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.
