1.
THE COMPLEXION of south central Wyoming is a range of emotion responding with its head thrown back to a wide and overwhelming sky. The Red Desert juts its chin in mesas, stubborn as a first child, patient as the last. I landed here in ’75 nut brown, six months and two thousand miles beyond a college incubation. Sleeping in the back of a company leased Suburban and living on a third of the stipend provided by the survey outfit. I was working as a crew boss for a Canadian company contracted to map the last of the oil pockets that lay somewhere beneath the brittle and placid skin of this dry ground.

It was the beginning of desperation days when Carter sensed we were running out of what mattered most in this country, the rotting goo that made it run. Even in this region, the derricks were all nodding agreement and pulling the stuff out as fast as they could but never fast enough. I and twelve other vagrants couldn't see what we were really doing. We owned only debts. Days were lost laying twenty miles of shock lines starting at six in the morning, seven days a week, looking only where we were walking as long as light held. Every morning for six months I walked the lines checking for chewed cords and lifting night-stiff rattlers off the geodes, each of which would have skewed the pictures we were making. No one would pay to drill where it was dry.

At nineteen I kept numb nights on tequila, grass and cigarettes, and screwed whoever would come back to the shop late, mostly lonely girls who looked at me across a bar and saw the chance to feel a hurt in themselves somewhere down the road or, once or twice, massage girls who would focus for fifteen minutes on the part that was stiffest at twenty-five bucks per quarter hour.

Days were long and hot. They ate memories and most thoughts right out of me. It was what I needed. But looking back I couldn't get it to crack the cairn I was building, like almost everyone, to wage work and a wasted life.


THE ONLY OFF TIME was when equipment would break down. It was one of those brokedown days in Rock Springs. I set out a blanket in the city park trying to get to comfort when a girl clad in India print sat down beside me. Sky-eyed and wheat-haired but too chesty to be one of Raphael's angels, she asked if I'd take her to the desert. By then I knew the way to places no one could ever find. In the pickup she told me she was Mormon. As far as I knew it was a town down the road I had no interest in visiting. Instead we sang to the radio and slowed at cattle guards on our way to distance. We peeled convenience store oranges on flat red rock while the mesquite overwhelmed everything in the air around us.

Then, as simple as daydreams, clothes slid to sand and I got to live for a short while in her breathing and what her afternoons felt like. The next week her mother told me at her front door that she was fifteen. I told her mother the flowers I was carrying were for her. That day I turned away from a woman on a white clapboard threshold with a daughter confounding her in the back bedroom. I got into my pickup and again into my own nineteen-year-old confusion.

Something somewhere between the sweetness that belonged to that young woman and the effort her arms made lifted her and us. It held us at the same time. It must be a second nature, a deeper nature, wider than a day's intention or adolescent hormonal charge. That and that love's need is so powerful that that young girl visits this room ten thousand days later. She fills this room. It is her salt sweet scent, her hair in cedar shade, our interlaced hands and a heart that became visible when our heat became breathless. It is all right here in a form we could call memory or yesterday, but that's not what it is. What is here is more powerful than visible. It has more to do with the unity of sky and its power to change the earth's complexion. Without mentioning it, it set my life on an entirely new course.


2.
IT IS MAY. My youngest son is at the wheel of a minivan rental that slipped a grand from my credit card without so much as have a nice day. I promised his mother I would take ten days off my appointment book to bring him from grad school in Syracuse home to her in Oregon. I am nothing but thankful for the uniqueness of spending a few days navigating interstates just to be with him again. As children get older the time spent near them is so rare as to become precious. At dawn we cross the Mississippi. By late afternoon at the Wyoming border I fork up sixty bucks for the fill to a woman behind the counter under fluorescents and short shock-white hair. I take the forty dollars in change from my last hundred and for no reason, with no emotion, tell her it has been three decades since I was last here and that I won't be able to pass through again. The wind is whistling horizontal through Scott's Bluff. There are still snow slabs on the shaded slopes outside. She looks me in the eye and simply says, "I know the road is clear."

We pass through Rawlins, home of cowboy justice, and take the truck loop through town. The garage, where I spent nights alone back in the survey days, back when I was near my son's age mending cable in the one room upstairs, has gone from its fading sky blue to an earth red since I last smacked the alarm, locked the door and drove to the work line. I never returned the key. Maybe the lock has changed.

We've spent two days on Eighty listening to a mix of audio books, rap and reggae. I have read him stories while he gripped the wheel and arched his back randomly. He likes the driver's seat. Reading to him is as familiar as our food. I eye his smile and take in his short laughter after humorous lines. Our conversations have bent loosely around relationships: to the world, to careers, to women, to ourselves. Our relationship to each other is not mentioned. It is a silent pronoun, understood by proximity.

As we approach the Wamsutter exit, the sun has gone west. It opens new earth on this red desert. For some reason my son fiddles the iPod in his lap and says, "I like this one." It is a Bach Concerto. Introduced by violin, the melody is singular and simple in its major key. But as he hums along I realize he is the responding line. The earth is turning gold. The sky is realizing this day. I lean toward his window to face it. The violas fold in alto and warm the repeating melody as the violins lift into upper octaves of air. There is the coincidence of light and of sound, of distances and all the times I have held this young man as a child. The coincidence too of all the evenings I have forgotten to sing on my way home from work. The concurrence that I would be here with this music he's giving me and how close he is in age to when I last passed through. And here also is this late light, the baritoning cellos begging and forgiving their entrance. How much more complex evening has become, this music is. There is no containing this music, this young man beside me, this person who is closer than my blood, this sky with its impossible phonetic colors. How it presses into evening. How, without so much as choosing, we are carried through what is around and in us en route to leaving.


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