains many crises, this is not a compilation of the best and worst of a ranch life, but the honest daily activities of a ranch year involving cattle, humans, and nature. This will strike a chord of authenticity for anyone who has ever cared for cattle.

This book is about people living strenuous lives in an environment of extremes -- drought and prairie fires in summer and fierce cold and blizzards in the winter. And there seem to be no moderating seasons in between.The author, a writer, poet and environmentalist, has returned in mid-life to the South Dakota ranch where she grew up. Here she lives with her husband, a Hodgkin's-survivor, helping her parents make a living by raising cattle. The year is 1987.Forget the Cartwrights. This is a book about real ranch life -- the endless hard work, the human and financial cost, the losses and disappointments that become almost routine. Only a stoic acceptance of forces far beyond one's control seems to keep these people facing one day after the next. There is also the redemptive power of work itself, whether fence mending, working cattle, or putting up food supplies for winter.Add to this an appreciation for the beauty of one's surroundings. Hasselstrom often stops to record the stark pleasures of life observed on the plains -- carpets of wildflowers on the pasture slopes, migrations of birds, the appearance of deer and coyotes. And there are the starker observations of weather. Each day's high and low temperatures are noted, and brief descriptions of cloud cover, the many varieties of snowfall, wind, rain, and the unrelenting sun and heat. There are sub-zero winter days with wind chills below -50, and one summer morning that dawns with a low of 90 degrees.Although she denies feeling isolated (a highway passes by the ranch, and they are only miles from a small town), there is a sense of lives lived without much contact with other people. Horses, pets, and even wildlife provide the social environment. You understand the appreciation she articulates when her rural community gathers for the end-of-summer county fair. And to know people is to know adversity and vulnerability -- there are frequent brushes with death. An uncle on a nearby ranch suffers a heart attack. The members of a family from another ranch are seriously injured in a car accident. The author herself is trampled by her horse. Her husband undergoes tests for cancer and is hospitalized for surgery. Her husband's spirited teenage son, from a previous marriage, spends a few summer weeks with them and then is gone again, the house suddenly filled with an unwelcome quiet.It is a compelling book that leaves you in wonder, with feelings welling up at the end that make you reluctant to part from these very real people whose daily lives you have come to know so intimately. Far from the farm I grew up on, I relived something of that demanding life as I read this book and was also helped to see it with new eyes.