Rain does strange things to sky in high dry country. Cloud settles so low the hills disappear. And then we miss them. We’ve gown fond of them, plain as they are, their homely twisted humps land-marking horizon in this forest-free beige prairie.
We do have some trees around here, but that’s just because we have a creek. Piney Creek. Small, but it gives us a whole lot more to look at than if it weren’t there.
Rain comes in after a string of blue days and obliterates the big sky. There go the shifting shades of morning, noon, and dusk blue; there go the highflying curlicues of dry cloud, the horizon-tracing streaks, the shadow racers, and the sunset makers. Rain settles in and the whole world blanches opaque opal. Except for that thin strip of field that never goes away no matter what you do. The blacker than usual cattle bend to the brighter yellow-green than usual grass.
I stay in. Through this hundred-year-old train depot’s small-paned windows I watch the rain get wetter and the air get colder. The brighter-than-bright grey trunks of the leafless creek-fed trees turn first a slicker darker grey with rain, and then fade to a TV static fuzz; snow falls in front of them, fat and white, the same colour as the sky.
There’s no point in going anywhere anyway. In the rain Wyoming’s red and black roads turn to gumbo. A four-wheel drive won’t do you one bit of good. If you’re waiting for rain you’re glad when it comes. Ten days of itching scratching flaking static and I was about ready to trade in my hair and lips, and forearms and shins for all new parts. If you’re not crazy about snow, come out back behind the depot and take a look at these slouching box elders half drawn in hard pencil lines and half encased in sticky white confection.
“With the lapping subtlety of incoming tide the shape of the ranch began to gather in his mind; he could recall the intimate fences he’d made, taut wire and perfect corners, the draws and rock outcrops, the water course valley steepening, cliffs like bones with shreds of meat on them rising and rising, and the stream plunging suddenly underground, disappearing into subterranean darkness of blind fish, shooting out of the mountain ten miles west on a neighbor’s place, but leaving their ranch the same badland red country as dry as a cracker.” Annie Proulx, “The Half-Skinned Steer”, Close Range, NY: Scribner, 1999, pages 33-34.
. . . . .