It feels like yesterday, sitting next to the big man driving the big black truck hard up over the vast inclines between Mirror Lake, Utah and the high plains of Wyoming west of the Green River Valley.

Like two tiny tics riding on the back of some dwarfish beast, we took in the vast expanse, so broad that our speeding progress seemed a crawl up onto the roof of a world obscured.

The three inclines, he said, were called “the Three Sisters,” their danger to tractor trailers well known in the form of the unseen winds that pushed his truck with the occasional gusty reminder.

The land was clothed in sage in its purple-green hues, rabbit brush, lighter and lively, mountain brohm, a straw-like grass, and the tenacious juniper, going anywhere, in its deep waxy green, that a pine can eke out a stunted growth of life and elsewhere in the dry corners of that harsh world.

Antelopes dotted the land with surprising laziness.

Great snow fences marched across the expanses in anticipation of the winter to come.

Tiny towns proclaimed themselves in giant letters to the planes passing but rarely above.

One town boasted of being the “ice box of America.”

But the thing that typified and signified this gusty land inside this rusted man was the quaking clones, the Aspen trees, expressions of one underground organism sending up slight, pale-barked clone trees, colonizing marginal tree zones first—pioneering for less cohesive trees—their small, coin-like leaves of light green shaking as in to the vibrations of an earthquake in the ever-present wind.

No feature worthy of notice escaped my guide’s pondering eye. In 16 hours of driving from Mirror Lake, Utah, over the high desert plains, down through commercialized Jackson Hole—where his wild heart sank—and through the Gran Tetons, Yellow Stone, and Shoshone national parks, and finally down into Cody, the journey was like becoming reacquainted with a long lost twin who saw this radically different world from the same perspective but through a clearer, knowing lens.

His was a world where the sky encouraged reflection and discouraged projection, so ominous it was.

Having wandered and wondered again in my own habitat since then, it seems, ambling tiny and alone among the increasingly deserted bones of Man’s aborted attempt to ape God, that an extra angle has been added to the tainted lens of the mind’s eye, a clear refraction to brighten the tiny observations of the grayly shadowed day.