Border States is a multi-year project focused on the vast short grass prairie where Colorado meets Wyoming. Subtle, desolate, rich in implicit metaphor and human history, this landscape evokes narratives of transition. From human-scale dramas of longing, love, and death, to geological dramas of natural and human-caused scarring and erosion, this land bears witness to, and embodies, time and loss.
Wound
In 1831 one hundred and sixty Crow hunters were massacred by a rival tribe in a small rock formation five miles south of what is now the Wyoming border. Two hundred feet in diameter, the circle of rocks has, since the massacre and probably long before, been the site of murder, mating, birthing, drunkenness, and gunplay—physical penetrations that lead to death, and to life. In this circle, and mostly at night, humans have for nearly two hundred years claimed the freedom to express all the tumult of hearts and loins—love and hate, worship and defilement, yearning and despair.
Border States is a multi-year project focused on the vast short grass prairie where Colorado meets Wyoming. Subtle, desolate, rich in implicit metaphor and human history, this landscape evokes narratives of transition. From human-scale dramas of longing, love, and death, to geological dramas of natural and human-caused scarring and erosion, this land bears witness to, and embodies, time and loss.
Mystery
Vedauwoo is a Cheyenne sacred ground just north of the Colorado border. If the rock circle of Wound holds a potent brew of id, the towering rock formation and hushed forests of Vedauwoo inspire deep reflection on our eventual journey from the immediacy of feeling and sensation in this life to another realm through death or spiritual transformation. Wooded portals invite us to consider the mystery beyond and offer a path through. Natural altars suggest shelter in the metaphysical, and the ‘furniture” of the altars—particular sticks and stones— are frequently rearranged by visitors, often with fresh metaphorical intent.
Border States is a multi-year project focused on the vast short grass prairie where Colorado meets Wyoming. Subtle, desolate, rich in implicit metaphor and human history, this landscape evokes narratives of transition. From human-scale dramas of longing, love, and death, to geological dramas of natural and human-caused scarring and erosion, this land bears witness to, and embodies, time and loss.
Grace
If Wound addresses the intensity of life, and Mystery explores the transcendence of life’s dramas , Grace suggests our eventual integration into sky and soil after death. The writer Phillip Pullman has suggested that a man’s worst fate is to retain consciousness after the physical body has expired—the Christian view of Heaven. Better by far, according Pullman, is to dis-integrate as an individual at death and re-integrate with the cosmos for eternity.
In 2013 a flood of biblical proportions scoured the Big Thompson river canyon in Northern Colorado. To prevent future cost to life and property the Department of Transportation re-engineered the canyon and, by the fall of 2020, bulldozers had revealed a geology of astonishing grace. Seeing the canyon now can we finally say, without a leap of faith, that our lives rest on a foundation beautiful, orderly, and immutable?
On October 17, 2020 high winds drove the massive Cameron Peak Fire toward the Buckhorn valley in northern Colorado. Three days later, ground still breathing smoke, I discovered in a tiny side canyon a narrative of the inferno. Flames had blasted through the narrow cleft with an intensity that blackened earth and tree trunks but left high limbs and autumn leaves intact. After the fury of wind and fire I found a scene startlingly serene—leaves like gold coins carpeted a soil so charred it crackled underfoot. Just another fine fall day.
In 2013 a flood in the Buckhorn Valley of northern Colorado devastated local farms and homes, some of which were, and remain still, abandoned by their owners. Seven years later one such property, owned by a solitary man in his 50’s, bears evidence of many harsh and lonely seasons. But it also, in overgrown apple orchards, rotting coops, piles of disintegrating everyday objects, gives poignant testament to the highly individual kingdom this man had created, and the loss he suffered.
As a small child I visited the new dioramas at the Museum of Nature and Science on a school field trip. We gathered to see the animals: here was a mother lion feeding her cub, there a fox leaping for a mouse. In 2019, more than fifty years later, I visited again and was stricken by their heartbreaking sameness—the mother lion whose cub never grew, the fox whose leap never landed. I imagined the animals’ spirits hovering over their empty bodies, begging for an end, and was acutely aware of my now-long life, full of richness, certain of mortality. Why, when we’re told that eternal life is heaven, do these animals seem trapped in a mournful purgatory?
