Admirer as I think I am
– The More Loving One,
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
W.H. Auden
Contrary Mary of Caney, KS, was a sheriff’s wife … so she had to be good. She also (whether she had to or not) kept pretty much to her husband’s jurisdiction. She never ventured farther than Bartlesville, OK, less than 20 miles over the state line. And since she and I were having this conversation in a nursing home, it’s safe to say she never will.
Six days later, I drove into my 43rd U.S. state, Montana.
after a Lovely night at the Snow Lodge, we went over to it’s bigger brother for breakfast. These places are immense and beautiful with giant central fireplaces worthy of the Game of Thrones. We got lost for quite a while trying to find our way back through, but in the process got to explore a very cool structureÂ
It might have been because of Mary that I set an alarm for 4 a.m. to watch the lunar eclipse. See, Mary seemed neither stubbornly proud of her stick-town-itiveness, nor troubled that she never saw much. That’s the trick: Regardless the expanse of one’s adventures, it’s really a person’s satisfaction with those adventures that defines a good life. Mary seemed satisfied. My bandmates and I were already on a 45-day, cross-country adventure. I arrived in the star-splattered blackness of Daniel, WY, exhausted, dehydrated and eying the guest bed. But as I grabbed my favorite pillow from the car, the moon was so full and bright that my shadow followed me on the ground as if I was Peter Pan. The shadow pulled at my wild heart, and I knew I had to wake to see the Blood Moon. The universe delivered me to the perfect place, not 20 miles away over a state line, but just over the windowsill.
I woke alone and dressed for the cold, and met the silhouette of a large man in a coat.
“You must be Jim,” I whispered. I was meeting the owner of the house I was sleeping in for the first time in the darkness. He’d gone to bed early so he could see this, too.
Outside, looking down, Jim and I met the quiet, warm, friendly nuzzles of their two dogs, Lucky and Reddy. Looking up, I could see the Milky Way and so many bright points, my celestial navigation was thrown off completely. We picked out a couple constellations, watching the moon turn a brownish red until only a sliver was left. I climbed back into my borrowed bed, and slept, satisfied.
I always thought I loved water and green, but my heart was broken open by the rocks, brush and grass of the landscape once we got to Wyoming. The sun-bleached tones and wind-whittled boulders make it obvious that this is a place of so much memory. But the weathered landscape suggests wisdom rather than bitterness, like someone so content with his long life that remembering the particulars becomes unnecessary. Contented and ancient. A place of forgetting. I felt like if I stayed, I would forget every hurt I’ve ever known, the hard landscape a gentle reminder that these troubles are small, and the coyotes and the mountains and the barbed-wire fences have stood through them all and are not concerned with them.
(They do concern themselves – the fences that is – with other things. For example, Jim tells me that the top wire is at 30 inches and the second at 20, so pronged antelope can dig under, and moose can step over, lest they get tangled up and die.)
By the time we arrived in Yellowstone, I was drunk on the landscape, simultaneously reveling in it and mourning for it. It felt like walking on the sand mandala painting Tibetan monks make, knowing they will drop it into a local water source and destroy every pathway lay down a grain at a time. I am in the caldera of a massive volcano. Steps from the tires, the ground seethes and waits. At times, they cordon off parts of parking lots and roads caving in to the geothermal activity. I am allowed to stand right here, but not a foot away there – the illusion of safety on top of a super volcano. The place is so alive, and it’s dying. Old Faithful is not as faithful. One day – perhaps even this very day – in a cataclysm of ash and fire all of this will be gone. My god.
Pictures don’t do it justice. When the full moon rose, and the steam vents billowed in the light, it might as well have been the moon.
There have been so many moments on this trip where I have felt reverent. The night we left Contrary Mary behind in Kansas, we drove into the sunset and a field of wind turbines at the Smoky Hills Wind Farm. I knew the blades were spinning incredibly fast, but at that massive size each turn seemed leisurely. When coupled with a massive field (a hundred?) of the creatures, it began to appear as a great migration. Maybe they are the only creatures left. They are all turned to the sun … maybe it’s their god? Maybe they are afraid of the dark. Maybe they only know one thing: That they have to get there.
Mineral deposits and bacterial mats both doing their damnedest to make sure Yellowstone National Park is NEVER boring.  this portion of the park exploded a couple of decades ago leaving a huge steady stream of steam and a huge crater. I was amused by this photo class that was wondering around discussing f-stops and shutter speeds with these HUGE tripods on a very brightly lit day. Eyeballing their cameras, some of which were lower-end digital SLRs like mine… … I’m just entirely sure what benefit lugging the tripods around was, as with this much light, you simply couldn’t stop down far enough to need slower than even 1/500 of a second, easily hand-held.  probably not technically an extremophile, but I’m amazed at how many plants and animals Live in such close proximity to boiling temperatures. I’d be curious about the range, probably measurable in INCHES, that’s inhabitable by this moss. these trees may well be dead, but they and their kin clearly keep coming back. Elsewhere in the park there’s vast swaths of sylvan devesation, apparently remnants of the lass mass forest fire in Yellowstone, less than a decade ago, when about a third of the park burned.  I don’t remember what this was actually called, but ilyAIMY declared it Gorn Rock. around Gorn Rock we found another car pulled over. At first we weren’t entirely sure why we were stopped – but then we spotted all the bison. ALL the bison. But then behind us… a geyser started acting up… So – as we were watching the geyser blow its top, bison snuck up on us. For such large animals, they move surprisingly quietly. Before we really realized what was happening, we were just about surrounded. I was really caught betwixt caution and curiousity. When we encountered our morning bison, there was a park employee following behind that said as long as you didn’t surprise them, you could really get quite close and told us a tale of having to walk through a herd once, jingling his keys. I eventually let caution be the better part of valour. Eventually we extricated ourselves from the bison herds and were back to climbing and wandering. we’ve run across these geodetic marker discs in various parts of the country. I just think they’re cool. Mud volcano goes glub, glub, glub. Yellowstone National Park. Forgive me my silliness. I didn’t even end up lining it up well because I was beginning to feel judged…. Muppets? Migrational Muppets at Yellowstone National Park? We’d finally decided it was time to start heading firmly for the West Entrance to the Park and that we were done with wildlife and geysers, steam vents and spectacular vistas – and though Heather was still chanting “I wanna see a MOOSE… I wanna see a BEAR…. I wanna see a MOOSEBEAR!!!!” this seemed to be a) unlikely and b) unbeknownst to us at the time, we’d already seen at least one of the above. And then we saw a coyote. For as wrong as HOW the animal had come to us was (I’m almost positive the photographer below had been feeding it) and despite the fact that he probably delayed us another 25 minutes or so, spotting this guy on the way out was fortuitous and beautiful. Our last moments in Yellowstone National Park. Okay, it was kind of dumb that we didn’t run across the way to take a picture of the “leaving Yellowstone” sign, but on the other hand, it was allllll the way across the street.
All-in-all, our first experiences with Montana were a little bizarre. We had the Westward Hos, the Bi-Inn, and the Dude Hotel… a little something for everyone. And then once your brain’s thinking like THAT, what’re you EXPECTED to do about the Slippery Otter and the Moose Drool? It’s ALL lube at that point. All-in-all Yellowstone, MT left us with a weird impression, and curious sensations. But then we started to truly take in our surroundings and slowly realized what a stunningly beautiful place we were in – even as we read that this entire lake was formed traumatically only a couple of decades ago by an earthquake and a landslide, killing many and uprooting many more… “Quake Lake” in Montana. In August of 1959 the Madison River was dammed by an earthquake, a 7.3 on the Richter Scale earthquake. Almost 30 people were killed and a huge landslide created Earthquake Lake within a month after the cataclysm. Ok, our first experiences with Montana were lube and frightening warning signs. it took both hands of both Heather and I to keep Kristen from leaping out of the car yelling “PONY for MEEEEEE!!!” On the outskirts of Butte, MT we encountered a downright frightening train bridge nestled amongst the scenery. The Lady of the Rockies. one of the most marvelous sunsets of 11 years of touring. West Montana. The sun going down over Montana.
