Tracks in the Snow

 

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There is comfort in being the only guest in a small motel and often the only customer at the café —a sense that I am a member of a club.  “Everyone gets along here, there’s no drama,” says Amy, waitress this morning, and maybe bartender tonight and housekeeper tomorrow. 

 

Hardly anyone says good morning when they come into the store/gas station/café.  They make some casual comment instead.  Mine today was, “Mule deer on the west hill, just standin’ still at daybreak; coyotes yappin’.” Not an uncommon sight or sound around here.  Nobody got excited.  

 

There was not enough light for pictures when I saw the mule deer, and they’re too far away anyway.  So far, my only picture of a mule deer is that road-kill you may have seen in my last blog post.  

 

Moose prints on a frozen creek

I’ve seen moose too, but they have no interest in letting me take their picture.  A few years ago, during the October rut in nearby Grand Teton National Park, a bull moose had more interest in me than I wanted, and my pictures of him were fantastic.   

 

Moose poop

During winter, bulls are not defending harems, and don’t consider me a threat.  So while  feeling ignored, I also feel safer.  Now I photograph their tracks and their poop.  

 

This might be the track of someone’s large domestic dog, or it might be a wolf.  It’s hard to tell the difference.  I placed my boot print beside it in this picture to show its size.  If it’s a dog I would expect to see boot prints heading in the same direction.  But I don’t see any boot prints.   

 

Moose print beside wolf print

If my younger sister were here and I were ten years old, I would not say that it could be a dog.  I was smart back then and knew what to say at any given moment, could take any possible danger and find the logical anecdote to terrorize her.  I would tell her that this is definitely a wolf print because of its size, having four toes, and that a pack of wolves is stalking us at this very moment.  

 

If you wish to drive on a snowy dirt road for fifteen miles, then trudge through half a mile of snow, you can see rock carvings made a thousand years ago or more on the high Wyoming plain. This petroglyph could be my sister and I.   

 

Experts can’t give a clear understanding of who these ancient people were or what their art means.  So I will render an opinion, as others have done, on this scene of an elongated animal in the lower left, high mountains above, and above the mountains a fish in the upper right.  I think it is abstract art, not intended to look real.  I don’t know why the four-legged animal’s body is too long, or what a fish is doing above mountains, but these people knew how to survive cold winters, and how to hunt.  They imagined many things, as poets and artists and ancient people did.  Maybe they wanted to inspire anyone who follows, even if our imagining is different form theirs.  (Incidentally, you may want to click on this picture or any picture to enlarge it, then press escape to return.)

 

Please see maps prepared by Michael Angerman showing the places the places I stayed.

Map for the summer trip of 2020:  Michael's Map 

Map for the winter trip of 2021:   Google Map for Winter 2021

 

Pinedale Winter

 

 Pine Street, the main street of Pinedale,
after the first real snowstorm since
my arrival two weeks ago

 

Heart and Soul Café, where “everybody knows your name,” or some of them do.  Margaret said she missed me and wondered what happened, referring to my many visits there last August.  And Lynn at the counter said she recognized me, with my mask on, and wondered where I had been.  “I’m happy that winter has finally arrived,” I said.  “This isn’t winter,” said Lynn.  

 

I have been the only guest here at the motel.  My jeep waits at the back door where I go in and out, its electric connection to the engine heater keeping it ready to start at any temperature, hopefully.

 

I go out and start it on cold mornings, scrape ice off its windshield or sweep snow off, unplug it, then go back inside for ten minutes or more before driving. 

 

Ice hangs from almost everything on the jeep’s bottom side, some of it dirty from sand and salt on the roads, some clean from a night at the motel 

 

Pillars of ice hang from the motel roof like stalactites.  They sometimes fall like spears in the wind or if it warms up too much or too long. 

 

The end window gives me a view to the Wind River Mountains   

 

No, the building is not leaning, the icicles are.  Tentacles of creatures on the roof try to get me by coming through my window.  They lurk until the wind blows, then creep over and under the eve and peer inside. 

 

I look out and see their devious plot, and just when I’m about to scream, they change direction and head earthward.  

 

I placed a thermometer on a tripod outside my window so I can know the temperature how to dress.  Only once has the wind blown it over, and more than once snow has covered it.  It is on the back side if the motel where nobody removes snow.  

It takes the putting on of high-top boots to trudge out there.  But I can usually get the temperature while snug inside.  

 

Fremont Lake, where I showed you visions inside the ice and talked with a friendly ice fisherman a few days ago, is now under a blanket of white.  I cannot see the ice I am walking on, and assume it is still there.  The symphony of cracking sounds is mostly gone, and the mystique of walking on water is replaced with a walk on what seems like a meadow. 

 

 

Rest in peace—mule deer beside the road.

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Please see maps prepared by Michael Angerman showing the places the places I stayed.

Map for the summer trip of 2020:  Michael's Map 

Map for the winter trip of 2021:   Google Map for Winter 2021   

Walking on Water

 

 

Pinedale art hug - Mural on the side of an ordinary building - More art hugs follow:

 

Wind River Mountains, so snowy and distant, I wonder if I can ever reach them before spring.  Between me and them, Fremont Lake in the foothills is reachable and even walkable.  Looking like liquid with patches of white floating on its surface, most people do not venture out.     

 

Far from the shore, I see a tiny box.  It appears of human making, either by having escaped from shore and becoming locked in ice, or having been slid so far out there after the ice formed.  Too thin to walk on was my first impression, so black in color it looks almost liquid.  I had asked before coming here how thick the ice is, and was told it’s about eight inches, strong enough to walk on. And so I ventured out.  

 

Tentatively at first, held up by rigid water, I crept away from the solid shore.  So clear was the ice that I could see through it and judge its thickness.  Black ice, very slippery, like window glass, it’s blackness acquired from the deep water below, as black ice on pavement gets its color from the road below.  Cracks all around me and the sounds of cracks as they form, a symphony of musical notes.  I was in a concert hall with both visual impressions and musical accompaniment.  Deep sounds reverberating from far out on the lake, treble notes from cracking close at hand, and percussion from an occasional crack that I could see happening on stage.  

 

I felt levitated as if only air were below me, looking down into clear water and not sinking.  Within the ice I saw the full depth of the cracks, verifying its thickness of about eight inches.  All through the ice, what appeared to be bubbles of air vertical columns, as if the lake was once boiling, then suddenly froze, capturing columns of rising bubbles.  

 

I knelt down and peered into the icy depth.  A three-dimensional scene revealed itself, an artform of cracks and bubbles fixed in time, like something ancient, like fossils, animated, as if creatures had been killed in an ancient flood and only now revealed in stereo pairs of photographs viewed one by each eye.    

 

These holes could only have been bored with the auger of an ice fisherman. And now that I was far out on the lake, the thing on the ice that I had walked on water for about half a mile to see, was looking like a tent that fishermen sometimes erect for protection from the wind. 

 

The object of my walk was now clearly of human doing, and when I saw the movement of someone near it, I called out, “Hello, do you mind if I come closer?” wondering if the ice was thick enough to support two people close together.  He said it would be okay.  

 I approached a rugged-looking man, who smiled and seemed to like my admiration of his set-up and of his courage on being the only one, and not so young, out on the lake today.

 He had bored two hoes in the ice, one for his ten-pound-test fishing line and the other for his sonar.  The little device told him that the water is 76 feet deep and its temperature 22 degrees Fahrenheit.  If there had been any fish within fifty feet, it would have shown them, he said.  “Í guess you don’t expect anyone to bother you way out here” I said.  

 

“I don’t mind,” and he seemed to mean it.  “I pull my gear on that sled and use my new electric auger, have spikes on boots to keep from falling.”  Noticing the spikes on my boots, he said, “We have to be careful as we get old.”  I half resented the comment, but couldn’t keep from enjoying his warm welcome into his cold and friendly camp.  We talked of past adventures and future plans and of being more daring or laughably crazy than most. 

As I was leaving, a hundred yards away, he hollered out to me with a six-inch trout hanging from his line.  I let out a cheer and hope to see him again. 

 

Within the ice, artistic forms appear
stimulants for poets and painters
fishers of men
adventurers of many kinds

Please see maps prepared by Michael Angerman showing the places the places I stayed.

Map for the summer trip of 2020:  Michael's Map 

Map for the winter trip of 2021:   Google Map for Winter 2021  

Wyoming Winter Wind

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Today, I will let pictures do most of the writing, while I ramble a bit.  Try to read between their lines to find a constant wind with gusts that raise clouds of fallen snow, and high above us lowlanders, the Wind River Mountains standing silent, watching over valley creatures as they try to stay warm. 

 

As I approached Pinedale, Wyoming, last Tuesday, the appearance of a country I was to inhabit rose in the distance from last August, but not the snow, not the heater full-on in the jeep. 

 "I feel affinity towards anything wintry." – Bon Callahan  

 

What words ran through the ancient native’s mind when he stared at this mountain?  His view is still my view, my feet where his stood. 

 

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it serves my nose
keeps it from freezing
face mask
 
winter wind
breath of the mountains

 

When I walked into the store where you go to check into the motel, I recognized Tasha, one of the owners.  She took time to talk with me and seemed calm compared to how she was in summer.  My comfort seemed a matter of real solicitude for her.

  

I guess there are half as many people now, and even the cleaning lady, who was hard to deal with in summer, took time to ask how I was doing. 

When I went back to Tasha with a burned-out light bulb, she fetched me a new one with a smile and an apology.  Not always so in summer.  I think you get the idea.  Tourists come in summer and sometimes they are not considerate.  It rubs off on the locals.  Winter changes all that.  There is a nearby ski area, but it’s not doing much business.

 

I am now ensconced in a comfortable room.  Some old snow all around, but much milder than normal, they say.  By placing around me my books and other possessions, I have formed for myself a home. 

 

From my window looking out on the snowy flatland, and beyond it to some fine bold hills.  Beyond them, I see the Wind River Mountains, which I came here in August to admire and become involved with.  I cannot see them to full advantage from here.  I tried once to enter them, but got my jeep stuck in deep snow.   

  

“I remember the designs of ice on the windows, back in my midwest era, and ice lining leftover leaves on trees, which make a high-pitched chime when the wind picks up.  Record that, too, please.” —Liz  Goetz

 “I can tell by your email that you are already happier and more excited about life.  It's amazing how the tone of the email resonates differently.  This makes me happy.” —a friend 

 

"How beautiful the world was
when one looked at it without searching,
just looked, simply and innocently."
       -Herman Hesse

 I think we can still do that: look on the world without excess complication, simply and innocently, not trying to understand too much.  

 

More mellow, serene, quiet, is how I describe it here, compared to Southern California.

 I pity the fears that prevent some of us from sharing such delightful sensations.

  

Please see maps prepared by Michael Angerman showing the places the places I stayed.

Map for the summer trip of 2020:  Michael's Map 

Map for the winter trip of 2021:   Google Map for Winter 2021