The Wyoming Plains

    I once read an account of a poet from Wyoming (sorry, I can't remember his name), who after sending his poems to his editor received the comment, "There are a lot of bones and wind in these poems." The poet hadn't realized these images were so prevalent because he was subsumed in the place. But being a traveler here, I can corroborate the sentiment. Bones and wind, prairie and sky, the Wyoming plains.
    Bones, and hides, guts, dark meat. Roadkill is the fruit of the highway, as well as expedient travel. I smell the carrion more often than I see it. Today I saw a badger in the middle of the interstate, lying on the yellow hash marks as if asleep. Later, a deer carcass that had been literally ripped in half, bowels trailing across the shoulder. These sights will not be ignored when you travel at this speed.
    Nor the wind. In the last four weeks we have had several memorably difficult days when biking upwind. It can be more demoralizing than climbing a steep pass: the pass has a definite end, and the climb stores potential energy you can reap when you head down the other side. In strong wind, you winch yourself along at six miles per hour, for hour after hour, bags and clothes like sails heading the wrong direction. Some of these days we end at the forty or fifty mile mark, instead of the expected seventy or eighty.
    But today we bike where the wind blows! The rolling highway sails under our tires, while the high winds carry us along. When biking with the wind, at speeds of twenty-five or thirty miles an hour, the air goes preternaturally still. One has to look for other signs of the wind's vector: the burnished grass rolling like the pelt of an irritated horse, the ghoulish howl of telephone wires.
    Under force of that wind today the flat-bottomed clouds skated close enough to brush fingers through it seemed. On the horizon storms stood rooted to the earth by rain. And all the rest seemed an outsized analogue to the hills and valleys through which we sped. For all the work other days, today we get to look and laugh and roll on.

Neale