Known and unknown - rediscovery

by Robert Tycen Hauser (France)

A leap into the unknown USA

I have now been in Paris almost 30 years, so going back home, to the west, to the United States west, harkens of something exotic as Paris once did when I was there. I go to my father’s 40 acres between Laramie and Cheyenne (Wyoming) at 8000 feet, where light plays all day, fading and intensifying, shadow and space pursue each other…Antelope and deer, moose, roam freely. Distant neighbors let their horses wander and graze. Granite formations scatter everywhere, remnants and ruins of ancient natural battles. Little by little the intense yellow daylight fades, culminating in hot oranges and pinks on the horizon where trees weave a delicate black lace along the ridges. With no light pollution, the limits of the sky melt into an infinite and endless starry night vault, a globe of splattered white points, traversed by the vague smear of the Milky Way. How a city dweller can forget such beauty is beyond me, and I am that city-dweller. That infiniteness seems to suspend a weightless wafer of land on which I stand and stare, think about life, what has been seen, what remains to be seen. Sometimes stars surge forward, having always been there, just not noticeable, life takes on another meaning, and I just want to gather this universe up and give it one strong hug. My mother’s family is from North Dakota, Grand Forks, on the Minnesota border, and in tribute to her passing some years ago I decided to do the Laramie -Grand Forks trip, maybe one last time? This trip that was sometimes the bane of our existence as children, her insisting we do the grueling 14-hour drive and remember our roots. But this trip took on a new meaning as I saw it with a domestic foreigner’s eyes, all my Parisian “sophistication” waned under the scrutiny of authenticity, of Americana… I took smaller highways when possible, as we would sometimes when I was young, and here the American road trip can be the most heartfelt discovery, competing with Timbuktu, or the Trans-Siberian. A myriad of dirt roads, sometimes slowed by a heard of crossing Antelope, lead from my father’s land out to highway 1-80, and down into Laramie, the starting point. The trip was quite simply, beautiful, and I forget how beautiful these regions, the American heartland, are… just space and light, rolling plains in beige and green, a churning, yet frozen, silent sea, still and endless until it meets expansive deep blue in a distant line, a seam on the horizon. Nothing. Stillness, except for perhaps a small herd of wild antelope to one side, to the other a clump of trees protecting a ranch compound, some cattle. At times a stain drifts across this sea, shed by a cloud or two… All of it cut by a double-lane ribbon extending to a distant point ahead, on the seam. Objects inch toward me in a slow progression, pass, as if in slow motion, even at 65 miles/hour, and disappear as if they have never been. Tiny towns dot, adorn the ribbons, with derisory populations of 40 or 60, one café with two old men in cowboy hats sitting in a booth…town names like Lusk, or Wheatland; I by-passed Chugwater this time. In one town a waitress told me, with a cowboy twang, that she is actually from L.A. (perhaps where she cultivated the accent?) and that she was just waiting for her husband to finish his legal problems before moving away forever. "He was accused of embezzlement at the Hardware store, they dropped the charges, now he is suing them." All of it reminds me of existence, of coming and going, Paris or Lusk. It’s all just, okay, just fine. My busy city mind slowly drains itself of need or pursuit, replaced by a churning still beige sea, blue sky, and a distant horizon, that I will never really reach.