Wyoming, The Range, Par-delà

Cheyenne, Wyoming: November 1 & Jackson, Wyoming: November 2 I arrived (a long way indeed from the digital-electric postindustrial metropolitan simulacra, with its postmodern fetishizing of Logos and Dialogue, Information and Attachments, speed and hyper-speed, all that merely cycles and recycles back, those towns and cities, their mediated manic faiths in dvd and dvr and satellite dish, dialogue and argument, Voice and Counter-Voice) to finally find my-self in Silence, and of a Silence, American Silence that expanded with every step I took, even on the cowboy-humble wide strutted streets of Cheyenne, even at ease in the Range Rover, where the radio's local coverage of Wyoming's native son Dick Cheney endorsing of McCain, were lost, hours later, by the time we exited the truck, took to the rocky edges near the torrential currents of the North Platte River, wind over sage, caws of hovering crows lost in the thin evening air -- the "Range," that evocative locus that is no locus, Range, synonymous with sphere of being and sphere of knowledge, space suggestive of endless motion, un-rooted Range, and this un-moored Ranging, views, not just of mountain peaks and valleys, but far-off cattle herders, horse ranchers, antique wagon wheels in the middle of no-where, seen through binoculars, "Dead Indian Pass," American earth haunted by pioneer ghosts, on their way to long since depleted gold rushes, to 2008, here, where now the only trace of the election was on the "trail" of one John Barrasso, a Republican running for Senate, who was good enough to host a brief coffee ("Just remember, Guy, that the myth of the stone-faced Marlboro Man wasn't just a myth. In this age of pundits and experts, us Wyomans know that a silent glance is often more eloquent than a hundred Gettysburg Addresses") before I took off on a private plane, northwest, for another Wyoming day in Yellowstone National Park, hiking along stony paths, along gorges and pine, boots on underbrush, spying bison crossing prairie and, further on, crossing before geysers, Ranging, I looked upward, struck by the coasting wingspan of a bald eagle against blue and white nimbus sky, and, downward, over my shoulder, I spied a wildcat peeping at me from behind an outcropping, and then on and on we Ranged, to that famous geyser, and further on, into further "Passes," absorbed by a wandering which makes of Space No-Space, and even when I spoke to my guides, I heard my Voice fall into the Silence: that Silence endless as the unheard infinite pause in a Mozart overture, Silence, loud as a single rock that falls, that we know falls now, somewhere hundreds of miles from this spot on these park roads, I stop to listen to the stone falling unheard by human ears: and, listening to Silence, I can hear America breathing.