Trekking

I love the glory of Saturdays. Saturdays have all the charm and possibility of an unexpected wink; they're full of opportunities to get into a situation that takes your breath away, to make memories that will carry you through the hard times that come later in the week. When I was growing up Mom didn't work Saturdays. Mom and Gram were (and are) members of the Wyoming State Historical Society, so most Saturdays contained fabulous adventures in sandstone canyons, up and down mountains, across sagebrush plains and deserts, under willows and cottonwood trees lining the banks of slow-swirling, late-summer-muddy rivers, along railroad tracks, and through barbed-wire gates that had to be opened by hand and shut behind the convoy of trucks to keep the cows in. The caravan forded rocky rivers and slid down hills at impossible, thrilling angles (coolers sliding, slamming against tailgates) and took dirt roads so rough they could hardly be called tracks, with oilpan-wrecking boulders the size of Mazdas and sagebrush so tall it scraped the roofs of the cabs. We called them Varley roads, in honor of Mom's cousin Ed and his sons Jeff and Roger, who drive anywhere.

We were a solid line of dusty Ford and Chevy and GMC trucks with kids and dogs and picnic lunches in the beds, windbreakers and tarps for unexpected weather, which has to be expected in Wyoming (and all over the Rockies, which was where we went.) We took binoculars and scopes, tackleboxes, cameras, basic first aid, sunscreen, Caladryl (which was only available in ghastly pink until recently) and aerosol bug spray or Skin-so-Soft. We took extra tennis-shoes and socks and jeans for when the first pairs got wet, and notice I didn't say 'in case.' Mom always packed wet wipes and Wheat Thins. To this day I feel incomplete in any vehicle without stiff sticks of spearmint Wrigleys, hard candy lemon drops in a jar (with grainy sugar coating, and ever-so-slightly stale), and Wheat Thins. We took plastic jugs of water, cans of orange soda and brown bottles of rootbeer. (The first real beer I ever drank from a bottle foamed relentlessly because I had learned to make my lips a suction seal around the rim of any container of fluid so it wouldn't drench me if we hit a pothole.) We packed lunchmeat and pre-sliced cheese and white deli buns, plain potato chips, some homebaked sweets like cookies or pie or potica, pasta salads, sliced fresh vegetables, coolers of ice.

There was always a 'stop' somewhere, always someplace historically significant, and there were always one-piece picnic benches of painfully slivery unpainted wood, and always plastic or wooden porta-potties with no toilet paper (we packed that, too) and the inevitable dead animal inside. Once when my older sister and I braved the stench and peeked down the hole it was an owl floating in the refuse; they were Mom's favorite animal, in a roundabout way. (By then we must have been pretty desperate to even venture in there, although we made no bones about peeing squatted at the side of the road behind the truck or up in the brush or trees, as long as there was a look-out). We saw homesteaders' cabins in ruins (one with a tree growing sedately up out of the window), petroglyphs, medicine wheels, teepee rings and fire pits, churches, mines, jails, stills, old trains and weed-grown train tracks, leaning barns, mineral springs, ranches, ghost towns, graves, hideouts, mills, forts, geysers and hot springs, lakes and ponds and rivers, monuments, beaver dams, caves, Oregon Trail ruts, and once a spring up in a mountain above Afton that stopped and started naturally every fifteen minutes like clockwork. It was surrounded by slimy, slippery rocks and a mud that stank and stained so bad Mom finally threw away the shoes that got in it, after Gram had a crack at them with every cleaning agent known to man and had no luck. We saw all manner of wildlife, alive and dead: coyotes, antelope, badgers, elk, sage grouse, deer, eagles and hawks, fish, lizards, snakes, skunks, hornytoads, and if we didn't see the living specimen or a body, we found tracks. We traveled in any weather; we started early and finished late.

I always brought something home with me, some souvenir of the day. It was generally a special rock or stick, a hunk of moss or a bone I'd picked up and packed around all day, or a styrofoam cup full of tiny petrified seashells, a fluff of rabbit fur I found caught on a barbed wire fence, or a piece of sandstone I'd rubbed on a harder rock until it was in the shape of a pyramid or square. Sometimes I'd slip a sqaure-headed nail or piece of rusted hinge in my windbreaker pocket, too young to understand why on BLM land I should leave such artifacts for others to enjoy. Sometimes the memento was a chunk of chipped granite I was sure some Native American (we called them Indians, or named the specific tribe, since we invariably had some expert with us) had used to hone his obsidian arrowheads to razor-sharpness. Morgan and I scoured anthills as big as dining room tables for Indian beads or pieces of pottery, avoiding the stinging red/black swarm as we stepped on their roofs. If we had been near water, I'd have a shred of brown paper sack (Gram brought them to hold trash; plastic grocery bags didn't exist then, or else Gram didn't use them, I'm not sure) that I had crumpled and soaked and laid out to dry until it resembled thin, stiff buckskin or sinew. I'd tear it in the shape of an animal hide and draw simple stick hunters and buffalo on it with charcoal or chalk, even though I could actually draw much better (in my opinion) than the early Natives. I wanted it to look authentic. Once in a great while we'd go somewhere that had a visitors' center and a gift shop, and then I'd come home with a real treasure. My favorite was a book of 19th-Century paper dolls I begged for at the Fort Bridger trading post, ladies in bloomers and camisoles, ladies that paraded fancy silk and wool dresses with bustles and netted, feathery hats like the kinds that might have been worn by an officer's wife stationed there at the Fort in the 1800's. I could just see her sweating under all those taffeta layers as she stood beneath the sweltering prairie sun to watch soldiers at drill on the parade grounds. I hoped she fainted in a most becoming and dramatic way; that was what my dolls did, anyhow. Mostly I came home with fresh scrapes and bruises and around ten pounds of dirt, gravel and sand in the rolled-up cuffs of my stained jeans, and hair so tangled from truck-bed wind that Mom made me cry when she brushed it out. She scolded that I should have let her put it in a ponytail when she suggested it.

Today I understand that the supreme legacy of these Saturday exploits was much more than what I squirreled away in the back of the sky-blue Ford Maverick for the trip home. Mainly, I gained a profound appreciation of history and all things old, including people, and a respect for public land and monuments. More importantly, I have memories. I have a catalog of Saturdays spent with family and friends in the great outdoors, learning about history, how to cope with emergencies, learning to respect land and people, learning to listen to stories and wind and water; all this instead of playing video games in a dim basement or standing in an empty lot somewhere, learning to smoke and swear and conceal emotion. In my memory, Saturdays are full of cowpies and laughter, the smells of gas and diesel and sagebrush and pine and soft, sandy Wyoming dirt, quick summer rain and noisy card games and picnics, and hanging onto a rollbar for dear life while a truck sloshed through red rut puddles, splashing the riders. No wonder modern Saturdays come around and I find myself itching to crawl over a tailgate and settle on a spare tire, waiting to watch the paved road disappear behind me and wilderness unfold before me. That yearning will never go away, and those Saturdays will never be replaced.