Big Horns and Emptiness, Pt. II

 I continued on my way like this, without bounds to contain me, and found myself trailing farther along the foot of the mountain (but the mountains were everywhere, and everything), and the motorcycle man's sputtering engine withdrew into the depths of forever. The sun cast the shadow of the mountain creeping along once more. It curled round the bend of the earth 'til piercing the sky's lobe opposite where it fell, and pulled up from an envelope of colors, to blaze white heat on all existence.

Through the trees, I drifted into Sheridan, and sifted onto the packed streets of the city, out and about, seeking a place to fill water and get on once again. The place was bursting at the brims with people in creamy ten-gallon hats, and girls in western skirts, all for the annual rodeo just like Lemmon, South Dakota had been. It was bigger here, though, and there were more streets and sidewalks to be filled than that other small and sincere town. All the bustling made me want to hurry to the long climb ahead. I traversed a winding twelve miles through the town, arcing from edge to edge like a lost tangent, always trailing a line of cars. Finally I found the road that was supposed to lead me out. It was a dusty dirt lane going twenty miles northwesterly. I stopped on the edge of the asphalt and stood there, eyes half-open to the pale mountain, and felt like crying.

On the porch of a little white house beside the road, two ladies I hadn't seen sat, rocking in chairs, tending to a drifting conversation. They witnessed me in all my pathetic troubles and gracefully called out. I sauntered up and they were kind enough to answer my question, telling me the interstate was in fact the only paved way out. They waved me on my desultory way, with four sweating bottles of water, to jostle a final path across town. Once more, past the rodeo grounds and the endless shuffling march of cowboy boots, and I'd reached the interstate, which would turn and eventually take me to the mountain's chopping straits.

In the dirt at the foot of the on-ramp stood a kid, shirtless, and skinny, looking like a limp, tattooed noodle. His thumb probed the air, hitchhiking, or trying to anyway. A stream of cars and trucks drove right past him, drivers' eyes peeled intently to the sunlit road ahead, leaving him unacknowledged and without a glance of pity.

“I had another bag, but I lost it,” he told me, and thus he had no shirts. I stood over my bike behind him, trying not to interfere with his ride seeking. “I think the tattoos might be scaring off all the rides.” He seemed to have lost all hope, like he'd been fully spent from a lack of other avenues. All my shirts had been worn to the point of putrefaction, but I gave him what I could.

“They can't smell you from the car anyway,” I said, trying to hide my embarrassment.

“Oh, it'll help. I really just want to start walking the highway, though. You think the coppers'd care? I don't wanna get picked up by the cops. I may not be welcome,” he said this last with a vacant shake of his head, wide blank eyes pasted to the ground. How long had it been since he'd slept? His was not the easy way.

Day's heat kept on beating down. A guy standing exposed like this was likely to boil. I passed on to him one of the water bottles I'd been given, then rode on up the ramp, with his call trailing me, “You take it easy,” as he returned his tired face to the procession of blind vehicles.

Half a mile on, in the shoulder of the opposite way, a pony-tailed cowboy in Hawaiian shirt, wielding cowboy hat and shades against the sun, sat propped atop his bags, bearing a sign in his hands which read:

“EAST

JESUS

SAVES”

in black letters. I took heed and made signs to him with my hands, yelling, trying to ask him if he, too, could use some water. He came sprinting across all four lanes and the grass median, cardboard placard waving wildly at his side. He hadn't understood me. “I've got water, but none cool like this!” he told me with exuberance, “This is great.” The blessings of the ladies had been three-fold, now bestowed to all the town's wayward pilgrims, shaking through the Arabian day like beaten chaff on a threshing wind. The guy turned and sprinted back across with a yelp of “God bless you, man!” his loose shirt flapping.

There the trees came and the plains between me and the mountain stretched out, and I felt the land. We're all on some kind of hajj, waiting to be carried off by whatever swift stream of eternity might be sent, meant to uproot us. For some it fully requires a flood, breaking the banks and stripping the soil from our foundation. We all stand like trees, pleased to keep our supply of the transcendent trickling into our roots from underground, feeling firm and fertile without necessarily wetting the feet. It's just those rare, solitary ones who bob precariously with wide eyes on the water's edge so meaningfully, when they stare out on the white, froth in such an unsettling way, groping and churning at it, simply trembling for the singular moment to come when they shall be bound away and submerged up to the mouth, nearly drowned in the pain and rapture of holy bliss. They are the ones who stir the vision that, in apathy, had nearly solidified before you, and it's then that you see what's really going on. It's then that you realize all the sublimely hectic motion that's filled your distracted eyes all along. I wait for these people all hours, for their willfulness strikes me like a force, rouses me, and tells me “Now's the time! Jump!” and they take me twisting into the unknown, bound forever wherever we ought, purified before the divinity, screaming to the water Epictetus' words, “I am of the same mind; I am one with Thee. I refuse nothing which seems good to Thee. Lead me whither Thou wilt!”

The slopes pushed and pulled me, rushing me onto the heights. I wound against the road's current until, finally, I could see its coils rising up like a flat black snake, being woken and filled on the mountainside. The morning air was hot again and cloudless, the tendrils of the sun sweeping on the valley pitch. I rose and pressed on with exertion to the inclining switchbacks of the mountain flanks. Sweat spilled all down my back, so I removed my shirt and draped it over my neck, wiping my wet face with its sleeve. To my left, chains of motorcycles burred over the asphalt, pilots bearded and goggled; on the right, a metal rail guarded me from the sheer drop which poured down the range's slope. Nothing could keep me from the top. I was Moses, summoned to the peak for divine rites, inflamed hedges guiding at every turn.

I'd be hard-pressed to overstate the dwarfing I felt, carving the side of that mountain. Every incremental moment, tramping across the country, had been the accumulated bursting forth of everything that had come before it, and how much more so at the passage of a mountain. From where I was now, with a mere glance to the east, all the distance of weeks past unfurled like a receding fog, revealing what had been done. This was the ramification of thousands of miles compiled. It's easy to see why the gods speak from the pinnacles. Things become so obvious, trivial, stripped small in this context. This was Mount Sinai or Zion, Mount Olympus or Mount Ida, Mount Haku-san, Fuji, and Tate-yama together, Hara Berezaiti, Mount Kailash or Mount Meru, all of them stacked up (because, remember, the holy mountain is everywhere). Here stood the axis of all, the source and the funnel, the flourish and the end of everything.

Its folds pulled me in. For two days I rode between them, the grounds laden with forest. Pale barren lakes of meadows stood isolated in swaths and dispersed, all stretching over the plateau's undulating surface like a decorated sea in suspension. When the meadows spread up to the roadside, the dim greens, as seen from a distance, gave way to a prism of coloration. Wildflowers appeared from what once seemed plain: variations of violet, yellow, azure and white all quivering and throwing themselves upward from the grasses to the sky. And the sun fell slowly behind the boundless ridge, drenching the solitary peaks in orange. A dim, cloud-lit sky was streamed through with the shifting hues of a rainbow face, the rotation of colors rolling west. The clouds burned in heed of the lowering light, and paled.

At the pass, I paused. I'd been stopping all along, at whatever sights caught me, but here I could look on all of what lay ahead. This was the other edge of the mountain, inclining to the west. There was snow still, in drifts on the highest slopes, white against brown stone, trickling pure crystal drops. Swelling within me was all the same as before, when I'd gazed from the mountain's opposite side to the past, but this view was to be contemplated with the gravity of the yet-to-be-decided. I stood my bike alongside the rail and sat, and breathed, eyes closed. Over the mountain's utmost brim came a chill wind, giving a thin whistle to the ear like the flute of some spirit crouched on the hillock behind me, sending his song quivering to whoever might hear. The thin air filled me up. I couldn't ask for more than any of this if there were any more to be had.

Distance seemed to radiate from me into infinite regressions below. The land wrapped past the horizon, bottomless lengths sloping away, circling fully round the planet's circumference, and rising up to this peak from its opposite side. The earth's a teardrop, not a sphere! Steeped in so much haze and volume of air, it could almost have been that nothing laid below, and this was simply a mountain-tip floating on the sky. But in the dim curvature of the earth, everything could faintly be seen. There, far away and barely traceable, the mountains of Yellowstone merged to the sky. Each lonesome speck between me and that distant ridge, reduced to appropriate size, neared what it truly was. When you see something from far enough away, all its unique features fade, and it becomes a smooth part of the folds around it. We float around on the surface thinking we're something we're not. Together, we're something greater.

A minivan turned off the road and parked. Out of it came a family, but for one child who stayed behind. They walked to the edge nearby to look out. “Pret-ty neat,” said the mother, hands on her sides looking over the edge for a second, to the end of the earth. They all shuffled back into their seats and resumed their way.

I returned to mine, too. With a bandana on my face, glasses, and hood on, I trailed the winding road down. Flying with full velocity, cold air burning at my cheeks and tears streaming, I came off the mountaintop to begin my wandering in the desert.

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.

Thinking Specks

 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.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

Mato Paha and the Clouds

An aroma of warmth and dry floated on the air from the south over the grasslands. The fields shined gold under lowering light, shadows lengthening on the rippled landscape. From the side of the highway snaked a dirt road, two brown parallel tracks winding through the empty stretch toward the distant rays of the sun. It led through a space undeveloped, unoccupied, and relatively undisturbed, a lone island among quilted monochrome patterns of crops in repetitious rows I'd left in the east, behind me. This land held a diversity of life written with rhythm and order legible to the eyes of nature alone. I rode the bare ruts, climbed upward and coasted down from the hillsides. Moved generally west, off the map, knowing it would lead me right. Throngs of cows ranged on the slopes or stood in the crevices steeping their heads in scummy dark ponds with soft ripples round their faces. They'd bellow out to me in unison as I pedaled between them, some startling and some turning to me with their eyes wide at my strange intrusion.

The primitive road wound a ridge round a hillside, affording me a panorama on the open extents of the east, and then bent its broad face to the open south. I pushed up the hill, sweat spidering on my forehead. On the path ahead stood a jackrabbit. It, slender and tall, with long legs paralyzed, looked along the grassy middle of the road. Its probing nose turned to the side, and it watched me in its glassy black eyes' periphery. I came to a stop to study its shape, but the scrape of my shoe on the gravel sparked it to flight. It bounded away on all fours, hopping like a whitetail does in high grass. With its huge linen ears flopping behind, it disappeared down the hill into the shroud of blooming goldenrod and sagebrush.

Over the western hills the sun faded into orange. I set my tent juxtaposed to the hard white flowers of a hillside yucca, unrolled my sleeping bag over my pad inside and sat myself down. Lying back and resting my tired head on a bunched up sweater, I gazed up through the mesh at a bright pearl moon as it rose into the dark above the flickering eastern clouds. Tomorrow it would storm. Stars began to pierce the overhead darkness, one at a time at first as the last salmon hues drained from the sky, then came in a flood of pale light flowing like spilled cream along the plane of the Milky Way. Wandering cows murmured a song into the silver grass, moonlit at my hill's base, and the sound wafted through the night, lulling me into dreamless sleep.

The clouds overhead were overcast and dull. To the south the rain curved away from the sky, bending and flowing in heed of an unbroken wind. The two lanes of asphalt wound like a thread to the distance, withering to point of infinite smallness at the Earth's true horizon. Little raindrops dotted the pavement. Whatever dregs of hope I grasped at that morning under a dismal sky evaporated when the rain began to fall. It was always that way. There was no shelter in sight, and I wouldn't delude myself into hoping for any soon. I was able to see as far into the fielded emptiness ahead as I could ever have wished to, but it yielded no reassurance in these blank plains.

A rickety red and white pickup slowed into the opposing shoulder ahead and came to idle halfway off the road. A man wearing an old trucker cap and beard of deep gray looked out from the rolled down window and waited for me. Then, as I approached, in a kind of shy way motioned to me. I recognized the truck from a minute earlier when he'd passed me by, looking at me in his mirrors, and remembered that the bed had been mostly empty, so I went over to greet him.

“Not the best day for a ride. Where are you from? I'm heading east if you might be wanting a ride through this rain. Only looks worse farther on there.” He helped me to fit my bike in the truck bed atop some stray metal pipes, and then he cleared off the passenger seat of loose papers, some old batteries and plastic bottles, sweeping everything onto the disheveled floor with his leathery hand.

I introduced myself and with a warm smile and handshake he told me his name was Clay. A glint in his eyes and the congenial creases of his face betrayed a timid sort of excitement, and childlike delight at having some company on his lonely drive. He turned back to the road, “That brim of rock up ahead, you see, is called Custer forest. I'm really not too bright, you know, but I think going up and over that hill would not have been at all kind to your equipments.” Then he said curiously downtrodden, “But, what do I know?” The string of highway bent south, turning away from that eroded cusp of chalky gray spread which he had pointed at, prevailing over the otherwise flat horizon. At its foot the tranquil green of South Dakota bowed and was broken into rugged disarray.

Some time later we'd come nearer to the dark blue clouds and streaks of lightning hanging over the vast plain southward. Down in the distance a hundred miles off stood the lone peak of a butte with the heavy sloping shoulders of an idle behemoth, pivoting for long eons under the plied earthen crust. Its hazy blue figure dominated the landscape, standing above its less ominous flat headed brethren. “That's all the Slim Buttes down there a ways. And that, the big one, that's Bear Butte there, a holy place for all the Plains Indians. Mato Paha they call it.”

The face of bare rock, the dark forests and thundering clouds; all of it amid the scope of the docile surrounding plains put a shudder in me. The crown of Bear Butte penetrating a full and fecund sky breathed of pure beauty and awe. We continued in silence.

We came into Newell, a small town where Clay left me and my bike in the parking lot of a western style restaurant. I rode around searching for some kind of shelter from the rain while it continued falling in the streets. On the edge of town I found an old baseball field and in one of the dugouts decided to lay down on a long wooden bench. Rain drops drummed on the aluminum roof. It was a bleak afternoon and I fell swiftly to sleep wondering if it were possible that the sky, filled with clouds, might be blue when I awoke.

The sky stayed smeared gray, but the pitter-patter abated toward a pace I could stand, so I started riding. Belle Fourche (bell-foosh), a big town, cropped up with its buildings on the dark northernmost remnants of Dakota's Black Hills. I took indoors at the library when a second, thicker, downpour began to fall. All the contents of the sky seemed to be spilling out on the other side of the glass pane. Then sudden blue holes filled wherever variance formed in the overcast. Streams of sunlight fell from them on the town, throwing delicate street corners and vibrant shop rows and misty people with umbrellas to reflections in the roadway puddles, trembling. And a high wind blew me west, my tires spattering forth beyond the town roads, the cattle exchange, auto junk shops, to the highway again.

Blood beat in my veins as I pushed my pedals hard but in gust-driven ease. A stone littered hill rose on my north. I stopped and went towards it through a break in the barbed roadside fence to make camp away from the highway. Pulling the bike through the sparse grass I realized too late that the ground was unnavigable mud, my shoes and tires caked and heavy with sod. My bike no longer rolled. I heaved its weight a foot at a time back to the road, resigning to make my bed in the ditch. Purple sunset pulled under the uniform blanket cloud which rolled over all the west. Illuminated not far off by the fleeting yellow headlights of vehicles, was a sign: the bucking silhouette of a cowboy on his bronco over the glorious, bold title, “Wyoming”.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

The Rodeo

A subtle breeze flowed with the hours, following our six-wheeled caravan's procession between the pastures. Strands of wheat brushed on the warmth of the air in waves and folds, heeding the wind. A line of black cows ambled in the patches of grass of an enclosed hillside, staring blankly on our moving figures with dark, fixed eyes as we went. Watching us, their heads shifted in intervals like a clock's ticking hand. Adam put his thumb and finger to his mouth and sent a great whistle piercing through the open silence. The cows roused from their reverie and started, only a few at first, plodding alongside the fence. Then followed the group with young calves hinged to swaying tails and heels of their cows.

We reached a pale town called McIntosh and decided to stop for the day. The main street of it broke from the highway, harboring a lonely shop with a rickety screen door and a faded post office amid a line of nondescript building faces. Beside these was a playground park and a blue water tower standing high on its four narrow metal legs, the only thing breaking the surface of the one story town. We rolled our bikes into the park and settled down by a covered picnic table.

Christie went off down the street for a walk to more closely examine things. I dug hastily through one of my panniers for my stove, ready to boil some ramen for dinner and then set up on the table.

Christie returned carrying a grocery bag in one hand. She sat down across from me and gave me a peculiar look.

“That's not a very substantial meal,” she said, removing a box of cheese crackers from the bag. She broke open the box and slid it over the table toward me.

“Did you name your bike yet?” she asked.

I told her it was called Yakul. “It's from a movie.”

“We both just got around to naming ours. It's weird the things people name. We met a family who was living in an RV and they'd given it a name.”

“I've been investigating what it is that makes people do it,” Adam said, sitting down and leaning forward, “So far, it seems to me that once an object acquires a meaning and purpose from somebody, more so than it can have in and of itself, once that's happened, it gets a name. The people with the RV named it Puff. Apparently their kid had named it.”

“So what do you call yours?” I wondered.

Christie pointed and looked toward their bikes, leaning on a near tree, “Mine's Ontwa. Adam's is named Jenny.”

“Like Forrest Gump's boat, if you've seen it,” Adam said, nodding.

“And what's Ontwa mean?”

“There's actually a story behind that,” Christie started. “So a while ago when we were riding through Minnesota we came by a street that was Christina Road. Christina's my full name. And then the next street was Adam Street (or maybe Road?). But that's crazy, right? The next street after that even was Juneau Street. Juneau is the name of our dog in Connecticut, so obviously this was destiny or something. I told Adam that whatever the name of the next street was we would have to name our first kid. But it might have been a mistake, because the next street was Ontwa Road. I decided it would be a better idea to just name my bike Ontwa, so I did that instead.”

Christie disappeared over a hill ahead, coffee-saturated blood pumping in her veins, and Adam pushed as best he could to keep up. I fell behind them both, keeping a slow morning pace, distracted from time by the eloquent folds of land on either side of me. The road bent around a hillside and, slowly, a town of substantial size relative to those we'd seen recently was revealed in the distance. Coming into it, I found Christie and Adam in the packed parking lot of a gas station, waving me down as I approached.

“I told you she does that, didn't I,” Adam said in reference to Christie's morning energy, “And do you see all this?” They were both looking on the bustle of vehicles bouncing around on the lot and the road.

Looking down the length of the main street which ran along the station's side I saw parked cars lined on left and right, pick-ups and cars filling the designated diagonal spaces and spilling onto lawns and everywhere else not actively prohibited. A yellow sheet of paper taped up in the gas station window explained the cause with a bold-faced headline, “Lemmon Boss Cowman Rodeo! Friday, Saturday, Sunday.” We were at the local hub, the densest town a hundred miles out, and on the primary occasion of the year: rural life jubilee for western times past.

We went into the station and bought some food to eat for lunch. I came out after them and we pedaled down the street to find a table. Instead we discovered the origin of all the weekend's hubbub. 

A full public block, framed on all sides by haphazardly strewn vehicles, was occupied with the celebration. White pavilions were propped up over lines of plastic tables. Everywhere were mustached men under ten-gallon hats with plaid cotton shirts tucked neatly into iron-pressed Wranglers. Neither stitch nor crease was out of place. Each was bound up by his leather belt and great gleaming buckle, jogging among the jumbled crowd with paper plate and pop in hand, or else standing tall with thumbs hooked on his pocket brims, surveying the crowd with soft eyes and lips curled in a smile of deep approval, polished boots planted wide and firmly in the grass. The women beamed with warmth at each other, their faces shining, scrutinizing each others' skirts and elaborately jeweled collared shirts, the permed or straightened hair meticulously done up. Children bounced around inside a giant inflated castle. They were perfect replicas of their parents and wore the same costumes.

Everyone gathered with their neighbors hoping to preserve a culture that had been stripped and made virtually obsolete by modernity. In their way they meant to glorify the dead cowboy, revive the settler, the trailblazing American past, and honor the tradition of the hardy Western nudge. But behind the simple facade lay an unintended mockery. Their visions were unconsciously distorted by what had become of the place, the country. They were each a glorified image following after a fairy tale born of movies; cosmetic imitations of a somber and rugged past reality. They celebrated themselves, their own unsoiled, over-civilized lives, making an innocent show of an idolized fantasy.

They were excited. Murmurs floated about between the tables describing what was expected of the wild rodeo to come in the evening. Men in bright shirts and leather chaps would lasso from horseback, rope and tie the calves, or strive for the most seconds spent tightly gripping the strap atop an aggravated bull or a bronco's back. They were proud, simple, honest, and pleased with the pomp and daring of it, even if it were diluted of the utility which had made it great. I couldn't begrudge them anything.

It was only early afternoon when we'd finished our meal. Adam and Christie stayed for the show to see the lingering fragments of the West. I knew there remained riding to do that day so I bid them goodbye, leaving them to celebrate with the people. Further solitary distance laid ahead.


Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

The Plains

A panorama of divine blue shown over a terrestrial pool, issuing a pale imitation of the scattered light and greater hues above it from its lesser body. Westward the water broadened. In its limited scope, it mimicked the infinite image of deep, pure sky, this lesser half complimenting its twin. The reflected symmetry was softly divided by a distant arboreal horizon, unifying forded east to coming west.

Now on the blank prairie a rare tree stood, robust, overlooking its company of grass-laden hills and beloved neighboring window lake. A subtle breeze folded through the open, pulling ripples across the lake's crystalline surface, brushing between the twiddling leaves of the tree. The limber bows were galvanized into a tendril dance of vivid, mystic motions. It waved as I passed.

A pheasant, in brilliant coat to match the prismatic season erupted from the green depths of the roadside and clucked away, flapping its wings violently on the quiet air, descending, then fading beneath the strands of grass at a distance, safe from my threat. On a pond, a terrorized mother duck bugled her warning, pressed and ushered on her startled ducklings, all who scooted forward with spurts across the surface toward a shroud of yellow-gray reeds and tall green leaves sprouting up round the water's edge, thrusting a quivering trail behind them in their paddle-foot retreat.

The hills grew in height as I approached the Missouri. It snaked a path between the green, waving lands, swollen and raised by northern flood rains, distributing the eroded soils of agriculture southward. At Mobridge I crossed the river and followed west into further open prairies and bounding hills, all vacant but for the purple and yellow kaleidoscope of wildflowers sprouting from the wild grasses. A trailing length of wire fence paralleled the roadside, and an occasional distant, solitary unit of reservation housing stood on the plain, a dirt drive bending over the land from each.

Distance and duration between towns increased. I was entering what was once the Western frontier, and it was evident by the names of the towns (Little Eagle, Thunder Hawk, White Butte) and also in the tangible feeling of an absence in the land. The towns Bison, and then Buffalo passed by, both dull and forgotten, the surrounding lands all vacant of their namesake. These empty hills were meant for the bison to roam, slowly walking, massive, brown faces and beards dipped to the ground, gnashing blades of grass in rows of teeth; a collection of broad shoulders, chests, forelegs, and heads draped with matted fur; bald sinewy bodies and rears in spring shedding the last tethers of fur from winter; cloven hooves dug into the soil beneath the great weight; wild horns bending from the skulls' opposite hemispheres to the burning sun; a fluid unit of life flowing, undulating over the slopes; literal behemoths plowing the land, pausing occasionally, throwing themselves with a great rumble on a barren patch and rolling in the dust, great clouds billowing to the sky; the vast body spreading and multiplying, dispensing seeds and perpetuating the prairie and enduring the annual, disparate shifts in climate; docile, black eyes looking patiently on a frozen white landscape, penetrating arrows of wind flowing over and around the phalanx; curling drifts sculpt round the solid matriarchal ring, they themselves a bulwark against the frigid months, unwintered young shivering in the sheltered core; insulating beards and locks grown thick and long on their bodies in the designated season, gathering lengths of frost to them as they stand stalwart, patient, wind-blazoned, or trudging through the barren expanse; steam rising from the nostrils, staring on white space, preserving their lives, strong, resolute, beyond humility or pride. I see their absence, an invisible scar of a once richer west spent.

Plains undulated to every distance, rolling, rolling with brushing wind. The tops of silos and a water tower on the horizon laid along the length of road, peaking above the grassy waves. Old wooden buildings, weathered by centuries and faded, grew toward me and I came to a gas station, a propped up pickup shedding its parts in the oily garage. The prairies here were all designated reservations. A few native men hung out in front of the shop window in greasy t-shirts, shooting the breeze on their midday work break. I went into the station, bought some chips and refilled my water, the next town being thirty miles off and without a guarantee there'd be a station there. I had to keep better stock of my supplies now.

I threw my leg over top of my bike, kicked my foot into its strap cage, and started pedaling off the lot. Squinting down the street the way I'd come from I saw two odd shifting dots on the roadside. I stood and waited, with excitement growing, and decided it had to be two far off people on packed bikes riding through these same afternoon plains toward town. Once they'd come closer to the station I distinguished clearly a guy and girl, hauling along on white bikes with four saddle bags each strapped to the sides. They wore black spandex shorts and matching riding jerseys, helmets strapped on, crowing their heads, and every exposed inch of skin colored brown by so many cycles of the sun. These were clean adventurers in all the vestments of their trade. Everything between the two matched. They coasted across from the street's far shoulder, hopped up the curb and squeezed on their brakes to a stop on the sidewalk beside me, meeting my big smile and wide eyes with great smiles and eyes of their own.

Through an exchange and brief talk we told each other of our separate origins, routes, and destinations and I came to know them each as Adam and Christie. They were pausing here at the station for lunch. Christie unhooked a pannier from her bike, “You want to come hang out for a bit?” I grabbed my chips, followed into the store's meager deli, and we each took seats in the folding chairs at the solitary square table.

Christie unbuckled the pannier she was carrying and removed a bag of tortillas, placing two on the table. Adam tore neat corners from two mayonnaise packets, and then drew a winding white line over each of the tortillas middles with finesse gained only from routine. Christie carved the top off a tuna can and spooned dollops over the mayo. Adam waited with eager eyes and then trickled almonds and cranberries on top of it all from a clear plastic bag. “It's kind of like having chicken salad,” he explained while he rolled his up, grinning in response to my quizzical look. “Anyway, we've experimented and rotated meals quite a bit by now, and this just never seems to get old.” Everyone really does develop their own unique patterns.

They'd been out since January, crossing bitter New Mexican colds under the freeze and blizzards of the southern Rockies. Across they'd gone through Kansas and Missouri flats, the bayou Louisianan coasts, bridging the Mississippi, Florida panhandle, pointing noses north to Maine, stretching themselves across the east in the flourishing green spring, then bending route west, and rolling out a similar path to what I'd done since Ohio. Come mid-October they hoped to have hit at least a piece of every state on the way to a continental finish in Washington state. “Then once we get there we'll take off on a Pacific ferry from Seattle for Alaska, and spend a few days riding round Anchorage,” pulling a full-circle in the seasons before one final jump to the island paradises in Hawaii, completing their self-propelled circumnavigation of the country.

“What's been your favorite state in all your travels?” Christie asked me for comparison.

“South Dakota,” I responded instinctively. “Maybe it's just because I'm here now, and it's most rich to me since it's most recent, but I love every part of this land. The barren wilds of the Badlands to the fields and fields of crops. It gets me and I get it. What about you?”

“We liked Wisconsin a lot. It's all trees and hills, beautiful, all picturesque, and the most kind people and positive experiences, I think. Plus we had nice weather the whole time. It was just simple and beautiful riding through there.”

I started thinking about where we were now in all this land, how, out of the immense length and breadth of it, in our slow paces we crossed ways here. A great expanse of thousands and thousands of miles behind us and now we sat, in the midst of months with months yet to follow, and so many unseen things lying beyond the fielded horizon.

I looked out on the peaceable plains, and I wondered why I'd said that this place, of it all, was my favorite. Maybe this was still home? but no, that was limited to the ways of nostalgia and reminiscence now. It didn't harbor that feeling for me anymore. If it had once fully possessed that position, those days were old and gone to me. Its people and soil were known to me and pleasing, its scent and sight satisfying to my discontented depths. Its substance was integrated with me more so than the substance of any other save one: Arizona. That raw state of infinite canyons, the points of the San Francisco peaks, the towering pines there, the transitory Flagstaff streets, the three mesas and their prophetic tribes: all these own the same perfection I find in Dakota's stalks of corn, the pristine stillness of the Black Hills in winter, a copper sun on the primordial Badlands, or quartzite columns on the Split Rock Creek. All of these, in thought and presence, comforted and placated me. Both put me in a reverence still (and always would), but were these those things which defined for me home?

My past and childhood, a strangely nomadic modern American life, which was defined by a chain of migrations, my parents and sister and I tossing each year between the various states and regions during my most impressionable age, instilled in me a grand appreciation for the beauty that is perpetual change. My home has exceeded the boundaries of states. It be only this country, America, having held me all my life, who has served me as home. Her parts had cradled and grown me in her arms, turning me over in her many fingered hands, bringing me up to intimately know the textures of her various touch. Only America as a whole, herself, may claim what her individual parts cannot. She alone is my land and my home; she alone, my bed and my rest.

My new friends were going west along the same road as me, the only road, and so we went on together for the next couple days' ride. There was a warmth in their company and the brightness in their eyes. They had a well of perfectly measured friendliness that begged to be drawn from. We all wanted to take the country, so we did.




Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4. Just click those numbers and enjoy! Off to Mexico for a week, then more posts.