On being a westerner.

It’s midnight, and I’m writing in the back of the car—hatchback open, moon blazing full across the big mountains. The silence is a hum that builds inside your ribcage.  This is Steven’s Gulch: a long Forest Service Road that starts where Grand Avenue hits the highway, taking you from pavement to spitting gravel, past mining equipment and private drives. Eventually it reaches a reservoir; I stop at the pullout. 

Up here you can see low clouds winding through the trees, how the mountains tilt a million different angles.  Up here, I’m alone.

When I first moved west eight years ago, I was hungry for everything. I loved mountains. I’d backpacked the spines of long, overgrown ranges and driven into the desert to rock climb. But I didn’t know how to build a life.  I landed in Kelly, Wyoming, three days after my high school graduation. My hair was long, my skin soft with humidity. In a platform tent with a white canvas cover, I waited out the early June blizzards.

What I needed to learn, I found out quickly, was practical:  how to drive a truck over rutted road. How fast to take turns on a pass.  How to anticipate weather.  My practice runs were all Trails Wilderness School vehicles, boasting over 200,000 miles, with spidery windshields. Then I borrowed Johnny, my co-leader’s old white GMC, and took him on jaunts to Idaho for a vanilla milkshake. I sat on Johnny’s hood on the bison flats to watch birds, writing postcards home.  I was learning.

The next summer I took a car west with me, and in many ways this is when I began to be the person I am now:  I didn’t just run alone or drink tea alone anymore; I went on trips alone. I slept beside Abraxas in aspen groves and in desert washes. I slept inside his hatchback on the street in San Juan Bautista, with sea air flooding in the cracked windows. I spent a night on the Nevada salt flats watching lights glint half a mile away, convinced a murderer was going to axe through the ceiling of my car. And over time I developed my rules: the vehicle is most easily organized in plastic bins. Always carry extra water. Check the oil at each gas station. Watch for deer eyes at the edges. Don’t plan to be anywhere on time. Do not apply cream cheese to stale bagels while driving.

On the way, I also learned about public lands. I bought big red Gazetteers—Colorado, Wyoming, Utah—to identify free BLM and Forest Service terrain. (“You should never have to pay for camping in the west,” I liked to say.)  I learned about ranching, then oil and gas.  I left coordinates in the windshield when backpacking. I learned you can wash your hair in public bathrooms or in rivers; I learned how to hold my whiskey, how to talk to roughnecks, and how to sniff out the best cup of coffee in town.  Driving led to hiking, hiking to wandering.  And over the years, as the dry air got in my skin, my daily way of living quieted. I learned to chop wood. I built fires in the dark of winter morning. I watched the river steam beside snowdrifts.

At a recent staff training, I was asked to write down seven of my identities.  I could hear murmurings, all around me, of what others chose for their lists: Wife. Daughter. Athlete. Nurse.  Then we were asked to discard our identities, one by one—to choose the most important.

I am a writer first. I also an advocate for social justice, a teacher, a body.  And, fiercely, I am a westerner. 

My roots are in the swamps and strip malls of middle America, but by now, the west is home. Frost-heaved roads. Glacial tarns. Forest fires. Fiddles. Squatting in the gravel to piss without a single light on the horizon. Most of the time I take it for granted. But once in a while I load up the car, heading off somewhere new, and feel that wiggle of joy deep in my belly. I roll down the window, take a deep breath. I holler into the big open space of the west.

I began with a love of a place I did not know. It is such a privilege to slowly speak the language.