On a dry autumn evening, the setting sun catches in the needles of a limber pine, sets the tree glimmering as if with raindrops from a summer shower. Each droplet shines, its own glowing globe. Sage and rabbit brush burnish golden, and granite glistens. The land whispers, wind over rock, through grass soft at the end of the day, and, as I listen, I hear it say that this study of light is a study of more, that it will darken with the falling sun, that it will catch itself tomorrow against new leaves, on the other side of pines, dancing with transposed shadows. That the light that shimmers in those delicate points in the tree before me never evaporates but instead turns and returns and touches into beauty many things, many places, in the course of one rotation of the earth.

Wyoming, August 2012

Join me here on the trail, and let’s rest, press our hands against our knees to ease the straps of our packs until they feel young and limber enough to continue stepping down and down to South Fork’s meadows. Here, where green grass and timberline break to the burn’s mean edge, where heat split stone to sharp slabs, where the earth baked to dust and ash powdered fine, where trees twist in blackened fingers that claw for blue sky, and where the thick smell of smoke lingers. But also, do you hear within the char the stream’s sweet chime, see the slender shoots that will grow and green with time? Our big tree, halfway down the ridge’s breakneck slope, clings with roots half-singed to earth gone black and reaches with living, rising limbs towards clouds. Those flowers springing from dark soot echo sparks, their petals red, orange, vibrant now, after fire gorged and fled along the ridge until, rim-rocked, it turned back, consumed its own licking tongue, left blessed trees untouched to seed the flame-tilled ground for saplings yet to come.  

I hold stories in the weft and weave of sturdy canvas threads. Stories from your grandfather and his step-father, from your father and mother, stories from your own lips. Also, from others, family by blood and shared experience. Stories you might tell your children if you could only tease them out, separate the details from the laden fabric of history and receding memory.

I hold also the fading stains of antelope blood, the scent of stew meat simmered long over propane stoves, the light of spring, summer, and fall suns, the dusky smoke and glow of campfires. I have stood in gale force winds, sudden rains, and heavy snows. When I grew weary and thin, an oiled tarp and new canvas stitched me strong again. New layers laid down atop the old, obscuring some of what was, metamorphosis a necessity of perpetuity.

What you have seen, so have I, the generations of Wyoming kin shaped by sage and sky. I know the hills of Old Carbon and Hanna and of the Red Desert. Raise me up still in that country, straighten the splintery ridgepole, string the guy wires taut, set me to catch the wind and hold to earth.

A twist of hair caught on a barb of wire, also a twist around the smooth barrel of the strand. Auburn shot through with white speaks of a roan hide. I pluck the coarse fibers free, feel with a fingertip the sharp point that snagged them, look out over ashen sage and a wash of bunchgrass to the rise of granite jagged ridges and the sweep of horizon climbing up the clouds to the sky above, squint beneath the bright sun and imagine but do not see the strong back, straight legs, and supple neck of the horse. My fingers work the tail hairs into a slim braid, perhaps with which to make a bracelet or necklace or a stampede strap but more likely just a magpie souvenir, like spent shell casings and wind smoothed stones, a thing without purpose but for its bright echoes. Probably this slender lock caught the wire whisking after a fly, but I like to imagine flight, the powerful action of hock and hoof across a broken land wide open for running. As I close the gate and walk back to the rumbling of my truck, I reflect on the new drift fence, the drift of time, that which shifts and that which does not in a place like this.

Every year in February, I start to get cabin fever and long to be outside. So, in honor of looking forward to getting outside and as a reminder that the seasons do indeed turn, here’s looking back to summer and fall!

I love to ride my horse, Scout, on dirt roads that form a square around the ranchlands surrounding the barn where I keep her. The barn owners jokingly call it “going around the block.” Scout and I watch the seasons turn each time we ride the loop.

How best to know this place? On a map, it is a giant dotted border that extends through most of southwest Wyoming and into Colorado and Utah, covering over nine-thousand three hundred square miles. It overlaps multiple counties — Carbon, Sweetwater, Fremont, Sublette, and Natrona. Places commonly noted on driving maps include the Great Divide Basin, the Killpecker Sand Dunes, Adobe Town, the Oregon Trail, and the former mining towns of South Pass and Atlantic City. To drive around it, you might take Interstate 80, US Highways 191 or 287, or State Highway 28.

From these ribbons of asphalt, perhaps it looks like flat, dull country, miles of sagebrush going out across alkali and dust to a few ragged ridges and on to the thin, white edge of the horizon. Online guides describe it as shrub steppe and high desert, as housing diverse landscapes, like badlands sand dunes, and alkali flats. Photographs show red-white dirt, clay cliffs, sagebrush, antelope, and wild horses.

But the desert only truly begins to come alive when you dare to take gravelled and grated roads until they trail off into two-tracks, when you roll down your windows and feel the wind whip through the cab of your truck, the cool, dry touch of it against you cheek, your neck, when you rest your elbow on the window-sill and feel the sun warming your arm even if the day is cool, when you see antelope race flat-backed across the road ahead of you and wild horses proud-stepping through the sagebrush, when you can smell the strong, nearly metallic bite of sage and sun warmed rock.

This is the Red Desert I grew up in, the place where I came of age just as much or more than I did in my hometown of Rawlins, Wyoming. I do not know it’s more famous locals (fame in desert landscapes is relative, less easily won than fame for picturesque mountain peaks and waterfalls, which more readily fit cultural definitions of “scenic) like Adobe Town and the Killpecker Sand Dunes. The desert of my heart is the Antelope Hills in the northern stretch, just beyond the way stations of South Pass and Atlantic City. Those liminal hills tumble down from the Wind River Mountains, another soul-scape for me, and crease into wondrous draws along the Sweetwater River’s unexpected canyon.

Even if you are within a few miles of the river on a two-track, it is easy to miss it — in this stretch of the desert, the Sweetwater cuts deep and sudden, and if you look out across the flats and ridges of the desert, across all that sage between you and the sky, the river canyon can look like any other small coulee or wash. But draw nearer and you see the size of it, how it drops steep-sided and wide to the river bottom. Walking down is like taking the stairs from the top of an old five story building, except for the uneven, sometimes shaley-footing. Smaller canyons and draws crease the sides of the river canyon, winding up into the desert and out into the sagebrush waves, some steep scrambles, others angled ambles.

Over and over, I come to know the desert more deeply, walking all those draws and the high country rising up beyond them. Many draws are dry, though runneled by spring runoff. Others cloister clear groundwater springs and streams, some of which run year-round, others that fade to trickles before retreating beneath the ground, perhaps rising to the surface once more nearer the river. At my feet, not just sagebrush and gravel, but also bright and surprising wildflowers, scarlet Indian paintbrush, blue flax, lemon and orange prickly pear blossoms, golden spearleaf stonecrop.

In that broken country, I might see antelope, yes, but also mule deer and sometimes elk, perhaps a moose. I have seen bear and mountain lion sign in the deeply timbered bottoms of a handful of draws, amongst the limber pines and aspen stands, once saw a bear trundling down the far side of a ridge. I might bust a lek of sage chickens (grouse, technically, but not in my family’s lingo) or track the flight of a red-tailed hawk or a golden eagle across a sky so blue it pierces me through.

This is the topography of my soul, my heart, twined into me as if part of my own flesh and bone. Which is to say it is like any other place a person might know and love while others simply pass by, never knowing the beauty and awe which it holds.

A deep map of place.

This phrase rang like truth for me from the moment I first heard it, spoke to my own love of wild places like Wyoming’s Red Desert and Wind River Mountains. The term, which I first heard credited to Wallace Stegner, comes from the subtitle of William Least Heat-Moon’s Prairie Erth (a deep map).

But I didn’t know that back in college and graduate school. My initial understanding of the concept was linked to my study of literary, place-based fiction and non-fiction, and thus I always thought of authors like Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams when I thought of deep maps, of authors who came to know wild places in complex layers — personal and familial experience, history, informal and formal ecology, close-looking and listening, meditation, reflection — and who wrote lyrically and beautifully about them, depicting them from different angles and perspectives, returning to them over and over again like a river-smoothed stone. I strove to create my own deep map of place, one focused on “my” Wyoming, on the Red Desert and Wind Rivers, on the horses that have carried me across the plains and into mountains, on the traditions that have tied my family to these landscapes and to each other for generations.

Since then, my understanding has expanded, has allowed me to see that deep maps are not limited to wild places and literary writing. For example, the HBO show Sex & the City was imminently popular with college women when I was in school, and looking back, I see that the show was, in a way, a deep map of New York City. I have encountered some interesting projects online that extend the what and how and why of deep mapping, like This is Not an Atlas (https://notanatlas.org/#atlas-maps). I have also read academic work in disciplines like Wildlife Biology and Anthropology that are excellent examples of the nuanced layering required of deep maps.

And I have realized that, though I bandy about the term frequently, I am far from being an expert on what it means. Therefore, I am beginning a, well, deeper exploration of the concept while also embarking on expanding my own deep map of place, and I invite you to join me.