The Winds that Fill the Voids

Dispatches from a Wild Mind is a weekly Precipitate feature that explores the wild in place, nature, history, and art.

Metal blinds bang. Doors rattle. The sounds are anything but unexpected or haunting. Moonlight through open windows casts sharp shadows. On the tiled floor, held-together hands flutter and dart like bats swooping for invisible insects. Outside, coyotes yip and howl.

The moon is whipped-cream white and nearly full. On the patio I hold my elbow to the horizon. The moon hovers at the height of my upheld fist. Except for a few white wisps like hair spread across a blue pillow, the sky is clear. Variable stars flicker like light reflected off the rising and falling of waves. What I can’t see touches my skin, tousles hair in need of a trim. It affects everything: The crickets rubbing together their legs, the water showering the alfalfa fields. From a distance in daylight, the water looks like smoke. Tonight, moonlight glints off the center-pivot irrigation pipes.

In the foreground, cedar and cottonwood bend as if bowing to the moon. Beyond, the surrounding ridges appear gray, washed out like a water-colored landscape. Only the brightest stars appear in this light: the T of Scorpius, the spine and body of the Great Bear, Arcturus in Bootes. The wide-spread W of Cassiopeia resembles the stick-figure birds I drew as a child. Though I’m in it, this scene seems neither real nor like something I might imagine.

Earlier this summer when wildfires burned in Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota, smoke settled like mist into the Niobrara River’s wide and shallow valley. The air smelled sometimes of burnt wood, an odor I know well from childhood camping trips and a youthful fascination with fire. For hours in front of my grandparents’ fireplace I’d marvel as wood glowed red and then blackened to cinder and ash. Here, local ranchers worried. How could they tell if a fire was new or nearby? They couldn’t, and neither could I.

Distance in western Nebraska is deceiving. Wind-churned smoke rose in billowing clouds above Curly Bear Hill north of Agate Fossil Beds’ housing complex. That fire’s close, I thought. So too did the superintendent, an easterner like me. Take the distance you think it is, he later explained, and multiply by three. That’s what the neighbor, a rancher and lifelong valley resident, had told him. When the superintendent shared this, we stood in his driveway eating watermelon as smoke from another lightning-struck fire grayed the eastern horizon. We judged that fire to be seven miles distant, just beyond the horizon. The same rancher said, “No.” The blaze was 20 miles east and blowing south across drought-dry ranchland.

Twenty million years ago, drought and wind shaped this land and led to death and burial. Light from the same stars reached a vastly different landscape, one a hundred and forty feet higher than today and filled with volcanic ash blown east. Then as now in this landscape, wind was water’s constant companion.

Visitors today assume water the element whose effect is most readily visible. I did, too. Look out the three visitor center windows behind the fossil exhibit, and one sees a rich green wetland and rising bluffs. Water eroded this land. When rains came, draws drained the tablelands. Streams and rivers flowed and cut shallow valleys. But they weren’t the first.

Earlier valleys had filled with wind-borne volcanic ash as gray as the moon’s seas, its crater-pocked maria. For a time, water reworked and layered that ash and buried mammals. When the rains ceased, ash fell and remained unworked where it lay. Like snow, it accumulated without layers. It filled in voids. Then the rains returned. Wind today brings new, fine ash. If drought and fires continue, winds once again might fill this valley with ash as pale as moonlight, ash that obscures all but the brightest stars.

Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger