As a child of the Midwest, I grew up with trees on all sides. Oaks and sycamores and dogwoods and redbuds, and sweetgum shaded the town at every intersection; hedgerows bordered the pastures. The horizon was something you glimpsed between the komorebi. But the older I get, the more I long for the open, the kind of open that makes you feel both small and free. Maybe that’s why the return trip from El Paso pulled at me so deeply. As we drove through New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma, chasing the long shadow of a summer storm, I found myself thinking not of a specific landmark, but of a painting: Wind of Wyoming by Maynard Dixon.
Dixon is, to me, what the West looks like; not just in form, but in feeling. His skies are impossibly wide, his mesas like sleeping giants, and his plains endless in their amber hush. Wind of Wyoming isn’t a picture of any place I visited on this trip, and yet it mirrors all of them. There is something in it that speaks to the rhythm of the road: the slow swell of grassland, the layered bluffs beyond, and the wind, the ever-present wind, that moves through it all like time itself.
I remember one moment from the drive, just north of Amarillo, when the land flattened into a kind of serene vastness. You could see for miles in every direction. The road ahead shimmered with heat. As I was driving we passed windmills and grain elevators and the ghosts of old Route 66. There was a silence between us, but it wasn’t empty. It was the kind of silence Dixon paints. A reverent hush. The kind that asks you to listen to your own life, to let the road unwind the knots you didn’t know you carried.
That’s when the heat hit me, dry, hard, unrelenting. For a moment the window was rolled down; it was the kind of wind that slaps the breath out of you and reminds you you’re alive. There is something primal in that kind of heat, something old. It doesn’t just touch your skin, it wakes your bones. That blast of dry air, scorching and fragrant with dust and sage, stirs a memory deeper than thought. It’s like the body recognizes it before the mind does.
This, it says. This, is the real world. This, is the world before the world. You are not above it. You are of it.
It reminded me of Jack Kerouac, of On the Road, and the way he wrote about the West as if it were both place and promise. “The road is life,” he said, and I believe he meant it. For Kerouac, the West was the end of the line and the beginning of something raw and luminous. It was where the map ran out and the soul kicked in. Every time he crossed the Rockies or hit the desert, his prose caught fire. There was something sacred in the barrenness. Some redemption in the desolation.
“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”
The West, even now, still holds that mythology. Freedom. Not the kind you legislate, but the kind you feel in your ribs when the sky is too wide to measure and the only sound is wind over land. Freedom that comes from absence; the absence of walls, of clocks, of obligation. Out there, nobody asks anything of you except that you keep going.
Wind of Wyoming feels like that. It leans into the wind, not away. It welcomes solitude. It tells no story but its own; one of light and dust, of clouds that drift and plains that endure. There’s no hero in the frame, no destination. Just movement. Just time. Just the echo of something vast and patient.
Thomas Merton once wrote, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” That’s what this road trip did for me. It gave me back a part of myself I didn’t know had drifted off; my love of motion, of light, of space. And it asked me to release what I couldn’t carry anymore: deadlines, disappointments, distractions. The open road takes those burdens gently, like wind across a prairie. It doesn’t argue. It just moves them along.
Returning to Missouri, the trees began to gather again. The horizon grew closer. But I held onto Dixon’s vision; that canvas of wind and gold and blue. I still do. Because in some way, it’s not just Wyoming. It’s everywhere the land is large enough to make you feel small in a holy kind of way. Everywhere the wind still sings.