Thinking Specks

 Wyoming came and then the swift mountains of lower Montana. Winds had brushed me through the briefest tip of Wyoming's northeastern extreme, just the corner of it, before sweeping me on to Montana, Montana announced by a dingy street sign.

There to the north of me was the first sight of her mountains, small but true. Bare gray and tan rock sides slid up from the far stretched slopes on a meadow's edge, passing to me the sweetest hints of the great northern wilds I'd be missing with my destination being west. I bent my wheels south to get back on track and into Wyoming again, issuing my apologies to that beautiful volume of land and greetings to the thrusting expanses ahead.

Loose folds in the land gave rise to peaked buttes. Smooth slopes fell away from the buttes' pinnacles as if some subterranean giant held them suspended over his pointed fingers, with the earth being nothing but a loose blanket spread over his poking fingertips.

Midday I dropped my bike beside the road and climbed over a fence and into a field. One of these perfect peaks stood clean and high away from the road. I ran first through the brush and grass growing in high thickets, then at the base of the butte I scrambled up its side. I'd misjudged the size and ruggedness of the thing by magnitudes. Whole boulders I had to scrape over, which grew ever more massive the nearer I came to the top. Hopping and heaving, I gripped with my fingers in the cracks of a final rock and pulled myself over the sheer stone, up onto the peak and was able at once to survey every near and distant part of the land. The fields rippled up all about the pinnacle in wavering green hills dissipating off into a clear fluctuating horizon, everything laden with webs of billowing yellow-petaled flowers and afar away thick dark forests blanketed the Black Hills' last northern dregs.

The roads were vacant and quiet now as I went on, rising and falling with the wild soft graces of an ocean vessel. Jagged horizons wound round on every side. A dignified pronghorn stood lone amid the grass of a hill, watching me, piqued with clairvoyant attention. Its hallowed face followed me, kingly black bifurcated horns rearing from its skull, hooves lightly, tentatively holding to the soil, ever ready to spring to flight. I came near, noticing it standing tranquil on the hillside, and in a moment it had leapt away and was a shrinking dot on distant slopes.

Clouds crawled in on the beating wind, which now blew broad against my side. With the sky dimming to a pale pink behind the west I set down my tent in a fallow field by some sage bushes as they waved against the old wooden rail of a fence. A lack of forethought left me eating the last of my food stocks for supper that evening and I checked the map to find barely a trace of any towns ahead.

Come morning the sky remained dim and a sprinkling of rain had doused the ground. With an empty belly I started my ride, the bike dragging with the void of energy in my legs. A missed meal on a long ride acts like a wrench in a moving gear, and the uncertainty of whether I'd find food that day compounded the emptiness in my stomach.

Rumbling along, I pulled into an open valley in the heart of which sat the few solitary buildings of a town called Biddle, one more dismal part of the gray afternoon. Along the road ahead shrouded in some trees, I was elated by sight of a gas station, garage behind it spitting out a buzzing, clanking ruckus of mechanics and machines.

I went into the station and picked out some candy and a box of cereal with a gallon of milk while the counter lady watched me slant-eyed behind the register. She didn't say a word while I paid, and kept her expressionless face bowed to the counter, dropping my change into my palm. The bell clanked against the glass in the door behind me and I sat down at a picnic table beneath what on a sunny day would've been an ample shade tree and set to eating cup-fulls of cereal.

The sounds from the garage went silent and two men came out toting lunch pales in hand. One was older with brown hands, wearing overalls and a grease-stained cap with the bill flipped up. Behind him followed his son, whose face was tired and had his blue sleeves rolled-up. He shook his fingers through his hair as he walked, ruffling it up. They plopped down at the other wooden table and did the same as I was. From somewhere the man's daughter, a girl aged sixteen or so with a long ponytail falling between her shoulders, walked up to their table and sat down beside.

They talked to each other a while (saying some things about tomorrow) before the father addressed me, waving his brown hand toward my bike which rested against the side of the station, “That yours?”

I looked up from my cup, “Yes, sir.”

“You're packing a bit on there. All self-sustained, are ya?”

“Yeah, but somehow that didn't keep me from running out of food, though.”

The son said with a thoughtful frown, “Least you got something there now. I wish I could just up and leave. I'd be all over the country.”

“I keep telling you, go on if you want,” his father said.

The son looked a little dejected, “It's not that easy. It does get dreary here, with the hills all around and on days like this no less. There's no seeing past them. It's just too small a place to keep a guy.”

“Talks like I used to,” said the father, nodding to me.

“It's true, though. Too many ties here, and all of 'em seem so comfortable. Like shiny lures. Things are peaceful, and I don't mind that, Dad, but it's easy to forget yourself in the quiet. And the years are short besides.”

His sister rolled her eyes and said with a smile, “He's always talking like this.”

“Yep. Something's gotta give. You can only ride the fence for so long,” the father sighed, his eyes on the bicycle.

I felt as if I'd intruded somehow, heralded some emergence or transformation. I could've been the drop of rain that broke the dam. It was just a bike laid up against that wall, but it was also an instrument, a vehicle – one with infinite potential. Just a bicycle, but commander of the whole revolving world. Not far past these western hills laid the rocky mountain spine of the continent, a bridge bent from pole to equator stretching right out from their doorstep. All it takes is a simple journey. Walking on the bare faced earth with neither shelter nor reserve, twinkling constellations, a roof; the trees and burly mountains, the walls; soil in deserts or meadows, a floor. Nature lends no supplement or support to a weak spirit. Contentment is internalized by necessity and gives birth to a raging durability. Oneself becomes a structure, a solid pillar against the furious kaleidoscope of elements.

Voyaging into the foreign spaces forces one to a realization of reality, the actual scope of oneself in the midst of a stretching universe. And the universe continually stretches, me shrinking in comparison all the time. I put out my arms as far as they reach and what is that distance! while even the fires of stars quiver and pale in the sky. A waning speck on the face of a planet, but I can function, I can move by my will. A thinking speck with some small and increasing understanding. And when by will I move with a wave of my hand, or a finger even, and the air waves from it in reaction, reverberating away to the edge of the atmosphere and outward beyond, to some small extent eventually I've touched the retreat of the stars.

A thinking speck with some little understanding. I threw my bleak self into the country to discover this and whatever else, to be here and wonder about this kid's unimaginable future. Later what would he see and what would he know? Something unknown would spark in him and it, through him, would affect me and some particle in every being beyond the bounds of country or continent, beyond all time, and on into the end if there is such a thing anyway.

They got up from their table. The man and his son disappeared into the shade of the garage. The daughter went off behind the station toward wherever home was and I sat a while, looking at my bike and wondering, and from this went off to say hello to the roads of Wyoming again and whatever it might teach in our time together.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.