December 2023 - 47

idea that your life's mentor can do no wrong,
comes up against another reality. I spent many
mountain summers with my grandmother at
her high-country ranch when I was a lad. We
picked wild raspberries by the gallon, visited
ranch neighbors on late-summer evenings,
climbed to a high ridge to watch nighthawks
dive for evening meals until the bats came out.
She knew the names of all the wildflowers and
birds. She knew where fairy slipper orchids
grew in the deep, Douglas fir forest, and had
pet designations for all the places on her ranch.
One was simply called the Big Spring and
was high on the mountain in the Engelmann
spruce woods where someone built a wooden
box over a spring of the coldest water you'd ever
want to numb your teeth with. When you are
young and your head is full of adventure,wonder
and exploration hunger, a mountain ranch
is a good place to feed it and a great place to
nurture a land ethic.
But on one thing my grandmother was
wrong. She detested sagebrush. Just north of
her house, up a long ridge covered with ponderosa
pine and scattered Doug fir, was a bench
of sagebrush about 50 acres. The Brits call a
high, undeveloped piece of ground a wold.
Grandma called this place the North Forty,
and it was her least favorite piece of ground.
Even now, many decades after she died in
her early 90s, I wonder how a woman so educated
- formally and self - could not have an
understanding of how important the humble
sagebrush is to Western land. I wonder, too,
how I did not fall into the influence of this
thinking at a young age when most every other
lesson stuck.
The answer lies in the land itself. In the big
empty open, in my unnumbered camps on
the sagebrush sea under a wide-open sky that
bursts in sunrise and sunset. Throw a bedroll
down on open ground and lie awake counting
shooting stars on some late-summer night. This
is the same sky that bedazzled and befuddled
Crow warriors, Teddy Blue Abbott's cowboys
and Evelyn Cameron's cameras - all of us
adrift on the sagebrush sea.
This is a land of surprises. A friend who has
spent her entire life on the sagebrush ocean
recently showed me a picture from this past
spring of the prairie alive with pasque flowers
stretching to the far horizon. She calls them
prairie crocuses and had never in all of her
70-plus years seen such a display. For some
reason, this was the year and all of the other
60-plus years of crocus production has been
woeful.
One year hunting antelope on the big
empty, I crawled up to a ridge where I could
peer down at a herd to possibly take a good
buck with my rifle. When I set up for the
shot, there at my elbow I found the horn of
a bison, its wearer long dead. Another friend
repeating a similar move on a different ridge
discovered a human skull on what turned out
to be a Sioux burial site.
There are those who cannot live without an
ocean in the near horizon, cannot dream of
a place without walks on a beach, the smell
of salt on a west breeze, the cry of shorebirds.
My sea is ancient and its water gone, drained
away before time began. The beaches I walk
are sand dunes in the Great Divide Basin. My
perfume is the smell of rain on Wyoming big
sagebrush drifting off a far ridge, the same
cologne coming off the wing of a sage grouse
held reverently close to the nose and breathed
deeply on a September afternoon. This is ocean
enough for me. I am an unapologetic landlubber,
the far curve of the world rising in ridges
and buttes like swells and waves on a horizon
that seems without limit. I have been to the
ocean and it is Wyoming.
Grandma's derision for sagebrush was not a
new notion, born in the tallgrass prairie of her
youth no doubt, and nurtured on high-country
pastures. There has been a war on sagebrush
since the first Europeans stepped foot into the
wide West, but notions evolve and change.
Today the sagebrush sea is recognized for its
raw beauty, its biodiversity, its importance to
all creatures domestic and wild.
Guided by ecologists like Fred Provenza,
we are only now understanding how grazing
regimes can take advantage of timing and duration,
how battles need not be engaged and the
sagebrush ocean can roll on. But mine is not
an affair rooted in science and ecology. It's a
romance grounded in the wide big beyond
where an imagination can sail to the ends of
the known world and perhaps beyond into
the far sunset where my bedroll is rolled out
among the waving artemisia beneath countless
stars spangling the night sky.
- Author Thomas Reed contemplates sagebrush
landscapes from his own North Forty where a bench
sits lonely on a high ridge amidst a sweep of mountain
silver sagebrush. His most recent work is helping edit,
" Mouthful of Feathers, Upland in America, " which was
released from Cornmill Press in 2023.
- Lori Eslick is an illustrator, artist, presenter, children's
picture book illustrator and workshop leader. She regularly
creates illustrations for Wyoming Wildlife magazine's
Wild Country Dispatch column. More of her work
can be seen at eslickart.com.
Wyoming Wildlife | 47
http://www.eslickart.com
December 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of December 2023
