high plains drifter

There was nowhere on the East Coast, or in the South – or, for that matter, in the Great Lakes states or in Appalachia – where I felt like I had stepped into a foreign land. Sure, there were differences, but the world seemed close. When we could cobble together a three-day weekend, we could go to Washington, D.C., or Atlanta, or the mountains, or the beach, or colonial Williamsburg, or wild horse country. We didn’t have to go far to get away from it all.

When we moved out here, it felt (and feels) as if we had moved to a different country altogether. You never get a sense of how vast this place is until you drive it. When you drive it, and when you realize it took the pioneers at least ten times as long to traverse this place, you get a sense of the journey. You watch the land roll and list and finally flatten; and then, finally, you see the mountains in the distance. You realize how Denver got as big as it did: When those pioneers, who had traveled for months en route to California or wherever, saw the seemingly insurmountable Rocky Mountains up ahead, and they saw a clean and fertile river at their feet, they said, “Um, this looks good, right here.”

And after a few months of feeling as if we were close to nothing else, we realized we’re just close to different stuff. To wit: We just spent the night in Lusk, Wyoming, en route to Mount Rushmore (the geography majors will tell you it’s outside Rapid City, S.D.). There are things you see in this part of the world that aren’t a part of life on the East Coast. The trains, for one. Just when it seems as if train travel is all but dead east of the Mississippi, here you see trains that stretch for miles and miles, that need engines in the back and middle just to keep them moving. And once you get out of the city, you see them all the time. We drove four hours last night and must have seen three or four. And gates on the highway, which are up right now to allow travel but close when the snowdrifts make the road impassable. And grates across the bottoms of egresses and ingresses to the interstate, which serve to prevent cows and horses from getting on the highway.
And the stars. I have never seen so many stars. We pulled over on the exit, somewhere between Wheatland and Douglas, on a dirt road called El Rancho Road (I am not making this up) to look at the stars. It was so black, and so flat. My oldest daughter and I watched the curve of the earth, saw the cloudy and distant bands of the Milky Way, saw Mars low and orange, saw a shooting star.
“This is amazing!” she said.
“It is amazing,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget this moment.”