Some people say Jackson isn’t part of Wyoming. I think that’s shit.
It’s noon, and I’m driving back to town from the valley floor. The sage are buried so deep they’re barely visible, just tiny specks of black where an arm reaches up. Snow pours off the banks and sweeps across the road. The mountains are invisible. My wipers cake with ice.
For three hours I’ve been lying in front of a group of people, naked. They are artists. Here is how it goes: beside a wood-pellet stove I bend and they draw me. I twist. I breathe. They dip brushes into ink wells, furrow their brows, and make magic.
Always, I fix my eyes on a point to hold the pose. The walls are covered in paintings, and I eat them as I wait: dark valleys. An elk, half turned. Snow-encrusted spires in the desert.
Once in a long while, I allow myself the luxury of peeking out the window. Today, a blizzard hissed outside. A cluster of aspens was quietly buried. The valley seemed more raw than ever.
Sometimes it’s people in Jackson who say it. These people are usually not from here. They don’t associate themselves with the metal lines of trailers, the endless high plains; they don’t venture into the dark bars, floors slick with snow. They don’t talk cows or gas rigs. Jackson, they think, cannot truly be part of Wyoming.
More often it’s the rest of the state disowning us: our eco-friendly lodges, our sushi and wine bars, our boutique shops. We have national parks. We make the covers of calendars. There’s not a Wal-Mart in sight.
Still, when the snow closes in like this, the differences dull down. There is snow. There is wind, endless cold. There is the giant silence, leaning over us.
Landscape painter Greg McHuron—who hosts the drawing group in his personal valley-floor studio—had a new canvas on his easel today. In the painting, the Tetons tilted over the floodplains at a startling angle. Cottonwoods flared orange. Rocky spines seemed to jar out of the canvas.
At noon, as the other artists filed out the door with big pads of paper tucked into their armpits, I asked him about it.
“This one new? Or are you still working on it?”
“This fall,” Greg said. “I did that plein air.” I nodded. “This part,” he pointed to where a sage berm twisted away into the distance, “this part I worked on inside a bit. But the rest of it was all outside.
“I get an emotional response to what’s going on around me when I’m out there. Painting from a photograph, you worry about getting it down exactly as it looks. Outside, you paint what you feel.”
We talked about about the shadows in the painting. How he hollowed out the canyons with color. Greg shook his bald head. “People paint snow too sweet. It’s not actually white. It’s blue, or a hard purple. Or then the sky opens up and it’s softer—yellow, maybe light orange, but almost never white.”
He looked hard at me. “If you’re going to be painting snow, you better be standing in it.”
This struck me as brilliant.
I went out into the snow, holding the sketches I’d nabbed to my chest, so they wouldn’t get wet. Fresh snow filled my tracks. When slush kicked up into my boot, I laughed.
If you’re going to be writing about snow, you better be bathing in it.
Gretel Ehrlich comes to mind:
…You should hear the way snow
sizzles and shrinks, hisses and rots away.
Overnight someone new steps into
those white thighs and drags herself downhill towards
the next season. A thunderstorm
unties the sky. It composes and decomposes darkness,
and forgives what it has gathered there
by letting it rain…
Ehrlich wrote the poem, “Other Seasons,” out of the center of Wyoming. But it was just as relevant here, during my first high mountain spring, when I was living in a one-room cabin five miles past the Hoback Junction. I read the poem daily as winter’s deep drifts shifted and cracked and slid into mud. The hills across the highway browned, then paled again. Then crept green in the late May rains. Weather was the language that ordered my life. Erhlich understood it, and I drank her in.
Driving back from Greg’s, I let my car slide a little as it goes around a bend. I know better than to fight the ice.
In Wyoming, weather is god. The wind with razor teeth, the steaming river, the mud season. Snow year-round, and a sun that makes us brown. Not a soul avoids it. It seeps into every corner of our lives: we live seasonally, we fight to remain, we sip on the tenuousness of an economy far from the city. We dig out our cars and split wood for the stove. We make love watching icicles crawl down the windows. We can’t help but know snow intimately: in Cheyenne and Ucross and Worland and LaBarge—and Jackson.
In the Hole, too, the god roars.
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