After Red

You can see storms coming in Wyoming, unless you're way up in the mountains, and then it's more of a sense of impending diaster. On the plains, though, or in the foothills, you can see storms coming from a long way off. The anticipation of their arrival when they are so obviously headed your way can be hard to take.



The clouds in Wyoming don't act like they do in other places that I've lived. Maybe it's the altitude, and I have a distorted sense of being closer to them, but they seem to have free will in Wyoming. Instead of streaming steadily east, as I have observed elsewhere, they frequently break from the accepted pattern and circle, cross paths, or billow in angry mob fashion, gathering strength in numbers and just looking for an excuse to open up a great big can of whoopass.



And because I can see them pouring buckets of rain—or hail, sleet, or snow, even this time of year—far from where I am, I am, there seems to be no escape. The clouds are capricious, though, even in their apparent intense rage, and sometimes after they collide and layer and irritably mingle, they dissipate without shedding a single tear, liquid or solid.

My favorite part of the pre-storm festivities is the lower level of clouds, the ones that are the fastest and defy the mainstream storm behavior the easiest. Last night, while the upper clouds were boiling up towards the East, the lower level was sliding in from the North, slipping with ease into the atmospheric mosh pit and looking like they'd be pleased to drop anyone who dared to dive in from above.



I took more than my fair share of pictures, but they never seem to capture the immensity of the sky, the way it breathes down like a dragon and pushes the voices of the pines from speech into bedlam shrieks, where individuals scarcely exist and all is controlled under the mind of the Borg cloud collective. It makes a person want to go into the lowest level of their home, to a room without windows, and when there is no such thing, to clutch the NOAA weather radio close, making sure that the storm warnings haven't morphed into something more serious, because there is no place to hide, not for miles.



We collected 7.5 gallons of rainwater overnight, but the bulk of the storm—including the bit that set off the NOAA tornado warning—went south of our location. We listened to the rain falling lush and fervent, but not rabid, on the roof, and in the morning, filtered it, boiled it, and drank it flavored with hot chocolate and coffee.

The clouds look quieter tonight, which is fortunate, because the land is soft and pungent with more moisture than it has known in many years. Wildflowers, while not garden-thick or generally brilliant and apparent to the unobservant passer-by, are abundant and beautiful, decorating the background of sage as if it were a Wyoming-sized birthday cake.

It looks good enough to eat.

A Whole New World

They would not know their sea today.



They would not understand who lives here now.



They had not even a concept of "dry."



But although they left no cities ...



... and wrote no books ...




... they were here; they were!




They left themselves behind so she would know them.




And now she's taken them places beyond all of our imaginings.

Red

Wyoming colors typically run to a muted palette of sage-toned greens and dusty browns. These are the paints most people see from the highways, as they set their jackrabbit-rapid pace across the state, viewing it as a step in the journey, but hardly one worth savoring.

There is red, too, though. Where the soil has been burned dry and hard by the sun and wind, or exposed—like bloody innards—by the wear and tear of years without number by rare rivers, then there is red. It's a rich, meaty red, setting off the paleness of the sage and olive with an obstinate level of contrast.

This morning, I awoke from under red to yet another red. One of the warm, flannel-lined red sleeping bags that I remember my parents using from my youngest childhood camping memories* was now blanketing my own sleep, as the other snuggled Little Girl, snoring ever-so-lightly in the bunk above me. And out the window, I saw even before I saw my mom pointing up at it and looking expectantly back at me, a sky mottled with blossoming red, and I was already shuffling the cozy protection of sleep from me and rushing for my fleece jacket and my camera.



The morning was brisk, as all but the heart of summer mornings are, but my toes were not cold, peeking out of my cabin-wear flip-flops. I staggered out into the open around the corner of the cabin and started taking pictures of the hot-blushing East immediately. The sky painting was a work in progress, and it just kept getting better.

When the rainbow emerged to the West—where the backdrop of sky had not been neglected with touches of red, either—I fought a losing battle to capture its subtle brilliance accurately. It was a full-on rainbow, but viewed as if through a red filter that left each rainbow hue slightly flushed. Above, a second rainbow fought hard to enter the picture, but only left the faintest traces in my memory.





Finally, the raindrops that were giving the red rainbow the opportunity to develop at all over the red morning sky started to pepper my lens, and I turned one last flip-flop piroutte, looking all the way around the horizon, from the start of the red bloom to the arc of the red rainbow. I wondered if the points of origin—one of sunrise still to come and two of rainbow starting to fade—formed an equilateral triangle from above, and then dismissed the idea when Mom explained that rainbows, like eclipses, need viewers in the right places to be seen. This notion would lead me down a path of quantum wanderings, and I was too tired to go there, even with the remarkable memory of the reddened sky to inspire me.

As I shifted and turned into hibernation position underneath the familiar red of the sleeping bag, though, I shivered a little more than the air temperature had dictated. Red skies in morning and rainbows, too, are said to precipitate storms, and Igor on the NOAA Weather Radio had been saying the same thing for days himself.

We decided to go walking before long that morning, lest the afternoon be less hospitable than the pre-dawn red skies had been.


*Later, I heard Mom telling Little Girl that the sleeping bags were even older than I knew. Her parents had ordered them out of the JC Penney catalog when she was Little Girl's age: one for her and one for her younger brother, The Artist. After summers and autumns of youthful family outings, Mom replaced The Artist's bag with a new one when she married, so that she and Dad could zip the red bags together. Quilted and soft, the sleeping bags were heavy as well, rendering them not so much the pick of the litter for backpacking. Thus, they'd ended up finding a permanent home here at the cabin, ready and warm.

Down and Dirty (but in a Good Way)

We arrived in Wyoming after some 12 hours of travel—more or less; even adding two values together seems like too much math for vacation—to overcast skies and briskly pushy breezes. We parked at a neighboring ranch, and after a brief visit with the current owner—the daughter of the couple my parents had become friendly with when they'd first procured their property—my mom, Little Girl, and I set about making final preparations for our hike.

Twitching with anticipation to be off and wishing I could make the trip as swiftly as the wind itself, I made a cursory search and pack and then shuffled back and forth in the chill of the wind. It was an uneasy dance, preoccupied as I still was with the "bad omen" of the dead kitten near the border, though I certainly don't believe in omens in the least (and I mean it), and I really should have taken a bit more time to be sure I wasn't forgetting something like, oh, MY JUMP DRIVE, but I didn't.

Little Girl was flush with energy and excitement, and I (accurately) worried that this would dim very shortly into the walk. But I didn't chastize her for launching her koosh ball like a rocket into the upper fringes of the atmosphere; at least it kept her mind and body occupied. I could have used a koosh ball of my own.

Mom was diligent in her preparations, but eventually, we were off. The altitude—far from extreme, but also far from what we had become accustomed to—switfly wore on Little Girl and I, while my tightly-crammed backpack wore even heavier on my shoulders and hips. I felt not unlike I was at the start of a marathon, only without the benefit of even half-assed training: what the HELL had I been thinking? I was in no shape for this sort of thing!

Like a marathon, though, each step brought me closer to my goal, and so I plodded on, and didn't bitch TOO loudly when I realized Little Girl had lost her flip-flops and she and I had to backtrack to retrieve them. Little Girl was similarly cranky-stoic, complaining of her own back, but not stopping in her forward progress. And so we went on ... UP and UP the road before us, even though it was really only a pair of trails, and muddy trails at that.

When you are putting so much effort into just moving forward, it's no small wonder if you don't put extra effort into appreciating your surroundings. Although we'd made this trip with that purpose in mind, and although Mom pointed out flowers to us—and I pointed out fleeing antelope asses when I spotted them—it was a passing sort of enthusiasm that we were exuding. We were already tired, and not even a quarter of the way to our destination! I was not able to cheer myself with the thought that if this WERE a marathon, we wouldn't even be 1/25^th of the way there.

But then, Little Girl made a discovery, right there in the flood-worn ruts in the road! There, in the dirt and muck, she found her very first Wyoming fossil ... a specimen like the ones my dad had found on his last trip—though he hadn't found his in the road itself—called a Belemnite, which he'd evocatively dubbed "dragon teeth" for the appearance of the pointy ones, and which I'd slang-renamed "squid bits" for no good reason at all.

"LOOK!" Little Girl enthused, with 100% REAL enthusiasm now, and not a smidgeon of tiredness showing anywhere in her or her expression. "IT'S A SQUID BIT!"

And so Mom and I started looking closer, too, and before you knew it, we were all in possession of a little handful of squid bits, and then a pocketful, and then a bulging pocketful, and then, well, by the time we arrived at the cabin, there were this many:



Before WE knew it, Little Girl and I—Mom never did complain—were not only not complaining about the weight we'd packed in, but we were happy as fossilized clams to be carrying the weight of fossilized squid, and Little Girl even had a fossilized something else (we're not sure what):



The distance we had to travel had not decreased, and the conditions under which we had to make it had actually become more difficult—fossils aren't exactly lightweight!—and while we had changed the way we regarded the journey—as a destination of its own—we might not have been able to make the adjustment in viewpoint without being downcast and frustrated to begin with.

Had we been looking ahead the whole time, we would not have taken the time to look down at our dragging feet, and had we not been doing that, we might never have known we were dragging them right over the fractured, ancient bodies of squid that had swam over Wyoming when it was not as we knew it at all, but was rather the very bottom of a shallow, long-gone sea.

Bug

Hey! I took a picture of a BUG!



I must be losing my freaking mind.

Good thing I'm in Wyoming right now! Yes, that's right, you're listening to PRE-RECORDED blog posts! WITH YOUR EYES! And I'm in WYOMING! Probably having Internet withdrawal that I'm medicating with deep breaths of crisp, high-altitude air, followed by lightheadedness and napping. ISN'T THAT GREAT?

And the bug is kinda cool, too. Or at least he looks pretty damn happy! Almost as happy AS IF HE WAS IN WYOMING! (Which, of course, he's not, as I wrote this the day before I left for Wyoming, and also, he's probably a she. Just a hunch.)

Oh, To Be Young Again!

Kids. Isn't it great how they love to roam barefoot, and frolic, and act goofy? Just look! Two of 'em put their feet together and it looks—from the knees down—as if it is only ONE child, twisting her legs in an unnatural way, and standing SO freakish and wonky that parental types only have to LOOK at the mock-pose to feel their own knees ache, and hips pop.

The thing is, though, that this WAS one child, twisting her legs in an unnatural way. Worse, it was MY child.



And worst of all? Now she knows HOW MUCH IT BOTHERS ME WHEN SHE DOES THIS.



Eww. I couldn't even do that when I WAS young!

First Bubble

I chewed bubblegum for a long time before I learned to blow a bubble with it. It took a lot of concentration—in short supply when one is young and possessed of precious little attention span—and serious effort, but one summer, en route to a remote hiking trail in the back of my parents' truck, I blew my first real gum bubble! It was with green Hubba Bubba bubble gum, though I do not remember what flavor "green" purported to be.

Whatever it is, it's not the same now. The triumph of the First Bubble, though? THAT is timeless:



This photo wasn't of THE first bubble gum bubble for Little Girl, although it was a subsequent bubble blown on the first day she successfully blew her first bubble. It still took some concentration, as you can see, but OH, was she delighted to show off her new talent!

Where In The World Is FRISKITTY?

Actually, I know just where she is. Old Lady Cat used to like to sit here, too, although she had different reasons for doing so. And it's good that FRISKitty doesn't like this location for the exact same reason that Old Lady Cat did—that would be more bitter than sweet, at least, I think so—because her very nature is different, and she marches to the beat of her own harpsichord. This way, it's similar enough to be comforting, but different enough not to be painful.

This way, too, I have the comfort of having FRISKitty "there," without the discomfort that Old Lady Cat used to produce, when she tired of licking the water as it ran down the inner (clear) shower curtain, and decided she might rather enjoy taking a bite out of whatever portion of my anatomy brushed up against it.

Cleaning Up

I was having some fun with my camera the other day—it's quite low-end at this point, with its 3.2 megapixels and 64 KB Compact Flash storage, but it's still SO cool to me—and so I spent a few minutes annoying the hell out of FRISKitty (her tail twitched every time the flash went off, although she otherwise played it totally "I AM IGNORING YOU" cool).

Here she is cleaning herself up, and do note the papillae on her tongue, which are captured pretty well with 3.2 megapixels! :)

In The Shadow of The Flag

Yesterday, as is our tradition in the days preceding Memorial Day, we placed flowers at the grave of Little Girl's daddy's father, who served in the Korean War.

We also took some time to "visit" other family members who are buried in the same cemetery, and when the opportunity to take part in Penny B's May 23 photography challenge using shadows in photos suddenly presented itself ... I took it:



(Name and dates purposefully distorted: this is the military marker belonging to Little Girl's great-grandfather.)

The Road More Traveled

Little Girl told me about it, and I'm glad she did. I would never have guessed that the trails the worms made along the edge of the road during a spring rain would be so interesting, prolific, or photogenic:

Not-So-New Glasses

Long-overdue photos of Little Girl's "new" glasses.

She has a pink pair:



and a purple pair:



(both of which have been lost, sometimes for days at a time. *sigh*).