25 pages • 50 minutes read
55 Miles to the Gas Pump
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Background
Authorial Context: Annie Proulx
Annie Proulx was born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1935 to a French Canadian father and amateur painter mother. Proulx spent her formative years in New England and briefly attended Colby College in Maine. She completed her college education at the University of Vermont, graduating in 1969 with high honors and a bachelor’s degree in history. She went on to earn her master’s degree at Sir George Williams University, now Concordia University, in Montreal. Although she began studying for a doctorate in Renaissance studies and passed her oral exams, she dropped out of the program to support her growing family.
While such an academic background may seem at odds with the grim stories of the American West for which Proulx is best known, she has witnessed firsthand the struggles of the rural working class struggling to get by in challenging environments. Upon moving to Wyoming in the mid-1990s, Proulx found herself facing a unique environment. She was especially enthralled by a landscape that seemed to stretch on without end. In the mid-2000s, she purchased 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and built a home filled with windows looking out on a rich and varied landscape. Proulx’s memoir, Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place (Scribner, 2011), blends her personal narrative of designing the house with discussions of the land’s natural history and its Indigenous peoples and cultures.
Proulx has received numerous awards, including the Dos Passos Prize, the O. Henry Prize for “Brokeback Mountain,” the National Book Award for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Besides sharing a setting with some of Proulx’s most famous work, “55 Miles” also showcases Proulx’s characteristic style in its alternation between lengthy, tangled run-ons and brief statements that read as pithy or even curt.
Literary Context: Close Range: Wyoming Stories
In Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), Annie Proulx explores what it means to be human—or what happens to one’s humanity—in a physically, socially, and emotionally challenging environment. Characters throughout the collection’s 11 stories contend with arid land, doomed business ventures, troubled relationships, and dysfunctional families. Even those who leave Wyoming in search of a better life find themselves pulled back—if not physically, then psychologically—as they reflect on the lingering effects of their formative years in an unforgiving landscape.
In the collection’s opening story, “The Half-Skinned Steer,” 83-year-old Mero Corn drives from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to his hometown in Wyoming in the dead of winter for his brother Rollo’s funeral. The narrative moves back and forth in time as Mero reflects on his father and the string of women he brought home when Mero and Rollo were young. A swirl of troubling memories along with confusion as he tries to find his brother’s ranch take their toll on Mero. Ultimately, he finds himself ill-equipped to handle either the fierce winter storm or the storm of memories, both of which lead to his demise.
“The Mud Below” features Diamond Felts, a young man who feels alive only when risking his life as a professional bull rider. A series of flashbacks reveals the emotional devastation wrought upon him by his mother and father when he was young, lending insight into his self-destructive impulses, solitary ways, and violence against women. “55 Miles to the Gas Pump,” the second-to-last story in the collection, presents an extreme outcome of isolation, prompting reflection on the mores engendered amid Proulx’s desolate Wyoming environs.
As Mark Asquith explains in The Lost Frontier: Reading Annie Proulx’s Wyoming Stories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), Wyoming’s vast flat landscape can prompt an existential crisis because it lacks vertical markers that normally signify distance and thus allow one to orient oneself both physically and psychically. To that end, it is notable that the movement in “55 Miles” is perpendicular to the “dark plain” it describes: Croom goes down the side of a precipice and back up while Mrs. Croom descends into the attic from the roof. As the final sentence suggests, the story’s action—including its violence—seems a response to the characters' otherwise unvarying world, suggesting The Dangerous Effects of Isolation.
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