FIELD REPORT: I am not a meal / Winter in Wyoming

October 12, 2009

It seems as though upon landing in Sheridan, I was given a dog’s eyes – all charcoals and chalks, and vistas driven by canine dream: infinite grey fields of languid deer and elk and pheasant, wild turkey and golden eagles and raccoon.

I have arrived at Ucross – a snow-swept Braque landscape of brutal, seductive monochrome. Flying up from Denver, the fractured onyx peaks near Sheridan broke through a solemn strata of white clouds, nearly reaching the propellers on our whim of a plane, which seemed a bobbling afternoon diversion for the children of the Sky Goddess – as though we nineteen inside were a vulnerable array of wobbly dolls within a marionette paper craft.

We popped through the low white cirrus with a jolt and the same aerial landscape was reproduced on the ground – a strata of white snow with low black stippled ridges.

The Sheridan Airport is made of pickup sticks and lincoln logs and snap together planes. Assiduous and outside are all the toy men that populate a toddler’s hook-and-ladder trucks. Thick skin pocked and burned with brush stubble. Features deeply compressed and then whittled with a jack knife through winter. Improbable shoulders – we later sighted a Golden Eagle gripping a frozen branch, and the choreographer whispered those shoulders…how much is required to keep a creature aloft.

Inside the toy airport, the snow-capped curls of baggage women slinging case after massive case of rifles and ammunition from the body of the plane onto the aluminum slide, where Bush-era corporate men with their soft pink skin and pressed khakis seem surprised at their own subsequent struggle to heft the weapons.

Hunting tourists, says the whisper-thin, kind-eyed man behind me – more hat than head, he has been pointed out as a celebrated alum of the stunt rodeo circuit. He seems to float weightless within his cowboy boots, his bones eroded by the wind, his fingers a gristly web of black magic, rope and broken root.

As the truck pulls away from the airport carrying me, a painter, and a choreographer, Sheridan reveals its startled response to last week’s snowstorm.

The idea of alcohol hangs in the air as opaque as snow. How much will be needed, and how soon.

The deciduous trees are still green-leafed, but now burdened and breaking from the weight of icicles and snow. They seem stupified by the betrayal of it all: only a few more weeks and their branches would have been clean, stripped down, and the snow would have fallen through unimpeded. Now, they have great yellow sap wounds at the juncture points, and the cold is leaching into their bones.

By the side of the road, a topless boy with a homespun haircut leans out of his truck. He’s bug-eyed – enormous optical spotting scopes pressed into his eager face, a high-powered rifle levered against his forearm, and an ATV four wheeler idling nearby. He’s looking for deer on public lands. He’s a bundle of joy, half-naked. From within the cozy comfort of his king cab, steam billows forth into the nineteen-degree air outside.  A few hundred yards away, a family of deer nuzzle down to chew on nubs of brittle twig, their arachnid’s legs buried up past the hock in freshly fallen snow. They are a Japanese funeral – chopsticks driven deep into a bowl of bright white rice.

The coatrack here in the Old Schoolhouse at Ucross boasts a monochrome haberdashery of florescent orange caps and hats. Vests and ponchos and bold sashes that plainly indicate – I am not a meal.

One of the writers here has proposed that we find all the animals we can and clothe them in orange. She has taken an abrupt and melancholy vow of vegetarianism after the sobering debacle of last week, when the calves were separated from their mothers. The mothers howled for hours – an eerie paean riding in with the horizontal snow. Somehow this reminds me of the MacLean House at Appomattox, where Generals Lee and Grant signed the surrender agreement directly below the children’s nursery. The woman of the house pregnant upstairs and surrounded by an array of children, engaged in that eternal mother’s struggle to bear live young and keep them alive as long as possible.  Both human and animal mothers in shared distrust of men with guns and something to prove.

Seven freshly baked cookies from the Ucross stargate cookie jar persuade me of the complete improbability that I will gird myself in my armor of wool and brave the arctic blast for the fifteen minute walk to my studio. The darkness outside has no depth. It’s like walking into a chalkboard until my dog-eyes adjust, and then the snow white earth makes me dizzy – seems the sky should be white and the earth black.  I am bewildered by this reversal. I am plunged into a negative. I have gone all Dali.

I want to tie a thick string between my isolated creekside cabin studio and the safe-haven of the kitchen house: food and shelter on one end, and the sweet precipice of self-expression at the other.  My hand gripping the line, undissuaded by the darkness whirling around me, by the wind and the snow and the groaning trees and stream cracking like knuckles as it freezes.

Winter brings the ossification of landscape. A calcification, a strengthening, the gamble of endurance.  We artists have gathered here from all parts, and are humbled, titillated by our agonizing frailty.   Perhaps it is a relief to find a fully tangible, senseless force here – wrestling with words, or oils, or constipated inspiration is a flaccid adversary, and defeat is humiliating. But there is something gorgeous about surrendering to this winter.

Hawks with swollen feathers, talons piercing the iced limbs of their trees, stubborn and fierce, remorseless determination to survive. They peer through their razor lenses for field mice and other prey of the plains. I am not a meal. It is a whispered benediction from the brush.

I am not a meal.

Where is the liquor.

I am an icicle. Within me are six small stones.

This gun is heavy.

three jetes to the left, then the dancers meet in the middle, and collapse in stacks.

The clouds are curled around the north star, and my calf is dead.

Take this weight off my branches.

Aim right near the shoulder – isn’t this better than the boardroom.

G sharp is what’s needed here.

Alizarin crimson. Alizarin crimson.

All of us thinking of winter, in our own ways.