wyoming, wyoming, wyoming
Three weeks into this voyage, I now see states through the prism of differently shaded color. Michigan, with its dense foliage and the looming remoteness of the Upper Peninsula, assumes a heavy, dark green. I picture Wisconsin, with its pillowy fields that almost reflect the sun and everpresent barns perched atop doughy hills, as key lime, brighter than its compatriot to the East. Minnesota, for some reason, is purple (maybe Vikings related?), while North Dakota is a dull, monotonous brown, and South Dakota, its younger brother with the better job and more refined social skills, an elegant prairie beige. But then you have Wyoming, the state I most eagerly anticipated visiting months even before leaving New York (a regal blue, with paint flaking around the edges), the state I fantasized about in the dregs of Minnesota (the Northern part) and the doldrums of North Dakota (all of it)...and Wyoming carries no distinguishable color at all.
I fetishized Wyoming. I'm not too proud to admit it. The midwest was familiar, the trees and lakes not entirely dissimilar from what I knew back home. The prairies were ranging and graceful in their own way but more than a little mundane. Wyoming, a state I had never visited, felt wide and wild, the true marker of the Western transition. In Wyoming, I figured, I would be able to contact, without any static interference, my juvenile fascination with the Wild West. Here, like Kerouac, I would feel myself in motion, on the road. But just as any state, Wyoming is heavy with contrasts, its square contours laden with contradictions. In my artificial, manufactured vision of the state, I hadn't allowed for nuance.
I spent four days in Wyoming but I'd rather focus on the first three. The fourth included bits of Idaho and Montana and was almost entirely Yellowstone anyway, which feels self-contained and distinct from Wyoming, like going to Disneyland and pretending you understand Anaheim. Those first three, which imposed challenge and delivered joy with denser volume and richness than any other similar stretch on this voyage, are enough on their own.
Day one began in Gillette, Wyoming, in the starched hallways of the most sterile Motel 6 I've stayed in thus far (a compliment). I had arrived from South Dakota smelling, frankly, terrible, days without a shower. I soaked myself in Wyoming water twice, once in the evening and once in the morning (watching silty black course down the shower drain both times), and washed my nausea-inducing clothes until they were crisp and concealed my dirtbag existence just the little bit more. Unlike my last motel experience in Fargo, ND, I awoke without bedbugs circumnavigating my pale body and was grateful to not find my skin burning as I drove out of town, past coal and methane plants, their usual hum silenced by the Sabbath rest.
My first stop was Devil's Tower, way in the Northeast corner 0f the state, almost back in the Dakotas. Any fear of regression dissipated when I saw this butte - an unnatural thing, really - looming out of the ground, its carved, soaring edges a beacon to climbers and the elderly of America alike. Now this, I thought...this is well and truly wild. I wandered about, chatted incredulously with people similarly in awe of this feature seemingly summoned from the earth, gawked at it through clunky telescopes, and laughed about how we could see nothing at all. A man from Iowa told me, for no reason at all, that his daughter had once deceived him into skydiving. I chuckled and eased my way out of the conversation.
Despite the sublime nature of it all, there was something eerie about that morning, a breeze in the air that felt imbued with something sinister. I saw the same family posing for pictures before anything remotely resembling a landmark every fifteen minutes and felt like I could not shake them. I was eager to leave, to be free of that place of immense RV density. After the park, I stopped in Sundance, WY - thinking naively, stupidly, that it was the town of the film festival and that I might be able to find a salad of some sort - and was met with a totality of stillness, a sobering reminder that I understood very little about the land I stood on. I pushed onwards, over abandoned salt mines and brush-populated empty hills, until I reached the town of Newcastle. Compared to the barren range I'd just traversed, it felt like a metropolis.
There is no space for hubris on a trip like this and yet, I continue to allow it to creep in. I made space for it when I ignored the 4.8 hotels.com rating of the Fargo Motel 6 and I yielded to it once again in Newcastle, when I abandoned my long-held pescetarianism (it's Wyoming! you gotta eat the beef!) for the sultry temptation of a dish of cajun fries, topped with small, slimy medallions of beef. In my excitement, my exultation, I gorged myself. I timed it just right so that when I was pulled over for driving 81 in a 70 an hour later (total bullshit...of course, the lights flashed on because they saw a Subaru that dared carry New York plates in this part of the world), my stomach was doing turns that even the Russian judge would've given a 10. It made for a nice pairing with the trooper's stern interrogation. When he asked, without any feigned interest, what a New Yorker was doing out in Newcastle Why-Yo-Meeng, my over-excited, overcompensating "driving across America!" response elicited a terse "Fun." that betrayed how very not fun he thought it was and how distinctly uninterested he was in the very concept of fun at all. "We think 70 is more than fast enough around here," he said to me, handing me a ticket sandwiched between my ID and registration, and it almost felt like Officer Rose was hamming it up for some unseen camera.
The day had little chance of recovery from there. Of course, the skies opened. Of course, as I smoked my ritualistic Camel Blue on the side of an unpaved road, a car pulled over on the gravel and the bearded occupant screamed at me to shut my damn brights off, despite my car, turned off, being clearly incapable of producing any light. And of course, temperatures plummeted that evening into the high 20s, forcing me to cower in the trunk of my car, a tragic figure hunched over Andre Agassi's memoir, eating the cold remnants of the fries that had devastated my GI system. It was a humbling day, with low, dark clouds, a day that felt interlaced with malice and menace. I was eager to be done with it.
Day two. I rose, teeth chattering, desperate to drive away from yesterday. I had stopped too frequently on day one, allowed myself to surrender too much control to the stationary. Today would be movement and motion, nothing else. I would leave the beef medallions and the not-quite-turned-off-brights far behind and I would cross Wyoming in its entirety. Destination: the Tetons.
Wyoming imposes itself upon you with immediacy. That was the theme of day two. I sensed it first when I pulled off the road, somewhere in the middle of the state, and was instantly besieged by a frantic hail storm. Afraid the chunks would dent my car, I drove down a hill, dropped a hundred feet in elevation, and emerged into blue sky. There is little space for complacency in a state that transforms from jaundiced prairie into terracotta cliffs into soaring alpine passes before your eyes, with hardly a road sign or an AM radio message announcing the change. Hail and transition are simply upon you in Wyoming, and it is incumbent upon you to keep up.
Up in one of those alpine passes, I met a man who bared his beefy upper arms in terrain already besieged by snow. His tanktop was shaded hunter-orange, a color that approximated his rosy biceps, and he approached me warily, just as I approached him. He was entirely without pretense, a character unconcerned with external human perception - he cared only about the two grizzlies that had just harassed him while he'd perched in the woods, beckoning elk with his bugle in the hope that they's meander into the crosshairs of his .308. He showed me both - the bugle and the rifle - and only after he lifted the gun to his eye did he bother to check if the chamber was cleared. We stood there, shoulder to shoulder, waiting for the bears to emerge from the treeline, and as his neon orange tank converged with the sundried orange of my bourgeois Patagonia quarter-zip, I felt simultaneously very close and very far away from my common man. It was frigid up there, my sweatpants leaked heat, and between the thin, freezing air and the man's too-comfortable wielding of the word 'orientals' to demean Asian tourists in the Tetons who emerged from their cars to snap photos of grizzlies, I soon found myself shivering. He noticed my discomfort (in only one sense), laughed, asked if I was cold, and then continued to talk. Eventually, afraid of impending exposure, I tore myself away and regrouped in my car, safe within the knowledge that if the grizzlies got me, such a fate would contain a quick mercy that Wyoming had thus far withheld.
Up and down the mountain passes, up and down. Clouds obscured the highest, most dramatic peaks but even still, I could tell that I was among great beauty. I plunged into the valley, eager to tread the same steps as the mythical mountain men and the Shoshone and Teddy Roosevelt and all those before me, and then, just like that, without issuing a press release, the mist lifted. Before me sto0d something so sublime that Bierstadt seemed guilty not of exaggeration and artifice but of minimization. I let my jaw hang open like a rube and found myself out of my own body, watching myself in a daze as I took in the grandeur of the place and spoke to other similarly numbed visitors from Illinois and Utah and Missouri. Someone said something about their daughter tricking them into skydiving and the voice sounded a lot like mine.
I went to bed early that night, another evening spent shaking in sub-freezing temperatures, another evening spent cradling my suitcase in the trunk of my car. Having caught the Tetons in the smoldering ends of sunset, I scrolled through my service-less phone photos again and again and again, each time marveling at a new crag caught in burnt light. I was so ready for the next day, a day where I was running from nothing, running towards it all.
Day three. I awoke, keenly aware that it was early, before sunrise (much love, Julie Delpy), and even more cognizant of the fact that I was a) almost out of gas and b) in bear territory (bearitory) and had nothing more severe than a spork with which to defend myself. As soon as the sky turned from pink to pastel cerulean, I made my way into Jackson (noted haven of the proletariat) and dramatically overpaid for both. When I asked the cashier of the outdoor shop for his favorite hike in the area he stared at me with the kind of withering look I hadn't seen since the one my good friend, the state trooper, had offered me when I asked him to describe the general appearance of a car registration slip. Some people in Wyoming just want you to die. At least they have the decency not to conceal it.
I found my own favorite hike. I overdressed for it like the ridiculous, totally out-of-place figure I am proud to be, loaded my huge pack with nothing but a sweater and tuna packets and granola bars. The pack weighed three times more than what I carried in it and I traipsed around from alpine lake to alpine lake, carrying air on my shoulders and smiling a sweet, stunted smile. There were no clouds in the sky, the weather seemed to warm 10 degrees every hour, and all the retirees looked young again. I met a sixty-eight-year-old man celebrating his birthday by biking a mile for every year he had lived and I asked him if he spent each mile reminiscing about the memories from the corresponding year of his life. He started at me with a look of gentle confusion and pedaled away without even pretending to answer. Another woman in her golden years shushed me because she didn't want me to scare away the moose standing before me. It was a deer (even I know a deer when I see one...I'm dumb but not that dumb) and when I told her as much, she shushed me again. I ate a granola bar and kept walking. The mountains loomed overhead; everything else seemed and was small.
These were new hiking boots that I was wearing, eager to solicit blisters, and when I returned to the parking lot, blood had soaked through my socks. I had hardly noticed the throbbing, moistening pain. When I do my sixty-eight-mile bike ride later in life, I'll remember the mirrored reflection of mountains on glassy lake at mile twenty-five. I'll surely forget the impact injuries.
Lunch was back in Jackson Hole, where I surrendered to capitalism and paid $32 for a salad and a side of fries. No one here yelled at me to turn off my brights. That would be too gauche. I let the sun rise higher in the sky, then drop a bit, before meeting up for a beer with a college friend who I hadn't seen in a while. I watched with warm bemusement as stranger after stranger approached him to compliment his hair. No one stands in awe of my 'lettuce.' Probably for the best. If they did, my ego would scrape the sky like those mountains a few miles away.
By now it was getting late. I had to leave town, leave the state (there are no reasonable motel rates within 100 miles of the park). I was Idaho-bound, Wyoming no longer a figure of fantasy and fascination, but rather a state rooted in reality and fixed in conflict with itself, containing as many multitudes as each of us. I loved Wyoming all the more for the austere hardships it had posed, for its briny beef and plummeting temperatures, and especially for its capacity to challenge perceptions of itself with sudden soaring cliffs and startling shifts. I felt a rare familiarity with the spiritual here in Wyoming, and I was grateful for it. The day dying, I climbed through the weaving, intricate passes of the Targhee Forest, and the parting Wyoming light began to glow ever-more yellow-blue.