Powell and Cody, Pt. I

 Man, curious man, you were once that which lifted your eyes over the rock, stood like a statue and watched as the swallows nestled or flew like sparks from holes in the sandstone slabs. There was no road, no path, just a jumbled landscape of stone and desert. You left a thin trail in the dust when your foot left the soil on the riverside. It stayed for a moment until wind and weather scraped your traces from the dirt. Only a few light feet wandered this way before, abandoning the isolation and loneliness that everyone felt when together. You listened to the stories spun round the fire, and something floated ephemerally through the spaces between the words and thought, evaporating in the smoke as it went to the stars. There is a bigger thing about than us, a thing that heeds only to a deeper insight than vision or sound or touch can relate. Your eyes have never beheld it. But if sought by the grasping will, its presence was affirmed, but it was not known. Never would it be known. You go in search of it however you can. Every pilgrimage gives something new. This is what made you leave: to find it and to feel it. The hints of the stories were fleeting like smoke, but to witness that thing for a moment was to transcend being and time, to affix yourself in eternity.

The swallows and clouds farther up flit about my head while I rode, thinking all disconnected thoughts, the question 'how soon will the town come?' floating beneath the rest. Powell was ahead of me somewhere. My dad had told me that his friend John lived there, friend from the California days when they'd worked for a theater outfit together. I'd apparently met him in my third winter, but I couldn't recall it now. So much is lost in the haze of childhood. They used to poke around in the subgroups of post-60s San Diego, figuring out what God was and doing whatever asceticisms they thought they needed to at the time.

A river passed under me with an irrigation canal running from it, branching into the dry fields before a bend in the road brought me into the ramshackle lines of the town's first buildings. I settled into silence at the town's library to write while waiting for John to ring on my phone. Somehow he couldn't get through and thought to try calling the library. A girl came up to me while I sat there typing, “Are you Nathaniel? You have a call at the desk. Somebody named John?” I followed her and picked up the phone where it lay on the counter.

He'd be home from work later on and had told me he would call me on my phone this time. It had rained sometime, and puddles were left in the streets. I pedaled my bike around and found an empty park at which to read at a sheltered table. Gray and blue clouds were mixing above, their layers shifting against one another. A sudden, powerful wind heaved the air east and grew wild, blowing rain on me. Shielding my eyes with my arm, I moved to the leeward side of a shed to keep from the weather. The sun was wiped away, and a constant rhythm of rain rapt against the shed's wooden panels. I sat in the grass and waited.

Across the street, a man in a fenced corral trod with a horse, hunched forward, tilting his hat against a cyclone whipping dust high about them. He went on with his chore. The rain faded, leaving the howl of rushing winds through the empty streets. Filings of gold settled to the bottom of the clouds and, for the briefest moment, the color was taken on by all the town, as if it came from somewhere within. Through the skin of the trees as they waved, and the grass, the light posts, the shimmering streets and the homes, I saw everything like some forgotten ideal.

Daylight darkened and the town faded away. Still there was no call. I took up my bicycle and walked it to the street, ready to find a discrete place nearby to sleep. I looked down the street. The headlights of a car, reflected in the puddles, turned and came toward me before slowing to a halt at the curb. From the window a man's voice hollered, “Nathaniel?”

I jogged up to the car. John's face was in darkness. He explained to me, “I guess I still have a digit wrong in your number! I thought I'd drive around, keeping an eye out. I just asked myself, 'Where would I go on a rainy night?'” He said he'd drive slowly so I could follow to the house. “I assure you, you are welcome. Stay as long as you need.”

In the morning I stayed in the blankets for a moment, drifting back from sleep to the soft sound of a guitar in a far room. John was strumming out chords, placing his lyrics to their notes as he wrote. He seemed pleased when I had come out of my room, and he took me to the kitchen, waved me into a chair at the table and set two muffins on a plate before me. I could see him clearly now in the morning light, with his soft, obliging face. A stoicism, that time will teach to some, ran beneath his casual humor. We sat in adjacent chairs talking. His wife, Holly, entered the room briefly before leaving to her job for the day. She had gone about the kitchen returning a few dishes to their rightful places and had wiped the counter tops with a towel in a calm, if somewhat removed, manner. Through each evening I'd come to know her son, CJ, over supper, an articulate dark-haired boy of about my age.

John was telling me memories of my father which had been stirred to the surface of his mind recently, just now shed of their dust. He recounted stories, the events of which had swayed my own formulation even before my birth. They had the import of my own experiences, only once removed. After all, we're nothing but tapestries woven of our parents' fabric. I was grateful to hear and to try to understand, but the time soon came for him to depart. There would be more opportunities to learn. I returned to the room and fell onto the bed in the quiet, empty house, staring up at the white of the ceiling. In this quiet I spent the next few days, writing, before I moved onto Cody.

On the final day, John took me into Cody with him. A package would be delivered to the post office for me, and I had to wait until it was. With my bike disassembled in the rear of the car, he parked at the store's back door. It was a boot store on the main street strip downtown. He walked before me, guiding me in and showing me his work area. Leather scraps were strewn on the floor, brushed to the foot of the walls. Cowboy boots stood in lines, set on the floor in pairs with tags, waiting for repair. Some drooped or were tarnished; others were hardened and cracked by stirrups and the trudging through the dirt of ranches. John shuffled between the machinery and stands, carving soles, or gluing and nailing fresh heels, working his hands efficiently over the leather and stitches, instructing me in whatever he was doing as he went about it. While he spun a knob, pressing a pair of black boots in a vice, he fell into a rhythm of work and began talking about other things. He deviated from boots to the philosophies of Nietzsche and the other “dead philosophers”, who were trying to feel their way in the dark, as he saw it. That's what we're doing, groping in the dark. The mast is open, and there's a dark sea in every direction, but we don't know what fantastic thing might be swimming right below us.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

Big Horns and Emptiness, Pt. II

 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.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

Big Horns and Emptiness, Pt. I

 Heavy blue cloud bottoms dangled in the spilt sky. From the side of a mountain, the curving spectrum of a rainbow disseminated itself into the sprinkling raindrops as I emerged into the sun. The asphalt was dark and wet. Faded beer cans and cigarette boxes lay moist in the weeds of the roadside. As the clouds thinned and the air dried, the sweet scent of rain lingered on the fields.

A pond, refreshed after the shower, lay at the bottom of a slope by the road shoulder, with the roots of trees and shrubbery dangling on its glassy banks. Bustling bugs skimmed over the water, the footprints of them cast on the surface in discrete, shivering rings. Reflected in the rings were the clouds, retreating into the sky beyond the pale, green hills, hills, raised on either side with the road rolling between them. They had an alpine appearance, reminiscent of mountains, but the Big Horn range was too far for these to be foothills. All the same, somehow the old, overgrown scree tumbling down their sides, with their brims capped by a dark rooftops of evergreens, and the clouds clearing beyond them running like the mists of a recollected memory, was an echo of something greater, something dominant and immense, something unfathomable in the feeble shallows of a mind.

Gillette approached as I came from the north. My wheels crawled up a hill on its sidewalks as the road transitioned from countryside fields to the grass that's cut short. All the town spread out before me, opening up with the highway threading east-west through the needle hole of the city's middle, mingling among the fabric of the little brown buildings. This town exuded the color brown and seemed to say something of the quiet industry which tilled at its borders, sucking oil from the depths of the land to siphon to the rest of the dry country. Pumpjacks stood crowded in the fields with perpetually nodding heads, looking like dippy bird toys with a never ending thirst (because that's simply the nature of these things).

I went about the streets, refreshing my supplies for a while. Combustion and hustle that accompanies urban spaces went on in the open alleys and on the asphalt of every lot, not like in the density of a big city, but as in the sprawling epicenter of a vast rural region. All the land about here was unoccupied, this being the sole hub of a thinly sown wheel. The sun's orange light streamed over the surface of everything, igniting the streets and walls. I fell to the highway which pulled me with the rush of an evening river to feed on dry lands, and into the mountains, to be fed on in turn.

To the east, the sky deepened and the last pink drained from the far clouds. A jagged, white line heaved across the western horizon, the Big Horns' broad peaks dripping into the blue earth below, snowcapped and stalwart in midsummer, standing bright and wide against the wavering hues of dusk. It has a tangible power that fills and commands, that required my reckoning just as the night required my finding a hiding place and making it my bed. It would take another two days of riding, but I'd be driven by the mountains all the while like a nail into my sheath, to my intended post on the mountaintop.

The beauty of mountains is that even as trim, distant things, they are as overwhelming as anything could ever be. They approach slowly and patiently, never rushing a moment, but accepting time as it is. And they know time. They know it more clearly than anything our senses are able to describe to us. We have only an acquaintance with time, whereas the mountains have a kinship. I approached the Big Horns, slowly, but without hesitation. They had something I wanted.

Networks of loose, dry canyons tumbled down from the shallow-rooted grass along my way. The edges of the canyons raised me and dropped me into a valley before the entrance to the mountains, like the withdrawal of water preceding a wave, which you know will pound you to the sandy floor, but your insides fear and love it. The nimble waves of Lake De Smet pummeled a shore by the road, and I stopped to bathe, at the point where I could enter farthest from the querulous eyes of beach goers. Then I went on again, my skin chilled against the zenith sun, north toward Sheridan.

I rode over and between the true foothills now. Processions of pronghorns straddled the shaded open curves. In the groves of slender aspens, shaking in the glens, strode hazel does paralyzed by my passing or struck to pace, fading like wisps into the branches. The shadow of the mountains slowly wandered over us, casting every part of every thing in a thin blue glaze.

 A yellow butterfly lay torn on the side of the road. The wind flowed around it, causing the wings to flutter on its still body, spurring it into some obscure form of life in death. From around a bend came a sputtering sound, ushering the emergence of a man's form on a motorcycle from the line of trees. He came toward me in the opposing lane, strapped with leathers, opaque goggles on his face, blowing through the air. All the experiences that had ever passed through his eyes were hid behind those lenses. Something tripped in my mind that moment, a dormant revelation springing forth from deep recesses, where it had probably been quietly watching since my birth for the singular sliver in time to expand within me and overflow into everything I knew, and had ever known, or would yet know.

Everything happened simultaneously. All the distance between me and the figure of the man on the motorbike seemed instantly to collapse. I recognized an eagerness in the creases around his stretched mouth, and in the way he leaned forward, heaving himself to the distance like the entire span of the world couldn't come soon enough. There was a commonality, a unity even, in our profuse lives, in everyone's life. This was the moment when everything fixed became fluid and melted together. My mind opened up, reaching out with innumerable spectral limbs, and perceiving, in him and the thin air that hung between us, the truth which resides at the core of everything.

Every atom is hardly anything at all; all the things in physical existence are practically empty space (and who knows if the physical part's are even real?). All the emptiness I'd ever perceived was actually the fabric of everything; everything was effectively nothing at all. The space that stretched between me and the motorcycle man, between the trees and the mountains and everything else, no more separated one from the other than it did join us all together, and it's only a sad ignorance that keeps a body isolated from anything else. A body's just emptiness, anyway, just emptiness walking through emptiness, more nothing than something. We're each like the buttes or the mountain peaks, merely raised points in a continuous blanket of being, but we imagine that we're somehow distinct from the rest.

Me and everything else stretched together in that moment like taffy. The spaces didn't stretch between us, but stretched one into the other. Everything was me, and I was everything. I was a consciousness adrift. I was the motorcycle man going the opposite way, the opposite way being no different from my own, and my way being just as much his. And I was the ways themselves, no longer bound to a body on a bicycle. Everything was a puzzle falling together, the lines disappearing, and the fact becoming plain that there never were any lines, and no pieces, either, just the infinite tableau of everything at once. It was all an illusory cycle. The surface of the undifferentiated whole appeared on its surface to ebb and flow, but it was only a trick of the eye and the mind. All my superfluous motion these days was a stillness in reality, and the stillness of the mountains was perpetual motion. I wasn't really going anywhere, and the mountains already knew eternity. I was where I wanted to be and could never be anywhere else.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

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.

The Rodeo

A subtle breeze flowed with the hours, following our six-wheeled caravan's procession between the pastures. Strands of wheat brushed on the warmth of the air in waves and folds, heeding the wind. A line of black cows ambled in the patches of grass of an enclosed hillside, staring blankly on our moving figures with dark, fixed eyes as we went. Watching us, their heads shifted in intervals like a clock's ticking hand. Adam put his thumb and finger to his mouth and sent a great whistle piercing through the open silence. The cows roused from their reverie and started, only a few at first, plodding alongside the fence. Then followed the group with young calves hinged to swaying tails and heels of their cows.

We reached a pale town called McIntosh and decided to stop for the day. The main street of it broke from the highway, harboring a lonely shop with a rickety screen door and a faded post office amid a line of nondescript building faces. Beside these was a playground park and a blue water tower standing high on its four narrow metal legs, the only thing breaking the surface of the one story town. We rolled our bikes into the park and settled down by a covered picnic table.

Christie went off down the street for a walk to more closely examine things. I dug hastily through one of my panniers for my stove, ready to boil some ramen for dinner and then set up on the table.

Christie returned carrying a grocery bag in one hand. She sat down across from me and gave me a peculiar look.

“That's not a very substantial meal,” she said, removing a box of cheese crackers from the bag. She broke open the box and slid it over the table toward me.

“Did you name your bike yet?” she asked.

I told her it was called Yakul. “It's from a movie.”

“We both just got around to naming ours. It's weird the things people name. We met a family who was living in an RV and they'd given it a name.”

“I've been investigating what it is that makes people do it,” Adam said, sitting down and leaning forward, “So far, it seems to me that once an object acquires a meaning and purpose from somebody, more so than it can have in and of itself, once that's happened, it gets a name. The people with the RV named it Puff. Apparently their kid had named it.”

“So what do you call yours?” I wondered.

Christie pointed and looked toward their bikes, leaning on a near tree, “Mine's Ontwa. Adam's is named Jenny.”

“Like Forrest Gump's boat, if you've seen it,” Adam said, nodding.

“And what's Ontwa mean?”

“There's actually a story behind that,” Christie started. “So a while ago when we were riding through Minnesota we came by a street that was Christina Road. Christina's my full name. And then the next street was Adam Street (or maybe Road?). But that's crazy, right? The next street after that even was Juneau Street. Juneau is the name of our dog in Connecticut, so obviously this was destiny or something. I told Adam that whatever the name of the next street was we would have to name our first kid. But it might have been a mistake, because the next street was Ontwa Road. I decided it would be a better idea to just name my bike Ontwa, so I did that instead.”

Christie disappeared over a hill ahead, coffee-saturated blood pumping in her veins, and Adam pushed as best he could to keep up. I fell behind them both, keeping a slow morning pace, distracted from time by the eloquent folds of land on either side of me. The road bent around a hillside and, slowly, a town of substantial size relative to those we'd seen recently was revealed in the distance. Coming into it, I found Christie and Adam in the packed parking lot of a gas station, waving me down as I approached.

“I told you she does that, didn't I,” Adam said in reference to Christie's morning energy, “And do you see all this?” They were both looking on the bustle of vehicles bouncing around on the lot and the road.

Looking down the length of the main street which ran along the station's side I saw parked cars lined on left and right, pick-ups and cars filling the designated diagonal spaces and spilling onto lawns and everywhere else not actively prohibited. A yellow sheet of paper taped up in the gas station window explained the cause with a bold-faced headline, “Lemmon Boss Cowman Rodeo! Friday, Saturday, Sunday.” We were at the local hub, the densest town a hundred miles out, and on the primary occasion of the year: rural life jubilee for western times past.

We went into the station and bought some food to eat for lunch. I came out after them and we pedaled down the street to find a table. Instead we discovered the origin of all the weekend's hubbub. 

A full public block, framed on all sides by haphazardly strewn vehicles, was occupied with the celebration. White pavilions were propped up over lines of plastic tables. Everywhere were mustached men under ten-gallon hats with plaid cotton shirts tucked neatly into iron-pressed Wranglers. Neither stitch nor crease was out of place. Each was bound up by his leather belt and great gleaming buckle, jogging among the jumbled crowd with paper plate and pop in hand, or else standing tall with thumbs hooked on his pocket brims, surveying the crowd with soft eyes and lips curled in a smile of deep approval, polished boots planted wide and firmly in the grass. The women beamed with warmth at each other, their faces shining, scrutinizing each others' skirts and elaborately jeweled collared shirts, the permed or straightened hair meticulously done up. Children bounced around inside a giant inflated castle. They were perfect replicas of their parents and wore the same costumes.

Everyone gathered with their neighbors hoping to preserve a culture that had been stripped and made virtually obsolete by modernity. In their way they meant to glorify the dead cowboy, revive the settler, the trailblazing American past, and honor the tradition of the hardy Western nudge. But behind the simple facade lay an unintended mockery. Their visions were unconsciously distorted by what had become of the place, the country. They were each a glorified image following after a fairy tale born of movies; cosmetic imitations of a somber and rugged past reality. They celebrated themselves, their own unsoiled, over-civilized lives, making an innocent show of an idolized fantasy.

They were excited. Murmurs floated about between the tables describing what was expected of the wild rodeo to come in the evening. Men in bright shirts and leather chaps would lasso from horseback, rope and tie the calves, or strive for the most seconds spent tightly gripping the strap atop an aggravated bull or a bronco's back. They were proud, simple, honest, and pleased with the pomp and daring of it, even if it were diluted of the utility which had made it great. I couldn't begrudge them anything.

It was only early afternoon when we'd finished our meal. Adam and Christie stayed for the show to see the lingering fragments of the West. I knew there remained riding to do that day so I bid them goodbye, leaving them to celebrate with the people. Further solitary distance laid ahead.


Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.