Windmill: Essays From
Four Mile Ranch
Publisher: Red Crane Books
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This is a collection of essays about the rural West written by a resident of a small Wyoming town.
Selections
From the essay Economy
The work that I do at Four Mile Ranch- both the windmill maintenance and everything else- is useful
work, fulfilling. Doing it I feel alive. I am inside a universe, not outside looking in. But when
asked about my profession, I tell people I'm a poet or, sometimes, I say writer, but never rancher.
A poet friend of mine was telling me about his experience of traveling in airplanes. "You ever notice," he asked,
"that mostly people on planes don't talk to each other? Except when the food comes. Then they start
talking. Like it's impolite, even unthinkable to eat in silence. It's like eating
has to happen as part of a social scene."
"I've noticed that," I say.
"So the food comes," my friend goes on, "and people start in with the 'What do you do?' If I want
to talk, I tell them I'm a writer. That gets 'em going. Nearly everyone in America is a writer and
is longing to talk about it. But sometimes I don't want to talk to a stranger. If that's how I'm feeling
when the person asks me what I do, I say I'm a poet. A deathly hush comes over the trays and I'm
left completely to my own resources. Ha! No one wants to talk to a poet."
Reviews
"Who could imagine Buffalo, Wyoming, so harsh, austere, and distant, being full of
metaphor- even wisdom? Thoreau could have and so can David Romtvedt. The view from his
sheepwagon is as clear and bracing as it was from Thoreau's shack at Walden. Romtvedt
takes us deep into the life his his adopted hometown: winter, ranching, the wonderful history
and character of the Basque immigrants, and gives us a fine tour. In a culture gone bonkers with
money, he shows us something of what it means to be a sane and decent man."
- Bill Holm
author of Boxelder Bug Variations and Coming Home Crazy
"David Romtvedt writes attentively about learning to belong to a place, an experience that is
becoming rare in our restless culture. Who better to cleanse our minds of the 'cowboyism' of
the Old West than a vegetarian ranch hand with an abiding love for weather, windmills, and staying
put on the land? These essays speak lyrically about the community formed at the intersection
of self, family, place, spirit, and about the work required to keep it running."
- Alison Hawthorne Deming
author of Temporary Homelands: Essays on Nature, Spirit, and Place
and Poems of the American West: A Columbia Anthology