June 20, 2008
The Wyoming writer Annie Proulx (she wrote the short story Brokeback Mountain which became the movie) is an excellent writer. Last night I finished her latest. Loved this sequence:

“They passed the Persa ranch, where the youngest son had drowned in last spring’s flood. She realized that every ranch she passed had lost a boy, lost boys early and late, boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers, and unsecured truck doors. Her boy, too. This was the waiting darkness that surrounded ranch boys, the dangerous growing up that cancelled out their favored status. The trip along this road was a roll call of grief. Wind began to lift the fine dust, and the sun set in haze.”
—Annie Proulx, in her short story “Tits-Up In A Ditch,” in The New Yorker