Feeling Sheridan

At the town of Hardin Montana Interstate 90 changes direction from roughly east to mostly south. As you cross the Wyoming State line the Bighorn Mountains begin to show themselves off to the west, with scrubby grassland to the east. The land has gentle hills and the road pleasantly rolls along, neither challenging nor boring. It continues south through Sheridan until you get to the town of Buffalo. From there the road forks, I-25 continues south and I-90 resumes a more easterly run.

 

The turn at Buffalo was a ways into the future as I took Exit 23 at Sheridan for a fuel and pit stop. Turn right at the stop sign and you head downhill into the city of about 17,000 people. Turn left and there’s a Visitor Centre on a rise about a quarter mile up the hill. The Visitor Centre had first priority because the state run rest stop facilities are a safer and cleaner bet than a possible losing hand at a gas station.

There are some covered table areas with a clear view south and west, down across the low valley to where the Bighorn Mountains begin to challenge the distant sky. In Wyoming and Montana size and space take on vastly different meaning. At home on the coast distance is more relative, defined by rivers and the geography of coastal fjords. There aren’t a lot of “wide open spaces”. It’s heavily treed making it seem tight and close. The mountain terrain controls access so you’re pretty much always going uphill, downhill, or crossing a bridge.
 
In Wyoming and Montana you drive long distances to reach mountains that have dominated the horizon for hours. Descriptive phrases such as “endless prairie”, and “desolate empty spaces” are useless because they seem trite, childish, and embarrassingly cliché. Light is colored golden beige and light brown with a mottling green undertone, moderated and brightened by a blue sky that changes from edge to edge, from robin’s egg to iris, and back. The sky is so big you can’t see all of it. You have to turn your head from side to side as far as your neck will let you, and then nod up and down, and turn around. There is a feeling you exist in the centre of the sky. You know where everything is in your mind, yet you never actually see it because there’s so much of it.

This is the land of great modern western fiction. This is the land of Absaroka County where aging Sherriff Walt Longmire lives his troubled way through the understanding hand of author Craig Johnson. It’s the land of Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett, a good man brought to life by C.J. Box.

It’s a land where the dead can rest in peace for centuries without being disturbed, because it’s doubtful any human would come across the remains. This is the land of the Crow, Shoshone, Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapaho, and pretty much has been since time was invented. There is Spirit in this land, and I get just a tickle whiff of what awaits me when I come back through the Black Hills in a few weeks.

Thousands of years pass here, and nothing will change. Coming from a place that increasingly wants to run forward to fill the mountain sides and sky with glass and steel, obliterating the mountains themselves from view, and stressing the existing resources to a point where the community itself won’t be viable in a hundred years. I find this place and vista to be a place of personal reckoning.

Great expanses challenge the human soul, and makes some nervous. It seeks to find meaning and connection. It seeks to not be irrelevant and insubstantial. For most it seeks to not be alone, seeking comfort and safety in the company of other like beings. So the sage ones keep telling us.

For this moment I am pleased there is no one near. I find great expanses settling to my soul. As if I can finally reach out to open the mental and intellectual doors of the real me, and let a cleansing breeze carry in the freshness of a quiet world my mind loves to explore.

Various waterfront rooms at the Sheraton Waikiki overlooking the Pacific Ocean with practically nothing between me and the ocean were such a place. I spent days on the lanai just staring, sometimes reading, and writing prolifically. The beach at Tierra Del Mar and the summit of Mount Hebo in Oregon, both a surprise to find, and wonderful places to let the breeze blow through. My perch in the Tropics, where the sun moves across the sky, the shadows changing color and depth on the two small mangrove islands. The sky telling its own unique daily story from sunup to moonset. Even then the stars quietly whisper on, telling tales from so long ago that common points of reference are impossible, but the whispered melody of the sparkling universal language brings soothing comfort, and inspires curiosity.

Not everyone can find pleasure in contemplative solitude. It makes some people angry and nervous. Some enjoy it for a while, and then return to their day to day. For a few poor souls any kind of solitary endeavour can drive them truly mad. Being with such people can drive me mad.

It takes time for the depth of a momentary feeling to coalesce into significant thought, and even then only if you seek to let it. I find there seems to be less and less appetite for considered thought. The now seemingly constant state of individually processing raw information for a personally satisfying experience has left cogent ponderous thought, and the desire for salient context kicked to the kerb. Intellectual road kill on the information super-highway. The comment sections of the inter-web are filled with ignorance, vitriol, and self-righteous irrelevances. Perhaps like this blog.

None of these thoughts coalesced in the few minutes I stood there looking out across the valley at the Bighorns, the grasslands, and the long southbound ribbon of I-90. At the time I had never read Craig Johnson or C.J. Box. That enjoyment was over a year in the future. I had no idea of the names of the First Nations that flourished on this land long before the original 13 Colonies were formed. I was uninformed but open to the new and old, feelings and facts.

 

I had been on the road since 7 that morning when I left Missoula. I had passed Clinton (famous for a “testicle” festival, whatever that might be), Anaconda (ugly and industrial), Manhattan, and Billings. I had crossed the Continental Divide in a more emotional experience than I had expected. I pulled into and out of Sheridan around 3 in the afternoon. I was in town all of 15 minutes, conducted my business, and left. It would be 7 that night before I kept my date with a Motel 6 in Rapid City, after passing through Gillette, Deadwood, Sturgis and hundreds of miles of inspiring empty land.

It would be several years before Sheridan would become a real and considered thought and feeling. It’s a work in progress, and it’s that progress keeping my life interesting.