I
continued on my way like this, without bounds to contain me, and
found myself trailing farther along the foot of the mountain (but the
mountains were everywhere, and everything), and the motorcycle man's
sputtering engine withdrew into the depths of forever. The sun cast
the shadow of the mountain creeping along once more. It curled round
the bend of the earth 'til piercing the sky's lobe opposite where it
fell, and pulled up from an envelope of colors, to blaze white heat
on all existence.
Through
the trees, I drifted into Sheridan, and sifted onto the packed
streets of the city, out and about, seeking a place to fill water and
get on once again. The place was bursting at the brims with people in
creamy ten-gallon hats, and girls in western skirts, all for the
annual rodeo just like Lemmon, South Dakota had been. It was bigger
here, though, and there were more streets and sidewalks to be filled
than that other small and sincere town. All the bustling made me want
to hurry to the long climb ahead. I traversed a winding twelve miles
through the town, arcing from edge to edge like a lost tangent,
always trailing a line of cars. Finally I found the road that was
supposed to lead me out. It was a dusty dirt lane going twenty miles
northwesterly. I stopped on the edge of the asphalt and stood there,
eyes half-open to the pale mountain, and felt like crying.
On
the porch of a little white house beside the road, two ladies I
hadn't seen sat, rocking in chairs, tending to a drifting
conversation. They witnessed me in all my pathetic troubles and
gracefully called out. I sauntered up and they were kind enough to
answer my question, telling me the interstate was in fact the only
paved way out. They waved me on my desultory way, with four sweating
bottles of water, to jostle a final path across town. Once more, past
the rodeo grounds and the endless shuffling march of cowboy boots,
and I'd reached the interstate, which would turn and eventually take
me to the mountain's chopping straits.
In
the dirt at the foot of the on-ramp stood a kid, shirtless, and
skinny, looking like a limp, tattooed noodle. His thumb probed the
air, hitchhiking, or trying to anyway. A stream of cars and trucks
drove right past him, drivers' eyes peeled intently to the sunlit
road ahead, leaving him unacknowledged and without a glance of pity.
“I
had another bag, but I lost it,” he told me, and thus he had no
shirts. I stood over my bike behind him, trying not to interfere with
his ride seeking. “I think the tattoos might be scaring off all the
rides.” He seemed to have lost all hope, like he'd been fully spent
from a lack of other avenues. All my shirts had been worn to the
point of putrefaction, but I gave him what I could.
“They
can't smell you from the car anyway,” I said, trying to hide my
embarrassment.
“Oh,
it'll help. I really just want to start walking the highway, though.
You think the coppers'd care? I don't wanna get picked up by the
cops. I may not be welcome,” he said this last with a vacant shake
of his head, wide blank eyes pasted to the ground. How long had it
been since he'd slept? His was not the easy way.
Day's
heat kept on beating down. A guy standing exposed like this was
likely to boil. I passed on to him one of the water bottles I'd been
given, then rode on up the ramp, with his call trailing me, “You
take it easy,” as he returned his tired face to the procession of
blind vehicles.
Half
a mile on, in the shoulder of the opposite way, a pony-tailed cowboy
in Hawaiian shirt, wielding cowboy hat and shades against the sun,
sat propped atop his bags, bearing a sign in his hands which read:
“EAST
JESUS
SAVES”
in
black letters. I took heed and made signs to him with my hands,
yelling, trying to ask him if he, too, could use some water. He came
sprinting across all four lanes and the grass median, cardboard
placard waving wildly at his side. He hadn't understood me. “I've
got water, but none cool like this!” he told me with exuberance,
“This is great.” The blessings of the ladies had been three-fold,
now bestowed to all the town's wayward pilgrims, shaking through the
Arabian day like beaten chaff on a threshing wind. The guy turned and
sprinted back across with a yelp of “God bless you, man!” his
loose shirt flapping.
There
the trees came and the plains between me and the mountain stretched
out, and I felt the land. We're all on some kind of hajj, waiting to
be carried off by whatever swift stream of eternity might be sent,
meant to uproot us. For some it fully requires a flood, breaking the
banks and stripping the soil from our foundation. We all stand like
trees, pleased to keep our supply of the transcendent trickling into
our roots from underground, feeling firm and fertile without
necessarily wetting the feet. It's just those rare, solitary ones who
bob precariously with wide eyes on the water's edge so meaningfully,
when they stare out on the white, froth in such an unsettling way,
groping and churning at it, simply trembling for the singular moment
to come when they shall be bound away and submerged up to the mouth,
nearly drowned in the pain and rapture of holy bliss. They are the
ones who stir the vision that, in apathy, had nearly solidified
before you, and it's then that you see what's really going on. It's
then that you realize all the sublimely hectic motion that's filled
your distracted eyes all along. I wait for these people all hours,
for their willfulness strikes me like a force, rouses me, and tells
me “Now's the time! Jump!” and they take me twisting into the
unknown, bound forever wherever we ought, purified before the
divinity, screaming to the water Epictetus' words, “I
am of the same mind; I am one with Thee. I refuse nothing which seems
good to Thee. Lead
me whither Thou wilt!”
The
slopes pushed and pulled me, rushing me onto the heights. I wound
against the road's current until, finally, I could see its coils
rising up like a flat black snake, being woken and filled on the
mountainside. The morning air was hot again and cloudless, the
tendrils of the sun sweeping on the valley pitch. I rose and pressed
on with exertion to the inclining switchbacks of the mountain flanks.
Sweat spilled all down my back, so I removed my shirt and draped it
over my neck, wiping my wet face with its sleeve. To my left, chains
of motorcycles burred over the asphalt, pilots bearded and goggled;
on the right, a metal rail guarded me from the sheer drop which
poured down the range's slope. Nothing could keep me from the top. I
was Moses, summoned to the peak for divine rites, inflamed hedges
guiding at every turn.
I'd
be hard-pressed to overstate the dwarfing I felt, carving the side of
that mountain. Every incremental moment, tramping across the country,
had been the accumulated bursting forth of everything that had come
before it, and how much more so at the passage of a mountain. From
where I was now, with a mere glance to the east, all the distance of
weeks past unfurled like a receding fog, revealing what had been
done. This was the ramification of thousands of miles compiled. It's
easy to see why the gods speak from the pinnacles. Things become so
obvious, trivial, stripped small in this context. This was Mount
Sinai or Zion, Mount Olympus or Mount Ida, Mount Haku-san, Fuji, and
Tate-yama together, Hara Berezaiti, Mount Kailash or Mount Meru, all
of them stacked up (because, remember, the holy mountain is
everywhere). Here stood the axis of all, the source and the funnel,
the flourish and the end of everything.
Its
folds pulled me in. For two days I rode between them, the grounds
laden with forest. Pale barren lakes of meadows stood isolated in
swaths and dispersed, all stretching over the plateau's undulating
surface like a decorated sea in suspension. When the meadows spread
up to the roadside, the dim greens, as seen from a distance, gave way
to a prism of coloration. Wildflowers appeared from what once seemed
plain: variations of violet, yellow, azure and white all quivering
and throwing themselves upward from the grasses to the sky. And the
sun fell slowly behind the boundless ridge, drenching the solitary
peaks in orange. A dim, cloud-lit sky was streamed through with the
shifting hues of a rainbow face, the rotation of colors rolling west.
The clouds burned in heed of the lowering light, and paled.
At
the pass, I paused. I'd been stopping all along, at whatever sights
caught me, but here I could look on all of what lay ahead. This was
the other edge of the mountain, inclining to the west. There was snow
still, in drifts on the highest slopes, white against brown stone,
trickling pure crystal drops. Swelling within me was all the same as
before, when I'd gazed from the mountain's opposite side to the past,
but this view was to be contemplated with the gravity of the
yet-to-be-decided. I stood my bike alongside the rail and sat, and
breathed, eyes closed. Over the mountain's utmost brim came a chill
wind, giving a thin whistle to the ear like the flute of some spirit
crouched on the hillock behind me, sending his song quivering to
whoever might hear. The thin air filled me up. I couldn't ask for
more than any of this if there were
any more to be had.
Distance
seemed to radiate from me into infinite regressions below. The land
wrapped past the horizon, bottomless lengths sloping away, circling
fully round the planet's circumference, and rising up to this peak
from its opposite side. The earth's a teardrop, not a sphere! Steeped
in so much haze and volume of air, it could almost have been that
nothing laid below, and this was simply a mountain-tip floating on
the sky. But in the dim curvature of the earth, everything could
faintly be seen. There, far away and barely traceable, the mountains
of Yellowstone merged to the sky. Each lonesome speck between me and
that distant ridge, reduced to appropriate size, neared what it truly
was. When you see something from far enough away, all its unique
features fade, and it becomes a smooth part of the folds around it.
We float around on the surface thinking we're something we're not.
Together, we're something greater.
A
minivan turned off the road and parked. Out of it came a family, but
for one child who stayed behind. They walked to the edge nearby to
look out. “Pret-ty neat,” said the mother, hands on her sides
looking over the edge for a second, to the end of the earth. They all
shuffled back into their seats and resumed their way.
I
returned to mine, too. With a bandana on my face, glasses, and hood
on, I trailed the winding road down. Flying with full velocity, cold
air burning at my cheeks and tears streaming, I came off the
mountaintop to begin my wandering in the desert.
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