We watched westerns obsessively at the beginning of the pandemic. The lone, mostly silent and allenated hero, the harshness and isolation of the wilderness, felt newly familiar and oddly comforting. The stories made sense in a senseless time. The hero always prevails, and the heroine embraces her future. Then, rather suddenly, we moved west, too. Driving cross country at the height of the pandemic felt like we were becoming the characters in these movies. Lone figures finding fleeting moments of beauty in a hostile landscape. Once here, I found solace in making small collages out of the ephemera I couldn't leave behind. My heroine is a particular kind of woman, one who finds herself stranded in an unfamiliar place, adrift but not exactly powerless, anxious but resilient, almost but not fully out of danger, and hopeful of the promise of the west.
