Last summer, buoyant with my old youthful joy borne of spending time in the deep countryside with this friend (our acquaintance goes back to those years in Indiana, a state then significantly more rural than it is today) I drove from Duluth out to Rapid City, South Dakota in one long day full of lofty clouds and sun, touring in the car a ways around the Oahe Reservoir outside the city of Pierre as dusk settled. Next day it was on, via the Theodore Roosevelt National Grassland, to Wyoming in that area between Buffalo and Sheridan, where immediately the same day I began to get acquainted with new birds of the Rocky Mountain valleys: the red-naped sapsucker and the calliope hummingbird. The watercolor kit had ridden with me in the car and a profusion of hound's tongue or gypsy flower on sunlit ground (per my friend locally called the beggar's fleas) challenged me to a several-days' botanical painting effort.
The hound's tongue is a weed of pastures, not a native North American herb, yet in its peculiar fuzziness and olive drab overtone, its florets the meaty pink of a dog's dripping tongue, it seems as habituated into the nearby mountain slopes as my friend, a native of Germany, was absorbed into the high elevations of the American West. I found a patch of ground with both sun and shade where I could sit, where a specimen of hound's tongue or Cynoglossum officinale made itself available, and spent four to five days finishing the details in watercolor and gouache. The card front in its photo is shown here, with a link to where it's for sale:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/103227055/blank-note-card-botanical-watercolor?
When I think about that gypsy flower in blossom alongside a sparkling rill beneath a line of cottonwood trees, with magpies' prattle over in the sun's direction and from behind me the flattened little death-knell sound, like a screech owl without the tremolo, that later proved to be the western wood pewee, I think about our car excursions up to the passes in the Bighorns near the Montana state line, where snowbanks enclosed the two paved lanes on either side. My friend, putting in her gardens for the year's food crop, never-the-less took afternoons off to drive me with her to such places as Shell Falls and Crazy Woman Canyon; we saw miles and miles of the changing topography that makes up Wyoming including sub-alpine slopes with whitebark pines, and way below them the red rock chasms, sagebrush deserts and, partway up again in elevation, meadows dampened by snow-fed springs, a-flit with mountain bluebirds the greenish blue of a twilit sky.
I remember her explanations of the sights around us: her elderly Australian sheep dog with the bald and hanging teats and one crossed eye, formerly the property of some unnamed sheep herder who had obviously used her to commercially breed pups and almost as likely had kicked her face at some point near one eye socket. This dog had entered into a new life at the grand age of ten. Her career as a companion dog must have felt to her like a paradise, one old lady rescued and given to another to ease their joint tragedies past into vaguest after-impression.
My friend explained runaway truck lanes I had glimpsed from the highway in another tragic story out of local news: a young transport driver fell asleep in his cab somewhere high above Sheridan or Buffalo, realized on waking that he'd lost his chance to use the emergency lane and knew he was fated to crash into the town below the heights in order to make his final stop. He dialed 911 and had the local sheriffs clear the whole route ahead of him and provided his speed and location. As predicted, with the main thoroughfare into town fully emptied of cars and trucks, he hurtled into view on schedule, missed a diagonal bend and crashed to his death into a building already vacant, the walls and roof collapsing around him. The local folk took up a collection for his widow and tiny children.
There was the day I spent mostly alone, creeping along the Penrose hiking trail, further teaching myself the local flora like the clematis folk-named sugar bowls, and somewhere along the way finding my first Lazuli bunting singing to the sunny afternoon so much like the indigo bunting of the Midwest. Eventually my friend dialed my cell phone to check that I still answered and hadn't fallen prey to any cougars or armed strangers or dropped off a precipice. One night we splurged like hungry girls with the metabolism of youth, eating three platefuls apiece of Asian buffet meat and vegetables. In her dining nook I ate roast bear and heart of venison for my first time. I learned of treating old bronchial mucous with cups of mullein tea, and vowed I'd forage my own back in Minnesota, as I have now done.
So now, more than a year later, with the western expanses of America a beacon in my memory each day I make my living in the north-central U.S., I have the gypsy flower art image to help remind me of this legacy in the person of a great critic, teacher and humanitarian, who had once beguiled me into thinking she had been born a Romany gypsy, an adoptee saved from one of the orphanages the Hitler regime set up for selective breeding. The gypsy flower might, among other things, stand for the drifter and re-colonizer in people and species the world over. She told me on the last visit that the half-gypsy girl had really been her cousin by adoption.
When I envision the future with its dire impending constraints like unaffordable car ownership and withering summer droughts taking place between floods and consequent washouts along high-country roads like those in the Bighorns, I wonder what will happen to byroads between hubs of commerce and manufacturing. Will patches of old America and for that matter old Europe and other places still flourish, visitable by ordinary folk who yearn over collective memory of them? I tend to think that they will, if at great expense in money and personal safety, somehow--maybe by bus or bike, van, wagon train or foot...
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