road trip: summer flashback
part 3: nothingness
We’ve been cruising up I-25 for what feels like three days.
“Wyoming is, umm, sparsely populated,” says my traveling companion.
This isn’t the Wyoming I’m familiar with, this deserted stretch of interstate and uninhabited prairie.
“The Tetons would blow your mind.” I tell her about my horseback trek over the Pass a million summers ago, with cowboys I’d met shooting pool at a dive bar. About warm cans of Coors swinging from the horses’ packs; dipping my toes in Jenny Lake; the soft lullaby of hooves on the trail.
“Horses?” She grins. “Hard enough sitting in the car this long.”
These road trip flashbacks are outtakes from a longer story: Your Roots are Showing.
I can only imagine the "soft lullaby of hooves" from watching Westerns as I know little of horses or Wyoming. It's such a great description.
Once when I was a kid we were driving from Colorado to Idaho by way of Wyoming. it was late at night. We crested a hill right above a city (Casper I think) and it disappeared. It turned out there was a power outage just as we came over the hill. The lights came back before we got into town. But I'll never forget feeling like we were in a Twilight Zone episode for those few minutes!