The Bison and the British

We head toward Montana in anticipation of a buffalo hunt, run by a friend and colleague, a Crow Indian who takes students and community members up to experience a different way of life for a few days and nights under the hot sun and the northern stars.

We reach Casper sometime after lunch and realize we’ll never make the Rez tonight. It is too great a distance for a group prone to impromptu stops for leg stretches at city parks.  A bit defeated, we call Solomon, promise he’ll see us next year, and turn the car West toward the ragged Tetons.  We’d seen a tiny mark on the map for a place called Boysen, a Wyoming State Park that looked windswept enough for our camping gear and the rainbow kite we’d brought home from China.

At Boysen we unleash the little boy into the wild, watch him bend down and filter sand and rocks and small bits of detritus through his not-so-tiny hands.  We cook up noodles, darkness falls, and we huddle in the tent, breathing and resting, as rain and wind lashes the fly overhead, then wishing the black dog was by our side, our pack complete.

Up that morning an overcast sky greets us, a melancholy day in blustery Wyoming. On the map the Tetons seem close now, and so we hatch a plan to drive onward. We’d missed them the last time we visited Yellowstone, the park that started it all, the one that paved the way for land protection in America, a blueprint for the rest of the sometimes-vulnerable natural world.  

On the road we meet Shoshoni. Riverton. Crowheart. Then Dubois. Towns beaten down by the Vanishing.  Collapsed farms and abandoned ranches and food deserts, people who seem to have left in a big hurry. I’d lost track of the news this year, the same old prattle of doomsday discourse and abandoned hope for a post World War II picture perfect America. Back in our suburban corner of Colorado I live with the Engineer and the boy and his furry sister in a beautiful fog of spilled yogurt on scratched floors and black fur in breakfast cereal spun in a soft web of cashmere. Our life is a fresh salad.  But America’s pain is raw here, out on the prairie, telltale stretch marks on the nation’s frontier. I want to gather these towns into my embrace. 

The Tetons are bold, beautiful and cold.  We camp near the lake and scout for bears and eagles while E collects more rocks.

A day’s drive to Flaming Gorge, a place you want to hate for the dam, but can’t, at least not tonight.  Downstream, the lower Green River is now lighter, and even cooler, and with no fish ladders for the rainbow and the brown trout, it’s a big, hot environmental mess. But up in the Firefighter’s Memorial Campground the vista throws smoke and mirrors at the visitor. It is a view unrivaled, one of golden scrub grass set against pinyon pines and rolling views of a reservoir hemmed in by a pale blue sky.  Kayaks and canoes populate the grounds and the air is ambient. We’re told by Tom Watts, the camp host, that an “aggressive” bear was spotted a few miles up the ridge, and my stomach rolls, but the Engineer convinces me that the motor homes offer a better meal than we do.

We stuff the boy with bananas and head toward Dinosaur National Park, the West Side, Utah’s claim to the land where T-Rex and Brontosaurus once roamed, the other half shared by Colorado. It’s extraordinary, really, to step out of a steel car run on oil, to slip into flip-flops built of synthetic rubber, a chemical concoction of fuels started before the dawn of human imagination. And to do this here, in this historic place. We spy pictographs of the Fremont culture, one thousand years old.  Animals etched into sandstone.


Suddenly it’s time to head up and over the Rockies to bring the adventure to a close. We gobble down anemic sandwiches and drive, listening to toe-tapping kids tunes, when just outside Walden, we spot two figures bobbing on the horizon.  They are jogging.  Here.  In the Middle of Somewhere.   And then we see it:  “Run Across America” – three words etched across the back of the man’s white shirt.

We pull over to start a conversation with these two unique people, a couple of British men running thousands of miles across our great nation, who will in three days sleep under our roof and become fast friends.