a landscape never before seen
If, when you wake up in Wyoming, it’s overcast out one window, look out another.
By mid-day Sunday blue sky had eclipsed grey. The intrepid Karen Russell and I made, and kept, a pact to work till 2PM. Then we donned hunting orange and headed for the hills.
When in Wyoming, wave at passing cars. Most cars that pass are trucks. One finger lifted off the steering wheel counts as a wave back. On the graded gravel route 195 to Sheridan a pickup truck slowed. Creepy anywhere else, but this driver was altruistic: I assume you’re walking cause you want to? We were. But if we had been broken down somewhere he would have been our saviour.
We walked along inventing fictional colour-names for things, with Flannery O’Connor’s rat-coloured car as our model, though, as Karen noted, makeup colour-names would also be a great source of inspiration. The road a rawhide strap, the cows so black they look hollow. We also thought up potentially ominous first sentences, after which anything could happen: Is that a deer in the road ahead? They turned off onto a smaller road. Their feet sank into the muck.
We turned off onto truck path that trailed up into the sway-backed hills. For a while I couldn’t remember this word, but it’s the bentonite in Wyoming’s black soil that makes it swell, when wet, into what the locals call gumbo, a muck so slippery that roughnecks use it to lubricate mining drill bits.
Gumbo glomming onto our sneakers we passed through a prairie dog kingdom, an eerie plain pockmarked by pyramidal mounds of dug up earth. “Inland gator holes,” said alligator savvy Miami native Karen Russell. An oddly perspicacious remark as, through its Palaeozoic and most of its Mesozoic history, Wyoming lay on the east coast of a broad sea. During most of Eocene time, palms, fig trees, cypress and magnolias grew in abundance and primitive mammals flourished in the tropical climate. Long before deer and antelope, flamingos and crocodiles once roamed this range.
For two weeks I’ve been dragging the serrated edges of these far distant hills into focus through a telephoto lens. Up close the high world forces a wide angle, too much view for one viewfinder, and a polarizing filter helps rein in the massive blue. The sun slanting one way and the hill slopping another, our shadows spilled out ahead of us so long that I lay down on the ground to keep mine out of more than one east-facing picture.
Up a last burst of steep slope, the grasses, every colour but green, ended at a stack of wind-raw red rock. We felt alone on the planet, and glad to have each other as witnesses: to how high up we were, to how far away everything was, to the wind, sun, sky, lichens, fossils and small animal bones. After a while Karen pointed out that I was swearing at Mother Nature: This is crazy. This is ridiculous. Can you believe this? It’s disgusting. It’s frightening. I assured her that these curses are all praises in French.
Happily, neither Karen nor I suffer from the disease of needing to be right. Theories abounded. Are those bones from a bird? The Indians must have been so cold. Maybe these are fossils. Magnolia leaves, perhaps? Look, there’re more over there. There’s so much shit up here! Is this deer shit or cow shit? It’s pretty big. I guess we shouldn’t be stepping on these gazillion year old lichens. They remind me of the Great Barrier Reef. I swear to god that log shaped rock is a petrified tree. No way. Well it looks like a tree, concentric rings and everything. Wait, yeah, this could totally be a tree. Did you hear a shotgun? Uh-oh.
On the way down we passed four semi-massive deeply black and bubble-pocked stones. They stood alone in the sparse grass looking quite unlike anything around them, in a weird Easter Island Head way. I don’t know how it’s possible but I’m pretty sure they’re volcanic. We stood in silence, our noses running in the wind. We stroked those glossy smooth surfaces and allowed ourselves to believe that once they were liquid molten lava.
Backtracking across the prairie dog kingdom we heard the racing high chatter of the guard dog barking out an intruder alert. “That’s our names over and over again in Prairie Dog,” Karen said. “I don’t know, maybe they’re trying to come up with new words for colours,” I said. We didn’t get to see them up close but their paw-prints scampered through the bentonite rich truck path mud.
Just past the last house before the main road we stopped to watch a dozen mule deer graze behind a No Hunting sign. “Just act natural,” I said. They stood stock-still not twenty feet from us - their tall oval ears outlined in black - listening to us. We all stared at each other. The intimacy was so prolonged and unnerving that when one turned and then the rest instantly disappeared after it, it was almost a relief. Karen said, “I’ve never had so many animals stare at me in one day.”
Back at the ranch, the sun set over the lumbering black cattle we now think of as our own. An owl conversed with some far off lowing that sounded quite tragic, but we were so hungry! We ate in a hurry and scurried off to our rooms. I, for one, felt incapable of conversation. Who knows what to say about a day like that?
Well, Annie Proulx does:
"He felt as though he had stumbled into a landscape never before seen on the earth and at the same time that he had been transported to the ur-landscape before human beginnings. The mountains crouched at every horizon like dark sleeping animals, their backs whitened by snow. He trod on wildflowers, glistening quartz crystals, on agate and jade, brilliant lichens. The unfamiliar grasses vibrated with light, their incandescent stalks lighting the huge ground. His heart squeezed in, and he wished for a celestial eraser to remove the fences… Even the sinewy, braided currents of the wind… pleased him." Annie Proulx, "Man Crawling Out of Trees", Bad Dirt, NY: Scribner, 2004, page 106.
. . . . .
By mid-day Sunday blue sky had eclipsed grey. The intrepid Karen Russell and I made, and kept, a pact to work till 2PM. Then we donned hunting orange and headed for the hills.
When in Wyoming, wave at passing cars. Most cars that pass are trucks. One finger lifted off the steering wheel counts as a wave back. On the graded gravel route 195 to Sheridan a pickup truck slowed. Creepy anywhere else, but this driver was altruistic: I assume you’re walking cause you want to? We were. But if we had been broken down somewhere he would have been our saviour.
We walked along inventing fictional colour-names for things, with Flannery O’Connor’s rat-coloured car as our model, though, as Karen noted, makeup colour-names would also be a great source of inspiration. The road a rawhide strap, the cows so black they look hollow. We also thought up potentially ominous first sentences, after which anything could happen: Is that a deer in the road ahead? They turned off onto a smaller road. Their feet sank into the muck.
We turned off onto truck path that trailed up into the sway-backed hills. For a while I couldn’t remember this word, but it’s the bentonite in Wyoming’s black soil that makes it swell, when wet, into what the locals call gumbo, a muck so slippery that roughnecks use it to lubricate mining drill bits.
Gumbo glomming onto our sneakers we passed through a prairie dog kingdom, an eerie plain pockmarked by pyramidal mounds of dug up earth. “Inland gator holes,” said alligator savvy Miami native Karen Russell. An oddly perspicacious remark as, through its Palaeozoic and most of its Mesozoic history, Wyoming lay on the east coast of a broad sea. During most of Eocene time, palms, fig trees, cypress and magnolias grew in abundance and primitive mammals flourished in the tropical climate. Long before deer and antelope, flamingos and crocodiles once roamed this range.
For two weeks I’ve been dragging the serrated edges of these far distant hills into focus through a telephoto lens. Up close the high world forces a wide angle, too much view for one viewfinder, and a polarizing filter helps rein in the massive blue. The sun slanting one way and the hill slopping another, our shadows spilled out ahead of us so long that I lay down on the ground to keep mine out of more than one east-facing picture.
Up a last burst of steep slope, the grasses, every colour but green, ended at a stack of wind-raw red rock. We felt alone on the planet, and glad to have each other as witnesses: to how high up we were, to how far away everything was, to the wind, sun, sky, lichens, fossils and small animal bones. After a while Karen pointed out that I was swearing at Mother Nature: This is crazy. This is ridiculous. Can you believe this? It’s disgusting. It’s frightening. I assured her that these curses are all praises in French.
Happily, neither Karen nor I suffer from the disease of needing to be right. Theories abounded. Are those bones from a bird? The Indians must have been so cold. Maybe these are fossils. Magnolia leaves, perhaps? Look, there’re more over there. There’s so much shit up here! Is this deer shit or cow shit? It’s pretty big. I guess we shouldn’t be stepping on these gazillion year old lichens. They remind me of the Great Barrier Reef. I swear to god that log shaped rock is a petrified tree. No way. Well it looks like a tree, concentric rings and everything. Wait, yeah, this could totally be a tree. Did you hear a shotgun? Uh-oh.
On the way down we passed four semi-massive deeply black and bubble-pocked stones. They stood alone in the sparse grass looking quite unlike anything around them, in a weird Easter Island Head way. I don’t know how it’s possible but I’m pretty sure they’re volcanic. We stood in silence, our noses running in the wind. We stroked those glossy smooth surfaces and allowed ourselves to believe that once they were liquid molten lava.
Backtracking across the prairie dog kingdom we heard the racing high chatter of the guard dog barking out an intruder alert. “That’s our names over and over again in Prairie Dog,” Karen said. “I don’t know, maybe they’re trying to come up with new words for colours,” I said. We didn’t get to see them up close but their paw-prints scampered through the bentonite rich truck path mud.
Just past the last house before the main road we stopped to watch a dozen mule deer graze behind a No Hunting sign. “Just act natural,” I said. They stood stock-still not twenty feet from us - their tall oval ears outlined in black - listening to us. We all stared at each other. The intimacy was so prolonged and unnerving that when one turned and then the rest instantly disappeared after it, it was almost a relief. Karen said, “I’ve never had so many animals stare at me in one day.”
Back at the ranch, the sun set over the lumbering black cattle we now think of as our own. An owl conversed with some far off lowing that sounded quite tragic, but we were so hungry! We ate in a hurry and scurried off to our rooms. I, for one, felt incapable of conversation. Who knows what to say about a day like that?
Well, Annie Proulx does:
"He felt as though he had stumbled into a landscape never before seen on the earth and at the same time that he had been transported to the ur-landscape before human beginnings. The mountains crouched at every horizon like dark sleeping animals, their backs whitened by snow. He trod on wildflowers, glistening quartz crystals, on agate and jade, brilliant lichens. The unfamiliar grasses vibrated with light, their incandescent stalks lighting the huge ground. His heart squeezed in, and he wished for a celestial eraser to remove the fences… Even the sinewy, braided currents of the wind… pleased him." Annie Proulx, "Man Crawling Out of Trees", Bad Dirt, NY: Scribner, 2004, page 106.
. . . . .
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