December 3, 2007
Monday

 

Loaf Mountain, Big Horn National Forest near Buffalo, Wyoming

Come, fairies, take me out of this dull house!
Let me have all the freedom I have lost;
Work when I will and idle when I will!
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
                       — William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939, Irish poet and playwright
                           from his play The Land of Heart’s Desire

It’s the concentration I have here, the focused productive energy, that is the most remarkable gift of my time at Jentel. This morning I was up before 6:30, fed the cats. made the coffee, knitted for a while. And then I wrote for nearly four hours. To the two thousand words I already had for the story I am working on I added another thousand and sketched out in longhand another seven scenes that will advance the story to a conclusion.

In that much time at home I would have gotten out of the chair and, as writer Ron Carlson warns against, visited my friends Mr. Coffee, Mr. Refrigerator, and Mr. Television. I’d have eaten three times, got sucked into the hot topics on The View, and been ready for a nap with maybe a hundred crappy words to show for the whole morning’s effort. Here I get out of the chair only to visit Mr. Bathroom, and since that requires putting on boots with deep-lugged soles for traversing the sometimes slick courtyard, I wait until the trip is really worth the trouble.

By noon I’d done in a single morning more and better work than I can usually do in a week at home. The temperature was climbing past 45º, and my Prius was sitting there like a silver horse waiting to take me off into adventure. I had a banana and a piece of yesterday’s psomi and then started out for Ten Sleep.

Really, how can you be in Wyoming and not want to go to a place called Ten Sleep over a mountain pass called the Cloud Peak Skyway? The guidebook I consulted promised “a 64-mile paved highway up spectacular Ten Sleep Canyon and over the southern end of the high Big Horn Mountains to Buffalo. . . . The road climbs from Ten Sleep up rugged Ten Sleep Canyon, past Meadowlark Lake, over Powder River Pass, and down into Buffalo.”

I was starting from Buffalo, the little town I’d visited on Friday. In the two and a half hours it took to traverse those sixty-four miles I saw three distinct kinds of geography. For twenty miles I climbed farther and farther into high plains grasslands. Then, almost suddenly, I was in deep forest. The wind swirled loose snow off what looked like avalanche rubble onto patches of packed snow on the roadway. Twenty miles of that and I started down again through rock canyon. Periodically there was a sign telling me what kind of rock I was looking at and what the age of it was, expressed in millions or billions of years. Millions and billions of years.

I stopped at every scenic overlook, every informational sign, every place I felt like pulling over and saying to myself, oh wow. Crazy Woman Canyon became my road not taken. It looked inviting, and the name alone was enough to entice me, but it was narrow and snow-covered and even had a sign that said “Warning: Steep Narrow Road.” I looked down to where it bent in the undergrowth, and decided to keep it for another day. And there will be another day, be sure of that.

I keep the picture seen at left of Vermont’s Bread Loaf Mountain on the back of my calendar book. I carry it with me everywhere and look at it dozens of times a day. The picture I took today of Loaf Mountain will join it. The soft contours of Bread Loaf remind me of my past, of the place that has nurtured me as a writer, as a reader, as a woman of courage and determination. The jagged young energy of Loaf Mountain shows me my future. I have stories to tell, books to write, mountains yet to dance upon like a flame.

 

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