Linda Hasselstrom is a friend of mine, although we don’t write often or know each other well. I visited her South Dakota ranch, between the Black HOls and the Badlands, only once, six years ago, at which time I had the unwitting bad manners to ask her how much land she owned. It was an adventure I’ll always remember warmly, and reading this book was like sitting at Linda’s kitchen table and drinking coffee from her Thermos. The winner of Fulcrum’s first American Writing Award, Going Over East is an easy ride, the best thing yet from this old pro. It’s quintessential Hasselstrom (pronounced HAY’-selstrum)—forthright and serious, with just enough humor, tenderness, and gall to keep it as interesting as she is.

The qualifier “woman” in the book’s subtitle is redundant: the book is not a “woman’s book” nor is it about a “woman rancher” in any but the most technical sense. Hasselstrom is simply a rancher—and a petite, fine-boned one at that. Not born to ranching—she was adopted by her mother’s new husband, a rancher, when she was nine—she was nonetheless born to ranch. After college and grad school, she returned home to work the place with her adoptive father and, later, with her husband. Had there been no father to return home to, and no terrific man to fall in love with and marry, I am convinced that she would be there nonetheless in the mud and heat and cold, pulling bloody calves, building her own house, fixing her own machinery, learning to use her word processor in her spare time. This woman is the genuine article.

For those city-dwellers who like to eat junk food, who waste water and fuel and rhapsodize about the romance of the West, she has undisguised contempt. “Broad generalities and shallow theories confuse and anger me,” she writes. “Reality hinges on practicality, on knowledge that has daily use. Many people here dehorn and castrate calves just before or after the new moon to cut down on bleeding, butcher during the first three days after the full moon for tender meat, harvest and kill weeds when the moon is old, in its third or fourth quarter. This is reality, the real West—sturdily defying the shallow theories dreamed up by metropolitan thinkers in high-rises, people whose well-shod feet and clean hands never touch earth or blood.”

Apparently, she doesn’t think much of any life-style but her own. While she makes me want to defend mine, aspects of which are indefensible, it’s a relief to have someone like her, for once, give the rest of us a swift kick. We’re all used to being criticized—or worse, patronized—by idiots: the peaceniks and feminists and “educators” of the world. An idiot is the antithesis of what Linda Hasselstrom is. She knows what she’s seen. City folk can’t be trusted not to trespass on her land, shoot her cows for sport, and leave her gates open. Government and big business? The less said about them, the better. What matters is taking care of your own people, land, livestock, neighbors. And working hard at something, and frugality, appreciating what you’ve been given. All the rest is garden fertilizer.

Had you noticed that all the good writing with what English teachers and book reviewers call a “sense of place” came from Southern writers—and that most of them are dead? Think again. This woman is so hard in love with the mean place in which she lives that she’s compelled to write about it, explicitly and with great care, and the writing is compelling as a result. It’s as simple as that, and there ought to be a law against writing a book any other way. Readers will smell the mud and dung, drink the spring water Hasselstrom drinks, fight fire with her, sit on her porch after an endless, scorching, grimy day, and eat her cool sandwiches and salad. There are few subtleties here, as, I suspect, there are few in the woman. There’s just too much to be done.

Greer_Review

[Going Over East: Rejections of a Woman Rancher, by Linda M. Hasselstrom (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, Inc.) $13.95]