It’s astonishing to watch how society places so little value on the sage steppe of the American West. There’s an issue with how we go about looking and seeing, a problem with our eyes, a hastiness, an undiagnosed disorder, a rampant disease of superficiality, a general impatience that prevents us from using our sight as an apparatus that can lead us into appreciating and knowing the world around us.
The blatant disregard for the richness and beauty of this region can be seen in the shimmer and twinkle of beer cans festooning remote areas, the posted speed limit on the interstate highway of 80 mph keeping people in a hurry to get somewhere nicer, the nuclear waste disposal sites, and all the sons and daughters who turn their backs on their ranching and farming birthrights and leave the expanse of sagebrush for the city. I was not raised in this region, but I proudly live here by choice, and not with a stubborn spirit that seeks a test of endurance, but because I’ve had my eyes opened. I regularly tease out the answers to the riddles of this place. I am not bored. I don’t view this landscape as a wide-reaching sameness that touches the horizon in every direction. I see the steppe as an invitation to practice my curiosity.
As I write this, the pronghorn buck I shot this afternoon hangs from the rafters of my garage, cooling in the night air of early October. He surprised me on my way to a different location I had been scouting for days. I saw him in the distance, a lone figure, crossing through open range until he disappeared into a shallow sway in the land that I could never have guessed was there without the context of his form to reveal
