On Driving Western Roads

Was it Sacajawea buried here? All the people carrying burdens to hold over the Pacific ocean. All the ways a horse can lay down its head. Roads unfurling into what? The forests of Seussian trees; the carpets of wildflowers: resourceful, jaunty. Outside of Ennis, Montana, the foothills roll into blue real hills. The real blue hills fold into real blue sky. Big Sky. Plains and glaciers. Glaciated plains with their screes of debris. Cows roam. When did you decide on blue and gold? When did you decide on green? The road unfurls into dilapidated farms. The image of a Ford driving away down the road. The image of the first timid deer over the doorstep. And they – deer and antelope and foxes – flushing out onto roads or wandering the stalks of corn. The real cowboys with their round chew silhouettes; rubbed raw, back pocket. And you can still be born and still go to high school and still die in these places. The ladies used to come and look in consternation at the lakes, fanning. You can see where the photographers brought their plate glass and curtains thousands of feet up. A bear is above you; the sunset’s unfurling below. The sunset is a cloud threading its hand over the crags. The sunset is the ring of blood on the trees. The bones of original ancestors lie here. The Blackfeet called this the backbone of the world. Even Sacajawea was buried here. Even she. 

The Year of Living Questions

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Artificial & Natural

Like many amateur smartphone photographers (and before smartphones, iPhoto & point-and-shoot aficionados), I take great pleasure in going to beautiful places and snapping eminently editable photos. Not that many areas in the Jackson Hole region need much of a boost in color saturation or sharpness, but still, the small tweaks here and there or the revelation of HDR make me feel that I've somehow done more than aimed and clicked. I've photographed.

Recently, I've been exploring the Gros Ventre region, which is full of pleasurable place names such as the Red and Lavender Hills, and is also the home of the most charming backcountry cabin I've ever encountered. Set betwixt a ridge and a burbling creek at the end of a scenic little dale, its outside was so perfect that I thought it might still be in use by the occasional Forest Service ranger. However, on closer examination, I found the cabin actually split in two and long-abandoned, even though its front windows still wavered with their original glass. In one side sat a 1940's era stove, and on the other, a built-in shelf and table. As to its owner, an hour of feverish internet research produced nothing, though I did uncover a snooty entry from an evaluator criticizing another Gros Ventre cabin's entry in the National Register of Historic Places. Historian snobbery, alive and well.

Klimt Stone

The Gros Ventre is defined by a massive 1925 landslide that brought an entire side of Sheep Mountain down in a crush of tons of rock and trees. The slide, in turn, dammed the Gros Ventre River to form Lower Slide Lake (the "Gros Ventre Slide" is also a locally-beloved breakfast dish at The Bunnery). Two years later, part of the dam gave way, flooding the nearby town of Kelly almost out of existence. Because of its devastation in the flood, Jackson stepped forward to become of the county seat of Teton County.

Evidence of the slide has not dissipated in the ninety odd years since it happened. Huge boulder fields and drowned trees rising eerily from the lake still attest to this past natural violence. Primarily composed of sedimentary Tensleep Sandstone, the rocks and boulders ejected from the mountainside have sometimes an orangish hue and are speckled with bright splotches of many-colored lichen. In my head, I've begun calling it Klimt Stone because this reminds me of Klimt's metallic, speckled, and variegated paint textures.

Burnt trees also lend themselves well to being re-interpreted and morphed into looming, portentous signifiers. The following was on an unnamed ridge (at least, unknown to me) bordering Granite Creek, which is south of Jackson. Against bluer-than-blue skies, the carbonized skin glitters--a stalk of coal.

And this brings us to cloudscapes--perhaps the easiest to manipulate into technicolor visions, mimicking the layering of paint pigment in the depth of the alabaster, the lemon, the champagne. Dialing up a cloudscape brings baroque and rococo heavenly vistas to mind--those windows into ethereality usually guarded by chubby putti with trumpets and garlands. The cherubim don't work for free in Wyoming, however. I've seen plenty of rare animals, including a wolverine (!), but so far, no swirling celestial babies. I'll keep you posted.

As I continue to walk the woods, thinking of my book, and continue to indulge my side interest in documenting new hikes and spectacles, the vividness of real nature and the artificiality of art and nature-translated-to-image continue to inform one another. Sometimes reading is the most vivid thing of all; sometimes writing feels like the shoddiest paintbrush to communicate what is real. Regardless, the richness of a life lived in art and in landscape imparts a reverence for all that hallows, communicates, and beautifies experience. The one is essential to the other.

(Painting: "Adele Bloch Bauer," Gustav Klimt)

Green Vibrations

I am thinking over a phrase of Annie Dillard's this morning, encountered in her collection of meditations on writing, appropriately titled The Writing Life. "There is no shortage of good days," she writes. "It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life."

It's an uncomfortably wise insight. Although I have never confused sensation-seeking with writerly preparation, it has nevertheless been an underlying motivator in many things I have done. I always feel an anxiety about missing things, or allowing experiences to remain undiscovered. In Jackson, it is some mythical canyon that haunts me: somehow obscure and crystalline; a field of wildflowers where no one is walking; a view from so high, that as I wrote once, "I can feel the cold on my eyes." Other places, it is about the potential of art, the potential of hitting just the right point of intoxication on food or wine, the potential that some person hides behind one of many turned shoulders, and that person has keys to unlock any number of things. It's what leaves me hungrily scanning the walls of cathedrals, looking for the original, homely paintwork, obsessed with even the humblest joints of the ceilings. I'd hate to think I missed it.

I think my assumption has always been that these moments of beauty will accrete, one layer of sand to the next, to make my soul altogether something fine and glittering, honed carefully and curated as I go. And yet, I often write so little of it. Why, I wonder.

Summer is upon us now, with its exquisite songbirds and trails, cleared at last of snow. In mid-May, it seemed that all the aspens and cottonwoods turned green at once. I thought of it as a susurration of some kind, completely undetectable to human ears, but nevertheless communicating spring through the groves, vibrating the landscape into a new incarnation of being. The green was so new; the operation itself so delicate. A miracle was gifted in a day, but a quotidian miracle, too, happening each May in a sudden sweep. And then summer. And then the sun and the obstinate eggshell blue.

It is a time of golden water in the evenings, and green trees etched in gold around it. The yellow of balsamroot flowers and the sentinels of violet lupine and monk's hood. Baby elk, tremulous on newly-jointed legs; a rather fat and pleased-with-himself marmot, like a caricature of an English friar; a miniscule duck who fed at the edge of a quiet stream, buoyantly bobbing up after each quarry.

A hard thing it is, to revise, when all of this is happening outside. The outdoors are a constant imprecation to leave the room and abandon the work. That mythical canyon taunts like a mirage. But ho hum,  another chance to gather strength and plug along anyway. To remember the life of the spirit. So many moments of muster, and then finally, I write about this color of green at last, and let go of that last nagging sensation, returning concentration to where it ought to be.

Brushstrokes

One more day left in the Year of Being Brave.  Yesterday, I got out of bed and looked out the window and was shocked into full consciousness by the sight of a little red-breasted bird sitting on one of the crystalline branches right in front of me.  That little streak of red on an otherwise white, glittering world reminded me that so much of winter in Wyoming lies in brushstrokes: the planar snow, the dusky shadows of the trees, the days that lack dimension as layer of layer of snow fold down vs. the days that  are etched in true bluebird blue.  Those days dawn with an almost shocking clarity.  When I lived in Seattle, those skies -- so full of pigment -- were one of the main things I missed about home.  The dense, mysterious snowstorms have their own beauty, however, not least being the anticipation of skiing fresh powder...

It's time to set a goal for next year, but I'm not sure what it will be yet.  Last year, it came to me on a wan, sunny morning as I sat on a bench on Orcas Island, facing the water.  That's when The Year of Being Brave declared itself as the goal and the mission for 2012.  Like anything, the grandiose title was truly a product of incremental changes and decisions, as well as setbacks, because, well, that's life, isn't it?  This year has tested me in ways that I couldn't have imagined: some of it has led me to immense happiness and pride, and some to sadness and discouragement.  One of the oddest things that occurred was that life began to imitate art, the very art I'd set out to create.  It's a bit eerie.  Someday I'd love to share that story, but first things first: the book.

I tabulated today, and the first draft is very close to done.  Of course, after that there will be days and weeks and months (??!?) of polishing and reconfiguring and quilting together the two narratives.  But the actual writing part is definitely on the wane.  At this point, I am happy to report that I am as comfortable in the skin of my second character as I was with my first.  If anything, she has become my virtual stand-in -- the more neutral, dispassionate voice.  I wrote a love scene for her today and felt almost suspicious of myself.  Was I subconsciously writing it for myself?  Hard to say.  I have learned through this process that spending so much time with one work is often glorious rather than limiting.  So much expansion is possible, so many tangents (even if I need to edit them out later).  Overall, the process is more freeing than expected.  So, yay!  Onwards...

Friends, so many of you have accomplished amazing feats this year.  What are your goals and purposes for the coming year?  I'd love to hear.  In the meantime, I'll wait for that stroke of clarity that will hopefully arrive on the morning of January 1.  

The Ugly Truth About Writing, and Thank You

 
I am currently backing up my hard drive.  You mean, you've had a novel on your laptop, 6 years' worth of writing, photographs, music...and your laptop is from 2006 and incredibly slow...and you've never once backed it up?  Nope.  Haven't.  Stop looking at me weird.  Although, the novel has been living in Dropbox since the spring, and I have used one of those online back-up thingamabobs.  I remain a technology neophyte in many ways.

A task such as backing up one's laptop always leads to the most delightful writerly navel-gazing.  In succession, I opened languishing Word documents entitled "Dream Transcripts," "The Savage Dentist," and "Even the sound of cars driving by is hurtful after the end of a relationship."  Raw. Ouch.  Like the true hoarder I am, I suddenly felt pained to even transfer these long-forgotten and yet obviously beloved documents to the external hard drive in order to delete them from the laptop and thus free up much-needed memory.  I suppose, at heart, every hoarder feels a sense of psychological ease in knowing that something will stay and live where it has always lived, instead of the "banishment" of storage, deletion, or (unspeakable!) actually throwing it away.  This exact drama had a preview as I felt pangs thinking of storing even one box of books or papers in my parents' garage, despite the fact that I haven't yet scratched the surface of unpacking them.  I had bought that used copy of W.H. Auden's Selected Poems, and now, in the dead of winter, on CHRISTMAS DAY, a rat was probably going to chew through its center, and then I would have never really read Auden, and his Modernist words would be masticated and forever lost to me.  This line of thinking would occur with each book.

Another thing I save with a hoarders' obsession are the drafts of stories that I wrote in grad school and submitted to workshops.  I save every single copy that was annotated by professors and fellow students: many covered with loopy script, and even personal, page-long comments sheets addressed as letters.  Same thing goes for the comments my writers' group of 3 years in Seattle was kind enough to bestow upon me.  The last time I really looked at some of these comments--some dating from the very first quarter of grad school--it struck me that in that period of my life, I received the most validation and well-wishing and good old-fashioned understanding of my writing than at any other time before or since.  I am aware of the flurry of critiques that surround MFA programs, and I have found myself on both sides of the debate.  Still, it is a special time: when you are a serious person in a serious city, writing late into the night, printing out multiple copies, receiving engaged attention, even when it is salted liberally with criticism.  For me, it was a time that made sense.  Not in every way.  But in one important way.  Each day, I do the thing I am best at doing.  Each day, others witness it.  Others care.  I cared about them, too.  Some of the writers I worked with at the University of Washington became my dearest friends (holla!) and through its hive of networking, I connected with the three fabulously talented women who traded work informally with me for several years.  Some of my colleagues wrote indelible stories and poems that I still think about, even if it has been years since I've seen them.

When I speak of the "ugly truth," what I mean is that, as any writer knows, the image of Hemingway and Fitzgerald drinking gin fizzes at a cafe table in Paris while also casually writing masterpieces on their napkins and/or moleskin journals is simply not a real thing that occurs.  Take me, for example--maybe not writing a masterpiece, but plugging away nevertheless.  Mostly, I am unglamorously dressed.  (The nice thing about living in a cold place is that you can wear a hat all the time).  I write on a Saturday night.  My dog seems confused by what I am doing.  I dream about my characters more than real people I know.  I set aside a day of unfettered writing and end up reading a book about the history of marriage until noon.  I queue up the novel and then hear the opening score to Downtown Abbey downstairs and spring from my bed in a second.  Truly Pavlovian.  I write.  And also, I don't write.  Or I write content for jobs, which are not novel-related.  The secret shame about working on a big project is that you've said "Goodbye!  I am off to make my fortune!" and you have been waved off and embraced and supported. And every day is a litmus test as to your commitment to the goal.  Some are banner days, and some are struggles--especially that old, beastly struggle of the will.

So, this is where I get to the "thank you" part.  Sometimes, I barely recognize myself.  Like an adolescent in limbo, I no longer live on my own (aka with the best roommate in the history of the world, ever); I no longer go out much; I no longer dress up (although I wear waaayyyy more hats); my evening calendar is often bare; I watch more television than I have in almost 10 years (unfortunate confession, but the fact that a show called "Duck Dynasty" exists has sadly not escaped my notice); I read about the same amount, but with a sense of guilt that I really ought to be writing my own words; I no longer report to the same office at the same time every day (give or take an hour); I no longer see the majority of the people that have provided my everything-or-close-to-it for the past seven years.  It's hard to know, without enough perspective, if all of these changes are bad or good, although certainly none of them have to be permanent.  I am not unhappy.  Sometimes, I feel happier than ever.  But, still.  Often I am confused and discouraged and demoralized, traded off equally with being ecstatic and purposeful and hopeful. I suppose there is no way to know what this time has meant until it is over, and the novel is done.  And even then, so much is uncertain.

So, thank you, friends from near and far.  And family, too (of course).  Every time you ask me how my novel is going, or we talk novel-shop, you comment on my blog, or you tell me that what I am doing is inspiring to you, it adds one more drop to the bucket of this is a time that makes sense.  Every time we talk in general, whatever it's about, my heart is gladdened and lightened.  The work is made real.  It seems less like the undertaking of an underemployed 29-year-old woman in her pajamas, and more like a valid project, and a dream that is worthwhile to pursue.  Obviously I wouldn't have come to Jackson if I didn't already believe that, but as obstacles rear themselves along the way, it is still heartening to remember.  I am so fortunate to have this time, to have the support to make it happen, and to have all of you.  Thank you.  Even though I am thousands of miles away, I could not do this without you.

P.S.  Miss you.  Love living vicariously through all of your news and adventures!

Winter's Teeth

It seems only yesterday that I was rhapsodizing about autumn.  Then this happened:

You may be able to make out the Wyoming flag flapping in the breeze.  A metallic edge is in the air and crystals are forming on our windshields at night.  In high school, I drove my sister to school in the mornings and we were always running so late (totally my fault) that I would scrape the tiniest little square using my driver's license and then force her to roll down the window and watch the edge of the road as we careened into the school parking lot and tried to make it to class before the 7:55 bell.  We were successful about 50% of the time.  Scraping a windshield in 10 degree weather on a dark, moonless morning with snow clogging the bottom of your flats? Probably not the most romantic part of Wyoming.  But, of course, even with the trees bared and the grasses grayed, a beauty of desolation remains.

In the past two weeks, a lot of things have happened, some of which I am choosing not to write about here.  I visited my grandfather and family in Dayton, Ohio; I started reading a book about the tracing of a family heritage through objects.  I started writing a children's book.  I wrote a description of Seymour, Indiana for a hotels website.  I want to write at length about stories and families and the beautiful sculptures of glass, light, and stainless steel that I saw at the Dayton Art Museum. Several friends have been blessed with new joys, and some have met new griefs. And, the other things that have happened...well, they have renewed my gratitude for life and for the people I love in ways I could not have imagined.  It truly is a gift, this life, and being able to see it as a gift...well, at the risk of sounding trite, that's a gift, too.

Also, I got a library card.


One thing I love about my life here is the repetition of my walks.  Readers of this blog may even notice that many photographs are taken from the same areas.  Each time I tackle Game Creek or Cache Creek
or what is fondly known in town as "the high school butte," I feel rewarded with the incremental changes to the landscape I see.  Geese were migrating, and now four swans are flapping by like white linen on a windy day.  No more two-stepping herons in the field; but on a still night, the coyotes whine.  The yellow leaves I love are also gone, but in their place are bundles of ice, binding the grass together in little clumps, little secrets.  The stars, even, seem colder and more inscrutable.  The characters in my book feel ignored; they, too, are cold and fractious and on edge.  That's what this in-between season is all about.  It's about the portent of changes, and oddly, amidst the tumult, about settling in.  It will be a long winter.  Better keep writing.  Better keep walking.  Better keep pausing to say thank you, under my breath, and yet loud enough for the world to hear.

Rounding the Seasons

A couple of days ago, I found myself longing for a specific poem about autumn.  I knew I had read it before, and that it was a well-known, oft-anthologized work.  I riffled through my memory, recalling that the poem was infused with a sense of drowsiness, the sharp smell of a cider press, the subtle-sweet scent of autumn's glorious decay.  Was it Yeats?  Something about gold, or another poem about the beloved "quiet one"?  Was it Dylan's young boy, singing in his chains by the sea?

But no, the poem I sought was Keats' "To Autumn."  "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" it begins, full of praise and exhortation.  There is a cider press, and a winnowing wind, and the long locks of autumn, golden in the sun.  The poem is infused with a honeyed sense of time, with languour, with, really, all those lovely -our words that signify leisure and slow time.   It sounds a bit like the autumn I am inhabiting right now--one I have not experienced in this specific setting for eleven years.  And oh, how worthy of an ode it is.

I smelled the first intimations weeks ago as I hiked into the Teton Range with my family on a very hot and sunny day.  The soft, sweet smell of the yellowing heart-shaped aspen leaves immediately conjured the first signs of an autumn I had completely forgotten.  I thought of all of the poets who have dedicated their work to each of the four seasons, and I listened to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"--the alternating frenzy and light strings of a year's passage.  In all the years of living elsewhere, autumn was always the season I had missed.  And how could I really say I had come home again until I experienced its return--right here?  I realize now that we can never truly love--or know--a place until we have experienced it in its roundness.  Every day is a gradation in color, every day adds a new, delicate tine to the comb of the chilling breeze.  Every day is a revelation.

This morning, I drove the curve of the highway, returning home towards town, and saw the crest of the Grand Teton peeking out over mellow, pastoral hills and fields, its crags just rinsed in snow.  My soundtrack for the drive--Prokofiev's "Romeo & Juliette"--swelled with grandeur during my favorite portion of the score, which I will unashamedly admit is the ultra-romantic balcony love theme.  (So beautiful!)  Ah, yes, there loomed my beloved.  Sighted with full orchestra accompaniment.  There have been so many moments like this for me in the past month that startle me into feeling vibrantly alive and full of an intense, heart-pressing gratitude for being here at this moment in time.  For seeing this place that has been relegated into memory for eleven years through a newly-discovered season, and a newly-discovered me breathing within it.

***

(I realize all of these blogs from Jackson have ended on somewhat of a heart-swelling note of effusion so far, but what can I say?  Effusive seems to be the name of the game for me right now...  As Modest Mouse would say, Blame It On the Tetons.)

(

Close Encounters of the Moose Kind

I took the above video in order to illustrate the peacefulness of the swaying aspens outside of our living room window, but what ended up coming through more ominously was the seemingly amplified ticking of the living room clock.  This winsomeness doth tend towards time-wasting, the clock seemed to declare, and I have to admit, it had a point.  I am under the gun, so to speak.  The Year of Being Brave has a timeline that can run out: it is a finite goal, and when I am tempted to treat my time here as just one long lollygagging vacation, the truth is that time looms large.  And so, I have responded with internal deadlines of my own: setting dates that characters' arcs will be completed and a date when I want to be done drafting and headed into revising (around December).

Two nights ago, I made the ill-advised decision to climb the small butte behind our house in the waning twilight.  I was treated to some spectacular sunset views at the top:

However, on the way down, I quickly realized my error in attempting to dismount in the encroaching darkness on a switchbacking trail wearing flimsy Tom's (total non-local move).  Using my phone as a flashlight, I stumbled down, taking twice as long as it would normally take, and set off on the bike path that curves through most of the valley and provides a beloved trail for bikers, dog walkers, and foolish pedestrians walking home in neighborhoods with no streetlights.  Relying on my familiarity with the path, I entered a section with a church parking lot and bushes to one side and homes on the other.  My phone died and all went dark.  At that exact moment, I heard the crashing of brush and twigs and one gigantic shape loomed ahead of me in the darkness, followed by another, slightly less tall dark shape.  I did the smart thing, and completely froze.  I knew a huge moose was standing just yards from me, and that the smaller shape was most definitely a moose calf.

Now, one thing about moose--they do not crash out spastically from the brush like deer and run every which way, alerting you to their presence while also revealing their fear of you.  Moose just stand there and stare at you, either aggressively or nonchalantly, and it's up to you to give them a wide berth, especially if they have young whom they'll want to protect...with their hooves.  So, locked into a staredown, I backed up, and up, and crashed through some underbrush of my own in order to cut across lawns and parking lots and come back to the trail far from where I'd encountered them.  And, just for good measure, I started to run.

The next morning, our dog Bodhi bayed and alerted us to the presence of not two, but three moose grazing on our neighbors' yard shrubbery.  Mama in actuality has two calves!  In another classic non-local move, I retrieved my camera and crept closer.  I stared at the two calves (probably up to my shoulders in height) and they stared back, unblinking, arranged identically side by side.  And then, once more, the cow--that huge, looming shape from the night before--lurched out and raised herself to full height.  Daylight staredown: engaged.  I knew my cue and hightailed it away, scampering on the driveway in bare feet.  As I fell asleep last night, I'm almost certain I heard the same moose crossing over our back deck during the witching hour.  Neither patron saints or goblins, the moose family are placidly going about their existence, and their neighborhood just happens to be mine.  I feel pretty lucky.

Second calf is hidden in the brush to the right.

I leave you with a few images from my last week about and around:

Home Again, Home Again: First Dispatch From the Year of Being Brave

This summer, I left my job and life in Seattle to move back to Jackson, Wyoming and finish my novel.

I woke up the morning after leaving Seattle in a tent 30 miles from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho to the sound of thunder and droplets of rain hitting my nose.  The previous evening had been so mild that my Dad and I had opted not to cover my brother's tent with a rainfly, and after sitting around the fire and drinking a glass or two of wine, I fell asleep looking up through the transparent netting towards the tops of Ponderosa pines.  The campsite was one of only two indicated on our indispensable road atlas, and after driving two country routes past "towns" with atmospheric names like Rose Lake, we found ourselves up high, flushing deer from their hidden hedgerow posts and passing old barns and cabins crumbling in on themselves.  (A note: decaying barns in fields are like my favorite thing, ever).  The next day, I listened to an interview with the author Deborah Magpie Earling, whose grandfather drowned in that very lake.  His son always remembered the sweat-stained hat that lay--abandoned--after he vanished beneath the glassy surface.  Oh, yes, I thought, it's totemic details like this that make us write in the first place.

Sleeping in a Forest Service campground after a long drive, partially on dirt road, seemed like exactly the right thing.  Even though I was still hundreds of miles from Jackson, my hometown, those kinds of woods are home, and so are the little outposts within them.  The campsite attendant camping there for the summer with his thick Northeastern accent; the little wooden port-o-potty and well structures; the process of walking out the flattest section of the ground and strategically pitching the tent to face the morning sun.  Those steps have been with me since I was very, very young.  

Of course, the thunderstorm and whipping winds dashed all attempts to rise with the sun or eat oatmeal cooked on the campstove, so off we drove as the sun rose (something I rarely see, being so much a night owl).  All of I-90, the route we'd taken straight from Seattle and eventually into Montana, proved to be a rich vein of memory.  As childhood memories tend to do, various family camping caravans and passings had collapsed in on themselves, but as the names of towns rose on green highway signs, the distinct places came back.  Wallace, ID where we had once visited a defunct brothel and seen a list of "acts" and prices taped unceremoniously over the light switch; "Anaconda Opportunity," surely one of the most delightful road signs in America; Deer Lodge, MT, home of the old territorial prison and an old car museum and a preserved rancher baron's property.  As a child, I'd keened towards every hint of History with a capital "H" and had probably driven the whole family crazy by insisting that we stop at all ghost towns and gravesites.  Sometimes, I was disappointed to find that my excavations of cross-beam cabins produced nothing more than beer cans and the remnants of campfires.  But nevertheless, a sense of struggle and effort underlies even lonely highways like I-90 and the empty fields and thick forests that mainly surround it.

My first glimpse of Jackson itself was through a haze of forest fire smoke, but the joyous greetings of our dogs remained the same.  And so now I'm here.  My trappings of Seattle life lie in a clutter of boxes and bags in my brother's borrowed room (the little kid's room, it still seems, even though Ben is 25 years old now).  In the morning, I wake to the sound of my parents going to work and the dogs' nails clicking back and forth along the tiled highway.  At night, I go to bed to the sound of coyotes wailing somewhere in the fields, and Canadian geese land and take off from the same fields all day long, honking and stitching together their ragged V-shape.  The aspens pattern our drawn shades like static, ticking and shivering.

Wyoming.  A place where you can go home again and ride around with one of your oldest friends in an old Ford Lariat pick-up truck and go to look at your old house on Angus Drive.  It looks the same from the street, but the well-worn trail you used to trudge into the willow thicket has been swallowed by a new house on the corner lot.  The trees are much taller.  Oddly, everything seems bigger rather than smaller.  And so you can go home again, but someone will have built a house over some part of your memory; a new generation of kids are leaving their inner tubes to dry in your old yard; the late-night diner is long-closed.  The landscape, however, neither remembers nor forgets you.  And this has always been the comfort of home.

(P.S. My friend Jessica Day is one of the people who inspired me with her own brave, astounding writing journey this year.  She gave me the excellent advice that blogging is like the warm-up run for the writing ahead, and keeps you accountable to your goals.  Her own blogging on the subject is so rich and lovely that I really must urge you to go here immediately and read it.  My first entree is just a pale copy in comparison!)

101 Reasons To Be Excited To Return Home For Thanksgiving