Mato Paha and the Clouds

An aroma of warmth and dry floated on the air from the south over the grasslands. The fields shined gold under lowering light, shadows lengthening on the rippled landscape. From the side of the highway snaked a dirt road, two brown parallel tracks winding through the empty stretch toward the distant rays of the sun. It led through a space undeveloped, unoccupied, and relatively undisturbed, a lone island among quilted monochrome patterns of crops in repetitious rows I'd left in the east, behind me. This land held a diversity of life written with rhythm and order legible to the eyes of nature alone. I rode the bare ruts, climbed upward and coasted down from the hillsides. Moved generally west, off the map, knowing it would lead me right. Throngs of cows ranged on the slopes or stood in the crevices steeping their heads in scummy dark ponds with soft ripples round their faces. They'd bellow out to me in unison as I pedaled between them, some startling and some turning to me with their eyes wide at my strange intrusion.

The primitive road wound a ridge round a hillside, affording me a panorama on the open extents of the east, and then bent its broad face to the open south. I pushed up the hill, sweat spidering on my forehead. On the path ahead stood a jackrabbit. It, slender and tall, with long legs paralyzed, looked along the grassy middle of the road. Its probing nose turned to the side, and it watched me in its glassy black eyes' periphery. I came to a stop to study its shape, but the scrape of my shoe on the gravel sparked it to flight. It bounded away on all fours, hopping like a whitetail does in high grass. With its huge linen ears flopping behind, it disappeared down the hill into the shroud of blooming goldenrod and sagebrush.

Over the western hills the sun faded into orange. I set my tent juxtaposed to the hard white flowers of a hillside yucca, unrolled my sleeping bag over my pad inside and sat myself down. Lying back and resting my tired head on a bunched up sweater, I gazed up through the mesh at a bright pearl moon as it rose into the dark above the flickering eastern clouds. Tomorrow it would storm. Stars began to pierce the overhead darkness, one at a time at first as the last salmon hues drained from the sky, then came in a flood of pale light flowing like spilled cream along the plane of the Milky Way. Wandering cows murmured a song into the silver grass, moonlit at my hill's base, and the sound wafted through the night, lulling me into dreamless sleep.

The clouds overhead were overcast and dull. To the south the rain curved away from the sky, bending and flowing in heed of an unbroken wind. The two lanes of asphalt wound like a thread to the distance, withering to point of infinite smallness at the Earth's true horizon. Little raindrops dotted the pavement. Whatever dregs of hope I grasped at that morning under a dismal sky evaporated when the rain began to fall. It was always that way. There was no shelter in sight, and I wouldn't delude myself into hoping for any soon. I was able to see as far into the fielded emptiness ahead as I could ever have wished to, but it yielded no reassurance in these blank plains.

A rickety red and white pickup slowed into the opposing shoulder ahead and came to idle halfway off the road. A man wearing an old trucker cap and beard of deep gray looked out from the rolled down window and waited for me. Then, as I approached, in a kind of shy way motioned to me. I recognized the truck from a minute earlier when he'd passed me by, looking at me in his mirrors, and remembered that the bed had been mostly empty, so I went over to greet him.

“Not the best day for a ride. Where are you from? I'm heading east if you might be wanting a ride through this rain. Only looks worse farther on there.” He helped me to fit my bike in the truck bed atop some stray metal pipes, and then he cleared off the passenger seat of loose papers, some old batteries and plastic bottles, sweeping everything onto the disheveled floor with his leathery hand.

I introduced myself and with a warm smile and handshake he told me his name was Clay. A glint in his eyes and the congenial creases of his face betrayed a timid sort of excitement, and childlike delight at having some company on his lonely drive. He turned back to the road, “That brim of rock up ahead, you see, is called Custer forest. I'm really not too bright, you know, but I think going up and over that hill would not have been at all kind to your equipments.” Then he said curiously downtrodden, “But, what do I know?” The string of highway bent south, turning away from that eroded cusp of chalky gray spread which he had pointed at, prevailing over the otherwise flat horizon. At its foot the tranquil green of South Dakota bowed and was broken into rugged disarray.

Some time later we'd come nearer to the dark blue clouds and streaks of lightning hanging over the vast plain southward. Down in the distance a hundred miles off stood the lone peak of a butte with the heavy sloping shoulders of an idle behemoth, pivoting for long eons under the plied earthen crust. Its hazy blue figure dominated the landscape, standing above its less ominous flat headed brethren. “That's all the Slim Buttes down there a ways. And that, the big one, that's Bear Butte there, a holy place for all the Plains Indians. Mato Paha they call it.”

The face of bare rock, the dark forests and thundering clouds; all of it amid the scope of the docile surrounding plains put a shudder in me. The crown of Bear Butte penetrating a full and fecund sky breathed of pure beauty and awe. We continued in silence.

We came into Newell, a small town where Clay left me and my bike in the parking lot of a western style restaurant. I rode around searching for some kind of shelter from the rain while it continued falling in the streets. On the edge of town I found an old baseball field and in one of the dugouts decided to lay down on a long wooden bench. Rain drops drummed on the aluminum roof. It was a bleak afternoon and I fell swiftly to sleep wondering if it were possible that the sky, filled with clouds, might be blue when I awoke.

The sky stayed smeared gray, but the pitter-patter abated toward a pace I could stand, so I started riding. Belle Fourche (bell-foosh), a big town, cropped up with its buildings on the dark northernmost remnants of Dakota's Black Hills. I took indoors at the library when a second, thicker, downpour began to fall. All the contents of the sky seemed to be spilling out on the other side of the glass pane. Then sudden blue holes filled wherever variance formed in the overcast. Streams of sunlight fell from them on the town, throwing delicate street corners and vibrant shop rows and misty people with umbrellas to reflections in the roadway puddles, trembling. And a high wind blew me west, my tires spattering forth beyond the town roads, the cattle exchange, auto junk shops, to the highway again.

Blood beat in my veins as I pushed my pedals hard but in gust-driven ease. A stone littered hill rose on my north. I stopped and went towards it through a break in the barbed roadside fence to make camp away from the highway. Pulling the bike through the sparse grass I realized too late that the ground was unnavigable mud, my shoes and tires caked and heavy with sod. My bike no longer rolled. I heaved its weight a foot at a time back to the road, resigning to make my bed in the ditch. Purple sunset pulled under the uniform blanket cloud which rolled over all the west. Illuminated not far off by the fleeting yellow headlights of vehicles, was a sign: the bucking silhouette of a cowboy on his bronco over the glorious, bold title, “Wyoming”.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.