Wyyoooooming

In some ways Wyoming reminds me of the Bolivian altiplano: it is desolate and open. Though the inhabitants are not poverty-stricken peasants, they are a rural crowd with a different way of living than those in the big cities. The people who live here are rugged and strong and love their land. Hardly anything grows here due to the short growing season, and it brings me back to when we went to the Tuni Condoriri glacier, and saw the campesinos struggling to nurture even the hardiest crops, and relying instead on sheep, llamas and alpacas. Here, though I have seen a handful of llamas and alpacas, there are mainly sheep and cattle. There are mines in both places, albeit for different materials. The clouds are remniscent of both places: high elevation, puffy and white against a vibrant blue sky; and the sun is strong against my face even when the temperature is cool. The temperature varies 50 degrees in a day, with beautiful warm sunny afternoons and frigid, almost-frosty nights.

When I chose the name 'Diversidad de Vida' for our travels, it was because I knew it was a new beginning into exploring the diversity life has to offer: culturally, biologically, spiritually; experiencing this on a new continent with another language, getting to know the unknown.

Now that we are back, we have opportunities to continue exploring on our tierra nativa (native land). With the lack of attachment to place after such a dramatic uprooting, we find ourselves migrating to different parts of the North American continent. Jameson just accepted a job working as a research assistant in wetlands in southern Georgia, and I am working in the high desert in Wyoming, watching the thunderstorms roll through while drinking in the scent of sagebrush.

Wyoming is the land of the cowboy, and this tradition still lives on quite evidently. There are oil men and cowboy hats and cowboy boots, big trucks and western accents. Every day I see antelope; since being here I've tried antelope jerky and elk meat, both of which were offered to me by the people who hunted and killed the animal. I saw a moose in a town park, there are cottontails outside my window on lazy Sundays, and the magpies are a delightful replacement to the niche a crow fills in a city. The people here are incredibly kind and I am settling into being in a small town quite nicely. I could do away with the conservative talk radio, but see it as a chance to bite my lip and listen to the other side after I've lived in liberal Seattle and Olympia for 10 years.

It is possible to find true solitude here: one of my first days I headed up a lonely dirt road, guitar and camera in tow, found a place to park that overlooked a basin and some colorful sagebrush-dotted mesas in the distance, and made music as passionately as one can only do when entertaining a crowd of the wind, swaying golden grasses, and magnificent open sky. It is a place for soul-searching, to learn how to be lonely and then how to package that aloneness into something that makes one stronger; it is a place for self-reflection and growth; it is Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire in the 21st century.

How the time has passed...

After our 8 months abroad, we boarded a plane from Quito, Ecuador, touching down briefly in Atlanta (and getting to see Jameson's dad, granny and granddaddy, making the 5 hour layover pass all too quickly), and ending ultimately in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We're readjusting to having technology and modern conveniences at our fingertips, for better or worse. It's pretty nice having toilet seats on all the toilets. It was strange speaking only English the first couple of days, disappointing that one needs a car to get anywhere, and has been incredibly comfortable relaxing here (thanks, guys!).

The last two months volunteering provided us with insights into Ecuador: its people, its floristic diversity, its conservation practices; we made some good friends, learned about orchid morphology and pollination, and about tropical dry tropical forest ecosystems. We ate more verdes (green plantains) and arroz (rice) than you can imagine, lived in a little bamboo hut, and ventured into the jungle. We spoke only Spanish for a month and gained an appreciation for Ecuadorian pop music and musica liquida.

Now it's time to figure out the next steps in life. After an adventure like we shared, we return with more photographs than we can count, new ideas about the world and ways of living, and a clean slate for moving forward. Our minds our full but lucid as we begin to process the reality of our experiences. As we recount them to family and friends they at the same time become more real and more abstract, in some ways fantastical - did those things really happen? Did we really collect a rare plant in Bolivia? Did we really walk from Argentina to Chile? How did we travel so far using only public transportation through the wild and remote places that we now know? As we review and show our photos we see how the photos and the stories are not the same thing: the hallucinogenic landscapes of the Uyuni Salt Flats have a story, but it is not embedded in the photos; and we have few images of the places which were most extreme because we were living them.

We fell off the bandwagon of recounting stories towards the end of the trip, and have caught some slack from that. I'm not sure if anyone is still reading this - if you are and you want to read more let us know, there is lots more to tell; and as we begin to incorporate these experiences into our frame of knowledge back here, I think there will be new layers of meaning in the things that we were immersed in while traveling. But I don't want to write to an absent audience.