When I logged in to Facebook yesterday, the first news I saw wasn't about the Connecticut shootings... for which I'm grateful. No, the first news I saw was a post from the owner of the HF Bar Ranch in Saddlestring, WY, informing the ranch's aficionados (of which I'm one) that the ranch had been added to a conservation easement. It would, in perpetuity, be maintained just as it has been for the better part of the last century.
What does this have to do with the school shootings? you're wondering. Bear with me; I'll get to that.
The HF Bar is located at the foot of the Big Horn Mountains in central Wyoming, up near the Montana border. My family has been going there as visitors for the better part of the last century, ever since my great-grandfather, Henry Russell Platt, took a 3-month-long trip to China with my great-grandmother and decided he needed a place to park their 11 year old son (my grandfather) for the duration. He left my grandfather, Sherwood Platt (known to all as 'Que' for reasons I won't go into) with the ranch's owner, a friend and/or business acquaintance, who promptly put Que to work herding cattle. Que, by his own account, loved it. And years later, when the ranch had gone from cattle to dudes, he still went out for a month each summer to ride in the mountains, hike in the woods, and (to a lesser extent) hang out with old friends. As he grew older, he brought his children and grandchildren with him. One of my cousins grew so enamored of the place, he lives there to this day.
I spent most of my summers there, and if there's one thing about the ranch that I always take with me, it's the night sky. There is no light pollution out there, and you're at a fairly substantial elevation, so the stars look like they're just over your head. The Milky Way is a thick veil across the inky blackness, a veil sprinkled in glittering diamonds. You look up at that sky, and you get a real sense of your place in the universe. You're a speck atop another speck, hidden among a crowd of similar specks. Time is meaningless; your whole existence is but a minute flicker in all the brilliant sparks that you can see, as well as those you can't. And in early August, the most exciting time, you could watch the Perseid meteor shower shoot sparks across the sky late into the night. You never could get your fill of those bright lights, because they were a sign that every so often, a tiny spark of light in those light-filled heavens did DO something... something spectacular, something that made it shine brighter, something that attracted the eye, even if only for a moment.
