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We awoke at eleven-thirty and were on the road again by twelve-fifteen. The Interstate in eastern Kansas undulated like a roller coaster over a rippled quilt of green pastureland. Now and again, at the top of the hills was cut rock where the Interstate is built through; like an "almost-made-it-over-the-top" pass. Nippled hills, treeless and green, squatted on the landscape like giant tepees. The sky was wide and blue. Over the course of two hundred miles, these rolling hills gradually gave way to the flatness of the Great Plains, once wild with buffalo, now tamed with corn. All the way to the horizon grew crew-cut rows of the corn, the vast sameness broken by an occasional silo or grain elevator with a freight engine pondering on the tracks beside it. As we drew closer to the Colorado border, the fields changed to sunflowers; their millions of yellow retinas open wide in amazement, and all facing the sun. Two hours later in Colorado, a thunderstorm fifty miles to the north kept pace with us, floating like a gray Portuguese man'o'war, dragging its tentacles of rain. We stopped for supper at a Pizza-Hut in Lymon, Colorado, where Interstate 70 makes a turn diagonally to the northwest towards Denver. By then, the thunderhead had stained the sky a deep dark purple, but the rain only fell occasionally, in spurts. We arrived in Boulder at one-thirty AM, Mountain Time. The next two days, Monday and Tuesday, were devoted to getting my stepson settled into the house he would share with his three classmates from University of Colorado. There was food to be bought, bank accounts to be opened, furniture to be put together, and good-byes to be said. We left Boulder at five PM Tuesday evening. Remembering our misadventures in Missouri, we had made reservations at a Holiday Inn in Cody Wyoming, fifty miles east of Yellowstone National Park. We drove north, up Interstate 25, crossing the Colorado/Wyoming state line. The drive was very straight and flat. Rolling plains spread out to the east of us, while the Rocky Mountains brooded to our west and then eventually veered farther away, like a slowly banking airplane. As the sunset, we were absorbed into a dark flat plain, pocked by an occasional hill. The farther north we headed, rim rock buttes seemed to rise up out of the earth, to our left. The van felt the wind, which seemed to be as permanent a part of this landscape as the grass and prairie. We stopped for gas in the town of Chugwater, and by now the sun had almost set. On the ramp back onto the Interstate was a gate, open, with a sign that read "Road Closed", and it was not hard to guess what it was for. With fifty miles of open prairie between towns, a blizzard could roam unopposed by tress, houses or fences. Under two feet of snow, the Interstate would be as relevant as the fossils buried farther down below it. Barreling down a piece of asphalt thirty feet wide with nothing on either side, with no lights in front or in back, and a dark sky scattered with stars, made for an eerie, lonely feeling. The only sign that human beings had been there before was the stripe down the middle of the road. What did a lone rider a hundred years ago feel out here? Would it make a difference if the rider were a ranch hand or a pioneer or a Native American? Except for the sound of tires on the road, it was as quiet and as dark and as mysterious as underwater. At one AM Wednesday morning, we left the Interstate at Buffalo, Wyoming, heading west on route 16 for Cody. What the map did not show was that route 16 was two-lane blacktop, and that the 75 mph that we had been doing on the Interstate was not going to be possible here. As we drove on, the road started to tilt upward, and I had to give the van more gas. It felt like the beginning of a roller coaster, where the chain catches the car and tows it to the top of the first hill. It brought back memories of a dizzying ride up a one-lane graveled mountain road in Rocky Mountain National Park the year before. Because of the dark, and the turns and the unfamiliar territory, the next 90 miles to the town of Worland would take two and a half hours. The map said we were driving through the southern end of Bighorn National Forest, but it didn't mention any mountains. On a down slope, we passed a tractor-trailer huffing and puffing up the hill in the opposite direction. It was dark and lonely, and it was impossible to gauge how sharp the turns were, or how high up we were. An occasional deer would pose momentarily on the shoulder in our headlights before leaping into the woods. There was a sign that read "Antelope Butte Ski Area" next to a dirt road. Later I would learn that we had gone through Powder River Pass, with an elevation of 9,666 feet. Up ahead was a sign that read "2 Sharp Turns Ahead. 25 MPH."Beyond that, another sign graphically drew the two back-t-back hairpins like a sideways "S". I slowed down to twenty. We eased around the first one, and a dark blue valley appeared on our right side. The only reason we knew it was a valley was that it had a few lights burning. The road dropped steadily, and the second turn appeared. Up above in front of us, headlights shot out into the sky where a car behind us was taking the first hairpin turn. The road continued to drop slowly. The car behind us was a Jeep, and it passed us on straightaway and sped off into the night. Some lights appeared ahead, and then a sign reading, "Ten sleep. Population: 73. Elevation: 4,206 Feet." Ten Sleep couldn't have been more than a block long. It was about two-thirty in the morning by then. As we drove past the only lighted building, my wife looked in and gasped, "My God! It's a saloon! With cowboys! On a weeknight!" The thought made me momentarily homesick for some reason. The road began to
climb again, and curve, and there were white hills on either side of us,
snow-like. It almost felt like we had somehow slipped off Earth onto another
planet. Soon, we could feel the road heading down. The lights of Worland
were before us and below us, and we didn't so much as drive into the town
as land in it like an airplane. We pulled into an all-night Conoco for
gas and coffee. |