"Gun's goin off"

It takes a lot to draw STML into the Western Lands - but, ah, what perfumed gardens await us there! Wide boulevards and fragrant airs abound; even the light is brighter and clearer. And such people as you would marvel to behold! The quality of their vestments has to be seen to be believed. In all truth, it was not garments but the promise of fine Spanish cheeses that brought STML to the King's Road, but I digress.

Entering John Sandoe Books in Blacklands Terrace is a bibliophile's dream: everything is right. In tiny rooms, fat hardbacks are stacked ten deep on the tables. Upstairs, the paperbacks are stored in standing cabinets on rails, pressed together like archives. Their wheels squeal, seeming almost to giggle, when you part them. And so they should, when their straining shelves contain such sweet delights.

Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, first published in The New Yorker in 1997, practically threw itself off the shelf. Such a topical tale should not be missed, if only so you can be smug by the time the movie arrives. (It's only 58 pages.)

It's a gem of a story, and quite beautifully told. Sixties ranchers Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar come together for one glorious summer on Brokeback Mountain, "gettin paid to leave the dogs babysit the sheep while you stemmed the rose", in the words of their unimpressed employer.

The years after are spent mostly apart, but there is never any doubt of the seriousness or depth of feeling, even if neither man is prepared to speak outright.

"You know, I was sittin up here all that time tryin to figure out if I was - ? I know I ain't. I mean, here we both got wives and kids, right? I like doin it with women, yeah, but Jesus H., ain't nothin like this. I never had no thoughts a doin it with another guy except I sure wrang it out a hunderd times thinkin about you."

There is no happy ending to the tale, but there is the time lived, the meetings in dusty, rodeo towns, the fishing trips - "that line hadn't touched water in its life" says Ennis' sad wife. What is central to the tale is Proulx's skill in detailing that which makes such a life possible, hence believable, and actual.

Years on years they worked their way through the high meadows and mountain drainages, horse-packing into the Big Horns, the Medicine Bows, the south end of the Gallatins, the Owl Creeks, the Bridger-Teton Range, the Freezeouts and the Shirleys, the Ferrises and the Rattlesnakes, the Salt River range, into the Wind Rivers over and again, the Sierra Madres, the Gros Ventres, the Washakies, the Laramies, but never returning to Brokeback.

This extension of life into the old lands of other myths is the key to rereading and retelling, to seeing in old places and old people a life lived but untold, until now. There is a duty to uncover stories from the past as they become relevant in the present.