‘If you don't follow your dreams, you might as well be a vegetable’.

I’m reading the newly published Annie Proulx book about her life and her home in Wyoming. Incomparable prose from the author of ‘Shipping News’.

And in reading this story it reminds of my brief experiences when in 2003 I drove across Wyoming.

From Yellowstone National Park in the North-Western corner to Cheyenne on the South-Eastern corner of this state, from where I barrelled out of the big sky state, like the bullet from a Colt 45, down Interstate 25 on my way to Loveland in Colorado, a gateway to the Rocky Mountains National Park.

The National Parks at the extremities of this drive are spellbinding; the journey in-between is unremarkable, in a remarkable way.

I leave Old Faithful Inn at about 7 a.m., and skirt round the northern end of Yellowstone Lake, where a Grisly Bear had been spotted the day before; a long, winding valley descended from snow clad peaks to a semi-desert landscape right out of a western movie.

It's a shock to arrive at Cody with the stupendous Yellowstone wilderness still in the rear view mirror; but a stop in the town is mandatory - as an aging warrior would you want to miss the chance to see a historical centre dedicated to the legendary Buffalo Bill? He founded the town with others, and he lived here for a time, before fame and fortune came along.

Bill was a colourful aging warrior if ever there was one; in his later years he fought for conservation, and the rights of indigenous Americans, and women; not activities you’d expect of a wild west legend.

There’s nothing like, I think, sliding behind the steering wheel with a map on your lap, rather than a GPS in your face, and heading into the personally unknown – it’s the kind of thing that I imagine many aging warriors like to do: exploring, discovering, meeting, sharing; it’s an experience exemplified in a wonderful movie titled ‘The World’s Fastest Indian’, about Burt Munro, an aging warrior from New Zealand, and his greatest love; in the movie Anthony Hopkins, as Burt, says, ‘If you don't follow your dreams, you might as well be a vegetable’.

On this trip I had already travelled from Los Angeles to Yosemite – where the young, gawky, piano-playing photographer Ansell Adams began his journey on the way to being, probably unarguably, the greatest landscape photographer of the twentieth-century.

Then I headed first north to Silver Springs, and then east to Fallon where I got my first and last American speeding ticket; then east again on the ‘loneliest road in America’, Route 50 across Nevada; at one point I stopped to look at the route taken by the riders of the pony express, a lonely track as straight as an arrow, across what I imagine to be sagebrush; impossible I would have thought to be in this lonely spot and not hear the wildest and most dangerous days of the wild west whispering on the wind. To the east, across my path, rose a range of snow-covered peaks, and some distance beyond these, Bonneville Salt Flats where Burt imagined realising his dream.

And that’s how I came to be east and south of Yellowstone meandering along Highway 20 in Wyoming about midday; I was in the thermal springs metropolis of Thermopolis for two minutes as I drove down the main street; the Mustang and I then sashayed between the steep slopes of a gorge through which a road, railway, and the racing Bighorn River squeezed.

Then along the shores of the Boysen Reservoir, and into Shoshoni I rolled, a dry and dusty township, as I recall, named after the Native American tribe; and as the afternoon light turned golden, and the rolling countryside, became a palette of shocking pinks, emerald greens, violets, and golden yellow I headed due east to Casper.

I made a meal stop at a road house, there a table with a family nearby, and I don’t know what possessed me, but on my way out I sauntered over and handed the kids the accumulated, heavy American coinage in my pockets; I meant it as an act of kindness, and the coins were well received, but I still wonder eight years later what those people thought. But hey, at least I can remember the event and for an aging warrior that can’t be all bad!

And that’s what I remember of Wyoming, and why I had the opportunity, no matter how briefly, to look at a beautiful and yet stark part of the USA.

Thanks Annie for giving me the opportunity to reminisce. And reader, if you got this far, thanks for following along.