Friday morning, still on east coast time, I rise at 5:30 AM, I feel a sense of urgency for the day to start, to not miss a thing. Presently the four of us: Joe, Judy, Wayne and myself pile into Joe's rented Impala for the ride downtown to Tom's Main Street Diner, a tiny little place where they will warn you how big the portions are and offer half portions if you like. The bacon was straight off the hog, homestyle.
Returning to the Z-Bar Motel to gather our belongings we were approached by a young woman who asked Judy if she were in cabin 21. Judy thought she was there to fix the phone, that rang all night with people calling the front desk looking for a room. Wrong. She was "I am Mouk", known to us from the Yahoo board. This French woman from Alsace, now living in England, had just two day earlier been in Namibia. She has flown half way around the planet to be here, and we almost missed her. She had arrived in Billings late the night before and stayed there and drove over in the morning light. She offered to follow us to Lighning Flat. "No way", we were all piling in that Impala, it holds 5.
The drive down I-90 to Gillette was spent primarily in discussion of Brokeback, prompted by some responce someone gave in the form of dialogue from the movie. Here five people who had never met before, drawn together by a story of the consequences of rural homophobia unloaned on one another what up till then they had only an internet board to post on. Ocassionally we caught the scenery, the abundant Antelope we say all day, and a few deer to play with them. The ocassional oil pump, slowly bleeding the world dry. My on tears slowly starting to drain me as we talk, I am glad I have brought along water.
In Gillette we gassed up and stopped next door at a farm supply place that advertized a new shipment of Wrangler shirts. Had to have one. The first one I saw reminded me of Ennis's shirt, Wayne found him a denim one, Judy a disposable camera, Mouk a jar of Almonds, Joe a relief driver.
"You finding everything allright?" I was asked by a female clerk. We engaged in conversation a good five minutes, she asking where we were all from and why we were visiting.
I told her we were on the trail of Brokeback Mountain, and did so gingerly.
"That was filmed up in Canada" she said.
"Yeah, but Lightning Flat is here." I told her. We talked a while longer and all the clerks were wishing us a good day when we left.
We continued up Rt. 16 a ways, missing the turn off for state road 59 while gawking at the open faced coal mine. I had no idea this area produced coal. It is quite a big deal. We doubled back and headed up the paved road to the National Grass Lands, missing the turn onto the gravel road that lead to Rocky Point. While pulled over to let a HUGE piece of equiptment, like a giant diesel generator pass on a flat bed truck we chanced to consult the maps again and realized we needed to go back. We were being looked after well.
The country side was wide open, rolling and rich. So green, greenish yellow, we past well maintained modern looking ranches infrequently with old car tires painted "No Tresspassing", signs that read "No Hunters Wanted, Don't Even Ask". We crossed numerous cattle grates and encountered several free range calfs standing in the middle of the road, taking off when we inched close enough. Both Cows and Calfs were branded, something I'd never seen in real life. Some sixty miles total on the best maintained gravel road I have ever seen. Our conversation continually peppered with with lines from the movie, we could make a whole conversation out of Brokebackspeak.
The countryside gave over to cultivation, huge round and rectangular bales of hay. The area betwixt the fields and the road a wash in Mustard, Cone Flower, Lupine. The Antelope herds growing in number and frequency. We encountered two vechiles and a grading machine the whole time on the gravel. It is not the poor, rough county I expected, it is still early in the season.
Reaching the community of Rocky Point we came upon the Rocky Point Cemetary, the only indication the place had a name. We had to stop, photograph the plot, the tired American flag flapping in the breeze. I produced a prayer tie from the trunk and fixed it to the fence, with my prayers for healing to be caried away on the wind. This was just the kind of place Jack's ashes would have gone into. We are quoting from memory now the passages in the story that describe the family plot, it faded plastic flowers and Ennis not wanting to think Jack was going in there. From that 90 degree angle at the entrance the road began its zigzag meandering toward our destination. Indentified in our Wyoming Gazettier at the "Rocky Point and Ridge Road", we meanered back and forth, like a cutting horse, past the Rocky Point Community Center, an abandoned looking prefab metal building with matching prefab metal out house, grounds choked with weeds, forlorn looking kids playground, long unused, one of those accordian looking white wedding bell decoration hung in the window for god knows how long.
I asked my travelling companions this question: "What does this story mean?" Judy asked me "Why are we here?" Yes, that was at least part of it, why were five people who had never met each other in this car headed to a ghost town where a fictional character never lived. The answer Wayne offered: because in this story something wrong happened. Because we cannot accept what happened to Jack and Ennis, we cannot stand it, and we will do anything to try and fix it. We discussed the hordes of fan fiction out there, where people pick up on a certain point in Proulx's story and carry it off into an alternate universe. Suddenly the closing of the story became a challenge from Proulx herself. There was no sign to tell us we had crossed into Crook County.
Up ahead a tank sat on the hill, a big white tank, be it for water or petrolium I don't know, and off to our right, a big old abandoned, unpainted house on a slight rise. It was a stunning sight, and we admired it more and more as we approached, almost did not notice the small white and green sign tacked to a fence post: "Entering Montana". Ah hell, we had made it. We were in Lighning Flat. We pulled into the road leading to the old house and stepped from the Impala into a place, to paraphraise Proulx: "Some where between what we knew and what we believed".
The house bore a resemblence to the Twist home, there was a piece of farm equiptment parked there, the remains of several collapsed buildings, the barn, a shed. Had Proulx herself been to this place, beheld this sight, or perhaps Ang Lee, or one of his scouts? We took group picture after group picture of ourselves with this foresaken relic in the back ground. The air and the sun were perfect, the sound was quiet, except for a breeze and the birds.
We started for the house, the ruts of the old road disclosing the bones of antelope, the over grown yard a mine field of old boards, junk, car parts, and old metal bedspring frame covered a 20 foot deep, dry, cistern. Judy was hesitant about going thru the weeds, but I took her hand and told her she had come too far to stop now. Why any of us thought going into the old place was a good idea, I dunno, but we did. A grand old place, bay windows not one pane left anywhere. Roof gone, floors in many places gone. Bird nests, cow dung, a skeleton in the closet, I think it was an Antelope. Not one wire, not one bit of plumbing had ever been in the place "in its life". The steps to the second floor were partly gone, it did not stop all of us from climbing to the second floor, all so oddly and errily familar until I realized I had seen this sceen a dozen times: it was the same as Ennis clibing the steps to Jack's room. The view out the empty windows I now recognized, it was the same greiving plain you see when Ennis shuts the door on the shirts, and the screen goes dark.
Outside swallows buzzed around the house, outside had once been a town with a post office and a newspaper. Here a family had lived, a large one maybe. Maybe they were buired down the road in the Rocky Point Cemetary, all its internees perhaps some extended family. Here someone had affixed something to the wall with a straight pin, whatever it was had long since vanished from the earth. We were perhaps the last visitors the place might every receive. Far to the south we saw a storm appraching, was treated to a display of Lightning in Lightning Flat. A place more ghost than town.
I collected the bones from the road, a handful of gravel, a bit of sage from the overgrown yard. I fastened a prayer tie to the barbwire fence and spoke quietly: "Jack, Ennis, Spirit, whoever, whatever you are that has come into this world and tormented me so, I acknowledge you. I will hear you, I will testify."
We all cried. We all greived our griefs, we all collected our paper sack and in the muted light of the late afternoon rain cloud, headed south the way we came, playing the soundtrack. "He was a Friend of Mine"
I sit here tonight, tears in my eyes still, still wondering. I no long wonder when it will end. It won't. I am forever changed by "this thing" that has grabbed hold of me. Maybe one day, if I am lucky to live out the normal course of my life, from that perspective I can tell you what, if anything, any of this means. Right now I know only this:
Whoever is moved by the story must one day follow the zigzaged road to Lightnin' Flat.
