Reading: Atonement

Watching: Wyoming

Moving: nope

1 September 2002: Driving

When I first drove north of Denver on I-25, a full year after moving here, it was with my mother and we were visiting her first cousin in Laramie. We saw pronghorn antelope (now officially called just pronghorn because they are not true antelope. Maybe because they can't jump? Seriously, they crawl under fences instead of hopping over them) and I saw my first buffalo hills. I call bison bison but I call the buffalo hills buffalo because I first saw them while singing "Home on the Range" (yes, with my mother; we do have our moments).

I call them buffalo hills because they are covered mostly short grasses (except this year, when they were mostly entirely bare) except for on their humped shoulders, where they are furry with sagebrush.

And just in case you don't see it, there's a sign to clue you in.

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When we went to Glacier National Park in 1997 (the second time I traveled that stretch of Colorado's I-25), RDC picked me up after work and we headed north. Somewhere in the darkness of the Wyoming night, we passed a sign for a town that said

[Town]
Population 3

and we immediately joked that if they hadn't employed a signmaker, the population'd've been 2. In 1997, i.e., predigital, I didn't take pictures of just anything; furthermore, we were zipping by at a rapid clip. This time, I was looking for it and my camera makes me snap-happy.

We never saw the sign.

We drove to Glacier through the northwest corner of Wyoming instead of interstate all the way so that we could drive into the Tetons with the morning light shining on them. We had omitted to plan where to sleep. Two o'clock in the morning found us in the driveway of a Shoshone National Forest campground, there to sleep in the Tercel which the merest grizzly could peel like a grape, after not finding room in any inn, stable, or manger in Dubois (the last town) and not braving the Deliverance-esque campground we'd passed. I, the shorter, took the driver's seat (with the pedals and wheels) while RDC took the passenger side. I should have been able to recline the seat except that the cooler was stowed behind it. The cooler could not come out of the car because of bears, and could not be shoved farther back (so I couldn't recline the seat at all) because someone who packed the car who wasn't me had cleverly put the box of tapes behind the cooler (there to be inaccessible while driving even). Three hours later, having had almost zero sleep, I woke up to this,

(except the sun was in the east instead of the west). That almost made it worthwhile.

So we drove through a bit of Grand Teton and the national forest, or is it still private land held by the Rockefellers, that divides Teton from Yellowstone, and through Yellowstone, stopping for provisions (and View-Master reels and a View Master, because I missed mine) at one of the general stores and at Old Faithful and at the Paint Pots and passing a badger before exiting the park on its north side.

That was then.

This was now, and we turned south entering Teton, now to sleep not in the car but in a Motel 6 in Jackson. And we passed the mountains on the way.

Whoever named them Tetons cannot have seen a woman for a long, long time.