Letter From the West

There is a map of the United States spread out on my kitchen table. It has lines on it, marking the trips I’ve taken across country. Tours, moves, vacations; in red lines and blue; from Savannah to Jackson; points south and west.

I can tell you a lot from that map. In Wyoming in spring the desert flowers are pointellist dots on the landscape. Due east from Las Cruces, New Mexico at dusk the town lights stars at the base of jagged pinnacles. Mist sweeps up the Shenandoahs in the morning. The heat is constant in Georgia. The wheat runs waist high and green in early summer through the Dakotas.

Most all the highways are the same; and most all the towns. But the landscape is varied, unexpected. It works well in memory. I can sit at the table, touch a point on the map, and I'm moving down Interstate 90 at Chamberlain, where the Missouri slopes into the continent, and the West begins.

There is a lot of sky over America, and it always changes in exact connection to the changed landscape. It is best in the West. The sky, mirroring the land, is still wild and open. Lonely. I'll bet it crushed a lot of people, pioneers who had little sentiment. But even they must have thought it was freedom, if only for a moment.

I moved to Seattle last year, due west across the high desert and the broad sky. I moved here with a tall woman who teased when she was happy and cried when she was sad. We went to the Badlands and the ocean savanna. We saw buffalo, elk and pronghorn in Wyoming. We hiked the Grand Tetons and clacked rocks together to avoid surprising the grizzlies in the backcountry of Montana. We crossed the Casades and the land got rough and green and the sky turned dramatic and gray.

The sky is stormy in Seattle, even on a bright day. The clouds move fast and the weather changes all the time, except in winter, when it drizzles continuously.

She stayed through the winter and then left.

In the spring I drove alone east through the desert to the Grand Coulee Dam, where I found that the folk songs about men buried in its concrete were myths. I added one short line to my map.

In the summer I met another tall woman, from California. We had one weekend. A day on Mount Ranier with the alpine flowers at their height; we ran down from the snowfields to Paradise Inn smelling them all the way. The next day in the Columbia Gorge, beneath gold bluffs on a blustry day that flecked waves upon the river. We drank beer in the car and listened to Johnny Cash and watched Mount Hood bend in the distance. She said she feared being old and alone and left the next day for New York, to marry a man she’d known for years.

I added long circle lines to my map, still sitting, flat, on my kitchen table.