Grey Smudges

After several months of tumultuous thought, I up and decided to move this last December. A request from my supervisor kept me in Lander for about a month longer than I had anticipated. It was mid-January before I found my Jetta overloaded and travelling across the prairie to a new place, which I had never even visited before. This place was Yankton, South Dakota.

A mid-sized town along the banks of the Missouri River, just north of Nebraska, it is different in many ways from the places where I have lived before. There are no mountains, no matter how much I turn my head. Trees are sparse, and clearly cultivated. The river is larger than any river I've ever lived within driving distance of.

As a child and teenager, I emphatically insisted that I could not live without the mountains. I was born in the mountains of New Mexico (two miles south of Colorado, a fact that irked me continually). At the age of four, my family moved to Grand County, Colorado, in the Fraser River Valley. Mountains surrounded me as a child, their presence seeming to lock out anything more dangerous than the moose or bears inhabiting them.

When time came to decide upon a college, Wyoming Catholic College was appealing, because the catalog described Lander as nestled in the foothills of the Wind River Mountains. This was a slight exaggeration of its location; still the mountains were there to the west, just a drive away.

But living in Wyoming helped me to appreciate that quite stark landscapes can still hold great beauty. Several visits to the Midwest convinced me that flat and beautiful are not incongruous, nor opposed.

Standing outside, with the world stretching away on every side, where the hills are subtle and rolling, the horizon is broken by the smudges of trees. They look like charcoal pencil drawings. It has been winter since I arrived in South Dakota, and the world has been a blue, white, and grey place. This is especially true along the river. The trees provide a contrast with the snowy fields, and the smooth or sparkling river. Grey smudges of a beauty that is difficult to describe in words, but which is easily felt while beholding it.