Skijoring

 

They have piled up the little snow that nature provided this year, making way for Winter Carnival in Pinedale, Wyoming.  Ice sculptures in Pinedale are half the normal size and number.  Signs at Nordic skiing trails say, “Caution, Thin Coverage.”  It’s the warmest and snowless winter anyone can remember.  

 

Nevertheless, Skijoring has not been cancelled.  Horses have been trucked in from ranches many miles away, and 200 entries have been registered in the annual skijoring event.  If anything can be said for Wyoming cowboys it is that they persevere in conservative politics and slow-talking Christian values.  Most of you in California will call them Trump radicals with no compassion for the poor. 

 

Only thirty-four percent of them are vaccinated, and almost none of them are masked.  I will be leaving Wyoming on Thursday after a month of trying to understand.  Returning to Pasadena, I expect to be shunned, an unholy contaminate to upright living, a friend of the enemy, a person to be avoided.  

 

So, in this my final post, give you one of their major sports, held on Superbowl Sunday, alternative to Democrat society.  They call it skijoring, where a horse and rider pull a skier on a rope.  The horse is required to gallop in a straight line, while the skier maneuvers jumps and ring-catches.  The best time wins.  But time is added for every ring missed and every gate missed.  Like time subtracted from life lived with injuries and losses.  It’s a high-speed gallop combined with Olympic-style slalom that cowboys, cowgirls, and skiers excel at.

 

Thanks to all of you who have read and commented on this blog, some by public comments here and some by private email.  I appreciate your interest in my travels.   

Until next adventure I bid you happy travel or happy isolation.  We deal with the current catastrophe each in our own way.  I hope not to lose any of you as friends in my admittedly dangerous way. 

 

See a map by Michael Angerman at  Michael's Map   

 

Love to you all, 

Sharon 

Vintage Snowmobile Races

 

Not a range of high mountains,
not even a little range close at hand.  
It’s where they pushed up snow so cars can park
for the Annual One Lunger Vintage Snowmobile Races,
1980 or older without modifications.

“Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”   

 

On the end, Number 27 in yellow, the youngest racer in the youngest division, just three years old.  He didn’t win, didn’t even place, but he will.

 

Fathers of these young racers are into lap forty or fifty of the hundred lap main event.  Even with their faces covered its easy to see how serious they are.  

 

But they’re not all so serious about winning.  This dad is out for fun and to support his sons who are bound to be winning athletes.   

 

When you have to pass one of these poky fathers and don’t want to wait until he’s out of a turn and into a straight-of-way, you gun your sled, take his kicked-up snow in your face, and power around him.    

What would you say
to visiting me here  
in an imaginary house
the way a poem begins
without foundation     

 

there’s craft to do
before it’s finished
a plan comes first
help from friends
but mostly gumption     
 
 

Truth

Truth as one of many opinions
open to debate
instead of truth 
I offer a greater consolation: 
dream
storyteller, monarch in a realm of imagination  
it happened ten years ago
or might have been yesterday
details flounder

 
It happened that evening as it does tonight

Have you ever stood on a hill
wind on your back
dress flying up in front
hair in shambles
his hands around your waist?
 

What matters in the end is life
sand on dunes and beach
each grain a mirror
conflicting perceptions
truth is immaterial
 

Tell me where you are from
I don’t mean to pry
from far away?
it doesn’t matter
everyone is an outsider
sit down, please
join my circle of listeners
 

Story is like dance
it takes at least two people
and two actions—
telling and the listening
sometimes the roles are reversed
the giver becomes the taker
 

we both do the talking
we both listen
silences become loaded
tapestry takes shape
suggestive of dream
 

If I don’t make you comfortable
how can I expect you to listen

 

reality in my story
remains elusive
a matter of trust
mutual imagining
the story we make together
 
transforming memories
into mythology
like smoke in the air
 

On the high Wyoming Plane and
Wind River Range above it
I come in need of a tale
one eye on reality
the other fixed on fantasy
 

One day I intend to visit
more distant places like
Madagascar
the fields of Athenry
Angkor, Cambodia
Eclipse of the sun, 2024
 

I know a woman who has never seen an image with her eyes.  But almost all her inspiration is what she calls “visual” not contemplative.  When I tell her a story she sees it and her comments are visual.  I have seen it and my comments are dream.
 

These pictures have little to do with my narrative.  As a string of images they tell a parallel story as pictures can: a walk on Caltech campus, snowy scenes in upstate New York, a series of woven collages on the wall of a Montrose gallery.
 

Herman Melville wrote the novel, Moby Dick, based on the real story of the Nantucket ship, Essex in 1820, rammed by a sperm whale and sunk.  He had an image and he had a dream—and the truth was in there too.

 
See a map by Michael Angerman at  Michael's Map  And that’s the truth.
 

In Review

 

Looking over my story so far, I have climbed a mountain that I couldn’t reach last winter; walked on water—the ice of Fremont Lake; slid through meadow and forest on Nordic skis,  snowshoed over deep snow, and disobeyed the covid rules I learned in California.  I have many flaws, but you can’t accuse me of maturing.  
 

Let us suppose for the sake of a happy narrative that I am free to romp like the mind of God, creating here and there little stories from nothing. Whatever I think appears.  

 

To go to the mountains helps me realize myself
they tell me quickly where I am weak
and where I am strong
they tell me how I feel that day
and how much I am changing
they teach me more than a university

 
 

 

WRANGLER CAFE
5:00am - it’s zero degrees outside
6:00am - I go outside, start the jeep

come back inside
6:10am - I’m driving north to Pinedale in the dark
6:30am - six pickups in front of the Wrangler Café 
 

big husky pickups. 
5 cowboys and a cowgirl
sit at the big round table
they talk about horses
cattle and fences
I’m gonna sell out
then retire, one says
I bought one of them mustangs
twenty-five dollars, another retorts
best horse I ever had  
 

Old barn siding on the inside walls
like we had in Tennessee
plaque on the wall, “A Cowboy is a Patriot”
they had a roundup of wild mustangs
700 of ‘em for sale at $25
you have to have the facilities.
one year to train the wild horse
and then you own it  
 

Tiny bubbles in the ice
from rotting corpses
on the bottom
stop rising when they hit the ice
it thickens around them
older bubbles near the surface
recent bubbles deeper  
 

FOOTPRINTS
unlike bubbles in the ice
recent footprints are near me

easy to remember
easy to redo
if only the old ones
were near enough to change 

Let the Games Begin

 

Months pass since September
like one intoxicated dream
the dream turns to winter
and returns to where I was   
 

It feels almost like I never left
like a dream happened
in a gap between stories
and now real life continues  
 

Everything changes
between summer's sprawling past
and winter's hard revision
I learn a lot about California by leaving it
for Wyoming’s high and cold   
 

Why go in the middle of winter again 
to put myself in the snowy mountains?
because maybe I’ll be smarter after going
or learn things I don’t want to learn   
 

Most city-raised people are afraid to enter deep wilderness, especially in winter.  They become afraid when far from any road, where bears are known to live, or rattle snakes.   but I embraced it from an early age in Pasadena, growing up within reach of the San Gabriel Mountains.  My parents thought it strange that I would run away and camp there without telling anyone.  Those were the days, and I’m still doing it. 
 

I feel like I’m cheating and I love it. 
 
See a map by Michael Angerman at  Michael's Map  

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