In Pam Houston`s short stories, glaciers, granite cliffs, bitter cold and rough white-water are backdrops for the warlike love between emotionally unattainable men and the women who want them.
In person, Houston, 30, looks almost too young and too healthy to have written about the sometimes bitter gender politics confronted by the female protagonists in the 12 stories that make up her first published book,
”Cowboys Are My Weakness” (Norton, $19.95). The work has been reviewed widely and praised by critics for its fresh, wry voice.
But Houston has put in a lot of time with the manly men and fierce environments of which she writes. And, like her female characters, she says she herself has evolved from needing male guides to get around in the wilderness, to achieving the self-confidence to survive outdoors alone and gain creative power from it.
She is an accomplished white water rafter, skier, rappeller and camper who has guided hunters in the Alaskan wilderness, worked as a wrangler and survived dangerous situations involving freezing cold and raging water.
The wilderness that stole Houston`s heart is a geographical and spiritual leap from her origins.
Houston was born in New Jersey, the only child of a businessman and an actress. She grew up in Pennsylvania, went to Denison College in Ohio, then lived and studied in Colorado and Utah after graduation.
A devoted outdoorswoman who spends at least 100 nights a year outside, she says she unconsciously ”headed steadily west” in her life, and she now prefers to make her home in Utah, although she just spent two semesters teaching creative writing at her alma mater.
Her short stories all have a very similar female protagonist (”I think of her as the same person now,” Houston says), and a similar theme runs through them. The female heroine`s accomplishments in the wilderness-surviving bears, raging rivers and solitary campouts in sub-zero weather-are the ballast that keeps her from losing herself in dependent, hopeless love affairs.
Often the women are closer spiritually to their dogs or girlfriends than to their men.
In real life, Houston says the wilderness is a great source of inspiration and strength for her.
”There`s nothing that makes me happy like sitting out in the middle of southern Utah on a rock,” she said during a visit to Chicago earlier this year to promote her book, over a breakfast of muesli and tomato juice.
”I love society; I don`t feel the need to get away. It`s a more direct thing than that. It`s like the energy just comes right up out of the ground and fills me up.”
Houston`s love for the great outdoors began during regular childhood camping trips she took with a neighbor in Bethlehem, Pa. Her athleticism developed later, she said.
Houston`s father, B. Ord Houston, also a tennis pro, wanted his only child to be a great athlete, but Houston says she was an uncoordinated, brainy child who ”rebelled by getting straight A`s.”
As an adult, she recalls having to struggle to succeed at the sports she eventually mastered, including skiing and rafting. Still, she says her fascination with physical feats and macho men may have something to do with her relationship with her father.
”My father was 49 when he got married, and he didn`t really know how to communicate with his kid,” Houston says. ”I was the only kid-his only `son.` The one thing we had was sports. I memorized the statistics of every sport, hockey, basketball, baseball. That was really the only way we could talk to each other.”
Houston`s writing career grew haphazardly, she says. During her last year at Denison, where she studied English, Houston found she was ”physically unable to write a resume,” while all her friends were getting jobs with ad agencies or applying to law schools.
”Now it seems like a choice, but it wasn`t a choice,” she says. ”I couldn`t buy interview clothes. I actually started seeing a school therapist, not because I felt bad but because everyone was asking me why I wasn`t interviewing.”
So instead of heading to the corporate halls after graduation, Houston got on her bicycle and headed west. She made it as far as Oregon, where it rained for three weeks, then she returned to Colorado to spend three years waitressing and doing other ski-town jobs.
Eventually, she entered the University of Utah`s creative writing program and spent five years working on her Ph.D. (which she has yet to complete), during which time she wrote the stories that make up ”Cowboys Are My Weakness” and had many of the wilderness experiences that contribute plot and setting to her work.
Although she says the stories aren`t autobiographical, her emotional life during that period contributed to the stories.
”The men I was going out with at the time of writing this book were very, very athletic, very much like my father, sort of avoiders. And I was out there, bashing myself on the ski slopes, thinking, `I`ve gotta do it again, and I`ve gotta do it right.` ”
One of the more adventurous episodes in Houston`s wilderness experience began when she assisted a male friend as a hunting guide in Alaska. The two-week trips cost $10,000 and mostly included wealthy American businessmen looking to bag Dall sheep, she says.
Although she detested the killing scenes, she returned twice to guide hunting expeditions alone. Some of those experiences are recounted in the short story ”Dall.”
”It turned out to be one of the most valuable experiences I`ve had so far,” Houston says. ”Hunting is at its very best a sort of spiritual thing for people who eat meat. Some hunters are really concerned about the environment. But three out of four just want to shoot something, and they`re waiting for their gun to go off and they say a lot of hideous things.
”I just can`t tell you how much it taught me about men and women and the world and America. I didn`t know these people were out there, I`d led such a sheltered, liberal, academic life.”
Houston guided hunters for three years. She got into, then extricated herself and clients from several dangerous situations, including being trapped after dark in icy weather on a glacier with deep crevices every few feet and having to ford a river swollen to 400 percent of its volume by spring thaws.
These days she confines herself to sight-seeing raft trips and camping in Alaska and has put hunting behind her.
”I won`t hunt again. It was not the sort of business I belonged in by any stretch of the imagination. I almost always was rooting for the sheep. The thing that was so awful, the thing that I had to go away and cry about, was the shooting and the dying. It wasn`t the gutting or the skinning-that I can do.”
Since the days when she was losing her heart to latter-day cowboys and hunting sheep reluctantly, Houston married Michael Elkington, a native of South Africa, who moved to the United States to earn his commercial helicopter`s license. The couple share an interest in writing and a love of the outdoors: Elkington was a safari guide.
They met in Park City, Utah, where Houston was working on her book.
”I was adamantly single at the time,” she recalls with a laugh. ”There was nothing in my house but herbal tea, and I was going home every night and dancing in my underwear with candles lit.” The couple married in April 1991. Houston is at work on her second book, which she says is about ”learning to celebrate the present of your life instead of looking always forward or backward.”
She`s not clear on the format, but it will feature another female protagonist; and nature, in the form of landscape and animals, will play an even greater role than in the first book. She says she has been reading animal behavior books to prepare for it.
”I`ve had a lot of face-to-face encounters with bears and non-threatening animals,” she says. ”I`ve sat amidst these creatures, and they have taught me so much about my own reactions and emotions. From just watching the way they watch you, it`s like being around a child in some ways. You see yourself in another form.”
Houston says she has not finished seeking adventure or pitting herself against the elements. A year or two on a sailboat, an African safari and two mountain climbs might lie ahead. But she shrugs off the notion of being a female Hemingway-style adventurer with pen.
”There`s really nothing I don`t want to do,” she says. ”Mention the Himalayas, yeah. I`m really anxious to see New Zealand and the Galapagos. At the same time, I want a home and a garden.”
