November 26, 2002

• Whew. What an absolute relief to have moved from getting ready to go to actually being gone.

  I’m thinking about the Fool card in the tarot. There’s the fool wandering around, not a care in the world. Never mind that he’s about to walk off a cliff. But he’s content. He’s got his satchel all packed and his colorful garb, and there’s a little dog. What’s the dog saying? Is it leading him over the cliff, or is it warning him?

  Ah, well. Cute little dog, yapping happily. “Hello, little dog!” (The little dog’s getting more frustrated by the moment..)

  Anyway. I cleaved myself from Seattle on Saturday and made it to eastern Oregon. I slept in the car in a brand-spankin’-new rest area in the mountain pass above Pendleton.

  In the morning it was cold as hell, in a manner of speaking. Crows were fighting over some scraps in the parking lot. In the silence between passing semi-trucks, I heard an eagle.

  There’s a cliche in movies. If you see a vast panorama of unspoiled wilderness, particularly if the scene is a valley, you’ll hear a sound effect of an eagle’s call. It’ll reverberate artfully in the air, in such a way that you’re not even really aware that you heard it. If you only ever watched movies and didn’t go out to the wilderness, you’d think the sound was somehow required of the place.

  Well, I heard that sound. Then I heard it again, and it made me smile. And I thought I could follow it, so I did, for a little while. Then I realized that yes, it was still cold as hell.

  That day of driving was uneventful, except that I was tired most of the time. I stopped in a rest area in Idaho and slept for a few hours. I woke up to realize I was hot as hell, so to speak. Closed car windows and a bright sun. A victim of the greenhouse effect!

  All that day I saw birds of prey. Hawks, mostly.

  Today, driving through southern Wyoming: Wind. More wind. Snow. Ice on the road. more wind. The usual for southern Wyoming in November.

  The snow turns ugly badlands into the surreal surface of a windblown moon. Elk Mountain looked like a a happy accident at the wedding cake factory.

  That’s a mean way to describe Elk Mountain. Let me describe for you in a thousand words the picture I would have taken if I had a camera that was worth a crap:

  Elk Mountain is not a huge mountain, but it is very large. It sticks out of the north end of the Rockies, creating havoc for the people who design interstate highways; open an atlas and look at I-80 west of Rawlins. Today Elk Mountain had a tuft of cloud hovering just above its pinnacle, like a huge UFO trying to find a place to land. Next to the mountain, about a mile south, was a huge cloud formation, exactly the same size and shape as the mountain. The cloud, itself, had another tuft of a cloud, exactly the same size and shape, hovering above it’s pinnacle. The wind blew crystalline snow, about as fine as confectioner’s sugar, in plumes and rivulets off the cliffs and crags of the mountain.

  This same sort of snow washed across the interstate in the same way. It reminded me of trying to drive through a flood. Which it was, just frozen.

  Oddly enough, in the midst of this utter whiteout of snow and wind, I saw at least three birds of prey in winter plumeage. I know hawks migrate, so this seemed strange, especially on such a bitter day. One picked up some roadkill right in front of my car; I had to swerve to avoid hitting it. Another flew right down the centerline of the road toward traffic (which at that point amounted to me and no one else). It was at just the exact altitude to make me think it might crash into the windshield, but it was just trying to yank my chain. What’s with the raptors?

  There’s a wind farm to the east of Elk Mountain. Hundreds of 5 or 6 story windmills churning in the stiff wind. The whole trip east across Wyoming had this 30mph tailwind. As I approached the wind farm, the blades were facing me. They appeared over the horizon like blooming flowers.

  Denver sucks. Denver always sucks. I’m in eastern Colorado, almost to the Kansas border. I can still see the halo of light from Denver, half a state away.

  • 2:31 am
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