New York Times Editorial Notebook
Out of the Darkness
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: March 17, 2010
When the sun finally rises, this will be a gray day, a great slab of flint laid across the plains. But the sun is still an hour off, and the snow is salting down just east of Riverton, Wyo. My eyes are straining for sight in the void out there, looking to see what emerges first from the darkness. The answer is the blackest objects — the old tires that ranchers sometimes place beside their cattle guards and the cattle themselves, black Angus stirring in a creek bottom. The cattle look as though they were bred black just so humans could find them easily in the gloom.
But mostly there are ravens, moving in singles and mated pairs, not so much gliding as fighting off the stiff north wind. They know the lights of this highway well, and I see them hopping into the ditches or flaring upward on the wind just out of my path as I hurtle by. To say the light is rising is to overspeak. I can just discern the seam between earth and sky. And in that seam, farther down the highway, I can see ravens sitting on the telephone poles as if the poles had been planted just for the convenience of their species.
The gray ahead broadens and seems to grow heavier, as if there could be no getting out from under it. And slowly color begins to emerge, what color there is — mostly gray-greens and bloodless tans. Up in the mountains, the river willows would look like a tartan now. Out here on the plains, pressed beneath the sky, they seem to be blushing furiously but only by contrast with the immensity of the drabness that surrounds them. It is a mood, I know, the wan hour of morning that makes their beauty feel so hidden, so lost.
And then, too, there is the question of what emerges last as the day rises. One answer is the pronghorn. I pass a small band standing right by the fence line, and they are barely discernible, almost without dimension, as though they had been camouflaged for the light of dawn. But the last thing to emerge in the dawn — stepping into visibility — is a red heeler dog trotting toward me in the brush along the ditch. He looks up at my headlights as if I were lost and he was the way home. I hope dearly that he isn’t lost and keep myself from turning back. The day is up now over central Wyoming, and I feel suddenly as if I’m merely microscopic, driving across the fawn-colored hide of a great beast.
