Andrew and I loaded up two small backpacks and our standby tickets for Bozeman, MT. It was supposed to be a trip to Paris for a week and the flight was cancelled. I was relieved. We've spent so much time in Paris in our lives -- months on end -- sometimes only a long Thanksgiving weekend spent drinking wine and smoking cigarettes [French version of the American holiday] -- but my heart has changed. I need nature and landscape. So when the pilots timed out and we were all sent scurrying for new flights, we went the other way. Straight into the belly of the big skies.
We hiked through rain to photograph moose and elk, bison and long stretches of endless land. Golden fields after the harvest, abandoned mines and leftover ruins from the gold rush. And of course, cemetaries atop hills where the whistling winds emulate the soundtracks of old western movies. Land once conquered, now lost to time. We stayed on the small roads, sometimes ending up nowhere at all but a crag of beautiful rock or the tributary of a small river. There it was quiet. The kind of silence you wish you could put in your pocket to keep.
It was a birthday gift, and a very fine one at that.
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| Big Sky, Montana. |
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