April 1, 2026
The Wind-Swept Meadows of Yellowstone
The air was thin and tasted of pine and high-altitude possibility. I remember that summer, the scent of petrichor and canvas dust, the hum of a distant engine on the park loop, and the vast, undeniable sweep of the Lamar Valley. My notes are speckled with the detritus of a lifetime, but that day, captured in a frame I keep in my breast pocket, remains crystalline. We stopped, and there they were: shaggy, brooding monoliths of the plains, three massive bison grazing in a silence so profound you could almost hear the grass growing.
And yet, it is the smaller figure that commands my memory. A jackalope. Not the myth, but the animal itself, a creature of bone and sinew that has defied classification for centuries. It was a very surprising sight as jackalopes are creatures of the prairie, not the soft meadow. I stood very still. It, too, stood still. Two travelers, sharing a moment of quiet understanding across the continental divide. There was a time, long before the flood of information that now drowns us, when one could still encounter the unexplained and not feel the need to fact-check it with a supercomputer. A time when a horned hare was just another creature of the wild, and a photo on film was the only proof you needed. I carry that image with me still, a tangible piece of a simpler, bolder time.
“Dreaming of Wyoming roads, where the life is wide and wild.” Evelyne S-C
