A Wyoming Sisyphus

There was snow on the ground when we first arrived in Wyoming. Late in the first week we slipped into a November heat wave: sun and in the seventies, no wind. Looks like those days are over.

Last evening the sun set down across the road in a furl of fuchsia and a slash of orange fury. We all ran out to photograph to photograph it. Our crashing camera-clutching footsteps disappeared whole families of deer. Dinnertime homebound traffic sped past ignoring us, tires high-whining, headlights blackening the cottonwood limbs.

Chill gusts came up in the night, blowing disturbed sleep and strange dreams through The Depot. In the morning we compared notes and confirmed multiple instances of synchronized waking, serial bathroom visits, strange noises, overhead lights left on. Even so, we agreed, The Depot isn’t haunted. But Buck’s Cabin sure is.

In Buck’s Cabin the wireless Internet modem blinks tiny green lights into the low log cabin cobweb gloom, its two stubby blue antennae communing with Buck’s hunting trophy skulls and horns. The Internet connection is tenuous today. Are these gusts of wind enough to interrupt a wireless signal? Or is Buck’s ghost out there, re-hunting the headless ghosts of his trophy kills.

All morning Sandy’s been out in the yard raking leaves in high wind and hunting orange, the poor woman. "A Wyoming Sisyphus," Karen Russell, quote of the day.

Buy Karen's book, by the way: St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, her debut collection of stories, was published by Knopf in September 2006, and, we just found out, it's going to be translated into Italian soon. We're all reading it at Ucross. The story "Z.Z.’s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers" may have something to do with our increasingly synchronous sleep paterns.
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