Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

Caters News photo of Ashol Pan by Asher Svidensky , used with permission In the fall of 1998, Taukel Sultan, a member of the Mongolian Parliament, traveled 6,000 miles to visit Wyoming, Mongolia’s Sister Province.  When he arrived in Sundance, my daughter and I went to meet this exotic visitor. "Do you ride horses?” he asked her, his Mongolian interpreter at his side, a few town locals gathered around us.   Her dark eyes lit up.   “Ah,” he smiled, using both his hands to shake hers. “In my country, every year, we hold a horse race for the children!   Six-year-olds race bareback 35 kilometers! You should come see our horse races!”   He turned his attention back to the small crowd and then suddenly turned back to Sarah.  “Do you drink milk?” he asked.  A little embarrassed, she grinned and nodded.  “Ah,” he smiled again, “our yaks have the fattest milk!  Like your beef cows, our yaks graze the open grasslands and uplands of the mo...

Nine years ago my New York agent circulated to four different publishing houses a 20-page memoir proposal for Sweetwater: A Mountain Cabin, a Life Unfolding, still a work-in-progress.   Despite accolades for my first memoir, three of the houses passed on the project with cordial letters that addressed its strengths and shortcomings.   The fourth pass came from the executive editor at Viking Penguin.   “This reminded me of a book I published..." wrote the editor, " Drinking the Rain by Alix Kates Shulman, the story of a summer she spent alone at a cabin in Maine as she turned fifty and was experiencing midlife and marriage crises.   I love that book… Shulman is an amazing writer, and I’m afraid for me Lambert’s writing did not hold up in comparison…”  Photo of Shulman by Marion Ettlinger. I was devastated.  Once I picked myself up off the floor (which took days), I ordered a copy of Drinking the Rain , flipped through the pages when it arrived, tho...

Bryce leaned toward us, pausing mid-sentence, a crispy fried green bean dangling from his chopstick.   “There was something about the silence that was different,” he said, “ranch work, well…it gives you time to think in long arcs.”     Seated in a corner booth at PF Chang’s, we had an hour before Bryce’s book signing at Denver’s Tattered Cover Bookstore .   I dipped a green bean in spicy sauce and watched Bryce devour two or three more before gusting his way through a crab wanton. Here was a man who liked to eat. In his early 30s now, Bryce Andrews was only 22 when he loaded up his pickup truck, left Seattle, and headed “west” to work as a hired hand on a 20,000-acre conservation ranch in Montana’s Madison River Valley.   Giving him time to chew before asking another question, I thought about my childhood vacations near Ennis, Montana, just outside of Yellowstone, summer after summer fishing the Madison River with my father, wading through kn...