ART OF LIVING l
2
ELIZABETH
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEFF
DODD
HENRY
INE WHEEL
Change is no stranger to this place we call home
e’re camping on the shortest night of the year
in northern Wyoming, our tent pitched in a spot
that must have lain beneath snow no more than a
week ago. A few yards away, a meltwater freshet
chatters and rushes toward pussy willows that haven’t even begun
to leaf out, though they’re fat with soft-furred potential. A Wilson’s
warbler works the branches, ?itting about and feeding.
Five miles southeast is Medicine Mountain and the Big
Horn Medicine Wheel, our destination for the solstice sunrise.
A monument of rocks laid thinly on the landscape, the medicine
wheel lacks the vertical reach of the great standing stones of
Stonehenge; exposed to the sky at an elevation of 9,642 feet, it is
accessible and visible only during the brevity of snow-free months
in summer, so lacks the history of architectural inhabitation one
admires in the great houses and towers of the Ancestral Puebloans.
But according to solar astronomer John Eddy, the wheel calibrates
the summer horizon in a variety of ways, lining up with the solstice
sunrise and sunset in June and, at di=erent times throughout the
weeks of summer, at least three di=erent star risings in the
predawn dark, just before they’re lost in the sun’s glare (“heliacal
risings” is the term for these). Like most other scholars, Eddy
remarks on how well preserved the medicine wheel is, and how
monumental in its dimensions, which are attractions enough to
make me want to see it with the sunrise washing across the pattern
of its cairns and spokes.
There’s one other party arriving in the campground, two men
and a little boy. They park their camper near our tent and step
outside to stretch. The boy hurries back inside, then re-emerges
having traded his shorts for long pants; soon, all three are
lobbing snowballs at one another while the boy shrieks with
enthusiasm. I watch them, then watch Dave following the warbler
with his camera, trying to get a good shot. Wilson’s warblers
are impressive migrants; most spend the winter in Mexico or
Central America, then hustle northward to their breeding
grounds—the Yellowstone area on up to Alaska, or across the
Canadian Shield to Labrador—before the snow has melted.
Their bodies carry records of these great migrations: each
feather holds an isotopic signature of the latitude at which it
grew. That signature is a kind of watermark, since, as Dave
explains—he researches this process in prairie birds—rainwater
varies in its isotopic composition, or the proportion of
deuterium present. And what determines that variation is time
may I june 2008 ORION
