Falling in Love with the Middle of Nowhere

The sun goes down with a perfect halo of golds and ambers, brilliance lighting up the hillside, illuminating the dried grasses that sway in the hillside on Oyster Ridge. I walk up to a view of the city, a view of the trains that make their way through the city, several times daily, freighters only, carrying coal, or pipe, or other hidden industrial materials within hard-sided train cars, brown and rusted and dark.

I can walk for miles here and not see a soul; I see more animals than people when I walk alone. Today, a jack rabbit, pouncing away in a criss-crossety jig-jag through three different types of sagebrush and wheat grass, and hiding in the boughs of an old and twisted juniper tree; a golden eagle, soaring and diving; vultures circling, hawks darting. Daily, herds of antelope, growing in numbers as the night-time lows drop below freezing, their populations peaking just before hunting season starts, their white behinds bouncing bright flashes in the hillside shadows at sunset. Sometimes a handful of mule deer, their ears long and slender, freezing for a moment to assess your movements, the males’ heads so adorned with antlers that it seems unnatural for them to balance.

In any direction one can escape the two-lane highways and amble by car or foot or horseback on dirt or two-track roads, into utter desolation, marked with an occasional home or abandoned wood cabin from the pioneer days, the ghost towns of decrepit buildings marking a resource boom at some time in the past, a few grazing black cows or wandering sheep, perhaps a strip of green indicating a riparian zone, but be just as likely not to see another human as to see one. The hills are painted in minerals and erosion, and shaded with vegetation fading into fall. The sky’s deep high-altitude blue plays host to magnificent cloud formations that catch the sun’s fading light at dusk in a myriad of ways.

Being in a small town, one can take one’s time, move slowly, wade through the days and appreciate drawn-out time. This, I believe, is accentuated by the fact that the last time I had a schedule and worked, I was also working on my masters degree, so in that perspective, I feel like I have all the time in the world. My days at work consist mainly of driving onto open sagebrush steppe and identifying plant populations and collecting seeds; on those days I don’t even feel like I’m working. There are so many spectacular places to go on the weekends that offer a botanically- or ecologically- or photography-minded person (like me!) a wealth of recreation. The days are warm and beautiful, with a strong high desert sun; the nights dipped into freezing at the end of August, and we could see our first dusting of snow any day (my car has already been frosty some mornings).

I can’t say I don’t miss culture, and seeing music in the evenings, or having tasty restaurants or microbrews to sample, and feeling that I can wear something funky when I’m feeling that way without getting stared at. I miss my good friends who I can relate to, and the spark and fizz of a progressive city or alternatively-minded college town. But here is the opportunity to know myself, to know the land, to immerse myself in the big open sky and undulating landscape, to develop friendships with people that I wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to know, and to stare down the cows from the safety of my big work truck while blasting Billy Jean as they turn their head to follow me, bored, chewing their cuds.