Broke down in Wyoming in an 18 wheel tanker-semi. The only sign of human habitation was the two lane road, a scar on the land, true, but a life line for our consumptive lives. Nothing else human was visible through the entire grand arc of an immense sea of undulating brown grass. The temperature was minus 10 degrees. Small herds of deer and pronghorn had jumped the fences lining the road to feed precariously near the 80,000 lb trucks that transported fuel to the largest open pit mines in the northern hemisphere. Allow me to correct myself. The deer, either white tail or mule deer jump over the fences. The pronghorn crawl under the fences. When they do the low crawl, I always cringe at the thought of the barbs on the wire cutting through their thick hides to the tender skin on their backs. We will have our electricity one way or another. I am stuck. Being stuck is more fun than driving the damn big rig. Rescue will take 5 hours and I will enjoy the time to myself.
Yesterday I met a delightful octogenarian in a small town. I suspect that she was a looker in her former days. As we sat in adjoining booths slurping our soup she told me about the buffalo ranch that she owned. She said, " buffalo are great for training horses. A buffalo can run at 45 miles an hour and the horses can't keep up." As I recall, she and her husband had moved to this huge nothingness from a large eastern city and fell in love with it. "It was like a riled up ocean with a grass surface. The animals; the horses, pronghorns and buffalo all walked on the surface instead of swimming in it."
We talked further of its vast immenseness and she finished by saying, more to herself than me, "we never really thought of going back east again."
