Here, The Landscape Screams

Wallace Stegner, writing about how Easterners visiting the West often fail to appreciate the drama and stark beauty of our desertic West, noted that, to appreciate the West, you must first “get over green.” This is certainly true to some measure. But you do not have to do entirely without. Often the green is on a smaller scale. Sometimes, you have to seek. Here, for much of the year, the landscape might only be daubed with the occasional green: there in a catchment among the rocks, again, along the shaded base of the mountain, stumbling alongside the fidgeting river and stream.
The beauty here is often more in the rockslide splashed in pinks, or maybe whaleblue across the flank of a mountain kicking almost straight up from a serpentine road you have no choice but to follow. Perhaps the most lovely thing is in how the clouds pour right through a notch between high powderhorn peaks. A single hawk hurled like a dusky flower and then caught by unremitting blue sky might be enough to give you pause. Here, the landscape erupts, screams, dives, gallops, crashes against you, then, at once, makes you halt in reverence, in what might almost be fear, when you discover yourself a dot, a spec, pressed against the leisurely rolls and sage-scented horizon to horizon expanse of the Northern Plains, the whole sky funneling clouds in overtop you. Nothing in this world gives me more reason for reflection than those moments when I drive up over a rise and see before me a narrow and empty road looping—vanishing here and appearing there—ten or fifteen miles through hills and rockface scarps before it draws tight and small as a thread and connects to the base of a new range of mountains.
But we are not without our green. In Montana, while our springtime days might be brief and bookended by snowstorms, they are often spectacularly green and ludicrously rich in wildflowers. I have twice in my life driven up upon meadows so blue with flowers I mistook them for lakes at first glance. I have seen hillsides so yellow with balsamroot heads you have to study to find the green of grass underneath them. I have come upon springtime places where the diversity and concentration of wildflowers is such that you might, from a single position sitting on the grass, pluck the flower off a shootingstar, a lupine, a fairy slipper, a balsamroot, a mountain dandelion, a paintbrush, a penstemon, an arnica, and a northern bedstraw—that, while ignoring altogether the wild strawberries, huckleberries, and half-dozen less tasty berry plants there. Some places in our mountains remain green from the end of April until the end of September—the green there held fast by snow at each end. And today, massaged by spring rain, our valley, the high and the low, all of the fastidious in-betweens, all has come green. Bluebirds dance the brief symmetry of low clouds, and all the whizzing things whiz, and the buzzing buzz.

--Mitchell Hegman