Forever

I went out hunting for forever yesterday.

Had to leave the pavement at Meeteetse,Wyoming and take the gravel road that runs beside Wood River, past the ranches, past the herds of cows and domestic buffalo, past the cottonwoods in flames and looking close to fire...

...It's hunting season in the mountains of forever. The pick-up trucks and horse-trailers of men who'd gone into the mountains to hunt elk, bighorn sheep and antelope were parked in out of the way places beside the road, waiting for their owners to return with the kill.

Forever beckoned. It was up there somewhere, south southwest, I think.

(I could only hope it wasn't where Dick and Lynne Cheney were hiding out).

Finally I came to a place in the road I couldn't navigate. A little stream was coming down out of the mountains and had to cross the road to join the Wood River to go to whatever forever the Wood River goes to.

I parked the car and set out on foot.

It wasn't long before the elevation started to get to me, 9,000 ft. and rising. Soon, icy winds started snapping their fingers closer and closer my extremities. Trees thinned out, even the evergreens, and the trees that survived looked like ghosts, beautiful but not in the image and likeness of god but as if Giacometti instead had fashioned them. I was light on provisions, only a small jug of water and the apple I'd bought at Albertson's in Cody.

On and on I trudged toward forever

At some point, however, I realized I was coming closer and closer to the kingdom of hunters, and that once I entered that kingdom I could just as easilybecome the hunted. I heard a gunshot or two ring out from the mountains and...

(...to be continued.)