The Wyoming Spectator: Chinook Winter
Croke, Bill
by Bill Croke Chinook Winter Subzero cold is no match for a warm melting wind. 2 0 Cody, Wyoming T o write about the weather, you have to be where the weather's interesting, or preferably...
...My front storm door bangs all night as if being pounded on by a violent drunk...
...But for the faint rumble of a semi on the distant highway, and a few dirt roads built by the Bureau of Land Management, the landscape is virtually the same as it was in the nineteenth century...
...In the northwest is the eternally snowy Beartooth Plateau, a forty mile wall ten thousand feet high...
...time my friend Joe rescued me, while his wife held down the fort at home and kept early-rising children away from the presents...
...Last winter he burned the ten acres, spending a rare, calm sunny day shepherding the low fronts of fire across the ground with a steel rake and the garden hose never far from reach...
...Not in time, as it turned out: Christmas Day brought another eighteen inches of snow...
...The big snowstorms bring antelope crowding into the sheltered draws...
...2 0 Cody, Wyoming T o write about the weather, you have to be where the weather's interesting, or preferably lethal...
...This BILL CROKE is a freelance writer in Cody, Wyoming...
...A few more after that, and my neighbor will free his four horses, who spend the summer roaming...
...On the undulating prairie east 64 March 1997 • The American Spectator of Cody, the typical winter day has some wind, either of the cold or mild variety...
...The chinook—in Salish it means "snow-eater"—is both friend and enemy...
...Off we went to round up stranded in-laws, crashing through drifts in his big truck and following country roads that hadn't seen the plow and were awash in scalloped waves of white...
...Miles of canals feed the residential ditches their share of the frothy, brown runoff...
...In cold the sky is milky, especially before snow...
...Shadows of clouds the size of towns drift over the gray sage...
...Stuck together in the barbed wire they become a buffet for coyotes, who arrive from out of nowhere...
...It is the paradox of the frozen: cold brings quiet, yet in the quiet you hear everything...
...Your vaporous breath trails sideways in the wind...
...Yet any time wind —no matter how balmy—blows for three or four days at 4o to 6o miles an hour, it tends to get on your nerves...
...Open the car door and it threatens to fly off...
...The Pryors fill the northeast corner, their piney draws home to sturdy wild horses, arrowheads and fossils, and their canyons decorated with ancient petroglyphs...
...I playfully slap his soft snout to tease him, and then back up as he tries to retaliate...
...The American Spectator March 1997 65...
...Warm as milk," as Wallace Stegner put it, the chinook can erase a foot or more of snow overnight...
...My neighbor, an older man retired but for his small horse boarding operation, putters in the big pasture in his overalls and old white straw cowboy hat...
...Within days the grass comes on like hair on a shaved head...
...The hard ice at dusk will be nothing but slush and mud by morning...
...After a subzero blizzard froze the battery in my senescent Honda, I had it replaced...
...then, a few days later, the fuel pump went too, making me a familiar roadside figure for a while, my thumb out hoping for a ride...
...In Wyoming, madmen hear the stars...
...The lucky ones die of exhaustion and exposure right there on the wire, before the coyotes get close...
...If the pronghorn is unlucky, it will escape bloody and only maimed, and will be followed...
...From Bridger Butte, high and flat and overlooking the vast sagebrush expanse, I can see for miles, in every direction, all the mountain ranges that ring the Big Horn Basin...
...The Big Horns run north-south, with Cloud Peak a massive jag in the middle...
...The water rushes down the 29th Street gully like a rowdy trout stream, feeding the side ditches along the way and flooding my neighbor's burned pasture...
...The morning paper catches an updraft, and instead of landing on the steps, grazes the roof on the way to the backyard...
...The world is buzzing and alive...
...At the end of the day there was charred, smoldering ground, and at night—under a full moon—a luminescent blue fog that hung just above the ground until a breeze shredded and dispersed it...
...The southwestshows the Absarokas and the sharkback Carter Range...
...He shovels loose clods in the irrigation dishes, and cleans out the winter's detritus...
...Here winter has been punctuated in a cadence of blizzard, dead cold, wild chi-nook — at twenty below, thin ribbons of smoke from chimneys and exhaust pipes rise upward for what seems a hundred yards or more, finally fading into the cobalt sky...
...The cottonwoods bordering the west side of the pasture sizzle and sway in the breeze...
...One steed is familiar, and his little horse brain might remember that last summer I fed him handfuls of small peeled carrots...
...Other times the antelope entangle themselves in fencelines hidden beneath the layers of snow...
...Each time they insisted on taking me to my exact destination, all the while talking politics and current events...
...Usually it would be a male retiree, topped off in a cowboy hat and driving a pickup with a cab bigger than the room I write in...
...n spring the chinook becomes a caress! ing warmth signaling new grass and the tiny green flags that are the first leaves on the cottonwoods...
...The air is full of debris, and anything light travels: hats abruptly leave heads...
...A couple of these gentlemen picked me up more than once, and invariably they'd get around to asking, "When you gonna git your outfit fixed...
...Pastel plastic grocery bags decorate the branches of gaunt cottonwoods...
...His heavy black head bobs and wags...
...When the draws drift over the poor things drown...
...Tires rolling on the frosty pavement make a sound like ripping Velcro, and at night you can just about hear the firmament throbbing...
...Completing the turn in the south are the low, lonely and roadless Owl Creeks, way down by Thermopolis and the Wind River...
...The white wafer sun sports a halo, and nearby hills are veiled in pogonip...
...You are constantly leaning forward...
...Sometime after the beginning of May, when the freezes seem safely over, the water department opens the gate of its reservoir, and mountain snowmelt circulates into Cody like a blood transfusion...
...We meet at the fenceline to review old times...
...To circumnavigate the three hundred miles of Basin by car would take the better part of a day...
...Winter is over this year...
Vol. 30 • March 1997 • No. 3
