Lisa Stewart’s The Big Quiet speaks to all of us who harbor in our hearts the memory of a child who loved, dreamed, wanted, cared for, learned from, and fed their soul on horses – imaginary or flesh and blood. I was certainly one, and I got my first horse, a brilliant and temperamental Anglo-Arab named Caleb, when I was the same age as Lisa. At fourteen, Caleb and I, with my friend Joy and her black mare, would take off for hours along the sandy roads of northwestern Michigan. We galloped bareback through the pines, our bare legs smeared with sweat and prickling horsehair. We scrambled down an old lumber rollaway and doused ourselves in the Big Sable River. I rode off and on for another forty-plus years – hunter-jumpers, eventing, dressage, and reschooling an off-the-track thoroughbred mare who hated racing (and me, I think). So I am likely a perfect reader for Stewart’s lyrical, observant, passionate memoir of the month she spent traversing rural miles of Kansas and Missouri with a volatile red horse named Chief.
Stewart is a horsewoman of exceptional knowledge and skill. She and her second husband ran a high-end, custom saddlemaking business for many years, and there’s not much she doesn’t know about a horse’s build, musculature, movement, and emotion – and a rider’s. She always dreamed of a trip alone, just her and her horse, solving problems, overcoming hardships, seeking joys and discoveries, exploring, wandering and pondering, reliant on only herself and her equine partner. She wants to try to find again that free-roaming, resourceful, brave child that she once was. With the support of her thoughtful third husband, she planned a 500-mile circuit to last 90 days, from Kansas City to circle through western Missouri and the country she grew up in.
It doesn’t quite work out that way. But it mostly does.
Each day’s routine is simple: ride the back roads, avoiding the highways and pavement when possible. As afternoon closes, she looks out for hospitable-looking farmsteads, rides up the drive and asks if she can water her horse. People say yes. Then she asks if they know anywhere she could stop for the night with her horse and pitch a tent. And most days, the homeowners say, “You can stay right here!” Most of these folks are older, farm people, who’ve raised cattle, ridden horses, and grown row-crops for generations. Wistful middle-aged women (Lisa herself is 54 at the time) say, “Oh, how I wish I could do what you’re doing!” Kids swarm around Chief’s hooves. She crashes birthday parties, chats with beefy men on riding mowers, and of course talks horses. She is friendly, unthreatening, undemanding, having an interesting adventure, and people warm to her. Not many ask her if she’s afraid, isn’t she worried about, well, something bad happening…? She chooses her stopovers, looking out for “happy/neat” homesteads of well-kept houses with flowers, decent vehicles, active farm equipment, and – preferably – horses or cattle on the premises. After all, she is a lone woman (though armed with her son’s Ruger) travelling the territory heartbreakingly written about by her friend, the fine “rural noir” writer Daniel Woodrell. But this is also her old home territory, and she is affectionate about this hot, sultry, garishly green, rambling land. She is comfortable with the connectivity of the people and the places, and feels her way back into her place in – or out of – it.
The days are long. She muses, she thinks, she talks to her horse, she pauses to scribble notes as Chief crops grass in a shady spot. There are rich descriptions of the country she is riding through: she knows the names of the flowers, the crops, the grasses, the kinds of hills and roads, what all the farm equipment does. There are wonderful observations: “…a gust of wind cuffed a stop sign… that twanged and quivered,” “a snake carved a wakeless S across the liquid silt.” The lilting sibilance of that snake sentence caught my breath. This adds up to a loving and attentive portrait of a particular American landscape. The people she meets are presented with respect and sincerity: how they dress (though perhaps we do not need to know exactly what every single person was wearing), what they say and how they say it, how they live and how hard they work. I did shudder at the woman who boasts about breeding Alaskan huskies and Australian shepherds and selling them online through a broker… Missouri, an epicenter for the atrocity of puppy mills, and it doesn’t appear to be on Stewart’s radar.
Any memoir carries the risk of becoming too focused on the writer, and Stewart avoids this trap with her resolutely outward gaze and finely tuned language. However, sometimes this can tip into something almost disingenuous: as she is trying to figure out her next day’s route, she suggests a road she could take, and the women she is with fall silent. Only then does she seem to realize that road will take her past the house where she lived with her first husband – who still lives there. Really? She didn’t notice that? One day, she finally rides by the house where she herself lived as a child… and chooses not to stop. Why? When one of the main points of this trip is to revisit that childhood of horses and no husbands and no children of her own to tend? She mentions her history with her second husband: a 3000-mile pack trip, her husband’s brain injury in a motorcycle accident, the shattering loss of her business, home and marriage – but with little detail or insight. To protect her ex’s privacy, perhaps, which is laudable, but it glosses over something deeply important. And after telling us so much about her golden childhood horse, Honey – how she looked, how she smelled, how she hugged her, how they barreled across Oklahoma winds and prairies – she describes (beautifully, and perfectly, as I know to my grief) Honey’s death in a single sentence, almost in passing.
Which brings me to Chief. I do know about difficult horses. Stewart buys this Missouri Fox Trotter horse eight weeks before setting out on her trip, from a horseman she knows well and trusts. He tells her several things about Chief, two of which are: do not give this horse grain, and the one time he dumped and bolted from his rider was when he saw horned bulls. Stewart herself describes the horse as a “twitchy explosives expert.” This is the horse she decides to ride off over hundreds of miles, alone? Yikes. And sure enough, barely into the trip, she has to pass a pasture full of horned cattle. He freaks, spins, she hits the gravel, and Chief bolts out of sight. She has to track him down, get the horse put up with a nearby farm, and get her husband to come take her to the local ER for a lot of stitching and bandaging a ravaged arm. Not a good beginning. I am curious as to why she as a writer describes this scene before she tells us that Chief’s previous owner had told her about the bull problem. So she knew. Chief melts down again near a convenience store where she has tied him to get something to eat and drink, and they have a “come to Jesus” moment in the street. It sort of helps. But there is always this worry: dogs, llamas, bulls, road signs, turkeys, slick pavement… this horse shies and spooks at everything. I suppose he is all she has in this moment, and she even says not long after that she had “[fallen] into mature love with him… right size, right bone, right hooves… right references.” And concludes with “every nerve a live wire.” I know what it is to love a horse, but to set off on this trip with this horse just felt foolhardy. There is a horribly dangerous bridge crossing, with planks missing and nowhere to go if a vehicle approaches. Stewart briefly considers the possibility of Chief’s putting a leg through a gap, but decides it’s too far to go around (after a lot of miles at a quick pace) and chances it, leading him across. They make it, but again: foolish risk? By the end of the journey, she tells of the grain Chief is getting… on one occasion, three times the normal ration. Granted, this travel requires hefty nutrition, but grain makes a horse “hot,” and Chief is plenty hot already… are we being set up for another catastrophe, when she knows better? Not here, but it’s unacknowledged.
At last, Stewart and Chief reach a dead end. She is deep in the Ozarks, and there are no open, gravel roads – only twisting, hilly, chip-sealed ones which are dangerously slick under steel horseshoes. She’s been away a month. There is no way around. She takes a wrong turn and can’t get across a highway. She decides to go home.
Lisa Stewart has acted out her dream. She shares her long, sweltering days, the fertile land and its people, her stormy partnership with her “Sweet-Person-Horse,” and bits of her own history. I would have liked more about some of her brief and acute observations: small towns that survived because they resisted school consolidation and kept their own schools alive; her approach / avoidance in talking about her own father (perhaps most movingly alluded to by quoting from Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays”). I loved the explanation of how roads in rural areas develop their own names (“Ball Diamond Road”) in defiance of how the gazetteer or Google Maps label them. There were some curious choices of timing, the order in which incidents were related or explained. The galley copy I reviewed had a handful of typos / misuses needing correction (levee / levy; peeling / pealing; tenet / tenant). I would have loved even a simple map of her route, to follow them along. Oh, and ticks. Having had a husband, a dog, and a friend’s horse all treated for Lyme disease (our poor dog was much the sickest, and the horse the most expensive), I would warn readers to pay much more attention to those evil little critters than Stewart does as she wears shorts and sandals to graze her horse in knee-high grass.
Fine writing, a good read, if imperfect in structure, and perhaps overendowed with pure description. But definitely a pleasure for its intended audience.