The sun was just beginning to reveal the layer of dust on the truck’s dashboard. He was westbound, with the window down and his forearm cool from the air. Part of him felt that depressive doom of something free and innocent ending. The way he felt as a boy when summer vacations were drawing to a close or how he slowed down reading when he didn’t want a book to end.
The summer had passed like a mild wind sweeping over the sagebrush. He knew that he couldn’t just stick around, play farm, joyride horses, drunk-drive home from the Clover Club and live his life like a never-ending gap year. And he had tried to work on the book. Everything was already structured into chapters and reading lists, after all, and he merely had to sit down and write it. But he couldn’t. Gave up each time, after a few minutes. Sometimes construing a reason, like interpreting a sound coming from the horses to be worth investigating. Sometimes without any reason at all, except for telling himself that after all the self-induced deprivation of the past years, this time off was but a small and well-deserved consolation.
Now, driving past homestead farms with no neighbours and highway towns killed by the interstate, his thoughts ran away from all of that. What he saw left and right of the road spoke to him like poetry pregnant with symbolism and substance.
There was an abandoned church with a wall missing but the wooden cross on the roof still standing straight. A rusty rodeo bull in a farm junkyard. A lanky boy with an air gun in his hands. A dust devil in the distance, twirling the dry grass in the air. Bay horses shining in the rising sun. A white mule with a bloated belly in a field burned black. The last alfalfa on the fields, cut in windrows, their green turning into gold. A single goat outside the fence, standing close to the goats inside the enclosure. Bullet holes of different diameters in a STOP sign.
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Everything assumed importance, told him something, was somehow addressed to him. The misguided sprinkler that made the roadside sagebrush smell like rain. Two magpies sitting on a scarecrow. Faded stars and stripes in the wind. A chicken running out onto the road. Lazy dogs lying in the trees’ shade. One-ton bales looking like pawns scattered across a playing field. An old rusty red Union Pacific boxcar with ‘Serves all the West’ in faded yellow letters, serving as a chicken coop behind a farmhouse.
What followed was nothing but wide spaces. No more rivers and creeks, no more coulees and canals, no more pivots drawing green circles into the desert, no more wheat, barley, beets, beans or corn. Naked land. Nothing to make the desert bloom. No more of the magic that had given the valley its name not too long ago. No sign of habitation for miles and miles. Nothing but sagebrush range and jagged rocks, harsh and rugged. Economic wasteland without water rights. Sagebrush plain that ran unbroken until the hills on the horizon, except for the road he was on.
There was a lonesome Russian olive tree defying the high desert. And a black expanse burned into the ground by a wildfire, where the sagebrush would be gone for decades, grass taking over in the meantime. And a few scattered heads of cattle, grazing as though they were stray or wild, which they were not, as proven by dented tin-panelled corrals and chutes looking like stairways leading nowhere.
It was arid and rugged and remote country. Really it was just land. It was land that wanted to be left alone, that gave nothing away, that only gave you something if you offered water first. Soil that refused to be subdued. Country that wasn’t waiting to be made into a landscape. It was somehow empty and full to the brim at the same time. Undramatic but powerful. And he felt himself growing to love it like he never thought possible. How maybe only a convert can. How only the starved yearn for food and orphans for their parents. Stemming from a deficit, an absence, a yearning that was physical.
He remembered sitting behind his father on Sonny, his father’s favourite horse. It was after dinner. His father had to ride out to check the irrigation and took Will with him. Usually, he would be going to bed at this time, but he sat on the backend of the saddle blanket, on the flanks of the horse, holding onto his father with both hands. It was cold out, their breath visible in the moonlight. But he felt the warmth of the horse and his father, who explained to him that not too long ago there were no fences around here, prompted him to imagine that, told him how fences changed, how everything moved out here, how he sometimes wished it was virgin land again. He remembered everything his father said to him during that ride, every detail, could have recited it word by word, and sometimes did so to himself. It was one of the few times his father ever mentioned the past to him.
Driving out here now, Will felt the opposite of the prairie madness he read about in the books that Julie had given him. Settlers were said to be overcome by the endless sameness. No trees, no sense of place or control. Just deceiving distances and the fear of getting lost at sea. Some were said to imagine cabins like Fata Morgana castles where there were none. Instead of mirages, Will imagined all the signs of human habitation to be gone, the pastoral landscape turned back to wildness. No more fences, cattle or canals. Just sagebrush and buffaloes and native tribes traversing the horizon. He imagined his father, riding around as a young man, smoking and laughing. Will could sense that a part of him was still out here and that made him feel closer to him than any photo album or retold memory ever could.
He had printed out all of his father’s letter drafts. It was a small stack of paper. It should have been leather-bound with gold-tinted pages, instead of cheap print paper. But at least it wasn’t just an icon on an old desktop computer anymore; not just some zeros and ones that were never delivered. Will was able to hold it in his hands now and he read all the different versions of different words, sentences and passages over and over again, picturing his father sitting in his office, probably a glass of Scotch next to the keyboard, his two thick forefingers hesitantly touching the plastic letters. Will could see that his father had only typed at night; sometimes three nights in a row, usually weeks and months in between. He could have used a pen. He had a regular fine hand that seemed incommensurate with the hand’s work-wornness. But he used a computer. Maybe because it created the distance needed. Maybe because he wanted to prove something.
Angry honking dragged him back into the present. Cars were overtaking him in droves on the straightaway. He was barely going thirty on the interstate. Lost in his thoughts, he must’ve taken his foot off the gas.
It was a contradictory process, all this sense-making. It seemed to move backward as it moved forward, and he felt stuck in it. Once you see something, you can never unsee it and the longer you’ve seen it, the harder it becomes to imagine that there had ever been a time when you didn’t see it. Will found it more and more unbelievable to have been so wrong, to have taken such a drastic turn and to have stayed on it for so long without ever looking back. He had dug a deep ditch for himself that he couldn’t see out of. At the same time, he began to understand how one can be so stuck in a line of thinking, so entrenched that it seems irreversible until one is forced to lift one’s head up. When you drive fast enough, you don’t get wet in the rain, even with the top down. He grew determined to slow down, keep his head up, be mindful of the paths he was making for himself, never lose range again.
When the sun had risen enough that he rolled up the window and turned on the cold air in the car, he drove past a dairy feedlot that was at least half a mile long. Tens of thousands of nameless cattle sticking their heads through the metal frames alongside the road like offenders in a pillory. Behind them there were walls of straw bales, stacked higher than buildings. Looking ahead to make out where this row of cattle might end, he saw something on the road. The right lane was blocked by a police car. Its lights were flashing, which looked completely meaningless in this vast expanse. In the left lane stood an officer motioning for Will to slow down. When he got close enough for the officer to see him, he stepped aside and waved him through. In passing Will saw about a dozen men standing in line with their hands behind their backs, surrounded by police and people taking pictures.
The rest of the drive provided no distractions. He was alone with his thoughts. All those thawing thoughts. He was a candidate for joining a cult, given how desperately he was looking for answers, helpful metaphors, heuristics, cognitive shortcuts – anything that might help him to get there.
Horseback riding had to hold some wisdom. It had to illustrate something, somehow visualize what he ought to do, how to face the world, how to learn how to trust and go with the motions, giving rein when the going got tough, calming down when the stress around him went up. But how did that help with anything?
The only thing that felt substantive, like something instructively parallel, was the wolf. Reading about wolves – invariably picturing the one who may or may not have come out of the barley that day – every new fact he found made him feel something, beyond the facts on the page. It all seemed to hold lessons somehow. How wolves didn’t mill like dogs, but often walked as packs in straight lines for miles and miles, making it hard to read from their tracks how many there were. How similar packs were to human families in their structure and behaviour. How lone wolves were sexually mature pack members setting off to find a wolf who has also left their pack behind to start one of their own. How losing the dominant female often dissolved the pack. How higher tensions within a pack meant that more members left and dispersed. How wolves could be cannibals, eating their own (parents their offspring, offspring their parents). How after a fight the defeated would offer their throat, the victor snapping without biting.
And then there were all these theories and findings about the impact of their return. The implications for places they had been native to but gone from for a long time. About these animals that were afraid of humans but sometimes ate them. That were seen by some as the last chance to return to prehistoric wilderness and others as a threat to a world that long ceased to be wild. In between these poles of the wolf wars, there were complex causalities underlying the chain reactions running through the ecosystem – trophic cascades – triggered by this reinserted domino. How wolves ate elk and deer, which meant more aspen and willow trees, which meant more productive beavers, which meant healthier rivers. How wolves meant fewer coyotes, which was good for sheep because nothing kills sheep like coyotes. How wolves carried dead fish into the forest, which worked as fertilizer. How wolves took out sick animals, which prevents the transmission of diseases and helps scavengers like eagles and ravens, which helps fight global warming. But also, how wolves actually eat most of their kills and leave very little for other scavengers. How wolves drew so much attention while other animals went extinct. How wolves stressed and ate the cattle of ranchers who were already struggling. And how a lot of wolf studies were either unreliable, written with a political agenda in mind or of limited validity beyond the protected national parks in which they were conducted.
Will concluded that there were no clear answers. Just comfort to be gained in carefully considering context-specific conjectures. Just like Melville’s Ishmael growing more convinced that the white whale had no face, the more he considered its multi-layered and meaningful tale. And it didn’t frustrate him. Will embraced this lack of clarity, this complexity that he would have assumed away in his past research.
Even when considering the actual animal rather than the beasts of fairytale and fable, McCarthy was probably right: ‘The wolf is an unknowable thing. That which one has in the trap is no more than teeth and fur. One cannot know the true wolf. Wolf or what the wolf knows. It’s like asking what the stones know. The trees. The world.’ Even the people who thought about wolves for a living and literally talked to them – the researchers who went out into the field and howled at them, collecting data that way – even they learned little more than how long it takes the pack to respond and to come closer. Hoping for writings about the wolf and its return to teach you anything was a fool’s errand, mystic monkey business, snowflakes melting in your hand – just like all his other desperate metaphor yearning.
Outside the car the sagebrush bushes slowly grew smaller and further apart throughout Nevada, before they were replaced with pine trees when he left the Great Basin and crossed the Sierra Nevada, until he finally reached Californian concrete and ultimately his hotel close to campus.
Nils Röper has been awarded The Moth Nature Writing Prize 2025, for Lost Range, an excerpt from his novel with the same title, judged anonymously by The Guardian country diarist Mark Cocker.
