Wyoming’s Charlie Russell sky

I’ve always loved the art of Charles Marion Russell. Nobody ever captured the feel of the high plains and mountains like “Kid.” He could paint horses so realistically, they seemed to jump right out at you. He always got the light just right, like someone who had actually spent time in the saddle and not just in the studio. And Ol’ Charlie, he knew how to paint the sky.

I was reminded of that recently, out just after first light. It was that best time of day, before the sun is full up, when the light first hits the east side of Sheep Mountain and the clouds are all pearly grey and pink over the Laramie Range. The wind was blowing a gale down off the ridges, sharp as a knife. It was bitter cold. There wasn’t much stirring up on the mountain mahogany slopes north of the house, but it was a grand time to be out and to just take it all in. Not many might pause to look at the sky when the air temperature is 10 degrees and the wind chill is minus 13, but I guess that’s why there aren’t very many of us here in Wyoming.

Even the most dyed-in-the-wool-and-Carhartt Wyomingite forgets to stop and look up every so often. We drive past most of the pronghorn antelope in the entire world on our way to Casper. We see a thunderstorm that rolls up all black and foreboding and think, “Dang, I hope it rains at our house.” We never stop to think about how breathtakingly beautiful it all is. It’s not like we don’t appreciate the beauty of living where the sky stretches from this horizon to that one and where you can feel the strength of the earth beneath your feet. We wouldn’t live here if we didn’t appreciate it. But too often, we forget to enjoy it.

Many years ago, my family and I lived for a time in Maryland. We were temporary residents of a small town about 70 miles west of Washington, D.C., while I worked in the capital. It was a nice place in many ways. But you could never see the sky. It was usually cloudy, or at least hazy, and the woods made you feel closed in after a while. It was claustrophobic, but nobody there even noticed. I’m not sure we did either, for a while.

But one night, we drove over South Mountain to Frederick to watch “The Horse Whisperer.” You know, the movie that’s loosely based on Buck Brannaman, where the young woman and the horse get hurt and the mom hauls them both to Montana to heal them. When they get to Montana, there’s a big, panoramic shot of the Rocky Mountain Front leaping up out of the plains and a sky so big it just knocks you back in your seat. My wife, Kim, and my daughter, Sarah, saw that shot and immediately both burst into tears. They were ready to strike out for home that night because they missed the enormity of the Wyoming sky.

I think most people in the world never get to have that experience — to be stopped dead in their tracks by the enormity of the sky above them. They rise too late to see that pearly grey and purple horizon before the sun hits the high plains on a cold day in winter. They’re too busy at work to look up and watch as the clouds roll from horizon to horizon on a summer afternoon. And they’re stuck inside their phone waiting for their kids at soccer practice when the fall sunset turns the whole world to gold. They live “lives of quiet desperation” as Henry David Thoreau once said, with their heads down and their hearts sealed up against monotony. I wonder sometimes if we live our whole lives without ever looking up. 

Maybe that’s a good thought to consider, as winter turns to spring here in the Cowboy State — that this year, no matter what, we’re going to look up and see the sky. We’re going to stop long enough to feel the connection between the earth below and God above. We’re going to take a minute to realize where we are and why we’re here. And we’re going to be thankful for that Charlie Russell sky.