DAY 49 - Crowheart, WY - 926 miles from home

Why oh why Wyoming? This landscape is hitting me deeply - and I'm not entirely sure why. It's not just the proverbially big sky. It's not just the Tetons, or the striated sandstone buttes, or the reminders of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a sudden realization that, in the scheme of things, we're actually not that far from Devil's Tower (340 miles northeast of here). It's also the corrals of horses who stare at me languidly, assess my predatory potential, and then occasionally decided to trot away... or who are already breaking into a canter as I stride by. It's the equally placid cattle and sheep. It's the sudden surprises - like our campsite by the Pilot Butte Reservoir: the vast plains improbably yielding to a pristine sandy-bottomed lake with soft sand beaches. (And yet: the campground itself - absolutely deserted, a wee bit spooky and sad, despite its beauty). So here we are. Crowheart. In the middle of the Wind River Reservation - fifth largest in the US and home to Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone. Sacagawea is buried here.

Talk about "close encounters": I've been thinking about what makes an encounter, a meeting, 'meaningful.' This is another version of my ongoing question about impact - about what any pilgrimage 'does'... about what Liberty Walks can accomplish.... About what it means to cross this land at human speed, with as open a heart as I can muster.

Kate and I were talking about all of this, this morning. About the increasing loss, in our world of screens and screeds, of those glancing human touches: those small in-person encounters with strangers, who then become neighbors, who then - with our hearts' net cast wide - yield the nourishment of community. Each day as we walk, one of our practices is to lift up our faces to the world, and to wave at the passing cars. I especially love to hold out two fingers in a peace-sign wave to the motorcyclists. How absurdly happy-making it is when folks salute or wave in return! This is all so lower-case: the smallest increment of intimacy one can imagine. And. Yet. Somehow... Kate shared one of her own small increments of spiritual practice: to forego self-checkout at the grocery store. To seek out the less efficient, the more human: the connection. (I'm remembering my lovely small moment with Dawnavan at Albertson's in Caldwell...)

One of these small encounters en route to Crowheart yielded an astonishing synchronicity. Kate and Bob were already at our camp. I was walking the last leg solo. I heard a clatter on the road. Something dropped from a passing car. About 200 feet ahead, a car u-turned - stopped on the shoulder in front of me. I watched a woman step out of her car - wait for passing traffic - run into the middle of the road to retrieve the items that had dropped. Two dogs, tails wagging, ran across the road to greet her - leaping and licking. And then I noticed a fleece jacket on the road as well. I gathered it up, quickened my pace, called out "Is this yours?" No, she explained. She'd just stopped because she noticed some possessions fall out of a vehicle's hitch basket, and she wanted to collect them in case the owners return. "The dogs aren't mine either," she laughed.

And then the absurd trail magic - the synchronicity and serendipity that seems to come of its own bidding, now that I've finally slowed down to 3 miles an hour. Liberty Walks?? she said. I've heard of this before. Where have I heard about this?

It turns out this woman is Judy, who was at the same Unitarian Universalist family summer camp as Kate was. That was a good month ago. Some 200 people were at that camp - and yet not only did Judy know Kate but she became really good friends with Kate's mom.

SO. Judy who lives in Indiana - just happened to go to family camp in Washington state - just happened to be driving slowly back home across the country, just happened to be having her own adventure... which just happened to take her to the middle of Wyoming on Highway 26 on a sunny afternoon in late August. As I just happened to be passing by.

You simply can NOT make this stuff up.

The unfolding road. The sky. The plains and hills. Wyoming.

An inviting homestead. Who lives here? Will they be my friend?

Wyoming sheep.

Road Mystery #257: Breakfast of Champions.

Message from the women of Crowheart, WY: "Welcome to BEEF Country. Part of a Lasting Legacy. Enjoy Nutritious, Delicious BEEF. ~ Crowheart Cattlewomen."

Pilot Butte Reservoir, Wind River Reservation, Wyoming.

Judy, Highway 26.