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.

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.