I spent three days wandering Wyoming, seeking out a home in the grass and in the wind, driving for miles along endless fenced-in ranch land, accompanied by crows and hawks and the occasional coyote.
I met a woman who said she was heading east from Washington without a real destination. She thought Nova Scotia might be where she ended up. I told her that I was following the same course but in the opposite direction and we had a laugh together. She continued back the way I had come, and I continued onward along the way she had come.
I humbled before shaggy, snorting Bison at Yellowstone as they walked the fringes of the bubbling, burping thermal pools. I peered up at Devil’s Tower, at the grooved fiery rock, echoes of the giant bear’s failed attempts to climb to the heavens. I watched the brim of sunset over the Grand Tetons as the rays of light broke through the brooding clouds and shattered atop the rocky crags of the Many Sisters, oozing like butter down their sides.
But it was when I found myself completely alone on the top of a mountain in the Big Horn range, at the foot of the Medicine Wheel, that something in me fully broke loose.
Thousands of years ago in a remote location, among the high grasses where the air plays about the skin and the sun comes to roost at night, The Big Horn Medicine Wheel was ritually constructed. Prayer bundles tied against barbed wire flutter in a wind that smells of far away rain and crushed earth. Hundreds of ribbons, feathers, tobacco ties, dream catchers, precious stones, beadwork strands and personal messages encircle it as it stands vigilant. Direction stones revolve around a central Creator stone, radiating 28 paths to the outer rim, each of the main piles of rock sprinkled with ceremonial gifts, the center itself hosting countless spears.
I had traveled a narrow, dangerous road and then had hiked almost 2 miles up a steeply winding path to reach it, into the higher altitude until I felt my heart might burst. The only sounds that came to me were those of my footsteps, beating out their rhythm over the gusts that raged across the open sky.
As I stood before it, the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming stretched out in sweeping peaks and valleys, with such delicate shades of being, such utter and complete silence, that I lost myself in that massive eternity. I felt like a waterskipper on the surface of a churning pool, a swallow darting through a hurricane in search of the flighty, fleeting insects. This entire journey is really just about finding a place to belong. I have chosen to be lost, having left the only place where I ever felt comfortable for the pull of the great beyond. And on that mountain I felt like I was falling through the void, holding dearly to the roots I thought would never crumble, would never be dislodged.
All these thoughts and feelings swirled around me. The wind, always the wind, filled my ears with a whining song that only seemed to rise with every passing second. I have never experienced wind that blew from all directions at once, and it seemed as I was at the center of the world, the place where all the breezes are born. I closed my eyes and listened to the bells tied to some of the prayer bundles mix with the sound of the larger ribbons thrumming and thumping the earth, before I again moved on down the path to the unknown.
Route: 90W from Custer, South Dakota through Devil’s Tower to 14A at Sheridan, Wyoming. From 14A to Lovell, Wyoming. Then 14W and the Chief Joseph Highway throughout Yellowstone with stays at Cody and Jackson, Wyoming.