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.

Visions of the Past

Our bikes came to a halt in awe of a field of small yellow flowers laying drenched in the suspended sunlight. We were riding roads unmarked on our map of Ohio. The road system was a grid, so there was no worry of becoming lost. We went west, parallel to the highway – away from all of the traffic and anxiety – riding instead amongst a silence broken only by the subtle wavering hum of wind against the eardrums.

A flurry of red winged blackbirds, nestling quietly in the long grass was roused in a flurry, unintentionally startled by us as we passed. The hills were effectively gone now, the lingering few being inconsequential in the scope of the flat farmland stretching out in all directions. This was the first of the Midwest. A humble farmhouse and its rickety barn, its silos and trucks or tractor adorned the roadside marking each transition from one plot of land to the next, and a dark line of trees stood mediating the boundary between crops. The sky was bright blue overhead.

Ahead of us I saw our road was coming to an end with the next intersection, and we would have to decide between taking the left or the right to find the next street leading west. In our pause Justin pulled out a water bottle to take a swig. I looked down the road to the right and saw two dirty blond heads bobbing up and down, a couple kids on bicycles coming toward us.

The one in front was the smaller, maybe five years old. His face was smudged with dirt and he was draped in a pair of dirty, tattered overalls. He carried a large white jug in his left hand with the few fingers he could spare while gripping onto the handlebars.

His brother followed. He was a bit taller, overalls faded and worn to the same pale blue as his brother's, probably having been handed down from a yet older dirty blond head. The white cloth handlebar tape was mostly stripped from his old orange road bike. His seat was too high and the bicycle was too big so he rode standing erect on its aluminum pedals with his little dusty bare feet.

They rode by slowly, perpendicular to us. Forgetting their bicycles, their destination, forgetting time and place, and forgetting their expressions their identical faces stared back at us as we stood over our bicycles and bags. Mouths open and eyes empty, they struggled alike to register what it was they saw before them. I was equivalently overwhelmed at the sight of their pure, unconscious possession of countryside childhood and waved to them as they passed in front of us. They were pulled suddenly away from their confusion, became suddenly conscious of the clicking from their freewheels and remembered where they were. They both returned to pedaling, and, shyly, they waved back.

When they were a bit down the road Justin looked at me, exasperated, and proclaimed, “I want to be them!"

We followed after, a short way behind. The boys had pulled off and dropped their bikes on the left side of the road. The little one was running, almost dancing, through the wheat field, waving the big white jug side to side in his hand held high toward his father who was stepping down from the lofty seat of a tractor. Once closer, I saw his father prop the little boy up on his shoulders and walk through the field while talking to another man, his son's arms hugging tight the straw hat on his head. The older brother was up in the tractor seat with his hands around the steering wheel. He put out his right hand to us and waved once again, proud of his position and grinning brightly from the honored seat.

Across the horizon in the distance the figure of a horse drew a buggy northward. It turned and began down the road we were on, coming toward us in the left half of its lane. I could distinguish a small brown horse with a loose vertical white stripe along the length of its face leading an uncovered old wooden carriage. In the seat sat three young girls. Holding the horse's leather reins was the oldest, wearing a dress of deep magenta. A thinly striped bonnet covered her dark hair, with its rippled brim shading her brown eyes from the noon sun. Sitting beside her was a slightly younger girl who had two tight, long, brown braids running down the front of her dress from behind each ear. A third littler girl sat at their feet. All three struggled between looking at us and looking anywhere else.

Present day had fallen out from beneath me and I was gone into a time so long passed we couldn't comprehend each other. It was here before me laid out not as a reenactment, but as their approach to reality, the functional past voluntarily lived out in the current. Time seemed to progressively slow in the lessening distance between us. In the moment we passed, they politely waved, their expressions still suspended in indecision, still unsure what to think or how to look. This got the attention of a little sandy blond girl sitting on the back who poked her head up from behind them. This littlest, seeing us as we went by, turned around to face us, then plopped down, her pale blue dress and little feet dangling over the back edge of the carriage. The dreamlike sense of fantasy escaped me in a smile I could no longer contain. She didn't wave, but her unabashed eyes, so full of gravity and insatiable wonder, followed us precisely, and curiously, seeking the timeless comprehension we all were seeking, following our figures at least as long as I could watch them in the distance from the corner of my own wondering eye. The clop-clop of the horses hooves began to slowly fade behind, and a fresh breeze rolled over the fields, bending the strands of wheat. Silence curled up around us once again as the eternal sun slowly drifted through the sky.

Childhood

Over the green rippling surface of Ohio I rode my bicycle. On my left came a barn, in front of it a plain black carriage sitting with reins resting slack and its attendant horse trotting about with its sisters and brothers in the field behind. At a spigot nearby was a woman in a plain black dress and bonnet, arched over, pumping water into a bucket, ignorant of me as I looked on. I'd entered the Amish country.

Next on the road, in the yard of a white house there sat two small girls beneath a tall old tree, both wearing the same dress and bonnets and little black shoes. They looked up suddenly to me from the grass and were first struck confused, but a broad smile spread across each bright face and they began vigorously waving with wide eyes fixed to me.

From behind the hill in front of me now their father came. He wore a black suit, a flat black hat, was bearded and projected a pleasant sensation, sitting in his carriage with the reins resting in his palms, a slim brown horse pulling him along. His face, too, showed a smile, and he chuckled when he saw me. The wonder his children had experienced in seeing me seemed in him to have been replaced predominantly with amusement, resulting from his benefit of experience.

Their wonder caused me to wonder, to attempt to see through their young eyes. They looked out from the boundary of their lawn onto a road traversed all day by vehicles they don't understand. Having never felt the vibrations of an engine from a passenger seat, having never seen images of the wide world flickering on a television screen or any of the other familiar and ubiquitous experiences the rest of America takes for granted. What must they think of it all?

As a child, I remember, my mother buckled me tightly into a safety seat in the rear of the car. I'd sat, bored and restless, while the mundane land passed by, occupying myself with my little fingers and hands until we pulled into the grocery store parking lot. She let my sister out, then placed her hands beneath my shoulders and lifted me out from the car, standing me on the asphalt. My sister tagged along beside her and I peered around from the shopping cart seat, keeping my fingers grasped around the thin metal bars. We wandered around the store, Mom picked out what we needed and placing it into the cart's basket. Inevitably my sister and I began losing our patience so Mom promised us each a 25 cent fruit roll up if we'd keep ourselves quiet. Back in the car I sat buckled again, now scratching at the edge of the gummy fruit circle and peeling it away from the plastic, poking out the animal shapes in its surface and chewing them one by one.

That memory flashed through my mind. Seemingly trivial, it was something these children couldn't know. They saw world as if separated from it by a pane of glass, but I could see in their eyes there was no loss of childhood. They held the same curiosity and pure amazement now as I'd had years ago. As children looking onto something new a waterfall of intrigue and bewilderment filled them up without them knowing what the difference was between intrigue and bewilderment, nor knowing the other words to comprehend their feelings. I looked now back at them through the eyes of my past to see inside them. There was understanding in the instant our gazes met. I was filled from the same waterfall of feelings and, though I tried, I couldn't help but be overwhelmed, and an simple smile burst onto my own face.

This road I'd taken led me through a line of Amish towns. Mennonites were intermixed, dressing similarly but with distinctly more colorful clothing. Outside every house were hung long lines of clothes drying in the day breeze, dresses and shirts running from little to big, one end to the other. Varieties of bicycles laid on the lawns or rested against a house or barn, and two or three stood outside each workplace and shop. The children were mostly out, the bigger ones working in the yards, littler ones playing.

As I slowly pedaled up one steep hill, a small boy in overalls sitting on a white swaying porch bench peered out at me with wide eyes and gaping mouth from underneath the brim of a straw hat. He sat intensely paralyzed, his stare glued like a magnet to my bicycle.

Every adult waved to me as I passed by, almost all with the same expression of amusement. But eventually I had passed the bounds of their humble land and was put back in modernity and to, what was to me, the repetition of the familiar.

Being so near to my next checkpoint, Justin's grandparents' house, I decided to push through the day and get to Canal Fulton. You may recall, on the night Justin had hurt his leg, we'd both spent the following day and night beside a stream in the forest just off the road. At the time neither of us had considered to look for, or had even known the looks of, poison ivy. Much too late, we both figured out we'd come in contact with it, and in my ignorance until that point I had been scratching wherever I itched. I'd had it for maybe a week now and it continued to spread. I passed the long hours of each night tormented by the intense itch, laying there in my sleeping bag with arms crossed in restraint, mustering all the force of will I could to keep myself from scratching.

What I wanted now more than anything else was a shower and I would ride a hundred miles to have one if that's what it took. So that's exactly what I did. It required nearly the full day, but once the sun had just barely dropped below the treeline I was stopped on a sidewalk corner by the green sign displaying “Canal Fulton Corporation Limit”.

Finding the way between towns is simple if given a map, but the mazes of neighborhoods and townships are a matter completely their own. I called Justin to get more detailed directions to the house. After a little more riding and a few more calls I had found their street. From a distance I saw Justin's silhouette, arms extended, waving me down. I waved back at him and coasted to a stop in the driveway of his grandparents' white house.

Once Justin's parents had picked him up on that cold and bitter day in Crossville, TN, he'd ridden back to home with them in Greenville, SC. In the days that followed he visited the doctor and was subjected to some exams, with the resulting report that his knee should recuperate on its own given adequate rest. With a knee brace on his leg he was sent on his relieved way.

Given this news he had devised a way to reconvene with me and continue the trip. While I was riding through Kentucky he was packing and shipping his bicycle, bags, and belongings to his grandparents and then he paid a bus fare to get himself there as well. He would need a bit more time to recuperate, but I greatly anticipated a break and an opportunity to rid myself of the ivy rash.

I pulled my bicycle into their garage. A group of people, most of them Justin's mother-side extended family, sat in chairs on the back porch talking, the nearest few giving me a wave and friendly comment.

Inside the house I met Justin's grandmother.

“We thought you'd look like some kind of monster, the way Justin made it sound with the poison ivy and all. It's not so bad is it?" She laughed. Their white dog waddled up and began to sniff my ankles, "And that's Mindy. She won't bite or anything. She's a nice dog."

Immediately Justin took me down the basement stairs, pulled a towel out of a cabinet in the bathroom and pointed out the knobs, nozzles, soaps and shampoos of the shower. Finally I set to cleaning off. If that shower had continued for the rest of my life I'd have died happy. But, of course, not wanting to be rude I kept the shower short and went upstairs to formally meet everyone. On the porch I was introduced to the slew of family members who I'd become further acquainted with over the next eight days.

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