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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Earth Colors
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“Deal.”
So I finished my sandwich and took a shower and dressed, shifted the sleeping baby into the carrier that doubled as a car seat, bundled her up with extra blankets, then hoisted her, the car keys and the backpack, and headed out into the cold.
It was a clear, crisp morning, the kind of air that freezes the hairs inside your nostrils. Just a few high clouds traced the sky. Watching the ghosts of my breath, I loaded the baby into the car and headed up Sheridan Avenue the opposite way, toward the road to Greybull. Soon I had left behind the tourist traps and strip malls and was rising onto the mesa that stood above Cody to the east.
The road swung eastward then started its climb onto the vast, desert outcropping of the Willwood Formation, a soft, striped shale that fills the middle of the Big Horn basin. The Willwood had been laid down by the events of the Eocene Epoch: Fifty million years ago, as the earth began to heave the Rocky Mountains upward and wind and water and ice began simultaneously to wear them back down, the rivers carried away the eroded muck and dumped it here. Then, the climate was cool and humid, and the clays that settled in the lakes and on floodplains oxidized into vibrant hues.
In their labor of birth, the mountains had rested awhile, and then had heaved higher again, and the climate had shifted as well, becoming arid, with cold winters and hot summers. With the further uplift, the great-granddaughters of the earlier watercourses had ceased depositing mud and grit and had instead begun to erode channels forming broad bottom lands that were now dotted with ranches. Most of the Willwood Formation now sat like a custard in the center of the basin, surrounded by a ring of mountains that stood high like a knuckly old pie crust: Starting from the northwest and continuing counterclockwise to the northeast rose the Absarokas, the Owl Creeks, and the Big Horns, a great circle of ranges raised high by the titanic forces of the earth. Only to the north did the ground lie lower, and through this portal flowed the waters of six counties.
Thus, as was Nature’s whim, the bones of ancient lakes had become a desert sculpture. Time and water and wind had eroded the Willwood into
an array of hoodoos and pagodas and pyramids and temples, a badlands in bold horizontal stripes, a desert paint-box of purple and gray and red. It was a no-man’s-land, good for nothing but hunting fossils and rattlesnakes, searching for oil, and taking long walks to clear the mind.
I was driving along the upper edge of the valley cut by the Shoshone River—the aptly named “Stinking Water,” as it smelled of sulfur. My intention was to search for cobbles, a miscellaneous passion of mine. The rivers had occasionally been so vigorous that they had carried not just mud and grit, but also cobbles, and it was their whim to leave them here and there, laced through the shales. In places, these cobbles formed great boulevards, like Parisian streets run wild, a pirate’s sampling of every kind of rock that had stuck its nose to the air as the mountains shoved their ways skyward. The Shoshone flowed east from the Yellowstone Plateau, and thus carried volcanic rocks from the Yellowstone eruptions.
I pulled the car over on the first bench in the badlands and got out to look around. I got the baby into the backpack and began to walk, turning over gray and black volcanic cobbles; dark, smooth orbs speckled randomly by angular feldspar laths. Farther afield, if I could remember where to look, waited lovely pearl-white quartzites—metamorphosed sandstones—carried clear from Idaho, that would display the interlocking circles of percussion fractures, a mute record of the violence of their turbulent ride downriver, rings within rings within rings. To anyone else these oddities might be less interesting than hockey pucks, but to me they were beautiful, a fascination of form and parentage.
The sun was well up now, and the day was perceptibly warming. Thin traces of snow lurked in the shadows behind the nearest mound of stripes. “This is a desert,” I told Sloane, picking up our one-sided conversation where I had last left off. “That means it doesn’t rain or snow much here. In fact, the snow you see hiding in that shadow over there is probably the only snow that actually fell from the sky this winter. The rest of the time, it’s just the same stuff blowing back and forth. And it never really melts. It just finally wears out.”
Sloane Renee leaned toward my left ear, making a noise like a miniature steam engine. So much for telling tall tales to an infant.
I stooped to pick up a dark gray cobble about the size of a small cantaloupe. “See this? As the ol’ Stinking Water River cut down from
Yellerstone Plateau, she left me some nice chunks o’ basalt and rhyolite. Any higher up into the Willwood we won’t find these, so I’m a-gonna walk us on around the hill here, just following the curve like a cow does. Got it?”
Sloane’s little gurgling noise now filled my right ear.
I turned to the right to see why Sloane had turned her head. Along the road, right next to where I had parked, was another car, and its driver was just stepping out. The driver was a man, and the car looked like a midsized rental, all shiny gray and blandly medium. He stood and stared at us for a moment, then he began to walk toward us, picking his way though the cacti. He took his time, stopping repeatedly to look around at the scenery.
Tourist,
I thought.
Can’t figure out what to do with himself, so he’s going to ask what I’m looking at
. I stood and waited, a subtle tension rising within me. The openness of the western landscape was my solace and my refuge, but, having grown up on a ranch, I had always greeted the arrival of another person in that openness as a rare chance for a little socialization. My father had taught me that it was good luck to run into a neighbor: What if I’d fallen off my horse, or had a broken axle in a truck? But this time something didn’t feel right. There was something about this man I didn’t like. And this time, I had a tiny soul to protect. This time, I was carrying Sloane Renee.
I scanned the terrain, checking for the clearest route between the man and the cars should I need to run. There was only one obvious path, and the man was on it. I glanced left and right, trying to choose an alternative. To my left, the ground rose to a crumbly slope of clay; not good. To my right lay a long downslope leading to a sharp drop-off, and I knew the same topography wrapped around behind me. I stood my ground, wondering why this man had stopped his car here and what he wanted with us. I kept a good grip on my cobble, in case I needed to hurl it at him.
The man wore an expensive jacket, and, with the hood up and his head bowed slightly so that he could carefully read the terrain, I couldn’t see his face. He was within fifty feet of me before I realized that I had seen him before, and where. It was the gray-eyed man. He closed to within ten feet of me, still taking his time, now gazing here and there as if appraising the
landscape as a subject for a photograph, studying it, occasionally squinting his eyes and furrowing his brow in concentration, as if I had nothing better to do in the world but wait for him. This presumption added annoyance to my list of emotions stirred in me by his approach.
“Hello again,” I said, when he was so close that something had to be said.
He stopped and leaned his head backwards, hands in pockets, back arched, and looked at the high reach of the sky. Finally he looked at me, and smiled. “Beautiful here.”
“Yes,” I replied, wondering,
Why did you stop?
Remote places like the badlands have no pathways through them, no burger stands or hardware stores to which one might be on one’s way, so the idea that this guy thought he could make it look like he was “just happening by” simply did not wash. But the situation was even more confusing than that: Most tenderfoots—and this guy certainly wasn’t from around here—find the badlands an oddity at best, if not downright forbidding. They floor the gas pedal as they head up this road, not wanting to tarry an extra moment for fear they will wind up like the faked mummified corpses of prospectors on the postcards labeled BUSHWHACKED. But this man appeared to be drinking in the scenery like a fine wine.
Sloane Renee wriggled in her backpack and gurgled coquettishly at him.
He shifted his focus to her ever so briefly, just long enough to send her a silent kiss, a quick pucker of his lips. Then he fixed his eyes on me. “What are you doing out here?” he inquired. Belatedly, he chased the question with a smile.
What am
I
doing?
Digging around in my mental knapsack for a suitably abrupt rejoinder, I chose the obvious and said, “Collecting rocks.”
He peered at my cobble, austerely keeping his hands in his pockets. “You are a geologist,” he said.
“Yes.” Did it show? Was he being funny? Or was this more of his condescension?
“What’s your speciality? Oil and gas? Mining?”
“Oil and gas.”
He said, “I hear there’s a lot of oil production from this area.”
My arm ached to throw the rock at him. I began to ease around him, instinctively keeping up the chitchat so he wouldn’t know how nervous he was making me. “Well, yeah … right over there behind you, maybe a
couple miles south, is Oregon Basin Field. Then, farther south, Little Buffalo Basin Field. To the east, Elk Basin. Torchlight. Manderson. There’s bunches of them.”
“Have you worked in the oil fields?” He took a few steps, once again positioning himself between the cars and me.
I stopped, assessing my options.
He opened a pocket, took out a packet of dried fruit and nuts, offered me some. When I shook my head, he took a nibble himself. “Did you go out on the oil derricks?” he inquired.
Drill rigs,
I wanted to say, but this wasn’t the moment to be correcting his jargon. “Not anymore,” I said, stepping around him and now resolutely strolling toward the cars. “Oil and gas kind of cratered. It’s hard to find work.”
He nodded and fell into step beside me. “Not much work in petroleum back where I come from either.”
“Where’s that?”
“Pennsylvania.”
I had been right: He was from the East. Somehow this was comforting. A man who put me ill at ease might pop up in the middle of nowhere, but I had at least gauged him accurately. “Been awhile since Pennsylvania was much of a threat for oil or gas.” We were now halfway back to the cars.
He stopped and stretched and stared back out across the badlands, taking in the high dance of the Absarokas. “Or coal. Or any other geological resource.”
“You got other resources back there?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Pennsylvania had a little bit of everything, if not a lot. It was once the mineral resource capital of our budding nation.” His tone was ironic, but also nostalgic, even longing.
Why was I continuing the conversation? This was the type of chat I had with strangers at parties, when men got stuck making small talk with me and found out that I worked in a so-called “man’s profession.” The exchange usually continued through two or three more volleys before they suddenly spotted someone they needed to talk to on the other side of the room. But this was no chat-filled room, and I was carrying something far more precious than a gin-and-tonic. I moved closer to Faye’s car.
The man tipped his head to one side, as if this was what everybody did on early mornings in the middle of nowhere. He said, “But you don’t go out on oil derricks anymore. What do you do now?”
I was still trying to assess what I did not like about this man. He was part of an elite of which I had never felt a part, and even after all these years, I still reacted to the sense of alienation such specimens raised in me. The countersnob within reared up and I answered his question with a statement meant to intimidate him right back: “I have a ranch.”
“Oh?” He didn’t smile. He fixed a probing look on me, as if testing for something.
I wondered if he didn’t believe me. It was not precisely true that I owned the ranch. I had been raised there, and I expected to inherit it one day, so, in a manner of speaking, it was mine. But I had not been there in years, and the rash act of speaking these words out loud, here in the open lands that were so beautiful to me, was like tugging at a self-inflicted wound. “I—I grew up there. Mostly I work as a geologist.” I realized that I was getting rattled, so I corrected that. “Sometimes I work as a forensic geologist.”
This seemed to sharpen his interest.
“Oh? What does that involve?”
I had arrived at Faye’s car now, and I stood with my hand on the door handle. I hadn’t locked it. I had only to open it now, duck inside, and drive away, except that to do so would be difficult with the baby on my back. I couldn’t imagine why this man was asking me all these questions, or why I was answering them, but I didn’t feel I could stop without signaling that I was getting uncomfortable. Slipping into “cool” mode, I said, “I do the Sherlock Holmes thing; you know, dig dirt out of people’s shoes and analyze where they’ve been. But also, it’s more a matter of understanding the world of geology. What geologists do, if the murder involves a death within a professional community. What geologists search for, if it involves how geologic resources are used or abused.”
He nodded. “The big picture.”
I began to feel oddly naked. He seemed to be recording me inch by inch, collecting words to go with the image he had mapped the day before. “Sure,” I said. “The big picture.”

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