These Vanishing Hills

Our white car with its green canoe roped on top is singing out of the short-grass prairies of Montana into the dry hills of Wyoming and then east toward Spearfish and Deadwood. Far off to the south and west, a strange sky leans over strange land. A darkness, a scarcely visible wall, brooding beyond the sunlight—tall, impersonal, private—looming from this treeless prairie of high hills and thin grass as if the sky is dreaming its own landscape.

Beside me, my 18-year-old son Alex rests his head against the window, half asleep, his long legs folded beneath the dash. After four weeks hiking and canoeing, his face is tanned and shows traces of a young beard. He’s a lover of pickup basketball games and beat-box rhythms self-created, of free-styling hip-hop songs, and jokes. He’d rather spend time with his friends than four weeks with his father, but we have a good relationship and he’s humored me by joining me on this last trip before he leaves for college.

Earlier that afternoon, driving through Montana, we passed the Crow Indian Agency. For a few miles we followed the Little Bighorn River along the dry hills where George Armstrong Custer and his 210 men, on a hot day in June 1876, scrambled up through sagebrush and prairie grass to escape their deaths. Surrounded, cut off, cut down by as many as 2,000 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, they were backing along the highest ridge they could find. They must have seen rather quickly that there was no way out, no way out at all. Custer has become an icon of those surprised by death.

As we drive, that mottled barrier far to the southwest rears up, pushing high into mist and storm. After a while it seems to lean toward us. Even the nearer shadowed hills seem to be blowing toward us, mixed into a thickening sky moving low and fast from that distant shadowland. Must be mountains, I tell myself. They don’t look like mountains.

Alex is now awake and staring out the window.

The road rises into higher hills that are gathering dark pines in clotted groups with the grass gone greener. A single deer grazes in a passing meadow. Now, dark forests are running down out of the Black Hills, crowding left and right, and the massive mountain substance to the south is moving quickly. Then suddenly, a heavy wind beats us sideways, and the canoe atop our car screeches and bounces against the ropes. A low, black, running ceiling of cloud rushes over us, and then a slashing, lashing rain. Hard. Harsh. Blinding. Tearing at us. Shaking us. A terrific noise of driven rain. I hit the brake, slowing us, slowing us.

And then, as if in a dream, an old man is pedaling a bicycle in front of us, miles from any town, bent over and pedaling, his gray raingear flapping hard in the dark wind and rain, but not stopping, pedaling alone, his balding head like a thin crockery bowl turned against the battering rain, but not stopping, pedaling patiently, neck and shoulders braced grimly against it all, and our white car easing past his maybe 70-year-old figure bent and flapping behind us now like a storm-driven pelican. Our windshield washers are jumping back and forth, and I’m thinking we should stop and pick him up, but he is clearly not asking for help. I think of old Lear caught in a terrible storm, betrayed by his daughters and yelling, “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!” Lear chose to leave protection and “wage against the enmity ’o the air, to be comrade with the wolf and owl.” Perhaps this old man has chosen his way, and like it or not, chosen this storm, as Alex and I chose four weeks of cold mountains and rushing rivers in the Bitterroot Mountains. And now he is behind us, gone, and the windshield wipers leap to the flood—with a heigh-ho! the wind and the rain!—and with dark clouds chasing...