Home At Last (Wyoming)

     It is as I remember it -- bright, warm sun; broiling, down-filled banks of clouds; wind that caresses your cheek like the light breath of a kiss or rages and howls, ripping the very breath from your mouth. The prairie stretches for hundreds of mile horizons and on a clear day I can even see the Lakota's Shining Mountains, the Bighorns - to the north of us.

     My first morning here I awoke before the sun blushed the horizon. As I gazed out my window, my eyes were filled to overflowing with the peace and tranquillity of the still life -- the gray-green sagebrush, the dusty brown, tan, and chalk white of the Earth Mother's skin; the dark blue and green of mountain spruce and pines with a slash/scar of Aspen white here and there. Then -- the actual rise in the East of the strong, high altitude sun, majestic, its rosy hue seen hundreds of miles away long before its actual lazy ascent. Slowly filling my window with red, yellow, and golden rays lighting on antelope across the road and deer which had also won the race with the sun at the start of the day.

     This then was what I'd come home for -- the solace of my soul -- contained in all these images, stirring long dormant emotions -- repressed and hidden until my arrival in my beloved West.

Live Quietly

    Bill, an old cowboy buried in Buffalo, Wyoming was not known as a church-goer. He had served in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. He always came back to the family ranch and became known, not only as a salt-of-the-earth kind of friend and neighbour, but also as an expert at fixing up old-time wagons for a local museum. According to his obituary which was published in the Casper Star Tribune, he had the following planned and printed in his funeral booklet:

   I ask "that we live quietly, talk gently, act wisely..Help us to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, rise up through the common."

Shirley Mountain

     The giant machinations of nature are so evident out on the high lonesome prairie of Wyoming. Today, we travelled for an hour and a half, down and up long, bumpy, rock-strewn roads to the remote site of yet another television transmitter, on Shirley Mountain, down near Medicine Bow. The very same Medicine Bow made famous in Owen Wister's The Virginian and in folksinger Art Thieme's Cowboy's Barbara Allen.

     On the way we saw Chalk Mountain, a stark sheer wall of a mountain rising up in brilliant white, a kind of wild West "Cliffs of Dover". The contrast of the brightness, with dark green ponderosa pines, blue grey silver of the sagebrush, along with the various wheat coloured prairie grasses was emphasised by huge, billowy white clouds, the sun peaking through in fits of hot, high altitude brilliance.

     All of the hills and mountains lift up in one direction, like giants' tilted tabletops, looking as though everything on them should come sliding off, crashing to the plains below. Wyoming is a geologist's dream garden.

     Shirley Mountain is the highest point in that area at about 8,500 feet, rising straight up from about 4,000 feet. On top, one can see for hundreds of miles in every direction with no impediments...just clear, long distances of rolling prairie full of muted reds, yellows, blues, and greens.

     The noise of our truck and rising dust behind us, scared up many prairie dogs, as well as small hawks and an eagle or two. Large bands of antelope criss-crossed the road in front of us, back and forth, in a ground-eating pattern of evasion, while four elk didn't even let us get close, running, melting into a small arroyo of trees, blending so well they were invisible.

     The transmitter on Shirley is located on a huge, private ranch of 100 square miles, approximately 200,000 acres. It was evident by the animals' behaviour they know their seasons well. The cold nights and pleasantly cool days bring the noisy long sticks which mean their death; all they can do is keep watch, be alert and try to outrun the manufactured death, the most unnatural thing in this landscape of timeless beauty.

     I feel blessed with the sights of today, by the ceaseless rustle of the wind through the dry and scrubby brush, and the sharp, tangy scent of crushed sage. They and creatures assure me of the rightness of all creation and I am thankful.

 

Copyright 2007 by Kat LaFrance - all rights reserved.

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