When I Came West
In the early 1970s, Buyer, a restless young college student yearning for the outdoor life—though she’d never even been camping—became the mail-order companion of a man 13 years her senior. Bill was a Vietnam vet from Whitefish, Montana, determined to live off the land with no modern conveniences, including indoor plumbing and electricity. She endures loneliness and physical hardship, occasional volatility and abuse from Bill, but what she missed most was the companionship of women. Four miles from their closest neighbor, she learned to appreciate solitude and endure Bill’s taciturn moods. She also learned to set traps and skin animals, to avoid grizzlies and stand up to mice, to adapt to the temperament of rivers and streams and animals and seasons. Though her attachment to Bill eventually fades, she never tires of her love for the remoteness of Montana and later Wyoming. Buyer is poetic in her descriptions, documented with photographs, of the physical beauty and challenge of life in the western wilderness. --Vanessa Bush