September 2021 - 46

WILD COUNTRY DISPATCH
Walking on
my ocean
Story by Tom Reed | Illustration by L. Eslick
F
or every high-country meadow deep with sedge and
reeking of September elk, for every aspen grove shimmering
and cool in the middle of the day, for every
lodgepole-cloaked ridgeline bleeding off into an
unknown but knowable canyon - for all of these landscapes
- if push comes to shove and ashes need to be spread, give me
the big empty. Even more, give me its icon - the sagebrush.
It rained during the night, a cold rain
with the bite of early snowfall a possibility,
but for now only a frigid-liquid reminder
of a coming season. This prompt carried
in a medium unlike any other, the scent of
wet sage slowly waking in a new day. Just
as pioneers were gob-smacked by the wide
ocean of sagebrush before their oxen, I am
sure that they were stopped in their tracks
by the scent of sagebrush after a rain. Who
could not be?
Ours is silver sage up on the bench above
our bottomland, and when the wind is just
right autumn is carried in my cabin office's
north window. It is an old friend, a memory
that quickens my heart and draws my
fingers away from paper and pen and to the
checkering of a favored shotgun or rifle, to
the softness of an eager setter's head in my
lap. Let's go, partner, let's go.
Just a few miles away the benchland rises
toward the high country and silver sage gives
way to Wyoming big sagebrush and its trileaves
like miniature salmon spears. I can
get on a good traveling horse and be there
in an hour, or I can drive and be there in
15 minutes.
Many years ago I sat astride another good
46 | September 2021
horse on a long ride across the open sagebrush
prairie as a group of us celebrated the
sesquicentennial of the Oregon-Mormon
Trail. It was a re-enactment of a sort, with
wagons turned westward and a good number
of us on strong saddle horses. We rode
through the sagebrush and imagined the
clink of shod oxen, the music, the laughter
of it all. The aroma of sage came with us. I
remember wet meadows alive with shooting
stars, rocky ridges, sage grouse taking wing
before our contingent in great, flapping wing
beats to a forever horizon.
I have spent half a day hiding behind one
sagebrush, hoping for just the right time to
ease from my blind and sight a good pronghorn
buck in the iron sights of my muzzleloader.
While I was down there, nose-in, I
studied the bark of the bush, the stem of its
existence perhaps two inches in diameter at
its base and the shaggy bark crumbling in my
fingers. I wondered about its life in a land
of little rain and much wind and I thanked
it for its thin shade in a September sun as I
waited for the buck to work his way toward
me. They tell me that a big sagebrush can
live more than a century, down there with
the stink bugs and horned toads.
I have ridden and walked, hiked and
hunted the sagebrush steppe for many decades
now and it is a land of abundance where others
might only see spare change. Here in the
sagebrush sea is life from the tiniest to the
most-mega. Walk a bare, grassy chukar slope
devoid of sagebrush and you are climbing
onto futility's shoulders. But mix in sagebrush
cover with your cheatgrass and caprock and
you are likely to swing your shotgun with
some frequency.
My grandmother, with her roots deep in
Iowa tall grass, reviled sagebrush and saw it
September 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of September 2021
