NOTES ON THE AMERICAN WEST

         Hello to all, and happy SPRING!! I have all my outdoor cleaning up finished in my garden and all around the rest of the house. Lots of hard work, but at my age, it’s best to keep busy. I already have 1” sprouts on all my rose bushes, and color is coming back into the stems of my hardwood shrubs. The grass is greening up beautifully after a really hard rain last week, so the mower is out and gassed up for that first mowing job, which I also do myself.

 

         Meantime, during some WINTER cleaning in my office, I came across notes I made years and years ago, in the 70’s and 80’s. I am going to share some of them with you in the next couple of blogs. The first one must be from around 1979. I didn’t date it, but I’m sure it is from our first trip to the American West, where I have always felt I belong. But I was born here in Michigan, all my family is here, and my German husband, who has farming in his blood and loves the Michigan woods, would not be happy living anywhere else.

 

        So, here I am – in Michigan, which certainly has its own beauty. Part of me belongs here because of my Potawatomi blood. However, all of you know how in love I am with the American West and how attached I feel to that part of the country, which is why I write about it. That first time I got to see it for myself, I felt as though I belonged there, came from there … that my spirit still lived there. I was either a pioneer woman, or lived there among a Native American tribe.

 

        I want to share with you what I wrote and how I felt about the Great West the first time I visited. I made these notes while traveling through Wyoming and the Rocky Mountains:

 

        “There is a peace here unlike any you can find anyplace else. It is not just quiet. It is total silence, except when the wind blows through the pines. The wind often picks up suddenly, surging violently down from higher peaks ahead of a storm, giving no warning, and diminishing in minutes.

 

        “We are in northern Wyoming, and it feels like home to me. I have been here in some other life, some other time frame. Perhaps my soul belongs to Sacajawea, or to Annie Oakley. Whoever has moved into this earthly body to live for whatever years God will grant me, she came from this place, just as surely as I live and breathe today. Some day I will live here again, if not in the flesh, then in spirit. My bones will be buried here, or my ashes scattered here, and I will at last be home again.

 

        “There is a life to this land I never could have imagined. What at first seems like desolation becomes something of beauty. What looks lifeless comes alive, and each time I come here in the future, I know why those who live here love it, as I, too, feel a love for it. I feel drawn to it. This is home, this Great West, all of it, from the arid deserts of Arizona to the snow-covered peaks of Colorado and Montana, from the green, rolling hills of eastern and middle Wyoming to Yellowstone.

 

        “There is truly nothing like our West in all the world, not one place that can match its beauty, its endless horizons, its thousands of miles of snowy peaks, its delicate ecology. It is wide and wild and beautiful. It is colorful and full of a unique history unmatched in its rapid growth, its untamed territories and once-rugged and hard-edged settlements. I can understand why those who came here first, for whatever reason, gold, free land, investments, exploration, or to get rich quick, ended up coming back again and again, or settled here permanently.

 

        “If I could, I would never go home. Never.”