By Todd CraigMy husband and I left this past weekend to road trip to South Dakota to retrieve our 9 year old son who had spent some time after school let out in my hometown of Rapid City with his grandparents. As we inched our way up north on a maddeningly backed-up I-25, hours seemed like days. Our frustration built. The first leg of our drive to Cheyenne existed as a normal two and a half hour drive away, and yet after three hours we weren’t even close to the state border.
There’s something about sitting and staring at brake lights that renders us our most powerless. We grip the wheel a little bit tighter. We crawl around in our heads letting emotions spin. We begin to see others next to us as opponents or obstacles.
By the time our stop-and-go traffic lurched past Fort Collins, my body had physically tightened, and my brow had furrowed. This road trip’s beginning had warped and twisted itself into something somewhere between awful and torturous. I wanted justification for it all.
Finally after hitting the Wyoming border and skirting one last set of brake lights through a construction zone, traffic eased. The glorious 80 mile per hour speed limit in Wyoming took over. We sped on.
In the distance, we watched one of those typical prairie rainstorms so common to Wyoming and the upper Midwest as it thundered eastward. Nature has a way, especially in these wild, empty, and vast spaces of America, of asserting both her power and beauty in ways that can stir the soul and frighten one senseless. The towering clouds with ominous gray blurs of rain at the bottom looked to be just beyond our path. We felt grateful knowing that we would likely not cross its path. The road was empty and clear, and my speeds climbed faster and faster.
Until they stopped altogether.
As you wind your way past the gas station town of Chugwater, Wyoming, there’s a vast open expanse of prairie just to the east dotted with a few scraggly trees and buttes in the distance. It’s a quintessential sight in the Wyoming landscape, both perfect in its wild beauty and in its fulfillment of one’s expectations of how Wyoming should look.
We’ve driven past this place a hundred times without so much as a second thought.
But tonight, nature had other ideas. Caught somewhere between the sunset and the thunderstorm, nature, Wyoming, and life had conspired to, in this place, paint the sky with the most wonderous of rainbows. We gasped, open-mouthed, at the sight of the most empty and rugged landscape lit by the setting sun and completely overshadowed by the blackened storm clouds. In one shot the view captured not just the darkness of the skies, but the raw green beauty of the earth, and framed it in the pure, glorious color of the rainbow.
Cars pulled over. Old ranchers in their battered Ford trucks stopped and gaped. Rushed tourists exited the highway and piled out of their cars with cell phone cameras in hand.
My husband and I stopped, too. We snapped photos like everyone else. We took it in. We had no choice. No one did. Doing 80 miles per hour past this would have been sacrilege.
The road trip, which began with four hours of man-made frustration, anger, and impatience, led us to this place. This moment. This perfection. It was the rainbow of a lifetime. It thrilled everyone there. It inspired people from all walks of life to pull over and take in big sights and think big thoughts. For a moment we all stopped and shared its beauty.
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Two days later, we would wake up to news of the Orlando massacre. Surely, life couldn’t get uglier or more awful than this. My emotions vacillated from sadness to anger to rage and back to sadness again as Sunday wore painfully on and the news reports grew increasingly worse.
There will be lots to sort out over the upcoming weeks beginning with the heart-breaking eulogies for the dead and our facing and mourning their loss. We will discuss again the necessity of gun restrictions. We will reflect upon about how we treat our minorities – queer, ethnic, and otherwise. We will honestly look our leaders and want-to-be leaders in the eye and ask them if they act out of love and seek to unify us or do they seek to play on our fears and build walls between us. We will hopefully move beyond thoughts and prayers and head straight to action towards building a more perfect union and a better country for our children and ourselves.
This morning, as I scrolled through my facebook feed, I came across an article listing the names of the murdered dead that shared bits and pieces of some of the victim’s stories. I’ve forced myself to read each one in an effort to rationalize the tragedy and to remember the fallen. The article featured a photograph centered on a tiny rainbow pride flag planted at a makeshift memorial for the dead, a poignant picture using the symbol of our gay pride as the symbol of our collective mourning. And I kept thinking back to that Wyoming rainbow – the play of light and dark, the dance of emptiness and beauty, and the randomness of time, place, and moment.
But mostly I remembered about how that Wyoming rainbow stopped us all in our tracks and made us look up. Of how it forced us to reconcile ourselves and our humanity to the vastness and power of nature and life.
And maybe, for the first time in my adult queer life, I appreciate the true strength and beauty of the pride rainbow. I hope that it, like its natural counterpart, will inspire us to stop together this day and night and look up. That the pride rainbow in 2016 should spur us to remember the injustices we’ve suffered in the past, the lives that we have lost, the beautiful people we have grown to become in this moment, and the bright future we want to forge together.
Such is the nature and power of rainbows, I think.
And such is the nature and power of Pride.
