Big Sky Country

    We've had several personal milestones in the last week or so: crossing the continental divide and the highest pass we've climbed, hitting our highest top speed, passing a truck for the first time (rather than being passed), biking over eighty miles in a day. These moderate accomplishments have a way of building up for me, almost like courses in a meal: with each I feel more full up. They combine with the landscape we pass through, so that I collect images and sensations as I go, and I feel expanded by them, broader.
    The challenges of aching muscles, complaining joints, baking sun and slashing rain, frosted mornings and stone-hard headwinds, can and do distract and discourage. I find I oscillate between emotional extremes. A high point was flying down from the pass above Virginia City, MT. After the hard climb, to come over the ridge, and see the broad valley spreading out and out, rolling prairie to the feet of the hazy peaks that are the gateway to Yellowstone. A feeling of filling, almost more than one small person could hold, and at once of being minuscule in the land, a realization of the expansiveness of plain and the massiveness of mountains, all standing and standing one after another after another, for time I cannot comprehend.
    At times the feeling of smallness can close in on me. Today we rode through slashing rain and hale to reach West Yellowstone. Just a summer squall in the mountains, but the pressure and power was almost enough to knock us over. After a mile we passed several downed trees, which the ranger said had been laid into the road by a small tornado. Everywhere we go we pass through cycles of uplift and breakdown, our ant-like tracks navigating in the interstices between the grinding teeth of the natural world.
    A phrase that has been running through my mind in these moments of fullness and smallness comes from a conversation I had with Dave, about the avant-garde composer John Cage, who believes that all sounds are music, not only organized sound. The shuffling and whispers and laughter and quietness of his audiences are integral components of his composition. What Dave said, and what I keep close in trying times and exultant: 'It's all part of the music.'

Neale