Coyote Nowhere

The land out here stands alone beneath skies filled with so many stars, planets, moons, and fizzling meteors that to look at all of it is to knock out your head.The brain can't take in all of the information, all of the truth that shines away up in the eternal dark.Eyes roll back into the head and thought processes short circuit.That's what the northern high plains are.What they do to a person.Look above or let the eye wander along the incomprehensible vastness of this wide-open country, and you drift swiftly into a world of myth and legend.If you want to feel what flows out here, hell, if you just want to survive way back in the middle of everywhere, you have to open up, suspend your beliefs, and submit to the land.Harsh, bone dry, freezing, unforgiving.And magic.Coyote Nowhere - a phrase taken from Jack Kerouac's On the Road - accomplishes all of this while exploring and examining the northern high plains through John Holt's words and Ginny Diers's photographs.Together, they look for the true west, not the shortsighted vision myopically viewed by most as they whiz here and there along the interstate, rarely seeing anything.The book appears at the start of a new century and millenium and is a unique view of the west as seen through eyes that have stared down the barrels of plenty of hard living and never enough truth.The northern high plains roll east from the base of the Rocky Mountains like still-life waves for hundreds of miles.From Canada's Northwest Territories down through Montana and into Wyoming, the sparsely populated country drifts off eternally.Isolated pockets of mountains rise thousands of feet above what was once an ancient sea bed and home to dinosaurs.Millions of acres of native grass sway back and forth in the wind or bake under a wicked sun.Yet, despite all of this space, threats to the country rain down in the form of strip-mining, oil exploration, and land development, to name a few.Where is this place headed?Where has it been through time?Coyote Nowhere begins in late spring in Livingston, Montana and describes a loop that courses down through Wyoming, back into Montana, crosses the border into Alberta, Canada, and heads north to the Northwest Territories before winding up back in Livingston as winter closes in.Along the way, Holt and Diers camp, fish, hang out in cowboy bars, dodge careening oil rig semis, meet their fair share of law enforcement officials, and sink even further into the country that has such a firm hold on them.