I have just one word for you—just one word…

Plastics...

I’ve read a number of western-based fiction for my two book groups.

I’m currently reading Dancing at the Rascal Fair, by Ivan Doig, about Scottish immigrants who settled and homestead in Montana in the late 1890s.

Last Fall I read The Work of Wolves, a beautifully written and hauntingly melancholic story about several modern-day youth coming of age in and around a South Dakota reservation, by Kent Meyers.

Pieces of the story have stayed with me, including these passages about plastic bags.

"A great blob of white came rolling out of the sky and flattened against the windshield with a sucking sound. Earl jumped and then saw it was only a plastic grocery bag. It reinflated immediately and sailed away, a prairie jellyfish…Caught in the stunted and dying trees in the cemetery and on the barbed wire fence that encircled it and on the stiff stalks of yucca and sage that grew on the hillsides above it, more plastic bags flapped, ballooning away from the wind. A few years earlier, Donaldson’s Foods had switched from paper to plastic. It had taken those years for the bags to accumulate, but now they occupied all jagged and jutting edges in town, leaving nothing for new bags to catch on. Through the closed windows of the car, Earl heard the bags’ chattering. Impaled and visible ghosts. From the corner of his eye, he saw them waving in the cemetery, but he refused to look there…On top pf a pile of rusted machinery in the empty lot where someone had once tried to start a manufacturing business, a single plastic bag fluttered. Earl saluted it—a new edge discovered—and drove on by."

I know, for-a-fact, that just as many plastic bags litter North Arlington as do here in Laramie but they're  usually ‘drowned’ and lying dormant or hidden in bushes or the like, by the rain and humidity.

The wind here, however, keeps the bags alive, floating and billowing like “prairie jellyfish” or “chattering impaled and visible ghosts,” waving as we pass by.

Plastic---caught along Happy Jack Road between Laramie & Cheyenne

I first noticed them as the wind flattens them along the fence, which is directly across the street and encircles the Jr. High.

Then I noticed them dangling along other fences and jagged edges and sometimes, dancing along the street, particularly on windy days.

I also think of the Work of Wolves, and that quote from The Graduate, when I see them flying around.

Mr. McGuire had absolutely no clue when he said “Plastics” to Benjamin Braddock in 1967…