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.
