Isolation and Rural Life Theme Analysis

The title of Annie Proulx’s “55 Miles to the Gas Pump” introduces the story’s primary theme: the isolation of rural life and the impact it has on people’s sanity. In this three-paragraph work of microfiction, Rancher Croom kills himself by jumping from a cliff, and then his wife, Mrs. Croom, discovers the bodies of dead women—his victims and “paramours”—in their attic. By emphasizing the couple’s solitude and the absence of law and society in the rural landscape, Proulx suggests that it is the Crooms’ isolation that drives their immorality—and that anyone in their position would do the same.

In the first of the story’s three paragraphs, Proulx establishes Rancher Croom’s seclusion, giving the reader a sense of how isolation affects his behavior. She describes Rancher Croom as a “walleyed cattleman” in “[a] filthy hat” and with “stray hairs,” suggesting a person in a lonely, rural setting who has no need to concern himself with how other people might see him. Two key details—Croom’s “handmade boots” and “bottles of his own strange beer”—tell the reader the extent of his isolation: his ranch is so far from a town or a city, and so difficult to get to, that he makes his own beer and boots rather than buying them. The fact that Proulx describes the beer as “strange” is the reader’s first indication that something about this man’s rural life is mysterious, uncanny, and possibly wrong. The reader then learns exactly how strange and twisted Croom’s rural life is when he dies by suicide, after “galloping drunk over the dark plain,” “turning off … at a canyon brink,” and “[looking] down on tumbled rock” before he “steps out.” His death is associated with the loneliness and danger of the rural Wyoming landscape, which he uses as a weapon against himself. Proulx’s suggestion to the reader is clear: the landscape was not only the physical cause of Rancher Croom’s death (landing on the rocks), but also the emotional cause of his suicidal mentality.

In the second paragraph, when Mrs. Croom cuts into the attic of their farmhouse to find the corpses of women her husband has killed, Proulx demonstrates that isolation has made this couple monstrous. The impact of social and geographic isolation on Mrs. Croom is more subtle than on her husband, but it’s still clear that isolation affects her. For instance, the reader learns that “she has not been [in the attic] for twelve years thanks to old Croom’s padlocks and warnings”—she has obeyed her husband and accepted whatever frightening secret he is keeping, perhaps because she has nowhere to go and no one to rely on within their solitary and distant life, except him. Furthermore, when she discovers the corpses in the attic, Proulx indicates that they do not come as a shock to her—instead, they are “just as she thought.” She has known or suspected that her husband has been killing women and allowed it to continue, which demonstrates the lack of morality that her distance from “civilized” people and behavior has produced. The visual details of this paragraph also emphasize the risks of rural life and the ways in which isolation enables violence and secrecy. Mrs. Croom “recognizes [the corpses] from their photographs in the paper,” implying that people made an effort to search for the missing women and were unsuccessful—perhaps because the Croom ranch is so far away from civilization that there would be no one nearby to notice anything amiss. Similarly, the corpses are “desiccated as jerky” and “bright blue with … paint used on the shutters years ago,” indicating to the reader that Rancher Croom has been killing for a long time without being noticed or caught.

Rancher Croom and his wife strike the reader initially as outliers and outcasts, as dangerous and remote as the landscape where they live. In other words, they seem fundamentally different from the kinds of people who live and participate in urbanized society and adhere to a moral code. However, the use of “you” in the final sentence (“When you live a long way out you make your own fun”) groups the reader collectively with the couple, implying that anyone who is living a long way out and isolated from society might come to “make their own fun”—or disregard the law and commit similar acts of horror. To Proulx, this couple is not unique; all of us, left wholly to ourselves, have the potential to lose our humanity.