Pronghorn have arrived for summer. Little hooves and sideburn fur. For six thousand years, they’ve come to graze the sagebrush along the Snake River. The elk are high in the mountains. Moose have climbed the canyons to the cool water of snowmelt streams.
By June, hundreds of shining motorhomes pull into the Gros Ventre campground, two miles from where I sit. They carry kids and grandparents. Picnic tables become covered in food, and cold sodas sit in the coolers. Men and women go fishing. They hike through fields of Balsamroot with their kids and are generally kind and happy.
In October I ride my bicycle to the same site, two miles away. The summertime campers have left. Hunters have taken their place. They carry on the tradition of feeding their families with wild game. The migration shifts.
As winter nears, Moose gather in sageflats to browse bitterbrush, or they stay hidden in the cottonwoods for warmth. Bighorn Sheep move to the south sides of the buttes where the grass can still be nibbled. People stack their wood. Meanwhile the pronghorn lose access to their food source as snow falls. As it deepens, they then lose their greatest survival ability – to run. So they hustle east through the Gros Ventre mountains and emerge along the Green River and the warmer valleys west of the Winds. In February, I ski the same trail along to find only emptiness.
Jackson Hole has always been a transient place. No native tribe called this valley home. Instead many tribes – Shoshone, Bannock, Blackfeet and Crow - would follow the migrations of elk and bison herds. The Gros Ventre traveled from the northern plains, and had violent clashes with fur trappers. These mountain men came in search of beaver pelts and adventure in the early eighteen hundreds. They made their fortunes with fur, and then the stylish others in Boston and New York decided on the next style. Mormons built barns and tried to cultivate the glacial debris of Antelope Flats, then moved on.
I had never been to the Rocky Mountain West, but felt its pull when I turned twenty. One week after leaving New Hampshire, I woke to the snort of a bison. It was rolling in the red dirt of the Badlands. Never had I seen a bison. I lay still in my sleeping bag, fearful. The rest of the herd, browsing grass, had me surrounded.
They moved on towards sculpted sandstone cliffs. I breathed more easily, then rose to make coffee for myself and two traveling friends who had picked me up in New Hampshire. Newlyweds on their way to California, willing to wind through Yellowstone and leave me looking at the Tetons. They unzipped their tent, smiled, and joined me for coffee.
We rode through Yellowstone in the middle of the night. A cloudless full moon laid a silver sheen over the landscape. We saw silhouetted elk and bison as we floated past. A million charred trunks, naked from the fire, and a million young green ones taking their place. I bid my friends goodbye as the sun rose, then stood alone at Moran Junction.
Bluebird and sunlight. Granite and gneiss. Peaks capped in June snow. The Grand Teton, with a dozen other peaks standing sentinel to its north and south seemed different than any mountains I had seen. But I moved on, putting my thumb out, hoping for Lander and the Winds.
Ten years later, I married the girl I met in those mountains. I hiked all day to bring her ice cream while she camped in Dickinson Creek. That about did it. We lived in a yurt for our first year of marriage. Me, My wife, our dog, and all the toughness we could muster. Most of the time, we loved the yurt. Sometimes, Liz cried. We’d trudge ten minutes through the snow to fill our water jug. A solar panel powered our radio. A woodstove heated. We peed outside, and I paid more attention to the stars that winter than ever in my life. Once I saw Aurora Borealis hovering over Yellowstone and once I heard a cold wolf howl.
So you see, I’ve come here. I am a stranger in Wyoming, no different than knapweed. This landscape has etched in all of us. Don’t know if I’ll stay or if I’ll migrate like the pronghorn. I believe you don’t need to live your entire life in a place to respect it, or for it to stir your soul. So, I will listen to coyotes yip and elk bugle at night, then go have coffee with my neighbors in the morning. I will ski and chop wood and love this landscape while knowing it is not mine.
