Ucross Preparations

At the end of October I head west for a six-week writing residency at the Ucross Foundation: http://www.ucrossfoundation.org Ucross is located on a 22,000-acre ranch in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains near Sheridan Wyoming. The artists-in-residence program operates out of the fully restored Clear Fork headquarters of the Pratt and Ferris Cattle Company, built in 1882. Only four writers and four studio artists are granted residence at one time. Some of my more urban friends shudder at the thought of such a rustic and isolated setting. I can’t wait. Preparations so far include: the purchase of a wind-proof/water-proof jacket and reading up on high-country geology. John McPhee says of Wyoming's topography: every scene is temporary, and is composed of fragments from other scenes. A perfect setting for fiction writing.

"Wyoming, at first, glance, would appear to be an arbitrary segment of the country. Wyoming and Colorado are the only states whose borders consist of four straight lines. That could be looked upon as an affront to nature, an utterly political conception, an ignoring of the outlines of physiographic worlds, in disregard of rivers and divides. Rivers and divides, however, are in some ways unworthy as boundaries, which are meant to imply a durability that is belied by the function of rivers and divides. They move, they change, and they go away. Rivers, almost by definition, are young. The oldest river in the United States is called the New River. It has existed (in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia) for a little more than one and a half per cent of the history of the world. In epochs and eras before there ever was a Colorado River, the formations of the Grand Canyon were crossed and crisscrossed, scoured and dissolved, deposited and moved by innumerable rivers. The Colorado River, which has only recently appeared on earth, has excavated the Grand Canyon in very little time. From its beginning, human beings could have watched the Grand Canyon being made. The Green River has cut down through the Uinta Mountains in the last few million years, the Wind River through the Owl Creek Mountains, the Laramie River through the Laramie Range. The mountains themselves came up and moved. Several thousand feet of basin fill has recently disappeared. As the rock around Rawlins amply shows, the face of the country has frequently changed. Wyoming suggests with emphasis the page-one principle of reading in rock the record of the earth: Surface appearances are only that; topography grows, shrinks, compresses, spreads, disintegrates, and disappears; every scene is temporary, and is composed of fragments from other scenes. Four straight lines – like a plug cut in the side of a watermelon – should do as well as any to frame Wyoming and its former worlds."

John McPhee, Rising from the Plains, NY: FSG, 1986, pages 28-29.
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