Coming Home
The Red Desert in March (!) and What Never Changes
It’s always the same: As winter edges into spring, cabin fever sets in hard. Wyoming landscapes are still largely sepia-colored but sometimes edged with heart-breaking hints of green. The wind seems to blow constantly. The days grow longer, but daylight savings disrupts internal rhythms.
Except, this year, all that same is isn’t quite the same. For good and ill, my sense of place and time have been upended by the unprecedented dry, warm weather.
Spring break is usually reserved for vacations to warmer climes, or at least a run to Colorado’s Front Range, which is slightly more temperate than Laramie. But last week, Rob, our son, Stebner, and I drove through a dust-dry Red Desert to the family cabin near the Sweetwater.
Returning to that place is always a much needed re-centering, but I don’t think I’ve ever been there in March. Once or twice, we’ve made it out for a late November over-night or a December or January day-trip, and occasionally, we’ve struck out in April. But those trips were mostly before my son was born, when Rob and I were younger and had a higher risk tolerance. My brother and his family have made several treks to the cabin in early spring in the last few years, partly because he’s half-nuts (just kidding, though his fervor for being out there might outstrip my own) and also because they live in Lander and the proximity makes day-trips and one-nighters more manageable than the five-hour journey from Laramie.
Going way back, my folks occasionally took us to the desert in the early spring, but we were usually barred from the Antelope Hills by drifts and had to settle for camps on Lost Creek, closer to our house in Rawlins. Memorial Day has generally marked the official start to Sweetwater season for the Stebner clan, and, when I was a kid, that was usually pushing it. We had to drive around lingering snowfields, flirt with getting stuck, dance with stormy forecasts.
And it was a different time — there were no cell phones, trucks were less reliable and more prone to breakdowns, and we didn’t have the cabin yet. A blustery — or, God forbid, blizzard-y — weekend is one thing when you have a solid roof, four walls, and a woodstove to dry your clothes and keep you toasty between outside adventures. Two or three nights in the snow in a backpacking tent was quite another.
Still, last week’s trip with my own little family felt like those old Memorial Days— we got in on Saturday afternoon, and it started to snow that night. We woke to three or four inches. The snow didn’t clear off proper until Monday, but when it did, the land didn’t green-up in a burst like it does later in the spring. So, we spent four March nights in a desert that felt like May and looked like September.
I tried not to dwell on what actual summer may bring if we don’t get more snow between now and June, if things stay so warm and parched. I looked for little signs telling me the land was waking up, and when I met sprigs of green grass and sighted a few early wildflowers, I greeted them with joy even as I feared for their longevity.
Though much has changed and will change in my life and in the desert and in the seasons, as it always has, two bedrock truths unfurled themselves within me during this trip. Both were so clear, delivered so completely and wholly, it felt as if someone was speaking directly into my ear even as the words emerged fully formed in my own heart.
One came as I walked the high country above the river. This is what you’re made for. I felt it in my bones, on every level. As bipedal mammal, I’m built to walk the plains for great distances, seeking the sustenance I need. As a child of half-wild, Wyoming parents, I was raised to this land, to this place, born to hunger for it even when reason warns against heading straight into the jaws of a storm to get here.
The same sureness whispered to me as I lay in a warm sleeping bag with the desert wind at the window and my husband, my son, and our two dogs breathing calm and deep around me.
I’m home.
What I’m Reading, Writing, Watching, Listening To, Thinking About This Week
Hello, Beautiful by Ann Napolitano: I plan to share deeper thoughts on this book in a full-length review, but for now, I’ll simply say that I was moved by this story about the four deeply connected Padavono sisters, the young man who joins their family when he marries the eldest, and how love and grief can simultaneously break us apart and bring us back together.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan: My nine year-old son loves to read, but we’ve had a hard time finding a chapter-book series that has really grabbed his attention. We’ve started the Redwall books (Rob’s childhood favorites) and Harry Potter (mine) and, of course, the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (which both of us have cherished memories of our parents reading to us), and, while Stebner enjoyed them, he didn’t clamor to get back to them. I didn’t understand this at first, since he loves the fantasy and action elements of Star Wars.
But we finally found a winner: He can’t get enough of Riordan’s middle-grade novel about twelve-year old Percy Jackson, who discovers he’s the son of Poseidon and is thrust into a quest that will either prevent or cause a war between the most powerful Greek gods. Stebner’s already asking if we can check the second book in the series out of the library.
Combined with the fact that the story is set in the modern day in a world that feels familiar to him, I think the witty, sarcastic humor throughout the book and Percy’ wisecracking quickness account for a lot of Stebner’s adoration. He loves comedy as much as he loves action. For instance, he started devouring the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes when he was about six even though half the jokes, pop culture references, and philosophical musings went over his head.
No matter the reason, I’m thrilled he’s so into the story.
I always imagined my kid falling in love with the books that so captured me. That hasn’t happened (yet, anyway), but I’m finding that the laughter and excitement are the same.