Hi from the ranch! We back from the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV after one big week away and two days of driving north under a blizzard warning. I have lots to say about the experience, which I’m drumming up for next week, but for now, here’s the column I wrote in the back seat of my SUV while my dad drove him, me and my guitar player, Mike, through Idaho.

Greetings from somewhere in the middle of Montana. As I write I’m on the second day of driving through this massive state on our way south to Elko, NV for the 40^th anniversary of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. There’s no easy way to get to Elko from Western North Dakota. You can drive two hours to take three tiny airplanes and hope you don’t miss your one 11 pm connection from Salt Lake to Elko so you don’t have to take the additional three-hour van ride to finally get you there.

Or you can load up your car with guitars and pray the blizzards are at your back or already through as you wind through fifteen hours of desserts and big mountains.

That’s the current choice we’re in the middle of, seeing so much of this America out the windshield of the SUV I usually use to take the kids back and forth from school every day. The amount of ranch mud and snack wrappers I removed from the floors of this ride to get ready for this trip was alarming. But here we are, cruising at 65 MPH through a sagebrush sea with the mountains ahead of us and behind us and the next tiny town fifty miles away. To see North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada this up close and personal gives a sort of perspective that only comes on a long stretch of highway with only the promise of more and more highway to come. I’ve spent a good portion of my life behind the windshield traveling for music. When you head in the same directions you’re reminded of the past trips by little landmarks or gas stations or favorite restaurants you’ve frequented years before.

 If you haven’t done the miles this direction it would surprise you how desolate it is. And I use desolate not with a negative connotation but with a lack of a better word for lack of people. Lack of porch lights or streetlights. We’re following the highway parallel to the powerline. “Coyote,” dad just pointed out. About sixty miles back I was the first to spot a bald eagle landing on one of those power line poles. We saw some deer. Some cows. I’m traveling with dad and our musical friend Mike who has been playing dobro and guitar with me since I was just a kid. The fact that he continues to take these long trips with me year after year to stand on stages so I can tell ranching stories to rooms and theaters full of people who want to hear ranching stories is a testament to how much we regard one another and the music.

Inside all of these miles, between pointing out elk tracks and that one big feedlot we just passed, humming along to old tried and true favorites of ours and making them listen to my new favorite (I am every trips’ DJ and navigator and chooser of hotels and restaurants) Mike will come out with a thread of a memory from playing in bands for fifty or so years and dad and I become the audience for a story that never ends the way we thought it would when it started. And you would think after all these years traveling together (here I pause to calculate just how long it’s been? I’m forty-one. Been playing out with dad and him since I was fourteen or fifteen or younger. How long really? Could it be 27 years now? Aren’t I still sixteen?) you would think I would have heard every one of his recollections, that there would be repeat shenanigans I could tell back to him, but that’s not Mike. He has memories for as many miles as we have driven, so there’s always a new one.

“These school busses have a long ways to go between houses,” dad remarks as we bend and weave on ID Hwy 33. It makes the ranch seem downright urban.

We’ll be in Elko before it’s dark. And tomorrow we’ll be on stages telling North Dakota stories in my now foreign accent. And all these miles we’ve driven between here and there, the mountains, the high desserts, the small blips of towns and ranch houses and barbed wire and wide open, their poets and musicians who live and work and call it home will gather to tell its story.

It’s the wide open. It’s the vastness of it all. Miles and miles of it. If you didn’t know any better, desolate could sound lonesome. But in Elko, it sings.