Wyoming
By two came the badlands. Empty, sunken spaces. No good for farmland, no good for pasture. No good for life, bad.
In mythology, poetry, in T.S. Eliot, of course, badlands stand for a serious problem. A collapse of life’s authenticity. Such things need to be fixed or else.
I like driving through badlands thou. They don’t stretch much on this leg of the trek. A half hour, a quarter hour sometimes. They make you feel like you’ve checked out of life for a bit, when rolling through them. Sort of like the Protestants crooning one of those peace-in-the-valley tracks. “There'll be no sadness, no sorrow, no trouble I'll see…” neatly they harmonize, going deeper, much deeper than plain holding hands. Checking out of the durn place for three minutes or four. And they’re good and ready for another day or a week after that.
By three Wyoming came up.
The country similar at first, then the peaks showed up far to the west. The Bighorns, the Rockies’ first grown-up range.
Ranches. Mostly cattle, some sheep outfits. Deer on the slopes. A herd of antelope.
By five a town began popping up on road signs. It came up, I drove off the interstate. A stretch on a local highway. A valley opens up, about half a thousand homes, a classic. The highway imperceptibly turns into Main Street, a classic too. Main swings left and right, for no good reason urban wise it seems. They must’ve built it along a former buffalo trail, the prairie towns often did, was easier.
A billboard for Outlaw Inn by a Texaco station. Couple of swings and I park in front of the inn on the main block of Main. A neat Quaker woman is working the front desk. The hair long, all up in a schoolmarm’s bun. The dress equally old-time country. Long-sleeved, buttoned up to the chin, ironed, too, now that’s something. A card-carrying fundamentalist Christian.
“Now Molly,” I open getting her name off the lapel tag. “There’s other motels in town, why’s Outlaw Inn you’ve hired out to?”
“Is there something wrong with Outlaw Inn?” she sincerely worries.
“Well, concerning myself nothing, as I’m, of course, a drifter. But you, a fine Quaker character…”
“I am not a Quaker,” she denies politely.
I check in, go to the room, then step out for a grub.
Back in the motel, seeing Molly not busy, I stop over for a chat. A fundamentalist alright. Except that her church isn’t your run-of-the-mill literalistic Scriptural operation, as you might’ve first supposed, but practices that other doctrine, of the Savior being a man like the rest of us. Not man and God in one, like our super doctrine holds.
“Jesus was a man, a perfect man, but only a man,” Molly lets out by the end of our talk, warmed up by the candor of my interest. Her breath affectionately trips when she shares that.
Wow, Arianism. Nice meeting you, ol’ buddy, in these beautiful Powder River country trimmings. Those incisive seeking chums back in the 4th century weren’t that off, after all.
Lessee how it holds for them these days.