Mitchell Pass, Neb.

Chimney Rock--the Eighth Wonder of the World, as emigrants called it

Jail and Courthouse Rocks, Neb.

Ruts at the base of Windlass Hill, Neb.

Windmill outside of Ogallala, Neb.

Landmarks of a former age (Part 3)

Calves in the grassy draws, the early morning sun slanted crosswise across the Nebraska sandhills layering contrasting swaths of light and shadow over a protuberant and gullied terrain. One and a half centuries ago a man named T. Parker traveled this same route and saw these selfsame hills and valleys and felt the warmth of the same morning sun and carved his mark on a naked bluff a hundred miles from here, and his presence somehow lingers if not on this hallowed trail then in my mind, a stranger but an invited guest nonetheless. Sojourners together on the western road.

I think of him often as we stand beside the road photographing an old wooden windmill and listening to the sweet fluted notes of a western meadowlark, or staring up a deeply-eroded gulch where wagons were once lowered from the heights by ropes and prayers. He was no relation but a name found decades ago inscribed on Register Cliff near Guernsey, Wyo. The shock of that encounter lingers to this bright day as together we at last come to the landmarks that captivated a fledgling nation.

Windlass Hill is the first such mark, contoured in the early sun and painted with wildflowers and sagebrush. We strip the silvery leaves from the plant and inhale deeply its pungent aroma and stride toward the crest, the trail nearly vertical as if designed to prove its perpendicularity. Coming down in a fully-loaded wagon must have been death-defying, but the base was reward enough in rich meadows and cool springs, the most famous of which is Ash Hollow a few miles downstream. It’s here that any questions of where the west begins are answered in the incontrovertible presence of yucca, Rocky Mountain juniper, black-billed magpie and two-tailed swallowtail. The east is behind us.

The hill and springs were merely obstacle and replenishment. The real landmarks are yet to come, those that dominated horizons and imagination and earned the recognition that eastern humidity and the prairie itself were departing, that a new land was hoving into view. The North Platte below Ash Hollow might be a ribbon of clear blue water with the air above speckled with terns and swallows of every kind, but the green blush of vegetation dries up rapidly as the gently rounded knolls erode into rocky bluffs and the river lies naked beneath a blazing sky. Portions of it are now forested with Russian olives, an unknown species when T. Parker rolled through. 

Neither were the signs marking today’s westward trail, of course: “Merrill County—livestock friendly,” read one, leading us to question whether the cows and horses were personable or if the county itself welcomed domesticated stock in preference to, say, the unwashed masses of humanity, like birders; another said “Mitchell’s—Guns, Ammo, Crafts.” 

“Must be married,” Jim said grimly.

And then there were the signs that became a ubiquitous presence wherever we stopped: “Warning: Rattlesnakes common in this area.” We laughed at them for the government’s penchant for stating the obvious. We warned each other in grave overtones whenever we stepped from the vehicle, as if snakebite were a certainty. We ridiculed the political correctness that made such signs necessary as a hedge however slight against base and frivolous lawsuits. We laughed across Nebraska and halfway through Wyoming to Independence Rock, where Chod had a very close encounter with a prairie rattler. After a sobering moment where we almost got serious, Jim and I cracked up and asked him if he’d bothered to read the damn signs.

“There aren’t any here!” Chod snapped peevishly. And, indeed there weren’t. Go figure.

The Courthouse and Jail were the first real geologic wonders of the trail, massive rock fortifications jutting from the sandy plains in an impressive array nevertheless all out of sorts with impressions left on today’s travelers. Many emigrants wrote that the stretch between the rocks and Scotts Bluff were the most scenic in the world. I watched for them long before they came into sight and then had to agree with Jim’s assessment: “This must be one of the least photogenic rocks in the world.”

In all fairness they looked better from the south, but a vast prairie dog colony filled with burrowing owls created a living foreground every bit as good as the vista. A dusty backroad took us over the rocky spine of the Wildcat Hills and descended into the Platte valley where we found a vast shimmering playa filled with shorebirds and waterfowl. In the distance the thin spire of Chimney Rock raked the sky. 

It was yet miles off but still riveting, an inverted funnel with a broad whitened base and a thin conical shaft rising 120 feet. No other landmark on the Oregon Trail so captured the wonder and awe of the emigrants, and for today’s expectant travelers it is no different. My first view of the obelisk was set to the music of screeching yellow-headed blackbirds, piping avocets and a chorus of frogs that wove a wild and primitive soundtrack into my consciousness. 

Scott’s Bluff, a few miles farther, was even more stunning. Today’s highway wends through majestic Mitchell’s Pass even as the original trail did, flanked by Eagle Rock and Sentinel Rock as if gateways to Wyoming. Indeed, atop the bluff one can see the faint blue triangular outline of Laramie Peak—the Rocky Mountains at last.

We were at the summit taking photographs when a park ranger approached Chod. He was hunched over a cactus with his lens a few inches from a scarlet blossom and glanced up as a shadow fell over him. The ranger was slim and fit and garbed in an exquisitely starched uniform.

“That’s a prickly pear,” he announced, enunciating each word slowly as if Chod were an idiot. The temperature on the crest plunged a good 30 degrees.

“I lead prairie tours,” Chod said icily. “I know what this is.”

The ranger disappeared without further ado.

Jim and I looked at each other and then at Chod. He was clearly irritated.

“That’s a prickly pear,” I said.

“Oh, shut up.”

(To be continued)

Almost the West (Part 2)

Jim once said that the greatest thing ever invented was the automatic dishwasher, followed in short order by the washing machine. “But” he admitted, “I’m lazy.”  

My own list is both long and fluid, its nature and substance changing with varying situations and fluctuating interests, such as the week we spent tenting in hot, humid South Carolina and felt upon our return that nothing could be finer than a simple refrigerator. I’d stand in front of the fridge grinning like an idiot while opening and closing the door, marveling each time at the miracle of cold beer and food without the mess of ice. For this moment, though, I’d rate paved roads as one of the preeminent inventions in history, and motorized vehicles to wend them.

I-80 across southern Nebraska, a modern four-lane superhighway paralleling the green ribbon of the North Platte River, speeds us toward western skies. Beneath us was once another road, a broad sandy path a mile or more wide, dotted with white shapes like “sailing vessels I had often seen on Lake Erie,” wrote Phoebe Judson in 1853. Dr. Thomasson declared it “level and smooth as a plank floor.” Rebecca Ketcham, writing in 1853, said it was as wide as eight or ten common roads back in the States, and with a little work could be made into one of the “most beautiful roads in the world.”

It’s impossible to drive this stretch without thinking of the emigrants who risked everything to start new lives in the west. Their experiences are as fresh today as they were back then, kept alive in journals and diaries and collected in such works as “The Great Platte River Road,” by Merrill Mattes. No other book so fully captures the excitement, wonder and hardship of travelers on the Oregon Trail through Nebraska. And to think: if conditions were favorable, they managed 40 miles a day; if not, 10 could be hoped for. We’re rocketing along at 70 miles an hour, a fact that puts the westward movement into stunning perspective. 

Nor could they run from supercells and tornadoes, as we did. Lightning killed oxen or stampeded cattle, hail knocked them senseless, wind sent wagons cartwheeling. After particularly wet storms the flat valley turned into a quagmire, miring wagons up to the axles. 

There are other parallels between the emigrants and our own codgernautical journey. Mattes remarked that the endless shimmering valley had a hypnotic effect upon travelers. “The monotony of the Platte makes one drowsy,” Peter Burnett wrote, and Rebecca Ketcham offered, “We are all afflicted with drowsiness.” One hundred fifty-five years later, Chod and Jim collapse on their hotel beds in the town of Ogallala and fall asleep at once. I have a brief pang of doubt about journeying with my elders and then digging my binoculars out of my duffel slip quietly out the door. 

***

Where does the West begin? Somehow I missed the 100th meridian, the fabled longitudinal demarcation bisecting the nation, but on a small pond behind the hotel I find a western grebe. The medium-sized waterfowl keeps company with a lesser scaup and a raft of coots, swimming lazily in circles or tucking its black-crowned head beneath a wing. I’m a little tired myself but unwilling to subject myself to a darkened room just yet, and so make my way around the pond on a hard-packed trail. The grebe is the first western species seen so far, leading me to wonder if the west is really more imagination than destination. An absurd idea, quickly quashed. For most of my life I lived in the west and considered myself a westerner first and an American second and the gap between the two was distant indeed. Wide as the Platte, to coin a phrase. Here in this small Nebraskan city I’ve lost my bearings even while retaining a modicum of cardinal directions, thanks mostly to the wooded path of the river. I decide that the bird will have to do: I’ve left the east behind. 

Without mountains on the horizon it’s never that easy, of course. When I break out of the trees a dirt road separates me from a line of small cottonwoods, their leaves clattering in a breeze. I want to dip a foot into the river but it’s evident what I’m seeing are sandy channels watered only during snowmelt, and the river somewhere beyond a menacing growth of waxy fronds of the triple-leaf variety. It’s a bit early to chance a rash so I strike off to the right, the sun at my back casting a shadow far before me like some animated caricature pumping its arms and legs in a skeletal jitterbug. 

Behind me the parking lot fills with travelers seeking shelter for the night. I imagine the wooded bottoms filling with wagons, the creak of harnesses and iron-shod wheels and the pungent aroma of cookfires. They, too, looked for the west even as I do now, and it comes to me that their west began with the sentinel rocks lying ahead. Perhaps boundaries are precise only on maps and never on the ground where our lives unfold. On the heels of the thought a bobwhite flushes and sails across the road. I hear the slurry whistle of an eastern bluebird. Eastern and western kingbirds chitter and scold. A pewee perches on a naked limb not 10 feet away and I cannot tell its orientation until it utters a thin trill identifying it as an eastern species. In the fading light an olive-sided flycatcher, larger, darker, with a streaked breast, cuts loose with a quick, three beers!, a sentiment I wholeheartedly ascribe to. The bird is as misplaced as I am, caught in a place that’s neither east nor west but somewhere in between. On the banks of the Great Platte River Road, we’re all emigrants still.

Flee the wind (Part 1)

Afterwards, Lori asked if I’d had fun, and I said, for the most part, and she asked what I’d liked best. I thought for a long moment and then took her in my arms and said, coming home.

***

Our codgernautical quest was supposed to be about companionship, about photography, about birds and birding, about floras and faunas not our own but montane, desert, prairie, sandhill, riverine. It was about the American West and the emigrant movement that opened this nation even as it signaled the beginning of the end for its native inhabitants. It was about exploration and adventure and getting away. It was all that and more, and less even, and carried its own weight of loss in things we left behind but never fully abandoned, fixed in each breath we took, each thought, each dream, a second shadow accompanying us to the West.

We launched with certain things understood as potentials, and the shadows they cast were long and grim: atmospheric conditions ideal for the formation of supercells and long-path tornadoes; our house under construction and Lori’s job demands more than anticipated, Jim’s wife awaiting biopsy results. It was, in retrospect, probably unwise to depart when we did. That I write this with the perfect clarity of hindsight is a given that must be understood. It is the underlying principle for all that follows, the glue that binds this tale.

(For mine is the godlike eye seeing the past in its entirety and poring over its structure, scrutinizing minutiae, actions, subtle nuances of inflection and intonation, striving to determine patterns and geometries pertaining to our ultimate fates, and in all ultimately failing. An inconsolable deity, encumbered by incomplete notes and recollections, prejudices, fears and fallacies, burdened with unanswerable questions and perhaps more content for it, with a latent yearning for simple slumber without dreams. A mere mortal after all.)

And so we went, our horizons before and behind indefinite from an excess of humidity, the sky above ponderous with rain, the fields below drenched and riven with gullies like raw bleeding wounds. A dam breached. Pastures submerged. Evidences of a changing climate and harbingers of more to come, and the western skies darkening with each passing mile.

Cows on the road were the first danger. I’ve driven that section of Highway 36 a hundred times or more and never encountered any form of wildlife save a family of raccoons late one night, and yet that solo free-ranging bovine was merely the first. More followed, leading me to wonder about the alleged mystical ability of mammals to forecast violent weather or natural catastrophes, normally manifested in an edgy restlessness, if you believe the tales. Jim said that several times he’d crossed snakes on that road and every time thereafter encountered heavy rain. Some sixth sense, perhaps, touched by atmospheric pressure, temperature spikes, even unknown qualities science can only surmise. And all the while the word “supercell” stuck in my brain like a bur, and I turned it this way and that as if to dissect it and in doing so lessen its menace.

It seems a distinctly Midwestern term. Residents from other parts of the country must think it something else entirely, a particularly efficient form of battery or maximum security prison housing the worst of the worst. To a Nebraskan, a Kansan, a resident of the prairie states, supercell is a bogeyman word, a nightmare with which to threaten unruly children, a curse, its every syllable and vowel dripping with evil. If any comfort can be drawn from the idea of a supercell, it’s that the devil unleashed is blind and unwitting, preying without favor or remonstrance on righteous and unrighteous alike.

It’s possible the cows were a warning. As we ate a quick sandwich at a park in Norton, we sniffed the air and felt in our bones its very instability. By the time we crossed into Nebraska the skies were black and the wind rising. Several lonely houses scarred with past storm damage went past, a storage shed reduced to twisted sheets of metal strewn across a soggy field, trees smashed flat or whipped to bare stalks. A large falcon winged by and we tracked it but could not agree on an identification, peregrine or prairie. Our attentions irrevocably diverted  toward that which moved to intersect us.

Some thunderstorms can be avoided, some not. This one spread across the earth consuming everything in its path and rumbling cavernously spit fire and darkness. In my mind the word supercell gained ascendance like a supplication or invocation to a disaffected spirit. A midnight wall of water raced toward us. Jim cursed gripping the wheel white-knuckled and stared balefully out the windshield on a world gone amorphous and liquid. Jagged forks of lightning exploded in the sudden night as if some great machine were short-circuiting, and us trapped within, but faintly, ever so faintly, our eyes trained on a paler shade of gray to our left, a safe haven if we could reach it. Chod flipped the radio to a channel static with blips and beeps and advisories. Hail ricocheted off the hood like bullets.

“Should we pull over and wait it out?” Jim yelled.

Before we could answer a sign passed spectrally announcing Red Willow State Recreation Area. The announcer broke in warning of a tornado on the ground at the selfsame location. Its direction almost matched ours as did its rate of speed. Jim accelerated and tersely told us to watch his back but there was little visible in the rear view mirrors but a pluvial twilight laced with fire.

So we fled and the storm pursued, but roads follow cardinal points and storms do not and after a while we broke free, and with all thoughts of tenting abolished we at last joined the green ribbon of the great Platte River Road and turning followed it toward the West.

(To be continued)

This green dream

Mouse munching in the cupboard to my left. Or is it—? No, Sheba’s lying by her special bowl on my right, splayed out with one eye cocked my way and a gleam lucent within that brown orb denoting a contentment I wish were mine. Me of all creatures forever dissatisfied, even if only passively, even if furtively, secretly, forever wanting more, and here at my feet a lesson for the ages. I find myself unconsciously shaking my head, eyes burning with exhaustion. How much actual sleep did I get last night? My addled mind struggles to do the math and arrives at last with a calculation of three hours. Maybe less. Maybe a shade more. Not enough. And not just a lack of sleep but fevered dreams and tormented thoughts dragging me into places no sane person would dare go, and now the dawn and dark overcast skies and the faint tap-tapping of rain dancing on the downspout and a mouse munching in the cupboard and Sheba nodding her furry head haughtily at me as if to say, “Are you going to let it do that?”

No. I remove my glasses and setting them carefully on the desk take two fingers and massage my eyes until ghostly halos electrify that interior darkness. I want to lose myself in that night and have no time for it but the sensation is so alluring and profound it’s almost erotic. With a sigh I wearily lift myself from the chair and root in the pantry until I locate the trap. It’s buried beneath a 12-pack of paper towels, which I move aside to clear space. The trap’s jaws yawn wide and latch snugly but snap without warning like some rabid dog turning on its master. My pulse rockets into overdrive. I wonder how many people have mangled fingers or suffered heart seizures by touchy mousetraps. A reverse sort of expiration or bone-splintering. Do mice privately rejoice at such times? Questions without answers. Useless ponderings of a sleep-starved brain. Time for work.

Stepping outside is to enter an emerald chamber painted with a thousand shades of green, the air warm and humid and soft on the skin like a caress and redolent of tropical breezes far beyond the farthest green ridge. Kansas summers aren’t slow to arrive such as the cuckoos and goatsuckers lollygagging their way northward from Yucatan jungles and Panamanian estuaries but sudden, explosive, irresistible. Our winter-logged minds stagger at the pace of change, the sheer random fecundity, the riotous transformation of brittle, colorless desiccation to teeming growth, and never more disconcertingly than when overwrought by sleeplessness and haunted dreams. I pause by the car and take it all in or as much as anyone can, tracing in my mind’s eye the erratic path of Juganine Creek and seeing behind that green veil an invitation to a world few enter or care to tread. 

I am never at my best when this weary, nor when my mind roams a different plane altogether, one of western skies and mountains upthrust into a cerulean sky or even redrock canyons echoing with rivers swollen from snowmelt and the land spare and unfinished somehow. And leaving, which exacts its own toll. I’m grateful for a long weekend spent in Lori’s companionship but now comes the workweek and nights alone and packing for a journey and the inevitable goodbye. 

Chimney swifts chitter a farewell and I’m off, music playing, coffee hot and working its indelible magic, the drive relaxed and long enough to allow me to settle into my bones. Almost lucid on arrival, getting in the groove, and somehow the day passes as they do and I come out the other side wondering where I was and what I might have done, if my words were any good or interspersed with exhortative notes to don’t forget flashlight or charge batteries or get hay for Sheba. The road reversed and a new weariness descending, and a host of new questions, too, what to cook for supper, when will I see Lori again. Where will my dreams take me tonight.

Half-awake, lost in thought, I see the elevated towers of Lynn far off and a single shaft of sunlight breaking through the low clouds and the atmosphere hazy and velvet and it seems like a dream but not the normal dreams of cities paralyzed with traffic or dark hallways but one I dreamed long ago in a time before this was real. I sit up straighter, roused and alert. I know this dream. This green dream, these green variegated fields textured with hedgerows and tottering fencelines and windmills without blades, with bisecting roads stretching away to indistinct horizons luminous in the fading light, the lowering clouds, a distant fork of lightning sizzling like a serpent’s fiery tongue, roadside ditches limpid with still pools of water mirroring lush grasses yet unmown, dark masses of cattle, darker clumps of cedars, swarms of swallows weaving the air around bridges and the streams below sluggish and half-lit and altogether mysterious and inviting, the pallid monolithic grain elevators rising with the miles humming beneath the tires, rising one after another, each containing its own tide wrack nestled at its base, each a waymark, each a variant of another, each a prairie lighthouse guiding me ever eastward to a home at the end of a gravel lane and hellos and goodbyes and hellos again. 

Racer

Things are tough all over

I was on my way to the bank when I opened the door and discovered a three-foot-long snake on the doorstep. It looked at me. I looked at it. Its black forked tongue slithered out and licked the air. Neither of us moved.

“Lori, come see this,” I yelled.

She halted transfixed at the top of the stairs.

“Is it poisonous?” she asked.

“No.”

“What kind is it?”

I wasn’t sure. I pointed out the drab gray body and a faint greenish tinge on its underparts. Secretly I thought racer, though I couldn’t say why. 

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“It doesn’t belong here,” she said. 

I closed the door and dashed into the back room to check the field guide. Sure enough, it was a racer, Coluber constrictor, a life-herp for me and a terrible aggravation to Lori.

“I don’t like it there,” she said. 

“I’m not killing it,” I argued. And getting nowhere—her look was one of blame, as if it were my fault that the snake decided to move into (literally) our porch. The same thing happened once in Colorado when she found a garter snake on the stairs. After screaming bloody murder she accused me of putting it there. No husband, I like to believe, is that stupid.

When I reopened the door the snake disappeared into a crack. Unfortunately, the saying “out of sight, out of mind” does not apply to herps in the yard, the basement or on the front doorstep. Lori was perfectly aware of the snake’s location and knew with utter certainty that it was up to no good. Her motto: Any snake is one too many.

Once it had been mine, too, but times change and so do people. I was taught to kill rattlesnakes on sight though any reason given has long since been forgotten. Because they’re poisonous, probably. They’re also beneficial, fairly docile and like you and me prefer to be left alone. This was in West Texas where almost every living thing was thorny, spiny, fangy or potentially lethal, a fact which no doubt gave the beleaguered occupants a somewhat jaded view of nature. Watching my grandmother casually dice a rattlesnake into small bloody bits with a hoe out by the henhouse and my grandfather stopping in the middle of a country road to shoot a rattlesnake basking on the shoulder drove home the point that such actions were what civilized people did to keep the wild at bay. It was us versus them, and we were outnumbered. 

But never outgunned. Sometime during my teenage years that mentality shifted to a more charitable approach. For my part it came when I was out hunting with my father south of Albuquerque in a dry area crisscrossed with acequias and framed in the west by a ridge of sandy hills slowly melting into rounded hummocks and deepcut ravines, like an ice cream cake left out in the sun too long. At some point during my wandering I glanced down to find a rattlesnake keeping pace at my feet, seemingly unconcerned, though aware, of my presence. I placed the barrel of the .22 against the back of its wedge-shaped head and squeezed the trigger, and thereafter watching it thrash its life out in the sand knew with implacable certainty that I would never again do such a thing. The senselessness of the killing made me feel petty and brutish. 

At some point in our young lives we come to a decision however confusing that things we were taught were either wrong or fading remnants from another era, and we have to relearn our personal geographies. It might take months or years but in my case it’s pretty much been a day-to-day affair. The racer certainly complicated matters. After promising to caulk the cracks I remembered the spider wasps that each summer inhabited the selfsame crevices. Would the two species coexist peacefully? Would filling the cracks drive the wasps away? I’m no fan of stinging insects but these small wasps are a special treat to watch as they paralyze wolf spiders with their venom and drag them back to their lairs. 

Our patio, I should explain, is in need of repair but perfectly serviceable, and anyway the wildlife appreciates it. Recently the county appraisers showed up on their six-year checkup to see if improvements had been made so they could collect more money. When I told them the cracks were wider and deeper, I noticed the absolute immobility of their pens. I don’t expect a discount.

The wasps aren’t the only creatures utilizing the fissured patio. Great plains skinks have been especially active this season, gliding in and out of the cracks like armored ghosts. Most are around seven inches in length but one in the garden must reach a good 12 inches, a relative giant in the skink species. The previous owner told us that copperheads were once common near the old shed foundation, an area where we’ve laid out a straw bale garden. Because of his warning the skink always jumpstarts my adrenaline when it darts in front of me, a defense mechanism likely predicated by a childhood spent roaming rattlesnake territory. For her part, Lori is developing an intense dislike for the lizard and complains about it with regularity.

Last week I came home to find Lori in a lather. The garden skink had once again scared the wits out of her. As it was, I had just finished reading an article about India’s Sundarbans, a mangrove forest at the mouth of the Ganges Delta and the largest single mangrove ecosystem in the world. It’s also the most dangerous place to live. Honey gatherers, fishermen and wood cutters are routinely eaten by tigers or crocodiles or fatally bitten by king cobras and other lethal reptiles. I had also just taken photos of a three-foot iguana some kids found roaming the streets of Washington. 

A foot-long skink? 

“You have no idea how easy you have it,” I said.

Already there, already back

I dropped the large green duffel on the grass and zipping it open drew out the various stuff sacks and emptied their contents and began assembling the nylon tent. The sun beat down from a cloudless sky and promised heat we had not experienced on what I considered the first true day of summer, the Harris’s sparrows having fled, indigo buntings their replacement and the transition complete, or almost. No cuckoos yet. The collapsible poles slid easily through the frame loops and with a simple twist the tent lurched into shape. I thought of how the Middle Fork of the Popo Agie River flows from deep within the Wind River Range to a spot just outside of Lander, Wyo., where it suddenly disappears down a cave, and what it was like to step from boulder to boulder and enter that gaping maw with the air humid and throbbing from the violence of the river as it foamed past splintered timbers and plunged into a series of narrow caverns where none could follow. And I thought, I am going there. I am going to the West.

It’s always been the case that the planning stages of a camping trip inevitably bring a low-level thrum of anticipation, something like an electrical shock that goes on and on. Since moving to Kansas eight years ago I’ve become somewhat rusty at generating the sensation after finding the summer heat inescapable, which was not the case in Colorado where a few thousand extra feet in elevation made all the difference between tolerable and intolerable. I’m not one of those who likes to cram cheek to jowl with others in what passes for modern campsites huddled around bodies of water, especially when all sounds of nature are drowned in a thunder of generators powering the air conditioners, microwaves and television sets that particular type of camper finds necessary. While I do appreciate certain amenities I also believe in roughing it now and then, if nothing else to connect to the wild more on its terms and less on mine. 

  

Wild this trip should be because I’m once again accompanying the codgernauts, Chod Hedinger and Jim Mayhew. Our itinerary takes us along the Oregon Trail through Nebraska and into Wyoming, where near the small town of Guernsey emigrant wagons wore four-foot-deep ruts through soft limestone outcrops and a nearby bluff is carved with hundreds of names as a sort of frontier registry of passers-by. When I was last there I received a jolt upon seeing my name with a date from the mid-1800s. Also nearby is a massive fortification crowning the highest point around, actually a stone outhouse built by the CCC in the 1930s. The view is spectacular though nothing like that near Lander, when the Continental Divide rears its jagged spine and the unwitting visitor is stunned to insensibility. It’s true that the West technically begins at the 100th Meridian but it takes real mountains to hammer the point home.

From there we gain altitude until topping out at Togwotee Pass and the headwaters of the Wind River, beyond which the magnificent Grand Tetons lift like a ragged sawblade tearing at the horizon. This is the West of the imagination, the iconic standard, inarguably the most scenic point in all of North America. It’s where one finally understands something of eternity. Two days later we’ll be in redrock country straddling the Colorado-Utah border where the bones of dinosaurs mingle with sands from an antediluvian age and the rivers run brown and turbid through canyons of tortured, folded and warped stone. We’ll once again cross the Continental Divide for Rocky Mountain National Park, my old stomping grounds, before ending our trip midway through Kansas where we’re guaranteed hotter, buggier and more humid conditions. I would consider that a major letdown were it not for the fact that we’ll be almost home. What I left behind will be sorely missed.

As if reading my mind, Lori suddenly appeared.

“Is that the tent we used in South Carolina?” she asked.

Indeed it was, and along the Texas coast, too. I crawled inside and invited her to join me but she balked at the offer. I stared through the mesh at the green Kansas countryside and remembered how we froze to death at Goose Island across Aransas Bay from Rockport, and of how we lay awake listening to the mysterious gurgles, groans and splashes coming from the alligator-infested marshes of Huntington Beach. How there was none of that companionship on the codgernautical journey across southern Colorado and the holy canyonlands of New Mexico. It was like the sun suddenly dimmed or went behind a cloud, and Lori, sensing the shift, said, “I want you to enjoy yourself and have a good time. And think of me.” As if I could do less.

She disappeared into the house leaving me to my lonesome thoughts. My eyes following her wake fell on a baby cottontail studying me with depthless brown eyes. When I said hi its tiny ears swiveled my way like miniature antennas, reminding me of Sheba, that other female in my life. My disconsolation blossomed and I wondered why everything no matter how enriching extracts its own pound of flesh.

The heat was lulling but I backed out of the tent and knocked it down and stuffed its various components back into their sacks and deposited the duffel in the living room. Lori was in the kitchen slicing pineapple so I  wrapped her in a hug and kissed her neck. Sheba got a kiss on the nose and sitting on the floor beside her I opened my DeLorme atlases and began tracing our route. Chimney Rock. Scotts Bluff. Register Cliff. The Sinks. Mount Moran. Jackson Lake. The Teton Range. Dinosaur and the Yampa River. Long’s Peak. The Never Summer Range. Lori. Sheba. There and back. The endless circle.

St. Bridget's Catholic Church, Axtell, Kansas

The other side of silence

The setting sun, and music at the close,

As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,

Writ in remembrance more than things long past.

– William Shakespeare

All the way there and back music of some sort played. Some we could hear, some we couldn’t. The car stereo played something electronic and soothing by Deepspace, though in my head a tune by Max Richter looped endlessly and I longed to sit back with headphones tucked deep in my ears and listen hard to its every nuance, sure that somewhere within those melodies my life began and played out and everything could be easily explained, or at least understood in its context. And maybe forgiven. 

No rain during the night but a deluge, fields flooded and laced with muddied rivulets winding down to the sea. Could we hear that music in its entirety it would render us motionless, melt our hearts in a fiery forge of tonality. “If we had the keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” George Eliot wrote, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” But I think rather we’d die of joy, given the proper location. 

Lately I’ve been thinking of time and timelessness and things that matter. Trimming my beard and watching snowy bristles cascade to the ground certainly brings to mind our intractable momentum toward the grave and what lies beyond. Nowhere in that contemplation was there any morbidity, only a placid acceptance of its inevitability and perhaps even a touch of curiosity. Partly this was fueled by something I read on the Internet where survivors of the Greensburg tornado offered wisdom gleaned from the wholesale destruction of their town, tidbits which ran the gamut from common sense (stay dressed when under tornado warning) to the practical (keep bottled water and supplies in the basement). A handful of nights after reading it a storm flared up in the southwest and rumbled on the peripheries of consciousness, out there past the horizon but just past. Nexrad radar indicated a scarlet crescent extending from Nebraska to Concordia and moving my direction, so that when I headed to bed an unease settled in my bones and I managed a minimal preparation at best, setting on the table beside the stairway to the basement a flashlight, a bottle of water and, almost as an afterthought, my iPod and earphones. Losing everything would indeed be cataclysmic but certain amenities remain necessary, one being music. 

Why music would play such a prominent role in the autumn of my life remains a mystery. I suspect that on some primordial level it’s an implement to plumb the depths of my soul, to discover who I am and  where I’m going and in that going to snag as much contentment and peace as possible in a tormented world. Also, to connect with whatever lies on the other side of silence. We’re not talking Garth Brooks here nor any other mainstream artist. They have their place, I suppose, though I can’t say where, a statement sure to grate on the ears of their fans but one which illustrates the subjective, indeed, essential nature of music. My taste lies in the ambient fields of electronica and classical instrumentation, such as Hammock’s Maybe they will sing for us tomorrow, or Johann Johannsson’s magnificent