Big Sky

The Montana skies were endless and spectacular, telling epic Rorschach stories in their ever-shifting shapes, forming dramas so compelling it was hard to watch the road. Beef cows grazed in big fields, deer darted into the underbrush, weathered trees coupled off in pairs, grasses swayed, rocks slid. The Bozeman Daily Chronicle told of painted lawns, while forest rangers played basketball and road workers lit up the black forest with hot white flourescence. Now in Idaho, next to a dark river, in a small log cabin with plaid beds and an old television, I think about everything that has already happened in this rented room, and whether those memories are still here in the air around me, and whether they can somehow be unhidden.