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| Reading my home-town newspaper The Newbury Weekly News |
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| July 1964 - with my little charge - Natalie Alderson, 7 months old |
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| Amusing Article in the Newbury Weekly News |
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On July 7th - 50 years ago this month, I entered the United States at Idelwild Airport in NY City. It was hot but pouring with rain and in those days passengers had to walk from the plane to the gate.
I spent the night in Denver and flew to Sheridan WY to meet my new employers. An account was published in "Crazy Woman Creek - women re-write the American west":
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Down Gravel Roads
by
Christine Valentine
“I remember how it was to drive in gravel……….”
Theodore Roethke –“ Journey to the Interior”
Roads in England where I was raised were either paved or muddy; very few were surfaced with gravel. In England when I was being interviewed for the job I applied for in Birney, Montana, I remember being told by the lady interviewer that all the roads around Birney were gravel roads - no paved roads for miles - and that I would be living 65 miles from the nearest town. It did not bother me at all. I desired an “experience”, an adventure I would remember for the rest of my life. Unpaved roads sounded pretty romantic, and I could always catch the bus to Sheridan on my day off – or so I thought!
It was July, and after a long and somewhat arduous flight from London, I arrived thirty- six hours later in Sheridan, Wyoming. The flight up from Denver on an old propeller plane along the side of the Rocky Mountains was pretty bumpy and my stomach still reeling, when I met my new employers in ninety-degree heat. Baggage loaded in their new Buick Electra that got around eight miles to the gallon, they told me proudly,
“It has Air Conditioning”
A girl from post-war Britain used to living in houses with nothing but a fireplace to heat the whole house, I asked innocently
“What’s air-conditioning?”
Of course this caused some giggles and they explained that it was a device to cool the inside of the car.
After my first American Ice Cream Cone we set off on the journey home. It was a lovely summer day with a cloudless blue sky. I marveled at the scenery; Big Horn Mountains, green irrigated pastures, and various creeks. But slowly the landscape began to flatten and look brown and the only feature breaking the wide horizon were flat-topped hills with red rocks on the top of them. They told me this was shale, burned-out coal deposits, and the flat-topped hills were called “Buttes”.
About the time I learned about Buttes, the car rocked and dipped and there was a roaring underneath us, and the sound of rocks hitting the underside of the car. We were in Montana, my new home, and driving on those gravel roads I had been warned about. This was definitely a new experience!! I learned that a person needed to drive slowly on these roads otherwise you got flat tires from the rocks – I hadn’t thought of that! Gravel roads in my limited experience were surfaced with finely crushed granite; now we were driving on great hunks of red scoria taken from the top of those Buttes! I could barely believe my eyes.
I did not return to England. The romance of gravel roads became part of my daily life.
A few years later I married a man from Birney, and bought my own air conditioned car.
I became an Avon lady, and drove miles into the countryside taking my bag full of cosmetic samples with me. I don’t recollect ever having a flat tire on these treks. I took the advice to heart from that first trip, and drove slowly. It was not only a job, being an Avon lady; I found I was also something of a celebrity.
Women on ranches rarely had visitors during the day so they usually poured a cup of coffee and sat down to chat when I arrived. I am sure their husbands were quite surprised when they came home for lunch to be served pot roast by their wife in her usual blue jeans, but made up to the nines with foundation, lipstick and eye shadow!
Being an Avon lady gave me the perfect opportunity to meet and form friendships with the women of the community. Before the inception of steel belted radial tires, people didn’t drive around much on the gravel roads unless it was important. Village gatherings focused around the monthly Church Supper, a few birthday picnics in the summertime, and school events such as the annual Christmas play. In the winter it was quite the norm for women to be at home for six to eight weeks without seeing anyone else except their husband and children.
Each family in my Avon territory became very special to me. I got to know the children; hear how the cows were doing; learn the names of each dog that greeted me as I drove up and in the summer they told me first hand about all the forest fires. Since the men ranchers grouped together to fight them, the women supplied the men on the fire lines with food, and often drove many miles to purchase the fire rations. In the spring we talked about the ice “going out” in the Tongue River and bridges that were threatened by ice jams, huge blocks of ice, ramming into their pilings
As I got to know the countryside better I ventured into the lovely scenery further away. I discovered the old Post Office at Quietus, now abandoned, after homesteaders gradually sold out. It still had second class mail in the slots waiting to be collected these many years later. As I became friends with the Quietus women they related stories to me about these homesteaders, many of whom were their forebears.
Eventually Avon decided to reduce the commission given to their Representatives. The new rate was not enough to cover the expenses of driving such long distances. I wrote to the company president and sent photographs of the lonely gravel roads I traveled, and some of the families in my little Avon community. Of course he wrote back apologetically and said nothing could be done about their new policy.
And so my voyages down gravel roads came to a regrettable end. But the friends I made during those years when they were part of my Avon community, became my friends for life.
