Family legends are interesting things. I think my perception of my mother, for instance, is heavily influenced by one particular anecdote from her teen years. When my mom tells it, she has to take long breaks to accommodate her own laughter. Maybe that's why I love the story so much; for the duration of my high school experience, my mom suffered from depression--which runs in our family, but evolved into a sort of postpartum depression for her, following multiple miscarriages--and so the sound of her laughter was a rare thrill. The only other story that could inspire that kind of laughter from her involved a tubing mishap that resulted in me losing my shorts. I think I can count the number of times my mom laughed in that four year period on one hand.
This particular anecdote took place in 1975 or 76. My mom, Viola Cherrie (pronounced "shuh-ree") Cranford would have been about 16 or 17. The Cranford's, at the time, comprised a large percentage of the population of Clearmont, WY (which, incidentally, influenced Ang Lee's portrayal of Wyoming in Brokeback Mountain). Intersected by US 14, Clearmont takes up .15 square miles of Sheridan County, and sits about 40 miles from Sheridan itself. Today, Clearmont's population (according to the 2003 estimate) is 117. 73% of its residents own their homes. It has one high school, Arvada, which serves 41 students; the student-teacher ratio is 7:2. Google image searches for Clearmont yield little more than ambiguous maps of Sheridan County, and pictures of the The Ranch at Ucross (19 miles SW of Clearmont), a sort of dude ranch which offers guests "fine dining, relaxing atmosphere, deluxe accommodations, an outdoor heated pool and ample opportunity to enjoy it's western hospitality." However, thanks to Google satellite and the wonders of modern technology, I can look down on the house and plot of land my mother's family grew up on, the dilapidated grain mill across the street where I used to raise hell while visiting my grandmother decades later, and I can almost pinpoint the solitary playground, who's main attraction was (for me, at least) the long-forsaken, single-roomed jail cell.
One could suppose that Clearmont hasn't changed a whole lot in 30 years. In 1970, Clearmont's population was a little larger--141--but I still imagine the sort of freedom the Cranford kids had as a result of living in a small, somewhat isolated cowboy community. 4H, Pep Club, and the Rodeo Club took up the majority of my mom's time. It was a different kind of adolescence, one I have a hard time relating to. For instance, where my parents used driving privileges and increases in allowance as incentives for better grades, my grandfather (Fern "Bud" Cranford) promised my mother a new horse for every yearly report card she brought home that read all A's. I don't know that he ever held up his end of this bargain, but I know my mom did her part (as I was reminded every day of my own high school experience.) These people--my grandparents, aunts, and uncles-- were Rodeo Queens and Kings, hunters, farmers, resourceful and self-efficient. 
So, on some autumn afternoon in Clearmont in the mid-70s, my mother asks her dad if she can drive into Sheridan with one of her girlfriends after school. Being as how they live on a ranch, my grandfather tells her that she can--after she's finished her chores. One of these chores involved moving the horses from one field to another.
My mom is now 50, and owns a ranch of her own. She and my stepfather keep 11 horses, and I have, on many occasions, been called upon to help move horses from pasture to pasture. As with any part of equine maintenance, it is not a quick task, and involves a lot of patience (as I see it). However, Cherrie at 16 -- short on time, probably on patience as well, and inspired by a seemingly brilliant idea-- forwent standard wrangling methods. To speed things up, she says, she and her friend tie the horses' halters to the Bronco, with the intention of pulling them to the other pasture.
Imagine: a 1972 Ford Bronco, with a horse tied to each of the doors and two tied to the rear bumper, plowing along. My mom swears that it was going well, better than she'd expected, actually--until something spooks the horses. Maybe it was a snake, maybe not; regardless of what it was, the horses panic, buck, rear, pull, jerk, etc., until they manage to free both doors and the bumper from the frame, while my mom and her friend scream and swear and bawl in the front seats. (When she tells this part, she's usually laughing so hard that she's crying, sometimes gasping for breath.)
My mom's friend runs home, terrified of Bud, leaving my mom to handle the situation herself. Then the story ceases to be funny for a while.
"Mom (my grandmother) comes home from work, sees the car, then storms through the house until she finds me packing a suitcase," my mom tells us. "At this point, I'm going to run away."
"Why were you going to run away?" I remember asking as a kid.
"Because I thought my dad would kill me," she says, and--now--I don't think she was being hyperbolic. My impression of my grandfather is not a flattering one: as I see him, he was (is?) an abusive alcoholic. Murdering my mother for trashing a car is well within his realm of possibility.
My grandmother proceeds to ream my mother out for being irresponsible, and for a second my mom thinks that her mother is going to kill her. However, as soon as they hear a car pulling into the gravel driveway, the mood and alliances shift, and they're both terrified.
"Hide," my grandmother tells my mom in a grave whisper. "Hide under the bed. Do NOT come out from under the bed."
From under her bed, my mom hears her dad's car stop. He opens his door, but does not close it. There is a crunching of gravel and he walks around the Bronco, purveying the damage. She hears hear mother, slowly descending the wood stairs, walking tentatively across the living room, the kitchen. The screen door opens. The gravelly pacing stops.
The clamor begins.
"WHERE THE HELL IS SHE? I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL HER! FUCKING STUPID BRAT, I'M GOING TO KILL HER!" and so on. (Of course, when my mother tells me this, she edits his speech, so for years I imagined him yelling, "WHERE THE HECK IS SHE?" and "I'M GOING TO FLIPPIN' KILL HER!")
"Somehow," my mom tells me, "somehow, my mom talks him into going to the bar. I have no idea how she does it, but she talks him into getting a drink before dealing with me. So, dad goes to the bar. He has a couple of drinks, tells the story to a friend. Has a couple more drinks, tells the story to another friend. Eventually, he's seven whiskeys deep [Note: this was also edited when I was a kid--he was "seven Coke's deep"], and he's telling the story to a painter friend of his, and instead of being mad, he starts to think it's funny. By the time he gets home, he thinks its hilarious, and he's not really mad at all. My mom saved my life."
So my mom escapes the fury of my grandfather. She's grounded and burdened with a heavy chore list for the next couple of months, but no worse for wear. The painter friend of my grandfather's is so taken with the story that he goes home and paints the scene--my mom, screaming in the Bronco, the horses rearing and bucking while tied to three sides of the car, a snake poised to strike in front of it--in oils. He later gives the painting to my grandfather, and to this day, it hangs in my grandfather's house. Of all the family artifacts I stand to inherit, the only one I'm even remotely interested in is that painting.
Thirty some odd years later, my mom and stepfather own 70+ acres of land they've christened "The Blue Diamond Ranch." Located right on the city limit of Billings, MT, it barely qualifies as a legitimate "ranch," but it'll suffice. My mom--who now goes by Cherrie (pronounced "Sherry"), is the owner of a herd of horses too damn smart for their own good, clever enough to open each and every form of lock, latch, bolt, catch, fastener, and fence we devise, and we're constantly rounding them up, driving them back to pasture; I have dozens of memories based upon wrangling the horses back to their allocated pastures.
In one such memory, my mom is absent, and my brother and stepfather, atop four-wheelers, attempt to round the horses up without her. It's a disaster: Monty, the perpetually insurgent Moab, ends up flaying his left forearms and shoulder, lacerating his face and neck, in a mad bid to jump a barbed-wire fence; Lufford, the 23 year old Thoroughbred we bought for $75 at an auction (and, consequently, rescued from the glue factory), cuts open his haunches on a different part of the fence; Dancer, our baby, a year-old Anglo-Arabian, remains spooked for weeks, and won't let anyone touch her for months.
In another, my sister and I, visiting from college, come home late via the backroad (a tactic often employed by those of us wishing to sneak in undetected. This time, we've been driving around, smoking cigarettes--an act which could result in both of us being cut off financially if we're caught). By this time, my mom has split the herd in two, and one of the groups has busted out. Faced with the choice of rounding them up ourselves, leaving them to their own devices (which would probably lead to mom waking us up at six in the morning to collect them from various locations around town), or waking my mom up at a quarter to four in morning, my sister and I decide to just do it ourselves in her Toyota 4Runner. It takes over an hour, but we get it done. We turn in for the night, proud of ourselves and more than a little smug. Any complacency we've earned, however, is shattered the next morning when our stepfather spends over an hour, yelling at us for not only tearing up the plot of land he's recently leveled and sodded (he coaches my youngest sister's soccer team, and so he built her a private soccer field), but for driving through an alfalfa field a week away from being harvested. My mom, on the other hand, kind of chuckles her thanks, and politely avoids asking us how we happened to notice that the horses were out at four in the morning.
A few years ago, when I asked my grandfather about the story of the Bronco, he scoffed. "Damn stupid kid," he said, but the corners of his mouth turned up slightly as he remembered that day. And then: "Who needs a drink?"
