The mind travels so much faster than a pickup truck hauling two humans, two dogs, two horses, and all their gear in a gooseneck trailer. The first day we come to the farms and factories southwest of Toledo. Rural roads dwindle to a single paved lane, and cars, meeting each other, drive half on a gravel track and half on the asphalt. A dank, sulfurous glow hangs over the truck stops and drive-ins near the Maumee River and the town of Napoleon, Ohio. The question of where the West begins is mooted, for the moment. It’s just another way of asking, When will we get there?
But by early afternoon the next day—western Illinois, eastern Iowa—I get momentary glimpses of a setting that carries me westward a thousand miles at once. It’s usually a pasture threaded by a creek, rare enough in an empire of soybeans and corn. Cattle wander among the trees, one or two of the trunks rubbed bare, bone white. The scene flashes across my eyes, raising the picture of a similar place along Wyoming’s Tongue River or Crazy Woman Creek. Then the corridor of corn resumes, row after row flickering past in the wet August light.
When the polite undulations of Iowa are past and we start the slow westward uptilt of Nebraska, the search for the West begins in earnest. Is it a copse of cottonwoods in a creek bottom? The first herd of horses where roans and duns predominate? I’m always surprised, driving across Nebraska, that no one thought to mark the hundredth meridian, somewhere between Cozad and Gothenburg, a well-known line of demarcation between the humid East and the semiarid West. But in Nebraska they irrigate the cornfields, and so the difference, in vegetation at least, is diminished.
Beyond North Platte, nearing Ogallala, the West begins to win out over the Midwest. The mileage signs give distances to Cheyenne and Denver instead of Chicago and Des Moines. The low hills in the distance begin to be ridged with pines and the farms start to look like ranches. Yet something is still missing, some defining marker. Sagebrush would do, or a small wilderness of yucca or prickly pear. And there, in the fields ahead, is the answer. Now I remember, for the answer is the same every year, on this highway at least. The West begins where they put hay up in stacks.
September
Beside a county road near the town of Hygiene, Colorado, stands a cottonwood that turned completely yellow the second week of August. To southbound cyclists that tree lies hidden, lurking beneath a sharp dip in the road. They coast along in summer’s full incumbency—the scent of hay practically creasing their foreheads—when all at once the asphalt slopes away, and that lone cottonwood presents itself, its leaves shimmering in a bright wind that suddenly seems autumnal, full of the brittleness, the clarity, of fall.
It’s not as though anyone goes searching for autumn in the midst of summer. In most of America those seasons have reversed their traditional, agricultural meanings. Summer is now the harvest season—a harvest of leisure, of fresh vegetables from the garden. The onset of autumn has become an occasion for brisk renewal, and Labor Day, not the autumnal equinox, is the hinge on which those seasons now swing. I try to ignore the signs of summer’s end—the drying milkweed in the fields, the reddening sumac along the railroad tracks, the schoolbuses. But sooner or later there’s a sign too portentous to ignore.
A few nights ago an enormous flight of blackbirds emerged from the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains. The blackbirds flew across open pasture and out over the low ground where Little Goose Creek flows. From the bluff overlooking the creek, I could see for a moment what shape the flock had taken. It was a lens of blackbirds. It neared the crown of a great cottonwood, and suddenly one bird, then another, plunged downward, dying on the wing it seemed, into the branches. The flock swirled, then settled. There was a momentary hush. Then, as if a school bell had sounded, the tree erupted in chatter, which rang out across the high ground.
After a sight like that I’m almost ready for autumn. But not quite. The days are still hot in Wyoming, the evenings warm, the skies full of dry thunder. The ranchers are beginning to move cattle to the sale yards and railheads—a sure sign of fall—but summer will reign for at least a few more days. I drive east of Sheridan, just to catch the evening, and wind up chasing a Burlington Northern coal train at sunset past the grade crossings at Dutch Center and East Dutch, past the old grain elevator at Wyarno. There the pavement ends, and the train pulls ahead, its new aluminum coal cars gleaming in the last of the light. I stop on a rise to watch the train slip away into the next valley, out among the round bales stacked in windbreaks. As the rumble of the train disappears, the crickets persist, and in their voices it’s high summer all over again.
In 1875 a photographer named Alphonse Deriaz took a picture of the Butchers’ Festival in the town of Morges, Switzerland. The butchers, twenty-six of them, stand at attention in the town square, their aprons swept to one side like dashing military tunics. Each man shoulders one of the tools of his trade. Five of the butchers share a raised platform with an enormous white-faced bullock wearing a halter and a crown of flowers while townsfolk look down from the windows above. What’s striking here, besides the soft expression on the bullock’s face, is the very public way that each butcher identifies himself by his labor, by his apron and bone-saw, and by the fraternity, publicly attested, of fellow butchers.
The festival this photograph preserves feels Old World, utterly unlike a modern American Labor Day, which is now less a celebration of labor than one last gasping infusion of summer’s ozone. But police officers and firefighters and union members and politicians still march together through the city streets on this day. It would be something to see the butchers of New York marching too, dressed for work—to see them and the sommeliers and the toll takers and the men and women who build wooden water tanks and each of the vocations that gives flesh to this society marching side by side, a society articulated, for one parade, into all its laboring parts.
What’s Old World about the Butchers’ Festival isn’t only the uniforms and the ability to look the source of meat right in the eye. It’s the sense of lifelong calling, of a time when going to work meant assuming, for life, an identity as binding, if perhaps not as deranging, as Bartleby the scrivener’s. The days when men and women bore the distinguishing marks of their labor have certainly not ended, nor will they ever end as long as the material world is shaped in part by human muscle. But now we seem as migratory in our vocations as we do in our dwelling places, as ready to shift jobs as to shift cities. There’s a familiar, prevailing sense that no matter what the job, it’s probably too small to contain something as volatile and transcendent as our latter-day identities—made up, we seem to believe, of finer stuff than those of our ancestors.
Labor is both trap and liberation, servitude and release, and it’s tempting to think of labor—even the word itself—in largely historical terms, to remember photographs from a century ago of coal-darkened miners and young women huddled over sewing machines, of factory workers looking up from the conveyor belt at the photographer’s flash. But there’s nothing historical about these labors. They’re still being performed today. Where the world of work is concerned, we still dwell among our ancestors. Some people dream of living in a world without work. But the better dream, even on a day as relaxed as Labor Day, is that of a world in which everyone has the work he wants.
Not long after the sun burns out, some 5 billion years from now, the galaxy we live in may collide with the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). For now the Andromeda Galaxy remains pretty much where it’s always been found in human experience: 2.2 million light years away and a few degrees below and to the right of the conspicuous, W-shaped constellation called Cassiopeia, which lies halfway up the northeastern sky about bedtime this season of the year. The impending collision of these two galaxies—the catastrophic intersifting of six or seven hundred billion stars and all their attendant worlds—is the kind of celestial happening that belongs on everyone’s worry list. A person would do well to resolve to fret about nothing less significant or less distant than an event of this magnitude. Compared to that, the sun’s flaming out is a bagatelle.
In the cottonwood draw where Little Goose Creek flows, deer cough from time to time and a great horned owl screeches punctually. A cricket in the hay stubble emits a pure, intermittent, staccato whine that could as well be the sound of some pulsar deep in the recesses of the universe. The horses that live in this field keep their distance, but I can feel their presence, a weight and a wariness nearly as palpable as the breeze that stirs the grasses. It’s almost time for Saturn to rise, a bright spot (scarcely eight hundred million miles away) climbing into the sky just below M31, whose light tonight is as ancient as the oldest stone tools ever found on Earth. On a night this clear, near and far, past and future, seem almost to merge, bisected only by the observer.
I blew a tire on the pickup not long ago between Lander and Riverton, Wyoming. The truck and horse trailer coasted to a stop on a slight rise, on a stretch of highway within sight of a cluster of pastel houses on the Wind River Reservation. In the distance, in a different direction, lay Riverton itself, a town, coincidentally, with more tire stores for its size than any other place I’ve ever been. To the west lay the mountains of the Wind River Range. While I put on the spare, I began wondering whether the indistinct rise I was parked on had ever been given a name. If I had hiked a tenth of a mile up the road, I would have come upon a highway marker giving my exact numerical location on that stretch of asphalt. But that’s not the same as a name.
To drive around the West, as I’ve been doing for the past few weeks—visiting friends and ranchers—is to drop again and again from an approximate geography into a highly specific one. I set my route by the red or black lines, sometimes even the faint gray ones, in the road atlas. But when the day is over and the horses are unloaded, Lindy and I find ourselves in the company of a rancher who tells his son how to locate a stray cow by saying, “across Butcher Creek where we saw the bear this spring.” Place becomes a question of time and incident, not maps, no matter how fine their scale.
In a way, that local sense of place can’t be mapped. It depends too much on experience. I understood this when I saw the Chief Joseph Trail in the Clark’s Fork Canyon of Wyoming—a delicate thread of a trail as steep and narrow as a crow’s-foot at the corner of a weathered eye. The Nez Perce fled along that path, which climbs high above the canyon and vanishes again and again. At a place called Big Sand Coulee, I met a woman who drives her cattle along that trail each June to her forest grazing permit. She rides her horse where it’s hard to imagine making your way on foot.
In Lander, my nephew Jake, a first grader, brought me to show-and-tell. He introduced me to the other students in Mrs. Foxley’s class at South School, and I showed them on a map of the United States just how far I had driven to be there. It was an old-fashioned schoolroom map that unfurled like a window blind and contained a striking absence of detail. I placed my finger where Lander would be, below the y in Wyoming. One boy asked, “Where’s Fort Washakie?” All I could do was point to the very same spot. It seemed, at the moment, like an absurd answer, for every student in that classroom knew that Fort Washakie lies only a few miles north, where the highway crosses the Little Wind River and begins to climb toward Dubois.
A hot southerly wind blew through central Wyoming recently, disturbing the dogs and turning the cottonwood leaves silver side out. A small forest fire had been burning for days near Stockwell Creek in the Bighorn Mountains. It had nearly been extinguished when the wind blew the fire over Little Goose Peak and onto the steep walls of an adjacent canyon. What had been a narrow plume a few hours earlier was now an inverted pyramid of smoke, its source steadily broadening, its edges keenly incised by the wind in an otherwise perfectly blue sky.
The smoke streamed northward over the town of Big Horn, a few miles away, which had grown distracted. A woman who had just come off the fire line walked up and down the stairs beside the Mercantile, Big Horn’s general store, unable to remember what she had wanted there in the first place. The doors of the fire station stood open, and there was a puzzling air of expectant idleness about the place, which was resolved the next morning when exhausted fire crews, eating white bread and bologna sandwiches, gathered in clumps outside the station. The whole town seemed to be living under the fuma-role of an active volcano.
It was impossible that afternoon to do much else but watch the smoke. Along the east-west face of the Bighorns, the wind sucked the lower edge of the smoke cloud downward, out over the hay meadows and pastures south of town. It looked as though the sky were full of deep-dyed virgas, falsely promising a smoky rain. The central mass of the smoke pillar was tinted a livid yellow—the color of wheat fields at twilight—and when I stood in its shadow I seemed to be standing in the eerie light of a partial eclipse. Even when I wandered into full sunlight, the atmosphere possessed a new chromatic intensity.
By night from the precincts of Big Horn, I could see only a dull red glow, like the moon rising behind a thin layer of clouds. Then the wind would shift, and the flames, burning in six or seven spots across the north face of the canyon, would come unveiled for a minute or two. Trucks and cars were returning from the mountains along the road called Red Grade, and compared to the headlights—so piercing, so focused—the fire seemed to burn with a blunt incandescence. But soon smoke settled over the canyon again, and the heat of the fire, its roar, and now even its light were lost in the distance. What remained in the darkness was a hot wind and the smell of ashes.
Around Sheridan, Wyoming, everyone has been talking about winter all summer. At the Big R, a ranch supply store on the edge of town, the aisles are filled with forecasts. “They say it’s going to be harder than last winter,” the ranchers and store clerks declare, and if the weight of rumor is any measure of truth, there’s a dire season coming.
But no one really knows. Judging the harshness of winter before Labor Day is like trying to predict cattle prices two years down the road. Some will guess right and some will guess wrong, and the fever of speculation won’t for an instant be quelled. In ranch country it’s never too soon to wonder about the next season of snow and ice. Cows have long since been pregnant with the calves that will come before winter has blown away.
In Wyoming people talk as though winter were “out there” even now, lurking not in time but in space, being prepared somewhere in a shop or factory, awaiting only final assembly and shipment to the proper address. Talk like that is a gesture of submission, and a reflection somehow of the topographical openness of the state. Also, that talk is a way for people to remind one another of what they’ve already gone through together and are prepared to go through again—just part of the cost of being neighbors in a landscape so spare of humans but so full of weather.
Still, what’s striking about all these rumors of a hard winter to come is their capacity to transform the scenery now. It’s been a cool, wet summer around Sheridan, and the hills carry the green of late June, not the brown of the end of September. The cottonwoods have only lately started to catch the rattle of autumn. But I can’t help standing in the hay fields and imagining the red snout of winter, the white shock of its hair, beginning to poke over the Bighorn Mountains.
“Not much of a summer,” people have been saying for weeks at the Mercantile in Big Horn. They mean that there have been very few days when a person could pretend that July would last forever. This summer was mortal from the sta
rt.
The days shorten, the morning chill intensifies, and all across the Rockies cattle have been driven down from the high country. Ranchers on horseback gathered before dawn at the mouth of a canyon along Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River to drive 193 yearling steers and one Corriente bull down the highway to a set of corrals—a trip of thirteen miles—where they would be weighed, given a clean bill of health, and trucked to feedlots in Kansas. The night before, some of the cattle had moved down the highway on their own, only to follow the wind back up into the canyon in early morning. The herd was footsore.
At sunrise the steers were on the move. The highway dropped eastward out of the mountains, where the wind was hard, and into a still basin that quickly filled with morning sun. From time to time I turned to hasten a laggard steer and caught a glimpse of dawn reflected against the mountain walls. Several men rode ahead of the herd, and as they came upon openings in the highway fence they positioned their horses abreast of them to keep the steers from breaking through into the open country beyond.
Wherever the sage and chamisa gave way to grass, the cattle would bunch up eating, and wherever their path crossed irrigation ditches, they would wallow and bawl, and then the blacktop would be traced with long sinuous lines of drool. But mostly the yearlings were quiet, almost stoic. From a distance their feet moving through stiff grass sounded like spring rain. In their silence they were completely unlike a herd of cow-calf pairs.
The night before, one of the horsemen had moved a herd of mother cows and their calves from one pasture into the next, a trip of perhaps five hundred yards. The word “moo” doesn’t do justice to the cries that filled the evening air. As the cries rose and fell and rose again, they began to sound like the tintinnabulation of bells on a feast day in some medieval city. Then the last calf was driven through the gate, its mother found, and the night was no louder than the wind across the hilltops.
The Rural Life Page 11