Mountain Musings

“I believe that a man gets closer to God out there in the big, free West,”  ~  William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody.

There’s something both invigorating and spiritual in sitting on a porch in the warmth of the late afternoon sun, listening to the gurgle of a creek not 10 yards away. Aside from that creek the only sounds are the wind and the occasional screech of a circling hawk.  I’m alternately reading and glancing up from my book at the red cliffs that overlook the cabin.  Bighorn sheep clamor on those cliffs.  Downstream the green, yellow and orange leaves on young aspens shiver in the cooling autumn wind.  They shine and shimmer like colored coins. 

Wow I guess I didn’t fully appreciate the quiet until I got back home to the San Francisco Bay Area and went to my gym a week later.  The noise was like getting whacked in the face with a baseball bat; clanging steel, grunting and shouting and of course the dreck and cacophony that the tone deaf call music.  Walking in I hunched over from the sheer weight of the din.

             Ante Up! Yap that fool!

Ante Up! Kidnap that fool!

It's the perfect timing, you see the man shining

Get up off them god damn diamonds! Huh!

Ante Up! Yap that fool!

Ante Up! Kidnap that fool!

In the locker room I got ready for my work out and said to myself in disgust that “I could eat alphabet soup and shit better lyrics.”  Maybe a little too loud as the guy a few lockers down shot me a look.

High mountain valley

Gridlock

                                                            

Jackson Hole - Horse Thieves and Celebrities; Cheap Beer and Overpriced Pretzels

We’d pulled into Jackson late on a Saturday night a bit disoriented, very hungry and too dog tired to worry about food.  Well the wife didn’t worry about food but I opted for some overpriced room service; but I repeat myself because room service is culinary grand larceny.  What we found in the morning when we headed into town was not the Jackson that I remembered from childhood when we visited on a family vacation.  Understand that I don’t have the faintest recollection of my childhood Jackson but I can state with positive certainty that my childhood Jackson was not this Jackson. I couldn't imagine that the Jackson that my parents brought me to was a haven for the 1 percent. 

Goin to Jackson (Wyoming)

I'm goin' to Jackson, I'm gonna mess around,

Yeah, I'm goin' to Jackson,

Look out Jackson town. – Song “Jackson” ; Billy Ed Wheeler and Jerry Leiber. 

Okay, the song that Johnny Cash made famous wasn’t referring to Jackson, Wyoming but the tune rambled through my head as we made our drive.

It was a long pull getting to Jackson, Wyoming from Fernley, Nevada where we spent our first night.  Fourteen hours on the road but not all of it driving.  We stopped for photos, for food, for coffee, water or soda.  We stopped to stretch and we stopped to relieve ourselves of the coffee, water and soda.  We left Fernley in the black of the morning and arrived in Jackson in what seemed a blacker night. 

Teasing Tatanka and Other Travel Plans

Tatanka – Lakota Sioux word for American Bison (buffalo)

If a bear charges you after a surprise encounter, stay still and stand your ground.  National Park Service Advisory

The plans are pretty much in place.  The accommodations are all booked, the basic itinerary is set and in less than two weeks it’ll be time for us to over pack, throw fishing and camera gear and mountains of other stuff and junk into the car that we won’t need and will never touch and head out on vacation.  I’ll leave the boilerplate “out of office” email message that says I’ll have no cell phone or internet service while I’m gone.  You see this is all part of the new American work protocol in which your employer expects you drop everything, leisure, kids's birthdays, sex and death (a family member's or yours), if and when duty calls.  By saying that you don't have any service you're trying to sound like you're saying, "Gosh I'd really like to but I'm in the wilderness."  But what you're really saying is "Fuck off:" Everyone leaves the same basic message, “Hi, I’m sorry I missed your email but I’m at Silicon Valley and there’s no internet or phone service here.”  I mean really how many places are left where you have no phone or internet service?  Actually I know of one.  That will be the cabin in Montana we’re renting for 5 nights out of the two weeks we'll be gone.  It’s about 20 miles from the nearest town and there really is no phone or internet. 

In The Land of the Mustangs

The three ambled slowly along the hard scrabble trail, rocky white clumps that crumble underfoot and disintegrate into grainy sand; a landscape peppered with knots of spiny sagebrush.  Looking at the trio you feel desolation; a desperate loneliness;drifting as if looking for something or someplace but you don’t know what or where.  They headed for the ridge that would soon swallow them up taking them to..

A family group of mustangs stops at a water hole