dispatchesfromkansas

Where Rivers Are Born

Flee the wind (Part 1)

Afterwards, Lori asked if I’d had fun, and I said, for the most part, and she asked what I’d liked best. I thought for a long moment and then took her in my arms and said, coming home.

***

Our codgernautical quest was supposed to be about companionship, about photography, about birds and birding, about floras and faunas not our own but montane, desert, prairie, sandhill, riverine. It was about the American West and the emigrant movement that opened this nation even as it signaled the beginning of the end for its native inhabitants. It was about exploration and adventure and getting away. It was all that and more, and less even, and carried its own weight of loss in things we left behind but never fully abandoned, fixed in each breath we took, each thought, each dream, a second shadow accompanying us to the West. 

We launched with certain things understood as potentials, and the shadows they cast were long and grim: atmospheric conditions ideal for the formation of supercells and long-path tornadoes; our house under construction and Lori’s job demands more than anticipated, Jim’s wife awaiting biopsy results. It was, in retrospect, probably unwise to depart when we did. That I write this with the perfect clarity of hindsight is a given that must be understood. It is the underlying principle for all that follows, the glue that binds this tale. 

(For mine is the godlike eye seeing the past in its entirety and poring over its structure, scrutinizing minutiae, actions, subtle nuances of inflection and intonation, striving to determine patterns and geometries pertaining to our ultimate fates, and in all ultimately failing. An inconsolable deity, encumbered by incomplete notes and recollections, prejudices, fears and fallacies, burdened with unanswerable questions and perhaps more content for it, with a latent yearning for simple slumber without dreams. A mere mortal after all.)

And so we went, our horizons before and behind indefinite from an excess of humidity, the sky above ponderous with rain, the fields below drenched and riven with gullies like raw bleeding wounds. A dam breached. Pastures submerged. Evidences of a changing climate and harbingers of more to come, and the western skies darkening with each passing mile. 

Cows on the road were the first danger. I’ve driven that section of Highway 36 a hundred times or more and never encountered any form of wildlife save a family of raccoons late one night, and yet that solo free-ranging bovine was merely the first. More followed, leading me to wonder about the alleged mystical ability of mammals to forecast violent weather or natural catastrophes, normally manifested in an edgy restlessness, if you believe the tales. Jim said that several times he’d crossed snakes on that road and every time thereafter encountered heavy rain. Some sixth sense, perhaps, touched by atmospheric pressure, temperature spikes, even unknown qualities science can only surmise. And all the while the word “supercell” stuck in my brain like a bur, and I turned it this way and that as if to dissect it and in doing so lessen its menace.

It seems a distinctly Midwestern term. Residents from other parts of the country must think it something else entirely, a particularly efficient form of battery or maximum security prison housing the worst of the worst. To a Nebraskan, a Kansan, a resident of the prairie states, supercell is a bogeyman word, a nightmare with which to threaten unruly children, a curse, its every syllable and vowel dripping with evil. If any comfort can be drawn from the idea of a supercell, it’s that the devil unleashed is blind and unwitting, preying without favor or remonstrance on righteous and unrighteous alike. 

It’s possible the cows were a warning. As we ate a quick sandwich at a park in Norton, we sniffed the air and felt in our bones its very instability. By the time we crossed into Nebraska the skies were black and the wind rising. Several lonely houses scarred with past storm damage sailed past, a storage shed reduced to twisted sheets of metal strewn across a soggy field, trees smashed flat or whipped to bare stalks. A large falcon winged by and we tracked it but could not agree on an identification, peregrine or prairie. Our attentions irrevocably diverted  toward that which moved to intersect us.

Some thunderstorms can be avoided, some not. This one spread across the earth consuming everything in its path and rumbling cavernously spit fire and darkness. In my mind the word supercell gained ascendance like a supplication or invocation to a disaffected spirit. A midnight wall of water raced toward us. Jim cursed gripping the wheel white-knuckled and stared balefully out the windshield on a world gone amorphous and liquid. Jagged forks of lightning exploded in the sudden night as if some great machine were short-circuiting, and us trapped within, but faintly, ever sso faintly, our eyes trained on a paler shade of gray to our left, a safe haven if we could reach it. Chod flipped the radio to a channel static with blips and beeps and advisories. Hail ricocheted off the hood like gunshots.

“Should we pull over and wait it out?” Jim yelled. 

Before we could answer a sign passed spectrally announcing Red Willow State Recreation Area. The announcer broke in warning of a tornado on the ground at the selfsame location. Its direction almost matched ours as did its rate of speed. Jim accelerated and tersely told us to watch his back but there was little visible in the rear view mirrors but a pluvial twilight laced with fire.

So we fled and the storm pursued, but roads follow cardinal points and storms do not and after a while we broke free, and with all thoughts of tenting abolished we joined the great Platte River Road and turned toward the West.

Almost the West (Part 2)

Jim once said that the greatest thing ever invented was the automatic dishwasher, followed in short order by the washing machine. “But” he admitted, “I’m lazy.”  

My own list is both long and fluid, its nature and substance changing with varying situations and fluctuating interests, such as the week we spent tenting in hot, humid South Carolina and felt upon our return that nothing could be finer than a simple refrigerator. I’d stand in front of the fridge grinning like an idiot while opening and closing the door, marveling each time at the miracle of cold beer and food without the mess of ice. For this moment, though, I’d rate paved roads as one of the preeminent inventions in history, and motorized vehicles to wend them.

I-80 across southern Nebraska, a modern four-lane superhighway paralleling the green ribbon of the North Platte River, speeds us toward western skies. Beneath us was once another road, a broad sandy path a mile or more wide, dotted with white shapes like “sailing vessels I had often seen on Lake Erie,” wrote Phoebe Judson in 1853. Dr. Thomasson declared it “level and smooth as a plank floor.” Rebecca Ketcham, writing in 1853, said it was as wide as eight or ten common roads back in the States, and with a little work could be made into one of the “most beautiful roads in the world.”

It’s impossible to drive this stretch without thinking of the emigrants who risked everything to start new lives in the west. Their experiences are as fresh today as they were back then, kept alive in journals and diaries and collected in such works as “The Great Platte River Road,” by Merrill Mattes. No other book so fully captures the excitement, wonder and hardship of travelers on the Oregon Trail through Nebraska. And to think: if conditions were favorable, they managed 40 miles a day; if not, 10 could be hoped for. We’re rocketing along at 70 miles an hour, a fact that puts the westward movement into stunning perspective. 

Nor could they run from supercells and tornadoes, as we did. Lightning killed oxen or stampeded cattle, hail knocked them senseless, wind sent wagons cartwheeling. After particularly wet storms the flat valley turned into a quagmire, miring wagons up to the axles. 

There are other parallels between the emigrants and our own codgernautical journey. Mattes remarked that the endless shimmering valley had a hypnotic effect upon travelers. “The monotony of the Platte makes one drowsy,” Peter Burnett wrote, and Rebecca Ketcham offered, “We are all afflicted with drowsiness.” One hundred fifty-five years later, Chod and Jim collapse on their hotel beds in the town of Ogallala and fall asleep at once. I have a brief pang of doubt about journeying with my elders and then digging my binoculars out of my duffel slip quietly out the door. 

***

Where does the West begin? Somehow I missed the 100th meridian, the fabled longitudinal demarcation bisecting the nation, but on a small pond behind the hotel I find a western grebe. The medium-sized waterfowl keeps company with a lesser scaup and a raft of coots, swimming lazily in circles or tucking its black-crowned head beneath a wing. I’m a little tired myself but unwilling to subject myself to a darkened room just yet, and so make my way around the pond on a hard-packed trail. The grebe is the first western species seen so far, leading me to wonder if the west is really more imagination than destination. An absurd idea, quickly quashed. For most of my life I lived in the west and considered myself a westerner first and an American second and the gap between the two was distant indeed. Wide as the Platte, to coin a phrase. Here in this small Nebraskan city I’ve lost my bearings even while retaining a modicum of cardinal directions, thanks mostly to the wooded path of the river. I decide that the bird will have to do: I’ve left the east behind. 

Without mountains on the horizon it’s never that easy, of course. When I break out of the trees a dirt road separates me from a line of small cottonwoods, their leaves clattering in a breeze. I want to dip a foot into the river but it’s evident what I’m seeing are sandy channels watered only during snowmelt, and the river somewhere beyond a menacing growth of waxy fronds of the triple-leaf variety. It’s a bit early to chance a rash so I strike off to the right, the sun at my back casting a shadow far before me like some animated caricature pumping its arms and legs in a skeletal jitterbug. 

Behind me the parking lot fills with travelers seeking shelter for the night. I imagine the wooded bottoms filling with wagons, the creak of harnesses and iron-shod wheels and the pungent aroma of cookfires. They, too, looked for the west even as I do now, and it comes to me that their west began with the sentinel rocks lying ahead. Perhaps boundaries are precise only on maps and never on the ground where our lives unfold. On the heels of the thought a bobwhite flushes and sails across the road. I hear the slurry whistle of an eastern bluebird. Eastern and western kingbirds chitter and scold. A pewee perches on a naked limb not 10 feet away and I cannot tell its orientation until it utters a thin trill identifying it as an eastern species. In the fading light an olive-sided flycatcher, larger, darker, with a streaked breast, cuts loose with a quick, three beers!, a sentiment I wholeheartedly ascribe to. The bird is as misplaced as I am, caught in a place that’s neither east nor west but somewhere in between. On the banks of the Great Platte River Road, we’re all emigrants still.

Landmarks of a former age (Part 3)

Calves in the grassy draws, the early morning sun slanted crosswise across the Nebraska sandhills layering contrasting swaths of light and shadow over a protuberant and gullied terrain. One and a half centuries ago a man named T. Parker traveled this same route and saw these selfsame hills and valleys and felt the warmth of the same morning sun and carved his mark on a naked bluff a hundred miles from here, and his presence somehow lingers if not on this hallowed trail then in my mind, a stranger but an invited guest nonetheless. Sojourners together on the western road.

I think of him often as we stand beside the road photographing an old wooden windmill and listening to the sweet fluted notes of a western meadowlark, or staring up a deeply-eroded gulch where wagons were once lowered from the heights by ropes and prayers. He was no relation but a name found decades ago inscribed on Register Cliff near Guernsey, Wyo. The shock of that encounter lingers to this bright day as together we at last come to the landmarks that captivated a fledgling nation.

Windlass Hill is the first such mark, contoured in the early sun and painted with wildflowers and sagebrush. We strip the silvery leaves from the plant and inhale deeply its pungent aroma and stride toward the crest, the trail nearly vertical as if designed to prove its perpendicularity. Coming down in a fully-loaded wagon must have been death-defying, but the base was reward enough in rich meadows and cool springs, the most famous of which is Ash Hollow a few miles downstream. It’s here that any questions of where the west begins are answered in the incontrovertible presence of yucca, Rocky Mountain juniper, black-billed magpie and two-tailed swallowtail. The east is behind us.

The hill and springs were merely obstacle and replenishment. The real landmarks are yet to come, those that dominated horizons and imagination and earned the recognition that eastern humidity and the prairie itself were departing, that a new land was hoving into view. The North Platte below Ash Hollow might be a ribbon of clear blue water with the air above speckled with terns and swallows of every kind, but the green blush of vegetation dries up rapidly as the gently rounded knolls erode into rocky bluffs and the river lies naked beneath a blazing sky. Portions of it are now forested with Russian olives, an unknown species when T. Parker rolled through. 

Neither were the signs marking today’s westward trail, of course: “Merrill County—livestock friendly,” read one, leading us to question whether the cows and horses were personable or if the county itself welcomed domesticated stock in preference to, say, the unwashed masses of humanity, like birders; another said “Mitchell’s—Guns, Ammo, Crafts.” 

“Must be married,” Jim said grimly.

And then there were the signs that became a ubiquitous presence wherever we stopped: “Warning: Rattlesnakes common in this area.” We laughed at them for the government’s penchant for stating the obvious. We warned each other in grave overtones whenever we stepped from the vehicle, as if snakebite were a certainty. We ridiculed the political correctness that made such signs necessary as a hedge however slight against base and frivolous lawsuits. We laughed across Nebraska and halfway through Wyoming to Independence Rock, where Chod had a very close encounter with a prairie rattler. After a sobering moment where we almost got serious, Jim and I cracked up and asked him if he’d bothered to read the damn signs.

“There aren’t any here!” Chod snapped peevishly. And, indeed there weren’t. Go figure.

The Courthouse and Jail were the first real geologic wonders of the trail, massive rock fortifications jutting from the sandy plains in an impressive array nevertheless all out of sorts with impressions left on today’s travelers. Many emigrants wrote that the stretch between the rocks and Scotts Bluff were the most scenic in the world. I watched for them long before they came into sight and then had to agree with Jim’s assessment: “This must be one of the least photogenic rocks in the world.”

In all fairness they looked better from the south, but a vast prairie dog colony filled with burrowing owls created a living foreground every bit as good as the vista. A dusty backroad took us over the rocky spine of the Wildcat Hills and descended into the Platte valley where we found a vast shimmering playa filled with shorebirds and waterfowl. In the distance the thin spire of Chimney Rock raked the sky. 

It was yet miles off but still riveting, an inverted funnel with a broad whitened base and a thin conical shaft rising 120 feet. No other landmark on the Oregon Trail so captured the wonder and awe of the emigrants, and for today’s expectant travelers it is no different. My first view of the obelisk was set to the music of screeching yellow-headed blackbirds, piping avocets and a chorus of frogs that wove a wild and primitive soundtrack into my consciousness. 

Scott’s Bluff, a few miles farther, was even more stunning. Today’s highway wends through majestic Mitchell’s Pass even as the original trail did, flanked by Eagle Rock and Sentinel Rock as if gateways to Wyoming. Indeed, atop the bluff one can see the faint blue triangular outline of Laramie Peak—the Rocky Mountains at last.

We were at the summit taking photographs when a park ranger approached Chod. He was hunched over a cactus with his lens a few inches from a scarlet blossom and glanced up as a shadow fell over him. The ranger was slim and fit and garbed in an exquisitely starched uniform.

“That’s a prickly pear,” he announced, enunciating each word slowly as if Chod were an idiot. The temperature on the crest plunged a good 30 degrees.

“I lead prairie tours,” Chod said icily. “I know what this is.”

The ranger disappeared without further ado.

Jim and I looked at each other and then at Chod. He was clearly irritated.

“That’s a prickly pear,” I said.

“Oh, shut up.”

Questions for the long view (Part 4)

So much has changed. Where once bighorn sheep scampered up sheer rock ledges a two-lane paved road now winds skyward, disappearing into blind curvated tunnels, hanging precariously on the outermost edge of Scott’s Bluff and ending at a broad parking lot where the immensity of the Great American Desert inserts its presence to become a livid, breathing entity. The sheep are gone and the buffalo and grizzlies, and the Brule Sioux, too. In their stead is a city spreading like an oil spill and a steady stream of tourists making the pilgrimage to the summit, and the road itself which takes us there.

It’s not that the bluff is all that high but that everything else around is so flat, plus the dry western air cuts the haze making distant objects appear closer than they are. It’s almost an optical illusion and one that confounded many an emigrant, though it wasn’t until I made a reverse emigration and saw firsthand the obscurant nature of humidity that I understood their plight. I was born with the long view.

The incident with the helpful park ranger unsettled us. While it gave us fodder to snipe at Chod, who as a budding wildflower expert and docent at Konza Prairie Biological Station hardly qualifies as a greenhorn, it also conjured a question no man likes to ask himself: how do I appear to others; and more specifically, how do I appear to people of authority? 

Clearly, we must have looked like cretins if the ranger felt we couldn’t distinguish prickly pear from pine needles. Or was, in fact, the ranger at fault? Fresh out of school perhaps, armed with a puppy dog eagerness to please and a little knowledge of the local flora and fauna (a little knowledge being a dangerous thing), proud of his starched uniform and shiny badge and an unquestionable authority among the humanity crowding the peak, and yet utterly incognizant of the various classifications of tourists. Had Chod been wearing plaid shorts, black socks and leather wingtips, the ranger would have been well within his bounds to offer identification pointers. But to us grizzled veterans weighed down with thousands of dollars of photographic and optical equipment and dressed shabbily to boot? Open your eyes, man!

We descended in a huff and with much conversation about the pretty blonde ranger manning the front entrance. Had she been the offending party things might have turned out better, though it’s possible that our fragile manly feelings would have been crushed all the more. At any rate, we parked at the visitor’s center and got out and immediately festooned ourselves with cameras and binoculars. A little blue bird zipped past, the second time since our arrival, but this time I tracked it to the top of a tall ponderosa. 

“A blue grosbeak!” I shouted, and lowering my binos found a pimply-faced ranger materialized before me. Chod and Jim backed off as if the fellow were contagious, leaving me to fend for myself. 

“Are you birders?” he asked. 

There are many ways to answer such a question. Some are even polite. I stared at the apparition and choked out a weak “yes.” It was all he needed. He launched into a checklist of the birds we might find and where we might find them, from purple finches (most assuredly not) to rufous-sided towhees. Those, he declared, could be found in the thick shrubbery behind the amphitheater, and jabbing one arm for directions, asked if we’d like him to personally lead us there.

Rufous-sided towhees?

An awkward silence fell as I struggled to get past the towhees part. I was entangled in it, snared in an internal argument ovser how many years had passed since the bird had been called that. A decade? More? And shouldn’t the ranger be more up-to-date with bird nomenclature? I blinked and found the young man awaiting a reply and the codgernauts beyond and on their amused faces the dead certainty of hell to come.

I thanked the ranger and told him we could find our own way around. As he skipped off to be friendly and informative to other unwitting tourists Chod sidled over and asked, “Seen any rufous-sided towhees?” 

I told him graphically and succinctly where he could put his towhee. 

***

Wyoming at last, sagebrush to the horizons and the mountains ahead. We entered Torrington and stopped to buy gas.

“I got drunk here once but I don’t remember much,” Jim said.

“That’s the way it usually works,” I said.

The old trail leads on to Fort Laramie and Register Cliff where T. Parker scribed his name in the soft limestone over a century ago but clouds were building and we pushed on to the campground above Guernsey. Before making camp we continued to the overlook where in the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps erected a massive shelter house with a 360-degree view. Lori and I discovered the place years ago and it was my intention to share the majestic view of Laramie Peak as seen through the monumental archway. As intentions go it was excellent but the sight ripped the breath from my lungs and I could not breathe but gasped helplessly while something within me crumpled. 

“How could I have left this?” I asked of no one. 

Some questions are never meant to be asked. Teetering on the lip of a vast and deep depression, I struggled to pull back, swearing at my inability to enjoy the scenery without being hammered with emotions. There was a pittance of success but a dark cloud hung over me until bedtime, when at last I crawled into my sleeping bag and inhaling deeply of the wet sage promised myself that tomorrow would be better.

Farewell to a friend (Part 5)

We crossed the North Platte on the outskirts of Guernsey, the early morning sun shattering into a thousand dancing orbs on its ageless riffles. The river was milky with snowmelt and running fast over smoothened rocks, and smelled perfectly like the inside of a trout-filled creel. I slowed to a crawl and parked on the bridge so we could scan the water for birds. A common merganser on the far shore added a new species to the trip. Does the river smell like trout or do trout smell like the river? The latter, I decided. Once I discovered my favorite stretch of the North St. Vrain bone-dry from dewatering and the few remaining trout gasping their last in a deep undercut pool. When the flow resumed the river smelled as it always had but the life had gone out of it. I never could return. And here on this bridge I recalled the first shock of icy water after stepping into a stream and for a moment the steering wheel became the cork grip of a nine-foot flyrod. “I am haunted by waters,” wrote Norman McClean, and in that sentiment we are blood brothers indeed.

A narrow dirt road led to a low ridge of piney hills gouged deeply by iron-shod wheels, the dry Wyoming air redolent of sage, pines and some unnameable quality. Three miles from here T. Parker paused long enough on his westward migration to carve his name on a bluff and the cut wherein we stood was a little deeper for his passing. He was here in this exact spot and if our kinship goes no deeper than name only it is more than enough to conjoin us to the trees and stones of this place. 

From here the trail entered a new kind of terrain, the high sagebrush desert. Trees grew scarce except for stunted willows lining watercourses and the occasional cottonwood towering above the silvery-green pungent sage. Horizons drifted back to eternity with the Laramie Mountains a snowy bulwark to the southwest, a broad serrated arc bending westward and the historic trails like the modern interstate skirting it as a river takes the path of least resistance. God, but this country was breathtaking and barely more inhabited now than when covered wagons crawled its length. What it must have been like to cross it at their glacial pace and to embody it at least for a short while. Their eyes of course were set at a farther resolve, their concerns beating an early winter to the high passes which they feared, and ours tamer by far. 

Their eyes on the short haul, too, the landmarks whose names still resonate: Mormon Ferry, Emigrant Gap, Avenue of Rocks, Prospect Hill, Devil’s Gate, Split Rock. Some were visible for days before and after, and some marked the deaths of many travelers. An estimated one in ten died along the way, an astounding figure. And some landmarks crept up unawares, seeming to rise like mirages from the shimmering sagebrush flats. Independence Rock was the most famous of these, a 128-foot-tall granite boulder measuring more than 27 acres at its base. It was not there one moment and there the next and I braked and whipped into a parking lot surrounding covered tables and restroom facilities and passed on through and looped back on the main highway to where a singletrack cut toward the massive stone. 

“There’s gotta be sage thrashers here,” Jim said.

Slow jaunts over dirt roads demand a certain protocol: unsheathe binoculars, roll down windows, stare hard at any movement. For the driver one overriding command supersedes all others: stop on a dime when commanded to. I was ready when the call came and there on its namesake shrub before us was the thrasher, and a Brewer’s blackbird beyond. Two new species.

We spilled from the truck and scattered in several directions. It’s not that we were tired of one other but that each had his own vision to pursue. Mine was the perimeter of the rock itself and the views of the distant Wind River Range with the sleepy Sweetwater River meandering through lush wet meadows. The place had been an oasis for mountain men, emigrants and Mormons alike, and a sort of calendar as well. If they reached the rock by July 4 they knew they were on schedule; if not, they needed to speed up. The rock also served as a register, its surface pocked still with inscriptions dating to the mid-1800s. If T. Parker added his it’s long since disappeared, or else I never found it. I wondered if he made it this far and felt in my bones that he had. He was here and carried on and survived to see the Oregon Territory. He did and that was the end of it.

The urge to scale the stone was irresistible. Circumnavigating its base we watched for likely places to ascend. Unfortunately, Chod also found a prairie rattlesnake sheltered under a narrow cleft and its distinctive buzzing inaugurated a cautionary atmosphere that ultimately kept us grounded. Plus we were no different from the emigrants in having time constraints, with miles to go before nightfall. 

The slow purl of the river pulled me as rivers always pull me. I toed the water to become a part of it if only briefly and looked downstream toward the way we’d come. I imagined the trail stretching back to the banks of the Missouri and every single mile a hard slog for people tougher than we can imagine. T. Parker watered his oxen in this river and looked back and saw the miles he’d come but it was nothing compared to what he still faced. The continental divide a few miles farther and all the rivers flowing to the west. Halfway there.

I was reluctant to leave and had to force my feet to move. We codgernauts rejoined at the truck and set off, and soon came to the ice slough where emigrants found ice well into summer, and turning toward Lander left the Oregon Trail behind us. Silently and sadly I bade T. Parker farewell, and vowed that before the end of my days I would follow him all the way to the Promised Land. 

The disappearing river and other Wyoming stories (Part 6)

The emigrants had the forts, McPherson, Kearny, Laramie, Casper and others, outposts of civilization in the middle of the howling wilderness where shelter, provisions and support could be found. We codgernauts had Lander, and if there were other refuges to follow, none so captured our imaginations nor made us so avid to rush home, quit our jobs, sell our houses, load our possessions pioneer-like and head to the foothills of Wyoming’s Wind River Range. Kansas be damned.

Camping brings its own set of deprivations of which we willingly partake. This, in turn, leads to a renewed appreciation for the trappings of modern society. Almost any city or town with hot food and flush toilets looks good after a night in wet sleeping bags, but Lander was different. With its classy microbreweries, fine restaurants and upscale coffee shops—one specializing in gourmet chocolates, a sure sign of humanity at its apogee—its beautiful college girls and scruffy cowboys and clean shaded streets and the snowy mountains rising beyond, the town resonated with us as only home can. Jim prattled on about ways to convince his wife, Patty, to leave Abilene, Chod envisioned a nice house on the edge of town with a little acreage, while I imagined a rustic writing cabin beside the river where I could dap a dry fly at leisure. Lori would come in a heartbeat, I knew. 

As we cruised Lander’s downtown we were tormented by signs advertising wood-fired pizzas and hot wings, specialty ales and coffees, and I think in the back of our minds, or at least the minds of two of us, our return would come in the early hours of evening when we would partake of the nightlife and sate our ravenous appetites. That it never happened still surprises me.

Leaving town, we paralleled the Middle Fork of the Popo Agie River through lush wet meadows sprinkled with lavish McMansions, the first of many to come as we moved evermore westward. The canyon’s mouth was a narrow slash barely wide enough to accommodate the river and the highway. A few miles upstream it widened sufficiently for a small campground to squeeze between the road and the water, and it was there we stopped to make camp. It was not an auspicious site.

For one, the campground was almost full, with all the better sites taken. What remained was an unlikely duo jumbled with boulders, stunted lodgepole pines, aspens and wild roses, and the adjoining site swarming with a young redneck family group with the alpha male sporting a shaved head, bare chest and holstered Glock. The latter raised a host of questions, not the least concerning the location of the nearest law enforcement officer or park ranger. Also, there was a very real concern over what might happen during the night should a bear wander into camp, or a raccoon, skunk or crazed chipmunk. Mindful of flying lead, I stuffed my tent behind a large boulder in hopes it would provide an adequate barricade. I also wished I’d brought my own pistol.

The river foamed just a few yards away, thundering between the narrow canyon walls. About a mile from camp it took a sudden turn and plunged into a cave. The resulting racket was as physical as it was audible, a bone-deep thrumming vibrating the very air. Rainbows danced above the fine mist generated by the funnel. This was the Sinks, and a quarter-mile downstream was the Rise, where the river re-emerged in a broad, placid pool. Between the two was a barren rocky channel. 

For many years it was believed two separate rivers existed for the disjointed segments could not be more unalike. The river enters the hill with a deafening roar and exits with barely a whisper. There is also more water entering the Rise than flowing into the Sinks. When dye was poured into the upper river to make a final determination, the results were startling: it takes over two hours for the water to flow between the two points, but the Middle Fork was a single entity, even if divisible.

I’d first come here with my family when the boys were young and it seemed as if their presence lingered. I remembered how Joel eagerly pointed to the brown trout finning in the Rise, trout as long as his leg, and how frustrated we were at the signs proclaiming the area off-limits. Grouse of some kind passed through camp that evening but I wasn’t a birder and found them merely another curiosity. Now the birds were like old friends, western specialities such as Cassin’s finch—a lifer for both Jim and Chod—and Virginia’s warbler, green-tailed towhee, lazuli bunting and violet-green swallow. High above a peregrine falcon silently hunted. And best of all a young cottontail hopped from a thicket and gave me a happy bunny dance, reminding me of the family I left behind. 

After dinner I led Chod to the upper part of the campground where a suspension bridge crossed the river. Dusk was falling and the raging waters luminescent beneath us and our movement caused the bridge to sway and bob. We crossed and climbed the bank into a sagebrush meadow and continued on into the trees. Under the pines the light turned purplish and dim and cooler, and we zipped our jackets and hurried on and came at last to a sign warning of cougars and the cliff seemed altogether more menacing, the stillness ruffled with soft footpads of taloned paws. Here in the mountainous west we’d dropped a rung on the food chain and it was oddly comforting as much as it was scary. Again I longed for a pistol until realizing that one doesn’t have to outrun a cougar, one must simply outrun a partner. Thereafter my plan of action was brief: grab a thick stout cudgel, bash Chod in the knee, and hightail it. Every man for himself!

The number of Wests is proportionate to the area traversed (Part 7)

I sometimes wonder if the West I yearn for is an impossible ideal, a mythical place conjured from separation, distances, the romanticism of childhood memories and the insatiable hunger of longing. When we lived on the far side of the 100th Meridian I never knew doubt but existed utterly as one on his own homeground, undiminished and inseparable, or so I believed. It wasn’t until the advent of Kansas that the cracks began to form, leaving me now unmoored, a man ruptured with dual geographies and neither fully inhabited. The inevitable conclusion is that entering the West is akin to being flayed with razors or submerged in a deep cave, until, at least, I acclimate to my surroundings. After that I’m myself again, more or less.

But what is the West? Writers and thinkers much more astute than I have wrestled with this for decades. The more sensible consider the true West less a geographical expanse and more a mindset, though certainly the one cannot exist without the other. Geography informs and grounds us. And yet even the most contrary farmer or philosopher will agree that geography is more than the sum of its parts. At heart we are bound to a certain place as if our blood and bones commingled with the soil and stones. Where I exist in that realm remains in constant flux. 

As does the West itself. At the gas station in Lander we noted mountain bikers cruising by garbed in multicolored spandex outfits, pretty college girls ordering expensive lattes and a beanpole-thin cowboy sauntering in so bowlegged that he appeared to straddle a barrel. “Now, there’s the real thing,” Chod said with a trace of admiration and perhaps a ghost of sadness for what was passing away before our very eyes.

Outside of town we ran into the mother lode of birds in a pond bordered by cattails raucous with the screeching of yellow-headed blackbirds. Hook-billed ibises and avocets foraged in the shallows while a dozen species of waterfowl plied the deeper waters. I tried pishing up a marsh wren but could manage only a common yellowthroat, a small yellowish warbler with a black bandit mask. 

We crossed into the Native American West, sparsely populated, riddled with poverty, one miserly hovel linked by a long green hose to a water tank on the bed of a pickup truck, their only water supply. Arid sagebrush gave way to redrock bluffs and the snowy ranges of the Absarokas, the Wind Rivers and the distant Owl Creek Mountains. Fort Washakie, the only fort named after an Indian chief, appeared a rundown, cinderblocked husk littered with rusted government vehicles whose utility seemed questionable. Witnessing the decrepitude of the reservation came as a shock but only in the sense of its contrast to the white settlements with their obvious, if not ostentatious, wealth. The shameful treatment of America’s indigenous races is depressingly familiar, a marriage of greed cloaked in high intentions and a religion based on a special dispensation of grace to those with the most firepower. Try as I might I’m not sure but we’re going through the same vicious cycle all over again.

Once past the reservation the new money appeared in expansive log cabins and mansions infesting two- to five-acre plots of wet meadows fringed with quaking aspens and blue spruce and driveways sprouting BMWs and Volvos, and in whose mirrored windows reflections of similar tracts staring back. The drive to own a piece of the boundless American West is no less feverish now than it was a century ago but it’s become much more exclusive. Housing for service people and employees invariably lacked aesthetic appeal and amenities and remained hidden from the main road, though one such jumble of trailers caught our eye: The Whistling Wino Mobile Home Park. “Sounds like a place I’d like to live,” Jim said. 

The town of Dubois bills itself as an authentic western town (“Where real cowboys work and play!”) as if on the shoulders of the Absaroka and Wind River mountains it could be anything but. And yet the incongruous juxtaposition of gourmet coffee shop and massive plastic jackalope complete with saddle and stirrups placed it squarely in the odious tradition of Fred Flintstone Village in the Black Hills and other monstrosities that should summarily be razed. My language upon seeing the jackalope was admittedly and unabashedly blue. 

Smoke plumbed into the rarified air as a shiny fifth wheel blazed to cinders. Streams and rivers ran milky from snowmelt. We rose into a lush and privileged world of rarified air and tastes and breathed freely only when we entered the national forest.

This was our West, owned by ourselves and every other citizen of these United States, and to my relief it was as luminous as the West of my imagination. Snow lay deep on the passes and we began picking up montane species such as Stellar’s jay and Wilson’s warbler. But birds weren’t the main focus as we crossed the continental divide and began our descent—it was the Tetons, the iconic mountain range immortalized by Ansel Adams. At this altitude streams ran clear over colorful gravel, leading always toward some snowy massif. Woods were dark and mysterious and inviting. And when the first glimpse of the Tetons appeared we swerved to the shoulder and sat there slack-jawed. They were much, much bigger than I remembered. 

Near Jackson Lake Junction we parked and spilled out with cameras ready. A group of Japanese cluttered the best view of the broad Snake River with Mount Moran as backdrop so we waited impatiently until they wandered off. Other photographers jockeyed for position. 

“I hate tourists,” Chod said.

“We are tourists,” I reminded him, and turned back in awe to the majestic spectacle of the Teton Range.

Oh give me a home (Part 8)

One side of the road contained million-dollar homes competing for expansive views of the Teton Range and the other a vast wet meadow stretching to the distant Wind River Mountains, home to bison, sandhill cranes, trumpeter swans and a single lumbering moose. The dichotomy was unnerving and surreal. Depending on which direction we looked we were either in the upper echelon of society or the Garden of Eden. Stopping at Dairy Queen for lunch only made it worse. While chowing down on burgers and fries and pointedly trying to ignore the other tourists who were unfortunately dressed exactly as we three codgernauts, I stared morosely across the street to a marshy area swarming with yellow-headed blackbirds and violet-green swallows, the panorama regularly eclipsed by heavy trucks, fancy cars and the occasional rattletrap truck. Regardless of its stellar wealth, its movie stars and celebrities, its upscale shops and stunning scenery, Jackson, Wyoming, was exactly like the hamburger in my hand: tasteless, plastic and overpriced.

I’m as clueless as the next guy over what a mountain town should look like but if we came here expecting another Lander we were nuts. People of all nationalities packed the streets downtown giving it a cosmopolitan atmosphere, almost festive, and if I could have lightened up I might have enjoyed myself. As it was I felt snarly and alienated and couldn’t wait to drop off our gear and escape back to the park. Being a curmudgeon isn’t difficult for me but here it came as natural as breathing.

To escape the inherent wealth this place attracts requires disappearing into the backcountry, something we had neither the time nor equipment for. There’s probably a mathematical formula proving the relationship of depopulation by the distance from classy shopping to mosquito-infested wilderness but I don’t know it offhand. We were fortunate to have arrived at the Tetons prior to the main tourist explosion and explored untrammeled areas nearer the road without having to fight for parking places, and dealt with the scenic hotspots in the best of codgernaut tradition, leering at the girls, comparing our photographic equipment with that of other photographers and making disparaging comments about the shoddy casting of the flyfishermen below the bridge. 

Still, we were unprepared for our chilly reception at Jenny Lake Lodge, which the park brochure made sound like a cozy place for a meal with the Tetons framed through the dining room windows. It might be but we never got past the entrance. Our first clue that we were outmatched should have been evident in the vehicles parked in the lot. Or the well-dressed couple walking out who studiously looked away. We’d been pushing hard and might have had a little B.O. and certainly didn’t wear our sweaters casually draped over our shoulders in the best yuppie-fashion, and I admit my pants had a hole in one knee and my shirt was wrinkled and my hiking boots unpolished, but should that exclude us from partaking of a fine meal at an establishment within the boundaries of a national park owned by me and every other American citizen? 

Apparently so. I’m not saying they would have tossed us out but when the gal at the front desk saw us her smile slipped a notch. So sorry but we were an hour too early for dinner but we were certainly welcome to look at the menu. While Chod talked her up Jim and I perused the night’s offerings and quickly concluded that if nothing was recognizable as food nor were prices evident other than bottles of wine costing almost a hundred bucks then we were probably outclassed. A sign asking that jackets be worn for the evening meal probably didn’t refer to our Gore-Tex shells, either.

The idea of backing into a Lexus was tempting but we slunk off as unobtrusively as possible. Who says choleric geezers are unmanageable?

An approaching storm shrouded the snowy peaks in luminous platinum light and raised a rough chop on the waters of Jenny Lake. If anything the mountains loomed larger, dominating and mesmeric so they drew the eye to the exclusion of all else. Behind them veiled in a gray nothingness lay thousands of square miles of wilderness I longed to disappear into. The range’s mood altered with each shift of luminance, each lowering cloud swirl or rain curtain obscuring the couloirs, cornices and snowfields radiant in the deepening gloom, and I knew that a lifetime could be spent studying that interplay without witnessing any repetition of light or shadow, that the spectacle could never grow tiresome or stale. Pulling ourselves away required an effort fueled by hunger and weariness of a day already long and eventful.

On a recommendation we tried Dornan’s, a full-service resort near the south entrance. Again the vehicles should have tipped us off but we marched inside and wended through the crowd of young and fit people to the counter where a menu was chalked in. No burgers nor Americanized fare, only pasta and pizza. Pizza sounded scrumptious but on second scrutiny we failed to discover any edible ingredients. The special had pizza with artichoke hearts and penne pasta atop a funky-sounding marinara sauce. Anything with pepperoni and mushrooms? Nope.

Back to Jackson and a tavern advertising “American” food. Prices on the menu were enough to flush my arteries but I ordered a mushroom burger that only cost ten dollars. I told the waiter to bring me coffee and lots of it. It was horrifically bad. My dislike for that town refined into a crystalline and perfect contempt.  

The road through time (Part 9)

One last stab at the Tetons, first light sharp on the snowy peaks, shadows long, air crisp and fragrant of wet sage and pine, distant meadows pebbled with the shambling forms of bison and elk, ground fog masking the river, photographers huddled over their tripods like protective mother birds and the clattering of camera shutters harmonizing with the trilling of a green-tailed towhee. Surely the ghost of Ansel Adams haunts this hallowed space and these photographers here for a séance divining their cameras the proper conduits for summoning the dead. Please, Mr. Adams, guide our aperture settings, let the light fall soft and luminary on the long curving sweep of the Snake, bless these our humble offerings so they may grace our walls.

Everybody juggled for The Same Angle. I spotted a lone pine in the sagebrush below the ridge and dropped down to frame it in my superwide lens. The upper branches arced into the cobalt sky as if supplicant to the mountains marching away in shimmering serrated ranks. The shutter snapped on what would become the defining image, my own iconic take. 

South then, following the spine of the Rockies, the Hoback River shining in the morning light. Chod, our driver for the day, was uncharacteristically grumbly so we tried humor to alleviate the tension. After a while I noticed that though we were going downhill the river flowed toward us. It was unnerving. When I pointed this out, Chod snapped, “No it’s not.”

Jim rolled his eyes and laughed and I retreated to silence. What we needed was some levity. It came in the form of a Nebraska car in front of us that braked hard and swung to the shoulder in a spray of gravel, the occupants gawking at a powerful bull bison standing in a meadow. The creature was noticeably fashioned from some form of metal. “It’s nice to see people enjoying an authentic western experience,” I said.

We dropped toward the Little Colorado Desert, the mountains falling behind and the land opening up and with each mile drying and growing more desolate.

After a while, Chod said, “The river is flowing uphill.”

***

The Green River, known to the Crow as the Seeds-ka-dee-a, or River of the Prairie Hen, was a braided ribbon of green in an ochre sunblasted land, and Fontenelle Reservoir a drawn-down puddle of colorless water braced by rocky bluffs scraggly with sage. Below its namesake town the river withdrew into the distance and collected into the upper reaches of Flaming Gorge Recreation Area. The term recreation as applied here equates to watercraft and little else, though we found a campground seemingly in the middle of nowhere and pulled in for lunch. We’re reduced to dregs now, cleaning out the icebox in preparation for civilization, and lunch a mishmash of odds and ends.

As we ate we huddled beneath a picnic shelter to shield a cold wind. The few trees were mostly Russian olive and barely alive. It was a hellish place where even the sagebrush looked anemic, but the shoreline was rich with gulls, most of them Californians. A black-capped bird with massive orange bill flew over and we tracked it feverishly. My first thought, Caspian tern, was verified when it stooped over the gulls. Its size alone identified it—with a 50-inch wingspan, nothing else compared. It’s the first tern of the trip and cause for a celebration though the beer was long gone and coffee but a dream.

This was once subtropical waters and shorelines shaded with palms and ferns, the haunt of crocodiles and gar. Mostly it appeared as if everything of value had been stripped to fashion the world elsewhere. Before us rose the blue mass of the Uintah Mountains lying crosswise across the normal axis of the Rocky Mountains, an anomaly announcing an end to Wyoming. As the road ascended it twisted and writhed back on itself and passed through layers of stone and compressed sand each with its own tale of ageless ages, each tilted crazily, each marked by signs explaining the fossils implanted within each strata and the dates thereof. I remarked how our old Baptist preacher who calculated the world a smidgen over 6,000 years old would have found the signs blasphemous. 

The upper reaches of the Uintahs were forested with pine and aspen and delightfully cool. Were I alone I would have pitched camp there and enjoyed the mountains one last time but we crossed over to the southern flanks and descended into Vernal, Utah. The temperature spiked to an uncomfortable level so we sweated like pigs when setting up our tents at a crowded KOA. It was a ghastly place to spend the night. Being back in civilization was an unwelcome experience which I longed to escape, and we did shortly with a jaunt into Dinosaur National Monument.

Here were cataclysmic geologic forces evident, with uplifts and faults and erosional beds the graveyard of saurians. It was a raw land though sprinkled with wildflowers and redrock pinnacles and deep rocky gorges carved by the Green and Yampa rivers heavy with snowmelt. Being cramped in the truck all day gave our feet momentum when we spilled out at the first trailhead and hastened toward a line of bluffs. The trail entered a bloodred arroyo and curved and twisted snakelike, its sandy floor scribbled with the irregular tracks of lizards and voles. The light dimmed as clouds boiled up and cloaked the sun.

A small trail branched off and I broke from the others. The path climbed precipitously to the base of a perpendicular cliff and petered out in a small clearing. There carved in the rock were two suns and two concentric circles, their pocked etchings a paler hue stark against the darker patina varnished by time and the relentless elements. So sudden was their appearance that it felt like trespassing and then like homecoming and I reached out to touch the indentations and paused with my finger an inch away and lightly traced its shape in the air and withdrawing my hand turned and left that place to the whispering wind and whatever spirits still lingered.

Where rivers are born (Part 10)

“C’mon, Brewer’s sparrow.”

For several days Jim had clamored for the bird, a drab species of the high sagebrush desert and a lifer if we could find one. As we entered Colorado he hunched forward in his seat, proclaiming every little brown job that flew before us a Brewer’s and then cursing and saying he couldn’t be sure, followed by a moment of silence where he weighed our doubts and a gruff reminder that it was his list and he could do whatever he wanted with it, and if he called that fleeting brown streak a Brewer’s then dammit it was a Brewer’s. To which we could only shrug.

We did, however, get into the spirit of his quest by trying to beat him to the punch.

“A Brewer’s sparrow!” we’d sing upon seeing a unidentifiable bird.

After a quick glance Jim would study us through slitted eyes and spit an obscenity. Typical codgernaut behavior.

The extreme western slope of Colorado is a Colorado of ageless memory, a Colorado predating people or pollution or cities, a great swath of sagebrush emptiness fringed with snowy ranges and a single lonesome road climbing ever higher. For hours the scenery changed little though its very remoteness appealed to me deeply so that I daydreamed of how it would be to live there, to exist so apart from humanity that elk, bear and coyotes form surrogate neighbors. But the winters must be bitter.

Steamboat Springs stood in stark contrast with its rich homes, requisite Starbucks and interminable panoply of Hummers and Beamers, sort of a lesser Jackson sans celebrities. Against my will I found myself liking it. Mountain bikers were plentiful as was housing for the middle classes, something rare in those glitzy enclaves. The raging Yampa River carved a broad channel through the valley, undercutting the highway in places and engulfing the lowlands. CDOT worked feverishly to stabilize the banks on one sharp bend but the river implacably devoured the hillside and the road itself. Beyond that decremental constriction we ascended a long series of switchbacks to the pass and crossed over and descended into North Park, a vast glacial basin where the North Platte River is born. 

In the center of this bowl a series of shallow ponds and marshes encompass Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge. On all sides mountain ranges ripsawed the horizons—the Medicine Bows, the Park Range, the Rabbit Ears Mountains and the Never Summer Range, the latter wreathed in storm clouds. 

“What do we do if the pass is closed?” Jim asked.

It was a question suddenly on our minds. Only two other routes existed to Estes Park, both requiring at least a hundred extra miles of driving. That fact that it was early June meant nothing at 12,000 feet. Not for nothing are they named the Never Summer Range.

I turned onto a narrow dirt road and stopped long enough for us to unsheathe our binoculars and ready our cameras. Jim rolled the window down and leaned forward, gripping his binoculars tightly. The breeze was raw and unforgiving.

A small sparrow darted across the road. I braked and three pairs of binoculars raced it to the crest of a tall sage.

“Lark sparrow.”

Another few yards, another sparrow, another stop. Heavily-streaked breast with faint yellow lores, a Savannah sparrow. Next a song sparrow. And vesper sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, horned larks, meadowlarks, killdeer and sparrows that took to ground and could not be found, sparrows that kept flying and disappeared against the backdrop of the snowy mountains, sparrows that played hide-and-seek in willows and thickets only half-leafed out in this place where summer is the shortest season of all.

After a few near-misses, Jim turned to me and said, “I’ve known several birders who didn’t know how to apply the brakes. Next time I say stop, stop!”

The road meandered through dense sagebrush, wet sloughs and grassy meadows. Past a small rise a pond opened before us, its cobalt surface rippled with waves and the bobbing forms of waterfowl. My hearty application of the brake pedal was sufficient to nearly unseat my navigator, who cursed loudly and soundly.

“Like that?” I asked.

Colors at this altitude—8,200 feet—seemed exaggerated as if to make up for winter’s latent white shroud.  The golden feathers of yellow-headed blackbirds fairly pulsed in the thin air, matched only by the rich chestnuts of cinnamon teal and the baby-blue bills of ruddy ducks. Indigo skies bled like ink into the pools and sloughs, deepening and intensifying their hues. Clouds launched blindingly white off the high peaks, their ponderous shadows eclipsing whole sections into temporal gloom, while beyond luminous shafts of sunlight skipped over the valley like some lambent finger tracing enigmatic hieroglyphs.

The road circumnavigated a wet meadow to a massive foursquare structure that if not for the cupolaed roof might have been the remnant of a frontier Army palisade. Its weathered boards were deeply furrowed and desiccated to a pale colorless gray. We parked beside it and stepped into the cold wind and framing the barn in our cameras captured it in a shuttersnap of time.  

On we went down an ever-narrowing two-track, mountains ringing us singing to us, the wind whispering and the immense cloud-freckled sky the greatest of the elements. A curtain of rain dragged a charcoal veil across the distant Park Range. White-tailed prairie dogs barked and scampered toward their burrows. A pale drab bird flushed and landed in the middle of the road as if to block our passage. Hard brake, lurch forward, settle back. Binos locked on. Breaths held, and held, and held. A slow steady exhale. 

“Is that—?”

“Yes.”

A forest of ghosts (Part 11)

We first noticed it when crossing the Uintah Mountains, vast stretches of ponderosa pine forests turned brown and brittle and dying before our eyes. If not for the cobalt sky and the layered azure of distant mountains, the occasional splash of yellow or crimson of wildflowers nodding in the breeze or the luminous lime of quaking aspen, the high mountains were as lifeless as the Chihuahuan Desert and the same ochreous hue. 

Once noticed it became startlingly obvious, as if blinders had been removed and our eyesight sharpened to a godlike perspective. The pestilence was there on the steep slopes of Rabbit Ears Pass, but the scope of the coming plague became manifest when we turned off Highway 40 at the small town of Granby and began our ascent to the upper reaches of the Never Summer Mountains. Mile after mile after mile of ponderosas were exanimate husks waiting for a castoff cigarette, a sizzling bolt of lightning or an unwatched campfire. The few patches of pines still living were visibly weakened and blotchy with disease. For these woods there would be no resurrection without conflagration.

It was heartbreaking and terrifying and probably none more so than to residents of mountain towns such as Grand Lake, squalid and mean even in its lust for grandeur, positioned smack in the middle of a tinderbox that once started would have no end until scorched earth and blackened stone were the only remnants. 

The culprit was a small insect known as the western pine beetle. This wasn’t a case of an introduced species but a naturally-occurring pest whose impact to healthy forests is usually minimal. Years of drought and fire in every western state have sapped the pines of their resistance and resilience, and coupled with explosive reproduction, the lack of natural predators and the impossibility of forest managers to combat the insect without harming other species—as if budgets allowed for such magnitude or exactitude—the great western pine forests are disappearing.

“We’re the last generation to see these woods,” Jim said. He was right, and from the amount of devastation it was evident that they’ll be gone long before we are. Considering the importance they’ve meant in my life, this plunged me into a deep funk. 

To our danger we imagine nature a benign and benevolent force. And yet behind us lay a trail of destruction, not merely woods but towns such as Jewell, Kansas, smashed flat by the same supercell formations that had chased us across Nebraska, hailstorms of biblical proportions, tornadoes, straight-line winds, nightly visitations of violent unpredictable tempests and constant, unflagging tension for residents of the Great Plains. While we were blithely traipsing across the West our wives back home were under assault. Nor as the week progressed did the news get any better. More than once I questioned the wisdom of continuing our trip but found no way to broach the subject to my companions. And so we betray our loved ones.

Snow was hip-deep on top of Milner Pass, the headwaters of the Cache La Poudre a white surge erupting to foam down grassy boulders into meadows without end. The road took us higher still hugging the curve of the mountain in a thin narrow path that seemed little more than a goat trail and altogether insubstantial. Firs and spruces grew stunted and dwarfed, their boles twisted like corkscrews from the incessant frigid wind. As we broke above timberline the sky opened into a depthless cobalt cathedral and the rainshowers relented. Clouds pulled back revealing endless ranges with their jagged peaks and snowfields shimmering in the sunlight. 

Several buildings at the Alpine Visitor Center were buried in snow but the gift shop was open for business and the parking lot mostly cleared of drifts. We slipped into our Gore-Tex jackets wishing for heavier winter gear and debated taking the trail to the overlook, about a third of a mile across the tundra. Jim, who had groused about the narrowness of the road and the lack of guardrails, spit out a dare to us and disappeared into the warmth of the shop. I hated to tell him that if he didn’t like the road thus far he was really going to dislike it when we started across the high tundra.

Perhaps due to his challenge we set off at a brisk pace. An observer might indeed have thought us in competition, which at this altitude, slightly more than two miles in elevation, was a foolish and dangerous thing for flatlanders to do. Our boots pounded through snowdrifts gone to slush and pools of gelid water soon to freeze solid with the setting of the sun and the wind sharp as razors. Within minutes I felt a deep throbbing headache forming behind my eyes and a band tightening around my head. My legs burned and felt heavy as stones and my breath came up short. It’s one thing to be out of shape and another to be unacclimated and here I was under the influence of both and refusing to slow down. An American pipit landed but we barely gave it a glance though it was new for the trip. My eyes roved ceaselessly looking for pikas. We pushed on to the top and sagged against a wooden post announcing the elevation at 12,005 feet. 

Once this place was a second home and now I was getting nailed with altitude sickness. The headache blossomed into white light and my stomach grew queasy. “I have to get off this mountain,” I said.

But first were a few photos, shaky and windblown, of the western ranges. Strange how I never looked to the east where with only a little imagination the farflung skies were Kansan. 

Rocky Mountain interlude (Part 12)

The marmot’s posture said it all: torso draped over a fallen log, head resting on its front paws, eyes slitted to the early morning sun. Too weary to lift its head or run from the idiot snapping its picture, it was the very embodiment of overindulgence. I felt the same. It was time to go home.

But first was a quiet interlude, our first and last for this trip, a two-night stay in a very nice house back in the woods above Estes Park with an extensive deck overlooking feeders whose occupants were montane species new to the trip: pygmy nuthatch, black-headed grosbeak, mountain chickadee. Our hosts, Dwight and Linda, were not only blessed with an extraordinary amount of patience to handle three increasingly-surly codgernauts, they were both gourmet cooks and wine lovers and we ate and drank accordingly. Plus she kept the coffeepot going.

Without the need to drive halfway across a state as we had done everyday for a week there was time to relax, but on a rapidfire pace merging our two passions, photography and birding. We began at the Horseshoe Park area where a dam bursting in 1982 deposited an alluvial fan heaped with splintered trees and stones the size of cars, a ghostly scar yet to heal. Dropping from a rocky ledge in a whitewater foam, the Roaring River spilled out into broad grassy meadows thick with elk including young ones we were careful to avoid. It was here that Jim found a red-naped sapsucker, a lifer for him, itself a flood of excitement replete with shouts and gesticulations of a nature sufficient to alarm bystanders, some of whom eyed us warily as if we’d gone batty or might even pose a danger. Unimaginative boobs. In the rapids below the falls we watched the antics of a dipper leaping into the current like some northern form of penguin though on a vastly smaller scale. 

But then this place was all about scale, something a ranger told me at the visitor center. People tend to think in present time, in generational time, he said, when nature thinks in geological time. Not in a matter of years or even decades but in hundreds and thousands of years. Millions of years. The forests so blighted and dying were merely a part of it, an ecological blip and no more, and not for the first time. The ponderosas would fade and something else would replace them, probably lodgepole pines which require fire to scarify their seeds and make them viable. And fire would come, the ranger promised; that, too, was guaranteed. In a hundred years the western forests would look much different and yet be healthy and vibrant, a transition reaching beyond our own short lives. His calm matter-of-factness allayed my fears, reminding me again of how short-sighted I can be. When these woods are again healthy I shall be dust.

Some of our leisurely haste could be attributed to a looming sense of finality. After all, this was our concluding moment to bird, to photograph, to take in the majestic scenery and capture it for our departure and beyond. This is where the road had taken us; by evening it would be finished, the hours remaining no more than an extended run for home. The realization whetted our appetite for more, and as we wended the winding roads of the park we each followed our own vision, Jim and Chod the narrow view with their long-range lenses, me a broader field with a superwide lens, Chod taking off after a coyote, me after a butterfly, Jim taking it all in with a solemnity almost spiritual in measure, his pale eyes offset against a sunburned face and a shock of hair as white as the snows on the upper peaks of the Mummy Range. 

The end came later, when we reached the house and packed our bags and stowed them by the door, and sitting down to a wonderful meal with the wine flowing and conversation and the bittersweet surety of closure and new friendships. 

But the true end occurred at an alpine lake at the end of the road, with storm clouds seething above the rocky crags of Flattop Mountain and Hallett Peak, the steely-gray waters rippling in an icy breeze. We parked and slipped into our jackets and entered a lodgepole forest half in dusk, the trail drifted in deep snow softly glowing in the twilight, the air sharp with the scent of pine needles, and at last broke out onto the pebbled shore of Bear Lake. I spotted a boulder jutting above the shallows and made my way to it and crouching down framed it within the eyepiece with the lake behind and Flattop Mountain a stark monolith and snapped the shutter on what would be the final photo of the trip.

That evening I phoned Lori and her voice possessed a frailty I’d not heard before. She said lightning took out the furnace and air conditioner and the stereo as well and more violent storms were predicted. And already the western skies were black, laced with lightning, thunder rising from the earth itself.

One more day, I said. 

Hurry, she whispered, and as the line went dead the night gathered about me like a mantle of crows summoning the storm, and if I heard the coming tempest in that dark, dark night it was not something dredged from desperation or loneliness but merely prophetic.

Deja vu all over again (Part 13)

No dawn but a paling only and in that gloom a faint hiss, almost metallic, of sleet and snow falling through pines. The first week of June and spring barely here in the foothills of the Rockies. Here our number grew by one, Linda hopping a ride to Abilene. We found room for her belongings solely through equal measures of creativity and imagination plus some forceful shoving. Waiting outside for her to say goodbye to Dwight, Jim turned to us and growled, you guys have to clean up your language. 

Does she know what she’s getting into? I asked.

I’m serious, you have to behave yourselves.

It seemed a dubious proposal but through decades of marriage a man acquires passable amounts of resiliency and training. It helped that Jim took the wheel and Linda the navigator seat, leaving me and Chod the back to doze. My camera bag was a comforting lump at the back of my head, and in my lap a journal, though what I really wanted was a book to get lost in, weary as I was of my own rantings, rambles and observations.

The road corkscrewed down the Big Thompson Canyon beside a whitewater river, sleet turning to drizzle and then to a driving rain obliterating any chance for speed. We topped off the tank and our snack supply in Loveland, traffic heavy and kicking up spray but slowing for no man nor anything else but the sheer density of it finally dragging it down to a crawl until we crossed the demarcation of I-25 and so departed a city I no longer recognized and sailed free onto the vast unpeopled spaces of the Great Plains.

Fields were sodden and torn, roadside ditches brimming. Cumulations of hail stood a foot deep behind buildings in the few somnolent towns staking claim to the shortgrass prairie, their streets carpeted with shredded leaves and twigs and the sky menacing more, and before us a lone jagged fork of lightning like a signal of hell to come. It was a somber and moody landscape hungover from a long night of nature’s inconceivable wrath, now breathlessly hunkered down in anticipation of the next wave. At a Dairy Queen the manager, looking haggard, answered our query with a simple but eloquent, Rough night. 

Near Wray the sun broke out in sudden shafts of light and heat. Any congratulatory impulse was quickly dampened by southern skies coagulating into seething masses laced with fire. We slivered the bottom corner of Nebraska where dismantled silos spread like Christmas tinsel across plowed fields and splintered trees implored with naked branches the unrepentant heavens. Our entry into Kansas was heralded by dire warnings on the FM dial and a horizon eclipsed in stygian darkness. Gone was any desire to tour the Arikaree Breaks. We studied that monster cell, charted its progression and knew that once again we were running before the storm.

I just love the Midwest, I said.  

We met the first storm spotters outside St. Francis. Thereafter their presence became ubiquitous: state troopers, small-town cops, EMTs, volunteer firefighters and a farmer or two, some with binoculars, others with two-way radios, all watching the approaching darkness. The radio cackled and hissed, punctuated by nagging beeps of fresh alerts. Tornadoes on the ground, heavy rains, hail, straight-line winds, the entire malevolent gamut in mother nature’s arsenal being brought to bear on western Kansas and moving at a rapid clip to intersect our path. Heedless of the increased number of law enforcement officers patrolling the roads, Jim kicked up the speed and Chod watching from the back seat said nothing.

It was a race we won, though surreally, the storm suddenly veering off outside of Norton, where we pulled in for the night, in its wake a calm stillness belying what was going on elsewhere. Jim’s friends, Larry and Terry, welcomed us to their home and made us comfortable, and as the others toured the grounds I studied the unfolding drama on the television. Severe thunderstorms were hammering the entire state, with one particularly nasty cell looming to the southwest of Blue Rapids. Seeing my worry, Terry handed me the phone and said, call home.

Lori answered and said, it’s black to the west, and I said is everything okay, and she said yes. The sound of sirens erupted in the distance, faint and tinny over the receiver, and the weather radio blared in the background. She said, I have to go, and the line went dead.

I blew out a long breath and went back to watching the Weather Channel. On the screen colorful shapes morphed and contorted, conjoining, splitting, slinking across the screen like bacteria studied through a microscope, seemingly endless loops of the same patterns only subtly different, and each bearing a signature decipherable only to the trained eye. The pretty blonde meteorologist pointed to a radar image overlying a map of Kansas, one long painted nail tracing the contours of a red amoeba-like shape. It had just crossed into Marshall County and nudged against the outskirts of our town. Hook echo, she said. Rotation. Tornado.

After that my mind went blank, and I got up and walked outside to be alone and to think dark thoughts.

If one were to have a crisis I can think of no better place to have it than at Larry and Terry’s house. For the next hour and a half I became a sort of de facto orphan with the others doing their best to calm me. The television provided no news other than the storm’s trajectory, leaving me with an imagination focused obsessively on the destructive. We sat down to a lavish feast, conversed, did the things people do in normal circumstances and yet there was nothing normal about it. A terrible emptiness threatened to swallow me whole.

When at last Lori answered the phone the relief was staggering. A funnel cloud had sent her and the rabbit to the basement, but as far as she knew there was no damage to the town. She asked, when will you be home?

Soon, I promised. But as we crawled into our sleeping bags that night we had no way of knowing there was one more crisis on our horizon.

Last house on the right (Part 14)

In the half-light of dawn I opened my eyes and listened for movement but the house was still. Soft breathing coming from the couch at my feet and the contours of an unfamiliar place at first unsettling and then a mystery to unravel. I was tucked into a small space between the couch and a staircase leading to the basement, a piano at my back and before me a portion of blank wall and the outline of a doorjamb. On the floor near at hand were my boots, socks, watch, flashlight, a small notebook and pen and a yellow iPod case, headphone wires spilling out in an untidy tangle. 

Snaking one arm out of the sleeping bag, I checked the time on my watch and set it back beside my boots and thought of where we had been and where we were going and of how only four hours separated me from Lori. Four hours. The thought sent a current through me and I sat up and reached for the pen and notebook. I’m going home, I wrote, and thinking of nothing else to say shut the notebook and placed it on the floor and wrote no more.

When I opened my eyes again an hour had passed and people were moving around. I slipped into a shirt and laced my boots and crammed the sleeping bag into the stuff sack. Everything else I tucked into a tote bag and set beside the front door. I was ready to go.

But first came an enormous breakfast and coffee and a sort of lull before the road. Larry and Terry prepared much more food than we could eat but we kept at it until most of it was gone and our belts tight. As we helped clean the table Jim made a call on his cell phone and listened and spoke a few words and snapping the phone closed stalked into the living room where he stared soundlessly out the window. We looked at one another in askance while a terrible silence fell. Chod finally broke it with a choked whisper: It’s Pattie. 

He explained, as I had forgotten, that Jim’s wife was going to have a biopsy taken. A cancer survivor himself, this must have weighed heavily on Jim during the trip, and yet he had made little reference to it. For all his volubility, the Shaman could be remarkably secretive at times, almost stoic, preferring to melt into the background, to watch silently, predatorial, the unfolding of human foibles and tragedies. (When he finally weighed in it was usually with wit and wisdom far exceeding what you’d expect from him, his gruff  demeanor camouflaging a sharp mind seasoned with a biting sense of humor. But he was no pedant; when he cut loose with profanities, paint would blister and milk sour. Sometimes I wanted to grow up to be just like him. Now, thinking of my own wife so close, it was the last thing I’d want.)

If I was clueless how to respond, the others weren’t. Our hosts, old friends of his, gently brought him back to the fold, and he told us that Pattie had cancer. His eyes smoldering, withdrawn for a moment to some inner hell, fists clenching, he spat out that cancer could be fought, that it was a mind game which must be won. We’ll beat this, he swore. None of us doubted whom he was talking to.

Outside the sun slanted brightly through a cobalt sky. The morning was cool with a hint of heat rising from the gravel road. A pheasant called. Kittens on the porch swatted halfheartedly at each other until boredom dragged their eyelids closed, victims of late-spring lassitude. The universe carried on unabated. Somewhere in the world the moon lifted from the horizon and stars wheeled across dark heavens. Tides rose and fell. On the outskirts of Norton, Kansas, six people walked to a vehicle and hugged and shook hands and said their goodbyes. Four drove away, homeward bound.

***

It was the same stretch of road we’d taken more than a week before and yet it had changed. Trees were the most evident testament to a fury that was as erratic as it was unsparing. In places shredded beyond measure, limbs hacked and splintered, bark stripped, they had borne the brunt and drew our eyes to their suffering. At least two houses were gone, their contents scattered across gouged fields, hugging anything taller than a blade of grass. Center-pivot irrigators lay toppled or twisted like pretzels. What wasn’t harmed seemed scarred by its very normality.

In the back seat, staring out the window, I wondered what was left of my own neighborhood. If, indeed, it was touched at all. News had been scarce, damages still being assessed, according to reports. The destruction we witnessed fed a fear that had been growing for some time, that the West was where we belonged and not this tornadic bulls-eye. I remembered staring at Lander Peak and lamenting all that we’d lost, the sorrow almost crippling. It seemed a million years ago. And yet even as we traveled eastward, fields greening by the mile, draws and gullies filling with woods and the land undulating like rising ocean swells, I felt a tug, faint at first but growing ever more insistent, as if I’d passed into the gravitational pull of a celestial object. It wasn’t simply that these were fields I knew, recognition and no more, but something resonating in the very core of my being. I plucked my notebook from the tote and opened it to explore the feelings but no words came, only a sensory vibration. It was all emotion. After a while I put it back and resorted to staring out the windshield, mentally charting our course and seeing as I would the tall elevators counting down the towns until there was one only remaining and it growing closer until we turned onto a dusty road and bouncing down it came finally to the last house on the right. I could see it as clearly as if we were already there, a woman coming down the steps and the question I asked in Wyoming turning back on itself in reproach, asking how could I have left this, how could I have left her, and finding in her embrace all the answers I would ever need. 

Epilogue 

Last ride of the codgernauts

Afterward, as I flipped through the 250 or so images I’d taken on our jaunt through north-central Kansas, methodically weeding out the worst ones by hitting the X key to mark them for deletion—and finding far too many so designated—I couldn’t help but question my skills as a photographer, a sort of internal lambasting and blame-game former Independent Baptists are so fond of indulging in. I imagine penitentes of the southwest do much the same though their preferred method of flagellation involves glass-tipped whips and cactus-studded sandals. Conscience can be such a nag at times.

It wasn’t until later that I learned I wasn’t alone in feeling dissatisfied. Both of my companions, Chod Hedinger and Jim Mayhew, ended up tossing more photos than they kept, and of the latter very few were real keepers. Perhaps Mayhew expressed it best when he wrote, “What you’re seeing is Kansas. It’s just not something to write home about when you’re taking pictures. But it was fun.”

Fun it was, and strangely unsettling. 

Our intent was for a final trip to close out the year, an exploratory birding and photographic trek through the heart of north-central Kansas. Our only imperative was to avoid pavement at all costs except where necessary. Chod drafted a route using a DeLorme Atlas as a guide, trasncribed into a long, rambling series of directions that were impossible to follow. I know, because I tried, using the selfsame map. Once off the beaten path roads usually hew to the square-mile grid devised by Thomas Jefferson, at least where the terrain allows, so that no matter which road we took we would theoretically be heading in a cardinal direction. As long as we remembered which direction was which we couldn’t get lost. Naturally, we left our compasses at home.

Minneapolis was our jumping-off point and the last hard-surfaced road we’d see for most of the day. It was mid-November, the sun barely lifted above the horizon. In the shadow of the Ada Grain elevator we parked by the railroad tracks to stretch our legs, and I lifted the camera to try for a hopeless shot of the full moon balanced on the upper girder of a trestle, an impossible composition with my equipment and the time of day, but I reasoned that pixels are free and so snapped the shutter thrice. And in so doing perhaps cursed the remainder of the trip to mundanity, as if inadvertently having offended the gods of creativity. We snaked around the elevator and trundled across an old bridge and headed west on an unmarked road.

Coming as I do from a megalopolis whose edges forever radiate outward, it still shocks me how quickly the trappings of civilization vanish in rural areas. No sooner had the elevator disappeared behind us than the fields opened up into miles of what can only be described as nothingness. The first few towns passed unremarked and fell away without a trace of memory, forgotten almost before the next undulant rise revealed yet more miles of November-gray woods bordering the mute creeks and abandoned homesteads, the shattered windmills and dusty lanes branching to the right and left without marker of any kind. 

Surprisingly, the land was wetter than normal, creeks filled, pastures damp and fringed by an unlikely green, ponds overflowing, scintillant under an azure sky, riffled with a whisper of a breeze. Everywhere the land lay fallow, prairie grasses bleached to pale shades of gold and rust and dusty along the roadways, coated in a fine powder, fields disked under or freshly shorn, stubbled and unkempt. And empty, almost incomprehensibly so.

Capturing that emptiness wasn’t easy. Jim Richardson, a National Geographic photographer whose traveling exhibition of the Flint Hills still tours the state, admitted as much in an interview. “These are low, rolling hills, and every time you pick up a camera and point it at them, they kind of get small in the distance,” he said. “They aren’t like the Tetons, which are big enough to fill a 4×5 frame.”

There was so little to fill any frame, or even to focus on, as if the eye or the imagination couldn’t find a reference point to land on. At one point we bounced down a rutted two-track to the ruin of a limestone house and erupted from the truck eager for something greater than sitting and staring, and as I approached the front door, tilted askew on one hinge, a barn owl blew out the doorway and flashed past me like a pale ghost, its wings almost brushing my face. Other than cows it was the first sign of life we’d seen in hours and served only to heighten the desolation. Walking back to the truck I gazed down the road both ways and it seemed to go on forever and nowhere, the far horizons etched with its solitary tracing, a faint and fading artifact on a land impossible to tame. Less a ruin than the once and future Kansas, a harbinger of a time not very distant when vast portions of the state become virtually uninhabited.

Angling north and west until dropping down into a country inhabited by rolling tumbleweeds and ghost towns and towns barely alive, the few shotgun-toting strangers eyeing us warily, we traversed a bewildering maze of gravel roads, some marked, most not. It’s a mystery how Chod, who was driving, kept his bearings. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was as surprised as us when he finally crested a ridge and saw the cobalt waters of Wilson Lake glinting in the sun.

By then lengthening shadows introducing a third dimension and we stopped for several more photographs. Or attempts, I should say, for the low rolling hills withdrew into the distance until all that remained was a vast featureless sky and the impression of windblown ridges marching away to infinity, and a dawning realization that some lands can only be briefly experienced and then left behind.