Table of Contents
From "O! the joy"
By Kelly Morris '04Written for English 308, Advanced Creative Non-Fiction Writing
The wind blows hard and carries dust into the air so it hangs like fog. Bolts of lightning spear the ground with the glinting rapidity of a needle in a sewing machine. Tumbleweeds roll across the road. Tornado warnings crackle on the radio. It is June 1, 2002, and I am traveling through Nebraska on the 2,000-mile journey from Pennsylvania to Yellowstone National Park to spend a second summer working at a lodge there.
The road is empty except for the tractor-trailers that rumble past. When it begins to rain, their tires fling gouts of water onto the windshield. By the time I reach Wyoming less than an hour later, the sun is shining in a brilliant blue sky. Darkness captures the horizon behind me, but I have escaped the storm.
Driving through Wyoming on empty roads where the speed limit is 75 miles per hour, where the ground rises and falls amidst gorges and hills, where in the distance mountains rear imposingly on the horizon while the gold medallion of the sun drifts downward to nestle in their peaks, flaring the sky with brilliant streaks of gold and purple and turning the slate-gray slopes a faded, subdued blue, I am wishing I could drive forever because nothing is quite as peaceful as this. The car glides on smooth pavement, up and down hills like a car on a roller coaster, but the wide-open spaces seem to slow time. A roller coaster ride is a hectic, rushed affair. This is more like flying. This is joy. .....
The sky alone is reason enough to never want to go home. The sky is larger than life out West and leaves one with the desire to melt into the rock and stare up at it for an eternity, to drown in its swirls of color and shifting of clouds, and its sunsets that make you forget you are standing on solid ground or that the ground even exists beneath your feet. And it's not just the sky that changes you. It's the land. When you leave it after a few months, your life doesn't feel right. Civilization cannot be enjoyed in the same way as before.
When you return home, you are relieved at first. You party with your friends, live it up, are glad that you can hop in the car and drive to the mall in minutes to go shopping or see a movie. You don't have to drive two hours to get a haircut. But pretty soon you get tired. You're willing to work for nothing, dirty your hands, and strain your back on the job again just to be back surrounded by that land. Returning to Yellowstone for a second year in a row, I do not want to return for the job. I want to return for the land. .....
So this is my vision of the West. It is a place that offers peace from the brutal current of society that so often does not care who it wrecks or who it leaves behind. It is a place that turns dreams to truth and weaker hearts to something tangible and whole and real. And if it is none of these things, if these things are merely what I wish the West to be, then the West remains the place it has always been throughout American history, the place where heroes are made and sometimes destroyed, but from whose successes and disillusionment we can learn all that we need to know to live in this world.