Finding My Own White Buffalo

The white buffalo was born on June 4^th, 2024, and the tribes rejoiced. They named it Wakan Gli or “return sacred”. Scientists said the chances of Wakan Gli being born is one in a million, and the Lakota people hold it in esteem because it is a symbol of harmony and spirituality. Nobody has seen it since those early days in June though. Not one of the myriad visitors to Yellowstone has seen the creature, nor the park rangers or natives alike. We know of its birth; there are photos of the creature, hunched in fear at all the newness. However, bison born in the wild have a 20% chance of succumbing to “natural hazards” before they meet adulthood.

A few weeks after the birth of the storied white bison, I found myself hurtling down Colorado’s route 285, thinking about whether the pitiful thing was still alive. The 285 cuts across the state from the “flats” of Boulder and Denver, down through the San Luis Valley, all the way to New Mexico. I was searching for my own white buffalo, hoping that somewhere in the 400 miles or so of this trip down to the sleepy town of Taos, New Mexico, I could maybe find a semblance of harmony myself.

I came this way because I wanted god to show me what nothing looks like. All my life, I’d been sequestered, brining in swills of somethings – online multiplayer shooters, World of Warcraft, milf porn, Criterion Collection films, metroidvanias, 4chan, imgur, Facebook posts, xangas, tumblr blogs, IM away messages, flimsy novels, YouTube ASMR, Food Network cooking shows, cheap horror films, flash fiction, live TV, heady chapbooks, SpongeBob Squarepants reruns. I looked down at my phone and saw it still had no service. Perfect.

Nothing doesn’t need a rerun. Beautiful nothing would climb across my sight and force a reckoning. In the endless plains and torrid skies, I’d come to an understanding and peace. That’s why I cam to Southern Colorado – to find my own half-baked harmony, my own white buffalo that could teach me to appreciate my station in life. Striving perpetual against the injustices, against the crushing student debt, against the mediocrity of online dating, against the infinite lacking as deep as this sky above was getting old. So, I figured the best way to appreciate where I live and who I am was to travel to a place so obscenely beautiful, I’d either be forced to upend my life or swallow this savage fate. I suppose I chose neither; I suppose I chose both.

I ate a cinnamon roll as big as my head, encrusted with a plop of pure white icing and took off in my rented Nissan Rogue on a random Tuesday morning in late June. The 1100 dollars I spent on it was worth every penny, just to have the freedom to go and move. I started at my friend’s house in Boulder, eking along the canyon byways toward the chunks of sky that would poke above the snow-capped peaks. The sheer drama of it all, the hills and mountains caught in terminal disarray, a midpoint of a clash beyond our lives that ended with us living like fleas on the backs of giants. You look ahead of you to mind a crosswalk or stop at a traffic light; you gaze up at the mountains and wonder how much blood was spilled so we could call this place ours. It isn’t hard to imagine the infinite slaughter – the mountains remind me of that need to own. The mountains remind me that the gun-shy can rise to any peak, that the shortest distance between life and profundity is suffering, that the valleys awaken when we least expect it.

After around 130 miles of classic Coors Rockies with crisp air, you hit the plains. I’d been waiting for years to gaze into this nothing. The road coiled down another stern peak, the pines clinging to it like bristles in the wind. You’re in it now. Here’s your nothing: the wide expanse that harbors shrubs and sky. Shit.

The 285 inches along the scrubbier mountains, the Mosquito range peaking through the window on your right as you ebb and flow with the road. All is drama in height. All is pine trees and easy brush fire bushes, hearty and wiry life that can cling to the worst. You’re riding through this dense overflow of rock and placid browns, and it seems like the uneven swells of land and hill will never end.

And then, it does. Just past the outdoorsy vacation town of Buena Vista, you speed down a gradual hill that curves down to the right, and you hit the open maw of the turn and suddenly to your right there they are: the plains. A planet of shimmering emerald grassland and brush and it’s all you can ever hope to see. The expanse could house a nation. It seems to be the place where the word “wander” was invented. When you descend the hill to the plains, there’s just you and the dividing line between the lanes, a checkered yellow cautionary of humanity still existing amid skies so big, even your thoughts aren’t private.

You can only see so much shiny blueness in one gulp of sight before you wonder how somebody can live here and not believe in some higher power. You’re an ant under the firmament’s magnifying glass, and the road just keeps on stretching out into the waves of heat mirage. And in that blissful little, you pick out odd houses here and there – rancher homes drawn back into the curtain of the land like the hand of a magician waiting to pluck forth your card, waiting to show you… nothing.

It’s only when the road slows down, when there is construction happening and you need to suddenly bunch up with the other cars in a dutiful line, waiting for the flagger to wave you past the construction zone do you realize that society still exists. Suddenly, there blares the engines of the dump trucks, and it echoes to the stratosphere.

These were the brief times I was able to look around, to see the rusted propane tanks nearby, or the one dilapidated wooden shed sitting in the middle of nothing’s echoes. I looked down at my phone—nope, still no service. Time for more downloaded podcasts. But even the crisp audio, the wafting vowels of the host’s diatribe couldn’t break the string threaded across my chest that I was wasting my life. Turn it off. This is nothing.

There. Roll down the window. Flash a peace sign to the flagger, clad in neon with only sunglasses shining. He flashes the two fingers back. Hereness. Nowing.

The waves of heat forming a mirage of distance can be intoxicating. I had to really pay attention to every car I passed, had to make sure I passed “with care” as the highway signs chided.

It took almost two hours of slicing into the cusp of sun-drenched desert air to figure out that maybe I’d missed home, just a little bit. Not much. It’s just a sea of sky. It’s just an endless hell of roiling clouds, of possibility. Maybe this is heaven – a stretching plain of green and blue where truth can’t foray from, where flowers of leftover convictions grow at the gate as you enter the empyrean. Gabriel gives you a few seeds of your own to plant in the garden, but they grow no further than the side of the road. In the end, that which you treasured most in life was only a painter’s brush or a simple wild aster by the wayside. Everyone scatters their truths and enters the endless plain of heaven—where nothing need be, other than god and the souls you missed so dearly. And maybe that’s bliss—needing no truth other than god, closeness to the infinite, and you bump into friends, family, and lovers only in times of traffic.

Or maybe, this is hell. Maybe hell is this endless expanse of sky and ground with no water, no gas, no souls except those resigned to never dealing with people. They have their ranches and their guns sequestered against the backdrop of mountains and heaven help you if you ever set foot on one acre of their vast expanse. Othering. They’re othering the universe, and the only way you’ll know how much of an outsider you really are is when they cast you a glance so askance, so skewed, that you could never spin it upright. And god can only give beauty to places lacking in beauty within the soul – is that why I could only make it down here by borrowing money from my father? Is this trip just more proof that I need to invest more in the self I have back home?

I was glad my phone was dead to the network. I could dodge the calls from my father about when I would be paying back the 1100 dollars he lent me for this car. “I want to show you how to be responsible with money”, he’d said.

“But I’ll give you this bit of cash, so you can have your first vacation in 8 years”, and he did.

I was nervous. The responsibilities came flooding back. And even in the vast expanse of the San Luis Valley, the sky forevering above, I couldn’t live fully in that moment.

Everything can’t exist without patches of nothing; nothing can’t exist without patches of everything. Did it really take giving Hertz 1100 damn dollars to figure out that even though this land was beautiful, it wasn’t my land? After hours of driving through the beautiful brush and desert, I began to approach the border of New Mexico. The landscape flattened out more, prostrate for the sun and sky. Each brush and foot of dirt sat golden and placid tan in place of forest green Colorado. There was change. I was becoming bored with nothing. Heaven and hell can be made from anything.

I made it to Taos after five hours. I was sick of nothing. I pulled into my hotel and sat under the pluckish pink neon light; it blared the image of a cowboy boot and called me to bed. I went into the adobe building, checked in at the front desk, and went to my room to lay on the bed. My fingers swiped open my phone and I went to photos app.

And

My land was back home in Pennsylvania. My land was humid and growing dead with the coming waves of global warming. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw significant snowfall; the winters were groaning more under the weight of smog.

And

My land had four whole seasons; seasons where the wind would whip the trees bare and scatter scarlet under your feet; seasons where bees would amble along to each flower and sing in scattered pulse of buzz; seasons where the sun would beat down and grow tomatoes juicy as gossip; seasons where snow might again fall. My land didn’t have the endless mountains, nor the prideful waterfalls or perfect plains.

But my land had something. I scanned through my phone and set it down on the nightstand, walking over to the tiny window that overlooked the center square of downtown Taos. The moonlight glazed over the adobe houses and tiles in clusters of acidic grays. I loved it; but it wasn’t mine to love.

And in the square, the moonlight reflected across a tiny shop filled with local paintings by New Mexican artists. A giant painting of a white buffalo stood in the front display window, gazing into the night.

I was just a tourist in this perfect nothing; I lived in something.