West, Over the Mountains
Don’t close your eyes. Don’t you dare fall asleep. You need to see it all. These are my grandmother’s instructions as she peers at me through the back window of my parents’ blue Oldsmobile, waving goodbye from the driveway of her house on Avalon Road in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She stands in the sunshine, smiling, shifting her weight from one foot to the other on the cracked concrete slab. She is poised at the base of the brick stairs, ready to go back inside, out of the summer glare. Her hair, piled in immobile, silver curls, swirls around her head. Dad reverses and waves once more. I churn the window up, and we head west, over the mountains. For home.
I think this is where it begins, my obsession with the open road. I want to be obedient, to placate my grandmother, who undoubtedly offers these instructions to tease my parents — they wish for nothing more than peace on the five-hour drive. I want to report back all I’ve seen.
Thirty years have passed since then. Nolan and I are with our boys north of Fort Collins, Colorado, on US Route 287. The land is flat enough to see the weather. It is a big, big sky. To the west is happiness, and we are headed all the way to the coast. The smell of rain on red dirt comes through the air conditioning vents. We have been out for hours on the road watching the day descend.
I-80 now, westbound toward the setting sun. A long train sidles around a bend outside Rock Springs, Wyoming. A strip of cloud is torn from the edge of the horizon as from a spiral-bound notebook. The sun sinks behind a cliff into the darkened silhouettes of mountains. The world reveals its edges.
It is early summer. We’ve been locked away, guarding ourselves from the global health crisis. Following instructions, we stayed home. Two months prior, Nolan’s nephew came into the world — a pandemic baby. We’ve missed so much. He’s getting bigger, already starting to smile when we talk to him on the screen. We are driving to Portland on a whim. We are driving to meet him, driving to see his smile.
On the road, I think of every time I’ve driven west. The roads, the land — it accumulates. Heavy, anvil-bottomed clouds build above the horizon — they hold memories of other journeys, of time now gone. Driving west has always led to something, led to story, led to love. To a man, yes. But mostly to the land.
There is the time in college, the first time I drive to Colorado to work for the summer — the view coming north on I-25, the Sangre de Cristo range — and I have to pull over: to see, to memorize the feeling, to make an attempt at understanding these peaks for the first time. I meet a boy in the mountains that year. It’s as if the road has driven me directly to him.
There is the time after I graduate when I drive west to Seattle to be with that boy. There is the time after we are done when I drive west to Colorado again with a broken heart and meet my husband. There are all the times we drive west, to the mountains – until, at last, we live there.
Now, we drive out of — through, within — quarantine. This brings into focus my love of the land. How happiness is west. This is where liberty is magnified — I remember what I’m so thankful for — this freedom, this wind, this openness. This memory of my grandmother, whispering in my ear. Don’t close your eyes. Don’t fall asleep. You’ll miss it.
My first time west, I was paralyzed by the mountains, the breadth and range of it all, the time it takes to travel from one place to the next. One minute I stood on the gravel shoulder of the empty interstate at dawn, and by the next stop I was in a different country altogether, mountains hazed over by nearby brushfire.
I am cut by the mountains, slain by the size of the sky, drawn by the vastness of my own capacity for wonder.
How — I wish I could ask my grandmother those years ago — how to see it all?
I-84, along the Snake River in Idaho. Blue mountains surround us. They are everywhere, defining distance. Green fields, sky forever. Here I can forget everything else, how the world burns, collapses, suffocates. Here, where we relieve ourselves on the side of the road and only stop for gas or food. Here, where we wear masks in truck stops and repeatedly sanitize our hands. Here, where we can’t deny reality when others are around.
Here, where the openness offers comfort, and the distance soothes, and for a moment we can forget all the pain.
Idaho is vast, windswept. Every house we pass is set back, nested into a windbreak, cottonwoods and cypress. There is acrid tar, a summer smell, paving. Deceptive waves hover over the asphalt. It’s that hot already. There is sky, and there is green, and we are here, small between them, carrying on and on, into the west, over the mountains. This much space is a breath, a long inhale. Nourishment.
Ryan Adams takes us over the miles, his voice buoyant, irreverent through the speakers. We drive on. The green gives way, acquiesces. I begin to wonder how often it rains here. The land seems to refuse cultivation in the high desert, but the cows in sage pastures, crowded into roadside holding pens, tell a different story. Near the river, the land blushes green again, and I remember water is life.
Oregon is cloud-shadow drifting on hills for as far as the eye can see. Rain in the distance never meets the ground. It is virga, caught in dark mountain teeth.
Then, almost suddenly, we are at the Columbia. The river takes us to Portland. We follow its current, pause at its dams. Nothing is open, of course. We can’t pull off to see Multnomah Falls or anything else, but it doesn’t matter, because the west never stops pulling us, carrying us, reeling us in. It is a long siren song, a frame of reference. Two days after we get to the city, we’ll go as far as we can, to Cannon Beach, to the Pacific — to stare out at the mystery of whatever is next. The ocean is not the destination. It is only the place we are going.
Portland now. The sound of rain on the roof. Big drops clang through the gutter. The sky is slate, and it looks like the downpour will last all day. We will drive out of it later, east, back toward Colorado. We will head over the mountains and the dry, high plains. I find I am longing for it already, after just a few days — for the road, the hours to sit and study the sky.
I never doze on our return journey. My grandmother still teaches me well. Her words clang through the cavern of me: I don’t want to miss any of it.
Northern Nevada. The Great Basin is a lunar landscape — empty, pure. Bones and curves, its beauty is austere and simple. The emptiness shows its edges. Dark ridges knife the horizon line into being. Stray light races across salt flats.
Rain pours. I see both the beginning and end of the storm. Nothing stands in the way of the wind. Nolan has to grip the steering wheel with both hands so that we are not blown from the road. Dark mountains come up on either side of the interstate. Mystery lives in the dimness between crags. The sage goes on, forever and ever and ever.
The fragrance of sand and sage and salt and sun mingle with the rain. I roll down the window to inhale the storm. This is wild weather, a front blowing over. Just after it begins to hail, we drive out and into the harsh sun once again. This violence is a memory.
The salt flats are a whiteout. Blowing sand and salt stick to the windshield. It is impossible to say what is land, what is sky. Distance is a concept I can’t understand. We cover the landscape as much as the landscape covers us.
We approach the Great Salt Lake. Water laps at the lip of the road. I wonder if it is rising or falling, flooding or evaporating.
The road is a dream. Time stops, and though we travel a straight line, our journey is anything but linear. As we move, threading ourselves across the landscape, I rediscover how to exist in myself. I am reset.
Each time we move west, over the mountains, my grandmother’s words resound. And I recommit myself to the promise: I won’t close my eyes. I won’t dare sleep. I don’t want to miss it.
Anna Oberg is a photographer and writer in Colorado. Her work appears in Cleaver Magazine, Burningword, Causeway Lit, The Maine Review, and others.