Wyoming Ho!

We giddyup on to Wyoming

The clouds become such a palpable part of the landscape in Wyoming - mountains of cumulus piled up over the glorious rolling prairie. This land soothes my soul and makes my eyes seek the far horizons.

As we were driving through the prairie today, Devin said, "I like this lifestyle." He was thinking about how we could keep doing it - find ways to make money from the road and just keep living in our rolling home. It is wonderful. We both love it, and I hope we can figure something out to keep doing it indefinitely. I'll have to buy lots more Terra-Passes, but if we are doing this indefinitely, we won't travel quite so much - staying put as long as we like, and probably traveling shorter distances between stops. We do feel a slight sense of pressure knowing that we are only going to do this a year, more or less, as circumstances allow, and that we want to get to Alaska by August at the latest. So we are speeding through some areas that could stand more exploring, and if we had all the time in the world, we would come back and stay longer.

Where the deer and the antelope play...

We started seeing pronghorn before Wyoming, in fact, just outside of Craig, Colorado, was our first. I saw a pronghorn and a deer having a staredown across a pasture! I think they were saying, "what are you lookin' at?" "what are yewww lookin' at?" etc. They were both still as statues and completely alert and focused on each other. I got the feeling that at any minute, they would charge each other like rams in rut! that would have been almost as cool as a mountain lion fighting a bear. That is the quintessential kid question about wildlife - "if a mountain lion and a bear got into a fight, which one would win?" Now, every time we see an inaccessible cave on a cliff side, we say that's where they have the mountain lion-bear fights. It's like Fight Club for animals.

True West

Wyoming really feels like the true west. It's another case of a state having a distinct identity, like I talked about when crossing into Arizona. Colorado has its western side, too - west of the Rockies mostly feels very western. And by western, I mean cowboy. Real cowboys that smell like horses and have dusty boots and sweaty hats. And actually herd cattle.

We passed a marker for the Overland Trail today - it is easy to imagine wagon trains crossing this landscape. It really feels like the old west here, even though there are gas and oil wells dotting the landscape - I guess that's western, too.

As we cross the prairie in our modern Conestoga, I wonder if gusty winds were as hard on the Prairie Schooners as they are in a motorhome... The sky has lowered down to the horizon to the north - the direction we are driving, so there may be a bumpy ride ahead! Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts and remain seated as we pass through some turbulence ahead...

Crossing the Great Divide

We crossed the Continental Divide four times today alone - not so much because we are wandering all over the place, but the divide does as well. That imaginary, yet very real division, that watershed roofline that tells a drop of water to go to the Pacific or Atlantic (via the Gulf of Mexico). It's not so obvious as you might think - not a great crest of a mountain range so often as it is the rounded top of a low rolling hill. But just as surely, water falling on one side will go to a different creek, different river, and utlimately a different ocean, than water falling on the other.

It makes me think of the divides, real and imaginary, that separate one kind of person from another. What watershed moments in our lives have directed us to where we are now, and to where we will ultimately end up. My wanderlust and love of the open road is easy to trace back directly to my parents, who also wandered North America in an RV, and before that they took me camping all over the west, and on long road trips on Route 66 "back east" to Missouri, where they both came from. And what watershed brought them to California from Missouri? That would be World War II, I suppose - many veterans found a new lease on life in the prosperity of the 1950's in southern California. Devin's wanderlust could perhaps be traced to his cousin Dave, who he looked up to as a child and has been a gypsy soul travelling the west in his truck camper with his dog for as long as Devin has known him. And what watershed divide directed the pioneers and settlers west in their wagon trains, and looking further back, what forces were at work on our country's first European settlers that they crossed an ocean to a new world? Of course, there are the easy explanations of history, but those same larger, historical forces were at work on entire populations, and most of them didn't go, so what was in the peculiar make-ups of our forbears that caused them to wander?

Divides, continental and personal, watershed events, make us who we are and direct our lives. But who can say when they are happening what effect they will have? They are more likely to be low rolling hills in the landscape of our lives than crested mountain ranges.

Split Rock

We stopped at Split Rock, and as if to answer my musing questions above, the interpretive signs listed all the reasons why the travellers on these westward trails passed this way. Trappers sought furs, prospectors wanted gold, Mormons sought their promised land, pony express riders, adventure, perhaps. But those are just reasons, and what I am more interested in goes beyond reason. Why, for instance, would a young man answer the call to become a Pony Express Rider when the ads said he would risk his life daily, and they preferred orphans? Is it because he valued his life so little? Or perhaps, and I think this more likely, that he valued Life so greatly? Life with a capitol L - Living Large - is what most adventurers, explorers and pioneers seek, I think. What could be larger for a religious person than their very own Promised Land? And for the Pioneers in the covered wagons, their very own quarter section to make into productive farmland, or for a miner, his very own grubstake. Their own. Finding a life that was theirs alone, and living it to the hilt. I guess that's what we seek as well.

Here's to you, fellow travelers!

Doobie Brothers and Beer

I've come this way before - over 30 years ago, my best friend, Lana, and I hitchiked across the country together. We got a ride up to Dubois, Wyoming, in a pickup truck, and it was one of the more memorable rides for me. I rode in the back, and they passed back a boombox with a Doobie Brothers tape playing "Old Black Water" and the rest of that album, and handed back some beer. Now I've never been a big drinker - I joke that my Indian name is "Maggie One Beer" - but man that beer was wonderful, as the plains and prairies flew away from the pickup and we floated along in that wonderful sky-prairie landscape, pronghorns leaping away in herds, like parting waters, as we passed.

Wyoming, to me, will always be a drunken ride on the prairie.

See more photos of southern Wyoming