Oh man.  I’m crushing so hard on Idaho right now.  I feel myself tightening my heart tethers even more, double knotting my soul strings to the land here, the sky, the wind, the spring creeks, the rivers wild, the timber (pungent douglas fir, subalpine fir, pondi pine, aspen, scrub maple), the sage.  Bless it all.  It is sweet tincture against the shadows of this world.

We went out yesterday afternoon, hunting grouse for our dinner table, of course, but also to walk up into a high place and survey our beautiful little pocket of the world.  To place the delicate, wild wafer of nature on our tongues and drink the breeze in holy communion.  There was Idaho, unfurling like a banner beneath our feet, rolling out like a royal rug in hues of tawny gold and silver sage.  I am not sure there’s a place more rumpled, more eaten by wind, mule deer and river water.  I think, time and time again, that the very hands of God reached out and crumpled the skin of the earth here into a ball, as one would a sheet of pure white paper, before unfolding it loosely and draping it over the bones of our planet.  I see stone spines rising up as far as my eyes can see, and then beyond, out across the Snake River Plain and the Buttes into the wide crowns of the Lemhi and Beaverhead Ranges that lay pulsing with wilderness North of our little town.

I forgot about the wind here.  We’ve reacquainted.  It has cold claws.  I missed the savage nature of the air here, as though it too has to survive by tooth and nail in order to scrub the high places clean and devour the dust between the sagebrush.  It has a big job, exfoliating the interior West.  Someone has to keep it clean, I suppose.

When the sun began to set and the golden hour dawned I stopped breathing.  It was surreal, almost like a summer sunset polluted by wildfire smoke — bright orange and pink lighting up the forest floors between strands of timber on the mountain slopes.  I fell far behind the boys, stopping to point my camera at every little detail that rose up to meet me, breathing in the scent of the wild spaces here and pausing, every other step, to sniff the sage.