The Rural Life (19 page)

N
ot 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.

At least that’s how it seems when I lie in a Wyoming hay field looking up at the sky on a warm September night. In the near
distance, the lights of Sheridan cast a benign glow, and in the far distance—as far, in fact, as the unaided eye can see—M31
dispels its faint cloud of light. It’s the kind of night in which the constellations seem like old friends. Scorpio—the Scorpion—has
hooked its tail into the Bighorn Mountains. Delphinus—the Dolphin—surfs in the foamy crest of the Milky Way. Sagittarius—the
Bowhunter in this part of the world—lies at the place where the Milky Way plunges into the Bighorns, and it marks, as well,
the center of our galaxy, whose brightness is obscured by clouds of dust.

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.

A
round 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 start.

T
he 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.