A Sacred Road

Part of being unemployed is being able to tag along with the spouse when he goes places, wherever those places are, since two can live almost as cheaply as one.  That meant that Japan wasn’t the only place I tagged along to this summer, but also Wyoming and Kansas, a week in either place.  You might argue that these are hardly as exotic as Japan and so hardly worth bothering with… or are you too sensible to argue such nonsense?

To me, they are still new places, and every new place is fraught with learnings, no matter how mundane they appear on the surface:  yes, you see many of the same chain restaurants, on the periphery of the towns, as you see anywhere in the States, but then there are the local businesses with their myriad new names, and even the local chains, ubiquitous to the natives but puzzling to the outsider.  We can see the same patterns played out in different ways.  And the landscapes – oh, this will be a long blog, pondered over the last month and more, hence its lateness in coming…

After long miles of occasional habitations and hamlets – all guarded by long ranks of snow-fence that argue for ferocious winter winds -- Casper looms up out of the prairie like Athena from Zeus’ head, fully-armed: a perfect model of a small American city.  Seen from the mountain that rises behind it, it can all be seen at a glance:  the tiny, still-living downtown, clustered around the railroad station and boasting large civic buildings; the array of numbered streets acting as latitudes of wealth, progressing through bands of businesses, churches, and schools from downtown up the slope to the college; the mirror-image array of lettered streets progressing into the low-income floodplain of the gorgeous North Platte River with its trailers and simple, respectable houses.  A miniature trailer, just yards from the river-bend is for sale…  Surrounding the part of the town mostly built at the beginning of the last century is a classic periphery of suburban and indeed edge-city development, yet it is still healthy in its expansion:  no dead areas, yet.

Casper is not an ironic place; it is in earnest. The man at the indie bookstore will speak passionately about the lousy drivers and at length about where to find bike-trails; the young city librarian explains to interested new users of all ages the many services their library can provide; the guy at the bike-shop will build you a new bike in a day if you’d like to rent a different model; the staff at the hotel chaff familiarly with the oil-workers far from home, and put out board games when kids are on the guest roster, and popcorn and veggies, every afternoon at 4:00. The boy in the college production of “Gypsy” speaks frankly about falling in love with dancing and with theater, and his certainty of landing a theater job in the big leagues.  I am reminded that this is the West.  Here “seldom is heard a discouraging word.”

But I am also being consciously blind to its history:  to the tragedy of the Great Indian War and Fort Caspar (sic)’s role in that, to the lynchings and shootings of the range wars, to the business of turning wild horses into whatever products might be saleable, after the oil bust of the Great Depression…

Manhattan, KS is so much more a mid-western place, a callous and sophomoric place, a college town as ever was, with its bar-saturated Aggieville and its big professorial houses arranged neatly around its Central Park.  But there is cosmopolis here, too, in modest doses:  a great café, a great bookstore, a pretty campus full of trees.  And it is surrounded by Kansas. Let’s talk about landscapes, and leave urban things behind.  Let’s talk about the harp-shaped hills of the Kansas prairies, and the rich, beautiful river-valleys filled with soybeans and tall trees, and let’s consider trails, for example the trails leading west from Council Grove.

The thin topsoil of Wyoming scars easily, and marks of the wagon-wheels of the pre-railroad emigrants are still clearly to be seen at the base of the mountains, skirting the river-valleys.  We wonder how they could be just two wheels wide, why everyone seems to have travelled in single-file along this one trail, for though it may branch into different trails, each trail is a single trail.  We discover that there is a very good reason for this:  if a wagon strayed from that trail, it was breaking a treaty.  In the slim space of time after peace councils with local tribes like those made at Council Grove and Council Bluffs, and before the treaties were broken – often escalated when whites took revenge disproportionately to an attack and on the wrong tribe – these trails were considered by at least some of the tribes through whose territories they went to be sacred, to be “base,” so that as long as the emigrants – as many as 1000 wagons a day, in high season for a brief stretch of years -- kept moving towards California or Oregon or Utah and did not stop to settle along the way, they were safe from attack.  But then came the massacres, and the railroad, and the killing of the buffalo and all-out war, and it was clear that nothing was sacred.

The landscapes between Caspar and Denver these trails traverse – or just between Caspar and Steamboat Springs, for starters – are just astounding.  I had thought that Arizona had the greatest variety of scenery with its ever-changing horizons of mountains and plains, but Wyoming!  Mountains the likes of which are no-where else, with formations like multi-colored gelato, and mountains diving into a vast reservoir with such stark stratigraphy that it seems they were invented by illustrators of outer-space fantasies... Between Wyoming and Colorado is a mysterious inland basin, falling between two curves of the Continental Divide, a landscape from which no river escapes, on the high center of the landmass.  It has a feeling of timelessness along with its centrality, like being a pole from which all directions are out.  Descending into the real, lush river-valleys of Colorado is like exhaling after holding a long breath.

And the sublimity of the road between Steamboat Springs and Estes Park, taking the Trail Ridge Road, and again between Estes Park and Loveland, taking Hwy 34 along the Big Thompson River – this has been described over and over and here I can only say that, taken on a day of mixed rain and sunshine, the Trail Ridge, at 11,000 feet, is beyond sublime, and tips into the realm of stupendous, with grey masses of rain falling into deep, deep valleys filled with pines (many of them – as all across Colorado – dead), making slick and terrifying a road innocent of guard-rails and just plastered in places alongside the ancient highland Ute trail that gives it its name.

We came to rest for a night at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, lingering into a sunny, timeless morning, looking out over the lake surrounded by mountains, from under a pine branch full of chickadees.  And there we will leave us, as in a sense we are there, still.