Powell and Cody, Pt. II

 At five John figured he'd done enough work for the day. We got into his car and he took me about the town, showing me what was there to be seen. Cody was once a town of the west, I mean the authentic west before it became a parody, but now it was all fake gun shows, cowboy cutouts, shops, and tourists.

The main road west leads through a vast gorge, then a reservoir, and at length to Yellowstone. He took me to the reservoir, not having seen it himself that year, and drove us by the water, “Would ya look at how low that is! You see the dark sediment marks on the rock? That's how high it should be. Never seen it that low before.” The yellow-sided mountains were like pillars in the water, propping the sky and cradling the canyon. Waves of the green water brushed against their base with never a thought for time. Rattlesnake Mountain curled its sharp precipice up to the north, peeling away from the earth as it sloped on the horizon. We turned back and John took us south of town to show me “quintessential Wyoming.” The land changed. Vast, yellow hills and dry plains expanded under the sky. Everything was desolate but full, in want of no person or thing – it was complete in itself.

We turned around on the empty highway and went back to the town, driving into the cul-de-sac of his friends' who'd be keeping me until my package came in. They accepted me like a stray cat, welcoming and feeding me when circumstance had left me on their doorstep. Pete and Kelly had been tossed about by the whims of fancy in years past, working fish and games jobs across the country, retaining few enough belongings to pack into their truck and set out. Now they were settled and had a son, Micah. His head was blond and soft eyed; his mien was clear and sweet, pouring the bliss of boyhood into whatever vessel he could find. At the end of supper outside on the picnic table, he slid off the bench. His nose runny from the salsa and chips, he wiped it across his arm and looked up patiently at his mother, “Can I go to the horses now? I'm all done.”

“Yes, now you can,” she said. She and Pete looked at him with admiration in their eyes.

He ran across the yard, stepped carefully around the water canal by the fence, and slipped through the gate. A horse stood nearby with its head in the brittle weeds, chewing. He took tentative steps toward it, resisting his instinctive eagerness in order to not scare the horse or himself for that matter. He moved his arm slowly toward it and placed his hand on its nose. The horse took no notice of him. It dipped its head to chew on a fresh strand of weed. Micah pulled his hand away by impulse at its movement, struggling to balance his fear and his adoration of the beast.

Days went by like this, with the Wyoming summer offering hints of what was waiting. In the mornings, by the window above my bed, I'd find deer lying in the grass, their heads held up to the rising sun. The males' horns were fully splayed; they were kings more worthy of the earth than me.

My bike slept against the sidewall of the house; my bags waited to be packed up again and run over the land. A beatific vision went on all the time, hidden by the Absaroka mountains, inside Yellowstone. It goes on as if nothing's ever changed, as if everything hasn't been broken. All in its borders is sacred. Holy mountains and woods, with elk, deer, or bison past every tree, pool, and rock, sometimes carrying out their mystery lives in the open, rummaging over the evergreen land, picking flowers with their mouths, passing on transcendent sights to the sad, ignorant eyes of our devoided age. All of it waited past the mountains that laid on the horizon, and my mind itched for it. But I couldn't act as if there weren't just as much wonder in the deer that rested by the window, or the owl which perched in the tree each evening sending its hoots out like drops into water, or the presence of these kindest people who knew the world and loved it. But my hungry imagination itched all the same, working its way west, perpetually west.

I made one trip during my stay there, taking a road that led southwest from Cody, into a valley of farmland. The balers were plowing across the fields. Trucks that were made to move hay sputtered on the roads, either hauling full loads off to wherever they were to be stacked and stored, or speeding by, empty as they rushed about to find a burden. There rose a monolith from the valley, a tower of stone plunging upward from the center of a hill of tumbling scree. It was called Castle Rock, standing sharp and resolute, isolated from the mountains which lay bulging behind. The Shoshone river slipped by between the road and the rock, its broad, brown stream trickling on. Passing into the branches and leaves growing on the river's stone beach, I glimpsed the white fur of mule deer's backside. It had drank at the water as its progenitors did before it, all those generations now past, individuals who had birthed, weaned, struggled, and forced themselves into perpetuity through the stern body of this deer that now fled into the bush. I looked around and felt strange, as if I'd been running in a circle since the day I was born.

On the fourth day my package, a camera lens, had come to the post office. I spoke with Pete and Kelly in the kitchen that morning as they readied themselves for work. They'd given me a buffalo summer sausage and a roll of crackers and cheese the night before and put them in a plastic bag. Kelly voiced her concern for me one last time before they left. I packed my bags after they'd gone, prepared my bike, and shut the door tightly behind me. Then I mounted my bicycle and made my way through the noontime streets, arriving downtown to retrieve my package. The last thing was to check if John was at his shop to receive my final goodbye. He was away, but I talked to the owner at the desk who promised he'd tell John I'd come to see him.

My road led through town and wound uphill, going northward into a stretch of plains. The mountains tarried along at the edge of barren fields. Foothills gradually bubbled up beside the road, their slopes forming stacks which rose in zigzagging layers until finally they blocked the sun. A valley, filled with cyan sagebrush and wild grasses, fell in on my right, inching up to the feet of Heart Mountain. I'd seen the shape of this mountain since before coming to Powell; now I was coming to it. The valley slopes built until reaching the two nobs of the mountain's crest. These nobs jutted up and out like the front and rear of a horse's saddle.

Farther on, stacks of immense mountains rose up on both sides with the road running like a black river in their trough. The valley was in shadow, the mountainsides tinted blue by the light of the sky. Cows were grazing on the lower parts of the mountains, looking like scattered black ants. The last sunlight dropped off lending a dim purple to the fold of clouds that floated among the mountaintops. The shades of blue deepened on the banks and then faded to dark against the pale light in the west. All light from the sun was quenched before the stars unfolded across the sky, beginning in the east and moving slowly across. Every star was a pinhole poked through the great bed sheet of night, which was pulled over half the world. The blazing glory of god shined through those holes and light filled the sky like a wild snowstorm. Only the mountains were unaffected. Their silhouettes loomed; their void shadows hung against the starlight. Maybe they're gods themselves.

In their shadows I slept, rising early in the morning before the sun. It was a chill predawn and it ran through me as I rode. Everything was pallid as if a haze pervaded the air. The mountains broke to the west, opening upon an expanse which reached to the horizon. Every detail was smoothed by the intervening air; the features of the buttes and the bluffs were cast in a softened blue. I sat in the pebbles beside the road with my arms draped over my knees and watched as the sun rose. It was a sharp point of orange at first, then a sliver on the bluffs. The circle rose, and filled in completely as it surmounted the edge of the earth, giving shadow and form to the valley as it cleared away the sense of dullness from me and everything else. Heat from the light poured onto me. I lifted my bike up onto its tires and got back on and started to pedal. The road turned, leading me away from the valley and into the mountain's core.

-

I just read a book about writing. Hopefully my posts will be more clear from now on! Hopefully.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

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.