Category: Ucross

Ucross administrative assistant Kate Johnston used to work as a wrangler. Friday morning she rounded a heard of us up and drove us into town. Between the five of us we needed: a flight to Denver, a tube of blue paint, a pair of cuticle clippers, five rolls of colour film, six rolls of slide film, one pair of sunglasses, one pair of snow boots, an unknown quantity of postcards, a padded envelope, a book on Wyoming, a bag of corn chips, a bottle of whisky and ten bottles of wine.

I ran into Alison at the Cigar Store. I ran into Michael at the Drug Store. Nora ran into me in the back of a Western Wear store where I furtively caressed a two hundred and fifty dollar pair of pale green cowboy boots.

“They match your coat,” she said thoughtlessly.

“Thanks a lot!” I cried, aghast.

“Danger, danger!” I cried, fleeing the store.

Main Street Sheridan during the Sheridan Stampede of 1914.
It looks pretty much the same today.
. . . . .

First thing this morning I found Alex in the Depot kitchen making coffee with no socks on. “Not a good idea,” she said, the floor a mess of box elder carcasses. “Are you going over to the other side soon?” I asked, hoping for a lift to Big Red. Alex thought I was asking if she was dying.

“I’m thinking of going into Clearmont,” she said. Not quite heaven, but ten miles down the road, population one-fifteen and we’ve heard rumours there’s a liquor store there.

Ten minutes later, I’m on my way out the front door and Alex’s on her way in to get me. Boom. Comedic confusions and almost collisions – that’s how our day began.

Off-road trekking across the snow-melting lawn, we saw two rabbits chased each other around and around Alex’s car. “Ever since I got here,” she said. “Rabbits flock to my Subaru like it’s the mother ship and they’re waiting to be beamed up.”

The snow-covered hills east of Ucross rolled out pale blue-beige in a repeating pattern: same, different, familiar, new, same.

There’s no liquor store in Clearmont, only the Red Dawg Bar. To get the Red Dawg and the water tower into the same photo I had to step out into US 14 a bit. “Alert me of any oncoming traffic.” A freight train rolled through smelling of coal.

Alex took a picture of the Claremont Historical Jail sign.

“Shouldn’t that read Historic?”

A stiff-legged woman with lots of earrings and no teeth came out of the Red Dawg to find out who we were and what we were doing taking pictures. “Such a great sign,” Alex said. “With the water tower behind it,” I added unhelpfully. The woman’s caved in face made her look extra sceptical. “Where’s the Historical Jail,” Alex asked. Brilliant move! Distract her with tourism.

Take a right on New York Avenue. The Historical Jail is under the water tower. To get out of town, take another right at the elementary school Drug Free Zone sign.

Back on US 14 Alex said she found people in Wyoming to be a suspicious lot. I’d only met friendly folks up until the toothless woman. I guess if I were an inhabitant of a town of a hundred and fifteen people and/or a Red Dawg regular I’d want to know why two never-before-seen women were taking pictures of my bar.

A few miles out of Clearmont a huge metal cross atop a small hill reminded Alex of Brazil and me of Montréal. I wondered if it was a memorial for a fatal car crash near there. A few minutes later, Alex said: “My car has lost power,” calm as anything, and steered us over to the shoulder. What happened? No idea. The owner’s manual was no help. We didn’t know what to look up. Ignition? How about Stopped? Well, at least the view is nice. Maybe we should get out of the car, take some photos. What an absurd day.

We stood on the side of the road and ogled the Big Horns and the mule deer and waved at passing pickups. They all waved back, but otherwise gave us a wide berth.

“Maybe we should pop the hood, that always works.” And a good thing we did too.

“A rabbit sabotaged my car!” Alex cried. The bright copper ends of chewed through wire glinted in the noonday sun.

“Now lets not be too hasty to lay blame. We don’t know the rabbits did it.”

“There’s rabbit hair.”

“Hmm… I guess that would be rabbit poop then.”

Alex rolled a cigarette and flipped through her owner’s manual some more. I attempted to twist the wire-ends back together but there wasn’t enough exposed copper to work with and, anyway, I didn’t really think it would work.

Alex stuck her head under the hood again but pulled it out in a hurry: “It’s still in there!”

“What?”

“The rabbit, it’s still in my car!”

“No way.” I did not believe her. “I don’t see any rabbit.”

“I saw its fur. Look straight down.”

Then I saw it!

“You should have seen the look on your face,” Alex was laughing so hard.

“I just saw that look on your face!”

“This is so awful!” she said, but we couldn’t stop laughing.

“Do you think it’s gone over to the other side?”

The mule deer glared at us, like: You two are so hopeless. Will you please keep it down.

We knew where we were, and that we were less than ten miles from where we wanted to be. There was a rabbit in Alex’s car, dead or otherwise. The car had Massachusetts plates. And brand spanking new pickup trucks passed us at speeds exceeding the sound barrier. We didn’t have a cell phone – not that it’d work in Wyoming’s hills and holes. We set in to discussing the options. Well. We could walk it. Or one of us could. How long would it take? I don’t mind doing it, just depends if you want to leave your car or not. What happens when you leave your car on the side of the road in Wyoming?

“Maybe we should push it further off the road.”

“Toward that post?”

More gales of laughter, more glares from the deer.

Right around when we were getting ready to set out on foot, an ancient boxy two-tone pick up rounded the bend, coming straight out of the Pleistocene and headed our way. It slowed. It stopped for us! Yeah!

Norma Mally is our new favourite person in all of Wyoming. We said, “We’re so glad you stopped for us. No one else would.” She said, “I’m local. They’re all up here working the methane.” Norma used to dry ranch eight miles east of somewhere out by Recluse. “I’m too old now,” she said. “Now we run cattle.” She had nothing good to say about rabbits. “The rabbits is bad out by us,” she said. “They got my neighbour,” she said, meaning they got her neighbour’s truck.

“I’m a peaceful person,” said Alex. “I’ve been swerving to miss them.”

“You’ll be going the other way now I bet.”

“Like a video game.”

Norma Mally drove us right up to the Big Red Ranch House. “Where are you from?” she asked. New York. Montréal. “I was stationed over in Washington five years in the Air Force,” she said. There go the suspicious theories. Wyoming rancher Norma Mally offering us up an east coast connection may have been even more generous than offering us a ride.

Alex’s version of the story told so far diverges from mine in a number of ways:

While I could hardly concentrate on a word the toothless woman was saying because a) her sunken face made her expression so hard to read and b) she wasn’t exactly toothless – she had the turned in gums and chalky yellow stumps of heavy and prolonged crystal-meth use, Alex didn’t notice because was understandably distracted by her abnormally enormous and erratically pieced ears.

Ironic considering when Norma Mally said those guys who didn’t stop to help us weren’t local, they were here working methane; Alex understood that they were all on crystal-meth. Some of them could well have been, but methane gas is one of the biggest industries in Wyoming and those were damn expensive pickup trucks passing us, so it’s more than likely those guys were out-of-state workers without an ounce of neighbourly feeling. The methane industry is notoriously shortsighted. The drilling pollutes and depletes the water table. There’s so much methane in our tap water we can’t drink it.

I’m sure there are other discrepancies besides. I think we got off lucky considering our day began with confusion over whether “the other side” meant the other side of the pasture or life after death.

Alex spent the rest of the afternoon chasing after insurance, towing, garages and mechanics. For more about these details read her post, number 154, on this website: http://wombatnation.com/2005/01/mice-ate-my-car

At dinner that night she said, “So guess what, the rabbit was still in the car.” I was confused, having not yet heard about how, when Reed gave Alex a lift back out to her car, the rabbit appeared to be gone. Reed spliced the chewed wires together so Alex could to drive to the garage in Buffalo. Man I would’ve felt like a hero if I’d made that work. The mechanic found the rabbit again, very much alive, hiding in a different spot. It took four people to get it out.

It turns out the precise reason we lost power is, the rabbit chewed the wire to the alternator. I could make us both sound a lot smarter about cars by going back and inserting that detail mid-story, but I’m not going to. Not just yet.

“Out on the lawn the rabbits were perfectly still. Then they sprang up in the air, turning and dropping and landing and then freezing again. Catherine stood at the window of the bathroom, towelling her hair. She turned the bathroom light off, so that she could see them better. The moonlight picked out their shining eyes, their moon-coloured fur, each hair tipped in paint. They were playing some rabbit game like leapfrog. Or they were dancing the quadrille. Fighting a rabbit way. Did rabbits fight wars? Catherine didn’t know. They ran at each other and then turned and darted back, jumping and crouching and rising up on their back legs. A pair of rabbits took off in tandem, like racehorses, sailing through the air.”

Kelly Link, “Stone Animals,” in The Best American Short Stories 2005, ed. Michael Chabon, Boston, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005, pages 96-97.
. . . . .

Photographer and Ucross residency coordinator Deborah Ford confirmed all the wild geological theories I came up with on Sunday at dinner tonight. Yes, those were volcanic rocks. Yes, those were petrified trees! I had a pretty clear idea of how the trees got petrified, but where did those lava boulders come from?

Well. It turns out that one of the largest super volcanoes in the world is sitting about 200 miles from here underneath Yellowstone National Park. A massive eruption there 2.1 million years ago left a gigantic caldera larger than the state of Rhode Island and hundreds of meters deep. Ground-hugging flows of hot volcanic ash, pumice, and gases swept across an area of more than 3,000 square miles and volume of about 1,000 cubic kilometres, enough material to cover Wyoming with a layer 13 feet thick. The eruption also shot a column of volcanic ash and gases high into Earth’s stratosphere. This volcanic cloud circled the globe many times and affected Earth’s climate by reducing the intensity of solar radiation reaching the lower atmosphere and surface. The fine volcanic ash that fell downwind from the eruption site blanketed much of North America and is still preserved in deposits as far away as Iowa, where it is a few inches thick, and the Gulf of Mexico, where it is recognizable in drill cores from the sea floor.

Subsequent smaller lava flows have since buried and obscured most of the caldera, but the underlying processes responsible for Yellowstone’s tremendous volcanic eruptions are still at work. Volcanologists tracking the movement of magma under the park have calculated that in parts of Yellowstone the ground has risen over seventy centimetres the past century. The Yellowstone super volcano has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago. The next is overdue. But I leave Wyoming December 8, so I’ll probably miss it. In Montréal all we’ll still see is fallout, toxic gas and ash.

. . . . .

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.
. . . . .

Deer race across Ucross’s no hunting fields. Dipsy-doodling like left-wingers up over the blue line, they out manoeuvre the slow moving cattle traffic. Yesterday a family settled in to graze the field behind the Depot – a doe, two fawns and a buck. The two fawns move, mirror images of each other, grazing chimerical in the fawn coloured grass [1]. I’m a little worried about the buck. His is the first set of antlers I’ve seen walking around, as opposed to hanging from the walls of Buck’s Cabin and Trading Post. Now here’s a real live rack. Not such a big buck, maybe no prize at all, maybe not the stuff of hunting fiction legend, which I admit I’ve read perhaps a little too much of lately, but he’s able to leap four-foot fences in a single bound. I hope he’s faster than a speeding bullet.

[1] After a brief arm wrestle over who gets the dictionary today, Karen and I perused the illustrated American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language together for a while this morning. Staring at fawns all day you start to wonder if it’s just your imagination or are fawns fawn coloured. They are indeed. The colour is named after the deer. Fawn comes from the old French foun, young animal, which comes from the vulgar Latin, feto, offspring. Chimerical may seem like an excessive word, but how else to describe it? You’re working away, writing about driving down an ancient Roman road, or trying to channel the point of view of a young man just drafted to fight in Vietnam, or editing a story that you can’t remember writing though apparently the word document has been languishing in your computer for over two years, and for no reason at all you glance out the window and a fawn coloured fawn flits across the fawn coloured grass, and then another one, and then, as if he hears you watching, a youn buck lifts his antlered head.

chimerical: 1. created by or as if by a wildly fanciful imagination; highly improbably.
2. given to unrealistic fantasies; fanciful.
. . . . .

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.
. . . . .

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.
. . . . .

In Wyoming one of the deadly sins is leaving a closed gate open. If there’s a closed gate in this wide-open place, it’s closed for a reason. Another deadly sin is going for a walk without hunting orange on. Dun-coloured clothing is a death warrant in these racing deer-season hills.

Annie Proulx is a former Ucross resident. Some of her Wyoming stories were written here. I’m reading the Close Range collection and the other fiction writer resident is reading Bad Dirt. We discuss Annie’s character development and dialogue in hushed tones in The Depot hallway, in case she’s still lurking near, and then we skulk back to our computers. Hardly intimidating or emasculating at all, to write from a desk that maybe the prolific giant Annie Proulx sat at.

Other Ucross alumni: http://ucrossfoundation.org/alumni.html

To not write about cows is an increasingly futile endeavour. In a whole field of black cows, why is there one brown cow? Why is it that the one brown cow wears the bell? Whither the brown cow goes, all the other cows follow.

“When you live a long way out you make your own fun.” Annie Proulx, “55 Miles to the Gas Pump,” Close Range, NY: Scribner, 1999.
. . . . .

Today the deeply funny Karen Russell and I set out to find the tepee rings we’ve been hearing about ever since we got to Ucross. Not the sportiest of girls, we set out in pink and green when really hunting season dictates florescent orange fashion. We had no map, not enough film and only one bottle of water between us, but we’d both got work done this morning and it was such a beautiful afternoon that we figured even if we didn’t find the tepee rings we’d still come out ahead.

Wyoming is not you’re your typical Vermont rolling green hill and fall foliage pretty. It’s not Rocky Mountain majestic either. “It’s ugly sister beautiful,” Karen Russell TM. The hills around Ucross are washed out wind worn treeless protuberances so adamantly whatever it is that they are that who could argue with them? Today’s brilliant blue skies contained just enough cloud in just the right places to make the sun turn the hills on and off at whim. Grey-green, yellow-beige, red tinges, black shadows, and then back to bright again. It helped that we didn’t know where we were going. We really had to look around. Could be this road? I think we missed it. Maybe it’s that one? Does that look like a dome house to you? Left here? Is this a road? I see what you mean. Don’t go toward the granite pile, that’s all I know. That’s gravel, not granite. Oh.

One thing I should mention is that all this time we’re yakking our heads off we were 4100 feet above sea level and heading further and further up hill. Putting the foot in foothills, if you know what I mean. We didn’t follow the directions we’d been given so much as let ourselves be lead along by the view. Through an assiduous process of stopping to catch our breath a lot and taking lots of photos, somehow we found the tepee rings. Are these tepee rings? I don’t know. They look pretty primordial. These are totally rings. How could they not be? If I had a tepee I’d put it right here.

We sat down cross-legged, not in deer dung, and watched deer crossing the Clear Creek far below. Patches of sunlight came and went over eerily flat patches of far off ranch lands punctuated by inexplicably regularly spaced pitch-black cattle. It’s a good thing there’re more cows than people in Wyoming – if those were people standing around in the fields down there it would be pretty weird.

On the way back down to the ranch we recognized a deer print sunk deep in the truck path mud and boy did we get excited. We tracked something! By four fifteen the hills behind us were cold, the hills in front of us were gold, and the almost-harvest-moon hung low and lace-white in the steel-blue sky.
. . . . .

In Montréal, the man who affixed the baggage-claim stickers to my suitcase handles said, “You’re checking these through to Sheridan?” This worried me. I thought perhaps I ought to ask him that same question.

On the flight from Montréal to Denver I watched Tickets, an Italian movie about three unrelated sets of characters traveling by train from Germany to Rome. This encouraged me – a traveling movie whilst traveling – what a good idea.

The Denver airport boasts a French Bistro. The view from Terminal C is colour-coordinated – tarmac-grey, rain-shadow parched grass, mile high cold blue sky and a thin strip of mountain – the perfect pallet for a Gore-Tex jacket. Two hours waiting for Big Sky Airlines flight 2593 to Sheridan is plenty of time to notice that tumbleweed are tossed about by the wind the same way empty Styrofoam cups are.

On the Beech 1900D every seat is a window seat. Every seat is also an isle seat. The co-pilot is also the flight attendant. There is no restroom or legroom on this plane.

There are more cattle in Wyoming than there are people. The drive from Sheridan to Ucross takes us through 27 miles of snow-dusted hills. S-curves on red-shouldered roads. It’s deer hunting season, but we see them everywhere. It’s adjective hunting season, but we can’t find enough words to describe where we are. Instead we talk about other places we’ve been, places this place reminds us of. This place reminds me of Tuscany west of Voltera. The hills there are called Poggi; they are similarly treeless and pubescent-breast shaped.

The population of Ucross is 25. The elevation is 4085. The Big Red Barn is an art gallery. The Ranch House is home to offices. We eat in the schoolhouse. We sleep in the Depot. We wake to Venetian blind sunlight lines and wonder for a moment if any of it is real. Whitetail deer graze in grasses the same green as our goose down duvets. A heard of wild turkeys forages in the cottonwoods. Perhaps we have died and gone to heaven. “Only, there must be some mistake… This appears to be the heaven for turkeys,” says Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Knopf 2006.

“This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock. Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothings shakes the heart so much as meeting – far, far away – what you last met at home. Some say that travelers are informal anthropologists. But it is ontology – the investigation of the nature of being – that travelers do. Call it the flooding-in of the real.” Cynthia Ozick, “The Shock of Teapots,” in Metaphor & Memory, NY: Vintage, 1991, p144.
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