Medicine Wheel

Medicine Wheel John Lane ? I read the small print out loud to Mark. The rental contract states clearly that we are not to take the Lumina off the pavement. If the car breaks down, crashes, or sustains "road damage," all terms ofthe contract are "null and void." So much for contracts. If we wanted pavement, we would have headed forYeUowstone. We want gravel and dirt, andWyoming is known for it. One ofthe most popular guides for travel in the state is caUed 8,000 Miles ofDirt. The Big Horn Medicine Wheel is at the end of at least four miles of that Wyoming dirt. This morning we fought through an arriving convention of 8,000 Jehovah's Witnesses at the Billings airport, picked up the rental car, drove south, and caught U.S. Highway 14 out ofRanchester,Wyoming, thejumping -off point for an eastern approach to the Big Horns. Highway 14 is blasted into the very stone itself and cUmbs in every switchback mile through another geologic stratum, moving from the soft sedimentary rock of the Powder River Basin's ancient sea floor until it finally peaks out in gray, heavy Precambrian granite. Rising along a northwest-tending axis in northern Wyoming, the Big Horns are the best kept mountain secret in the West. Hardly anyone stops, in spite of the experiences to be found in some of the country's highest mountains: deep, jagged, and wild. The most spiritual people on this planet Uve in the highest places. So do the most spiritual flowers, the Dalai Lama has speculated. Life is sparse and sounds travel great distances. The air is thin at 9,000 feet in the Big Horns, and everything up here, in a geologic sense, seems to me exactly upside down: hard granite, the oldest rock on the planet at nearly 2.5 biUion years, should be deep in the earth, not pushed high to the top of these old mountains. But I know deep time 20 John Lane21 and the earth's gigantic convulsions have a way with even matter's hardest sentiments. Once before we flew into BilUngs and rented a similar car. That time it was Mark's first experience in the big western parks—Glacier, YeUowstone, Teton. The first place he wanted to return to when we planned the second trip out west was the mysterious Medicine Wheel. When we stopped on the first trip, we were headed for Buffalo, Wyoming, where we would stay with friends of mine for several days. Buffalo is on the eastern slope of the Big Horns. As we were crossing the mountains we slid up the dirt road to the Medicine Wheel because we'd seen the small red cross with the tight print on the Wyoming state map. Mark took a series ofphotos in our hour-long tourist visit to the Wheel. It was those exposures and the black-and-white prints he made that have drawn us back for a longer stay. "There's something in those rocks," Mark said more than once over the past four years. Mostly he talked about the "faces in the stone," and how he wanted to get there in the right Ught and catch them aU. I have a hunch Mark is on to something; it is the landscape around theWheel that is drawing us back, not theWheel itself.You could even say we are circUng back to work over sacred ground. Mark is driving. He has a bandanna wrapped around his neck, three days' growth ofbeard stubble on his face. He's relaxed. The nearest mobile phone ceU is a hundred miles away, and Mark's about as far from industrial/commercial photography—how he makes his living—as he could get in the continental U.S. And, though he misses his wife and little boy, Mark's happy about being out West. I'm happy too. For me, the last semester's EngUsh composition papers are finally beginning to recede surely as the Powder River Basin below us. Our first trip, when we approached from the west, we drove through YeUowstone, Cody, and finaUy LoveU, where we saw the Medicine Wheel Bar and the Medicine Wheel Motor...