What's Next?

I’m writing this from the air over the great Midwestern plains, on my way to Denver.  My goal for today was to make it to Meeteetse, Wyoming, via Chicago, Denver and Cody.  But my bad luck with flying this year continues unabated.  I spent an extra, unplanned three and a half hours marooned in O’Hare; consequently, I’ll be very late getting into Denver and will miss my flight to Cody this evening.  Hopefully I’ll track down my checked bag in Denver, catch a ride to a hotel, and find another flight out tomorrow.  Good thing I’m retired and have time to spare.  That knowledge isn’t much consolation to me at the moment, but a second free cup of Dewars is providing some measure of solace.

I’ve already answered my title question – what's next is that I’m bound for Wyoming, which has been a second home to me for the last eleven or twelve years.  If the magma churning under Yellowstone National Park doesn’t soon turn the area into a wasteland of pyroclastic material, as some prophets say it will, western Wyoming will likely continue to be my primary getaway for many years to come.  While I was stuck in O’Hare this afternoon, I was reading “Bird Cloud” by Annie Proulx, who is arguably Wyoming’s finest prose laureate even though she’s a latecomer to the state.  Her vivid depictions of the colored crags, scrubbed prairie and raptor-filled skies ripped by winds straight out of Zeus’s cheeks ring entirely true to me.  Wyoming is not for the faint of heart.  If I remember correctly, it’s the least populated state, per square mile, in the lower 48.  No one who has been there should be surprised by that.  But it’s the very absence of people – the fierce wildness of the place – that attracts me so much.

By tomorrow afternoon, or the next day at the latest, I expect to have a tight connection to a hefty brown trout on the South Fork of the Shoshone River.  Might see an elk herd leaping fences, or bighorn sheep butting heads.  Certainly a lot of pronghorn antelope and mule deer, and definitely a host of regal mountains crowned with clouds and robed in snow.  I can already envision, in my mind’s eye, what I am likely to witness from the deck of my friend Chip’s cabin – spurs of the Absaroka Mountains stretching into the raw desert of the Bighorn basin, badgers and mountain lions slinking through the sage and across distant ridges, and the Milky Way as well-defined in the frigid night sky as an interstate highway is on my GPS.

That’s what’s next!  I’ll tell you more about it when it’s real.  Very soon, very soon, I fervently hope.