Wyoming days

Stepping away from San Francisco and entering the miniature national park that is my cabin in Wyoming, I become a transcendentalist and decide that T.S. Eliot is the now the poet laureate for our time and not WC Williams.

All along Rt. 14, on the road from Cody to the cabin, American flags are flying, having shrunk to the smallest size in the nation's history. They're hung on fenceposts by big ranchers and small, alfalfa farmers and gentlemen farmers, personally endorsed by the framer of our new Constitution, Supreme Court Justice Neil Goresuch, and mailed in red-white-and blue plastic shrink-wrapped bags to constituents.

I'm silently angry now most of the time, hanging by the emotional threads my pet spiders spun on the rafters of the cabin and left behind as my inheritance. (Perhaps I should take a hint and start a cause, a protest, a movement? The Silently Angry Minority of Artists and Writers). Stepping into the cabin I take a deep breath and calm down, never failing to be awed by the scene from the big window: 10,00- ft. mountain peaks that do the work in one instant that Blaise Pascal attempted his whole life: "Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness." Once ensconced I sit down and make a list of people I hope I never see again, beginning with the letter A.

Gradually, after a day or two in the cabin, my one-time hope of becoming a great man is dashed, though my new grandaughter, visiting for a few days with her family in celebration of her 11th month of life, looks up at me as if I am a beautiful tall building designed by Rem Koolhaus.

Walking around Cody, a sweet little town in The Rockies but stuffed with tourists this time of year, it feels like the people are on edge; but maybe it's just me walking around in the little socialist country of my heart, thinking about the way things might be instead of the way things are. A friend who lives here year-round praises a man named Charles Krauthammer, "a great journalist" my friend says, "who told the truth." When I inquire where I may find the journalism of Charles Krauthammer my friend tells me that Charles Krauthammer is dead but before that he was a newspaper columnist and a comnentator on Fox News.

I killed a rattlesnake yesterday; I didn't want to, it was pure self defense. I'd found it the night before, huddled in front of the guest house door, and shoveled it out in the high desert landscape that surrounds the cabin. In the morning  the snake had slithered back. I pinned it down with a shovel and my youngest son finished it off with the ax, keeping the rattle for his son, my grandson, as a Wyoming momento. I placed the rattlesnake--a Prairie Rattlesnake it turns out, indigenous to the greater Yellowstone area--on a rock in the sun and by evening it was gone, a tasty hors d'oeuvre for one of my carnivore neighbors.

Eliot has the goods--we are the stuffed men, we are the hollow men and so forth--I'm sorry to say. Our hollow and stuffed men are new versions of Eliot's hollow and stuffed men however, replicas like those characters in bad science fiction movies of the 1980's when Ronald Reagan was President, not even men enough to be either hollow or stuffed. 

ps: tomorrow or the next day or the day after that I promise to be more positive.

pps: I going to the library in Cody sometime soon to see if it has a copy of Eliot's Collected Poems.

Necklace hanging from mirror, 1998 GMC truck, Northfork Hwy. (14) Cody, Wyoming, July 18, 2018.