Out in Places Like Wyoming, 1933 Custer

The House on Custer Street

My father designed and built the house at 1933 Custer Street near mid-century, and we moved in when I was an infant. We had lived in a house north of the University of Wyoming when my parents returned to Laramie with my oldest brother Jay after the War. He was war baby, born in 1944 while my father was serving in the Army. John, Jerry and I were all born in Laramie, which means we must have moved to that first, smaller house before John arrived in 1947.

As I understand the sequence, my father was somewhere in the process of designing and building a bigger house for the property on Custer Street, when I showed up 13 months later, hard on the heels of my older brother.

Custer Street was a new development when my parents decided to build there; most of the houses  in that neighborhood were built between 1945 and 1955. I may be a bit off for any
particular house here and there, but a quick look at the street now certainly suggests they are of the same vintage.

During our years in that house, ending in June of 1958 when we moved to New Hampshire where my youngest brother, Jonas, was born a Yankee instead of a cowboy, my father worked hard to grow grass, shrubs,and trees. Despite his staking, fertilizing, and watering the new saplings with religious fervor, he was not successful with the trees. Now there are trees everywhere.

At the end of the street to the east, now occupied by a movie theater and other businesses, was the National Guard Armory, a long, low, dark-green wood-frame building with a WWII-vintage cannon on the lawn out front. I could be wrong to think the Armory was wood-frame. It may have been a huge quonset hut of the type used frequently during WWII,  I don't remember that part clearly as we were not generally invited inside.

Outside was a different matter. We used to climb on the display cannon when the Armory was closed up for the day. Beyond were the open plains.


Along the block and across the street were several lots that eventually grew houses. I remember this only because we used the piles of dirt and top-soil left by the foundation diggers as a playground while the houses were going up. Next to us on the east, in a stucco house, lived the Zeiglers, whose youngest son, Freddie, was my friend. To the west, next door, lived the Morgans, with three boys, Newlin, Willy, and Evan, close in age to John, me, and Jerry. Willy, a grade younger, was my best friend. At the end of the block in a house with a loud and frightening Pekinese that would sometimes strut in their front yard lived a couple who ran a photography business. When I was a toddler, they asked my parents if they could photograph me to test a new colorizing process then coming into use.  The resulting portrait has dominated one room after another for the rest of my life, affirming my place -- thank you very much -- in some kind of cosmic family hierarchy.

As I noted in an earlier post, Stefan and I found the house without difficulty when we took our first drive around Laramie on the day we arrived. It was right where memory told me it should be. The layout was as clear in my mind when we first saw it as it had ever been, even though my last view was close to forty years before.

We parked across the street from the house.  What had been a new, developing neighborhood when I was young is now a decidedly middle-aged neighborhood.  And it is not just the big trees. Our old family home seems to have held its own in the aging process, but the street as a whole seemed a bit tired, even in spots untended.Should we take a chance and knock on the door to see if we will be invited in?

The door was answered by a young man in his twenties named Casey, who seemed intrigued by my connection to the house.  I had explained who we were and why we had appeared uninvited.  This house now belongs to his mother, who was still at work.  When his attempts to reach her by phone failed, he invited us in anyway.

If you had asked me to draw a layout for the house before this visit, my diagram would have matched almost exactly. The front door opens into a hallway that runs left toward three bedrooms and bath clustered around a small square inner hall and right toward the living room. Beyond the living room is the dining room, which I remember as being bigger than it turned out to be; and behind the living room, toward the rear of the house is the kitchen, with access from the hall and from the dining room. The rear of the house and the adjacent eating area had windows opening to the back yard, something my mother would have valued.While I may have always been able to summon this layout, I was struck, maybe for the first time, by the logic, coherence, and efficiency of the design.

Casey allowed us to wander into the rooms and take in both the space and the architectural features. Some touches, like the fireplace on the inner wall of the living room, the arched door frames, the matching arched cutout for the door chimes on the wall leading to the kitchen, and the rounded -- essentially arched -- top of the living room walls that break the straight angles after the fashion of crown molding seem to me now both simple and brilliant features. I know from seeing him work on other blueprints -- for our house in Durham, NH, and for the retirement houses he didn't get to build -- that my father would have drafted and redrafted, refining his ideas by adding and removing, including a variety of features to see how they worked, until the plans came together, until he had incorporated things my mother wanted into his vision to form a singular, elegant design.

After we had walked from end to end of the main floor, Casey asked if we wanted to see the basement as well.  My father had built the house with an apartment in the basement to provide rental income. To get there you have to go out the kitchen door into the garage, across the front of the garage and down stairs at the end. There are two rooms at the east end of the basement not part of the apartment; the one toward the front had been a play room when we lived there and is now used for storage; the one toward the back of the house was and is a laundry room. I remember the play room chiefly from a little drama we put on once called, if I remember correctly, "The Peddler's Plot." I played the female lead, a part without line which I brought off by wearing a gold table-runner for hair.  I don't remember much else about it except for an audience of, no-doubt, coerced neighbors.

The apartment has an independent entry from the west end of the house, but it is also accessible through the laundry room.  Being currently vacant, Casey let us walk through it.

                                                                                                    




It is a funny thing.  I had felt OK walking up to the door to introduce myself and to explain my connection to this house at 1933 Custer. I have spent forty years teaching college students, so I can assert myself when I need to.

But once we were inside looking at the layout, the rooms, and unique features, I was shy about venturing too far in.  I should have gone into the kitchen, for example, rather than looking from the entry.  I should have ventured into the bedrooms at the end instead of peeking from the little square hallway. Attached as I am, this house is now someone else's territory. I felt almost as if I were trespassing.

After we left the house Stefan asked me what I thought. But I'm afraid I wasn't very helpful. On a day when we had already seen so much -- Ames Monument, two of my grandparents' churches (one for the first time), my uncle Dean's grave (also for the first time), Vedauwoo, and now the old homestead on Custer Street . . .  Each detail had both corroborated and corrected the memories I have carried around in my head for so many years.

Perhaps I was too full of stimulation.  Memory has kept a lot of things for me, only some of which I can put into words. And it has kept other things -- associations, emotions, -- that lie deep within the passing decades that may yet, over time, continue to bubble up. Then, perhaps, I will find ways to name them, little by little, as I have always done.

Out in Places Like Wyoming, 4d

Vedauwood

A brochure from the Laramie Area Visitor Center notes that Vedauwoo "is a sacred place" to "young Arapaho men [who] travelled the region on vision quests." When we visited Ames Monument in the morning and decided to wait before crossing the road to Vedauwoo, it was easy to imagine spirits on the move.

Snow that had fallen overnight was still blowing on strong northwesterly winds, the sky was forebodingly dark, and rock formations for which Vedauwoo is known appeared treacherous.

On our way back to Laramie from visiting my grandparents' churches in Albin and Golden Prairie, the hills were inhabited by an entirely different set of spirits.

The sun was shining, the overnight snow had disappeared, and the wind for which Wyoming is famous had calmed to a breeze.

 Vedauwoo is as close to I-80 on the north side as the Ames Monument is on the south side. A well aimed arrow shot at the entrance to one would reach the entrance to the other with ease. According to the same brochure I cited earlier, these attractions are no more than 18 miles from Laramie.

My memories of Vedauwoo, I realize, have been shaped more by family stories we have told and retold than by actual memories of doing something there.  We always came to have a picnic, perhaps at the Happy Jack area, which is now comprised of campsites. Mom always made a big production out of picnics -- I can remember her "setting" the picnic table -- but all I remember for food is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cool-aid, and brownies or cookies for desert.

As with any place we had to travel to, I had no idea Vedauwoo was so close to home and so accessible. The ride was always long, often hot, and sometimes contentious -- if we brothers were not at that moment getting along. My memory wants to blame one of them for most of the contention, but my adult mind says leave it alone.

 As kids, once my father had stopped at a likely spot for our picnic, we hit the ground running. We would disappear into the rocks until someone heard Mom calling us back to eat.  It was easy to see the lure of the place, both for the original Arapaho inhabitants and for more recent adventurers.

Both Stefan and I started taking pictures instead of running down the trails, but I left the rock climbing to him. Perhaps on another visit, in warmer weather, I will attempt to reprise the old feelings of exploration.

 The interesting feature of these rock formations is that the rocks appear to have been set in place with a kind random precision. So if you imagine there were spirits involved in the landscape rather than natural forces, it is fairly easy to see the long straight crevasses and cracks as a form of creative play. If only we were big enough.

With other formations, such as these with random cracks and signs of vertical upheavals, it is easy to see the strong power of nature at work as if the whole enterprise were an ancient engineering project. If my father, the civil engineer, were still around, I would like to hear his take on this pile of rocks.  Or on the one below, where a boulder the size of a house seems to have been perched with just enough balance to keep from tumbling down the slope.

 Soon enough the clouds returned and the wind turned sharp again.  We decided to head into Laramie before the afternoon was completely gone to see if we could wangle an invitation to step inside the old homestead, 1933 Custer, leaving this sacred place to visit another.

Out in Places Like Wyoming [4,c]

Golden Prairie

Given that Golden Prairie played a prominent role in my early years and that I had never been to Albin, it was surprising to me how close they were to one another, a grand total of 17 miles.

When we left the cemetery where my uncle Dean is buried, we headed straight west, back through Albin along highway 216, then south on 213.

If I ever visited Albin, it was too early in my life to recall. As with my uncle, I just have a handful of sketchy stories. Golden Prairie, on the other hand, is loaded with memories. Both of these places were important to my grandparents' life and ministry.

Three miles south on 213 we found a little sign indicating the Golden Prairie Baptist Church was off to the left. And sure enough, in another quarter of a mile we found a straight dirt road on the left, that is, heading east, with a cattle gate at its end and small white signs indicating that the Baptist Church was somewhere ahead.

Apart from the cattle gate, which I don't remember, and, I suppose, the late October absence of wheat, this was exactly what I remembered -- the huge fields on either side, the single-wire telephone poles, the fine loose-gravel "paving," the dark spot in the distance that would materialize into a church and a parsonage as we approached.

It was at or very near this cattle gate where we got stuck in drifts one Christmas Eve in my father's pickup. Although it had stopped snowing and the county road had been plowed, the side roads hadn't. The wind had blown snow into deep drifts. My father, who could drive through most anything, found himself mired this time. So we bundled up with everything we had and hiked the mile into my grandparents' house.  My father left a kerosene lantern burning in the cap he had built on the back of the truck to keep the from freezing.  As I remember, of particular concern was a television set we were bringing out for my grandparents.

No one was at the church or parsonage when Stefan and I arrived. I had not called ahead either for the Albin church or the Golden Prairie church because I was not sure if or when we would actually show up. The church was locked and it had undergone some changes -- as one would expect after nearly sixty years.

The church itself, a simple wood-framed rectangular sanctuary with a basement for Sunday School classes, opened to a wood porch and steps when my grandfather was pastor. A new entry appeared to have added space for classrooms, an elevator, and perhaps an office. My grandfather, as I recall, had used one of the two bedrooms in the parsonage as his study and office.

Apart from these improvements, much of the church and parsonage remain as I remember them.  There is still a big propane tank beside the church, for example, that served as a prop for many games when we came for visits as boys.  One of the games I remember well involved sneaking single-file, oldest to youngest, through the gloom of the unlighted church basement. At some point someone would yell "there it is" and we would all race out of the basement, climb the stairs, and clamber onto the propane tank.

Usually we would slam the door behind us on the way out, shutting Jerry in. By the time he got out, we were all riding away on the tank, and because he was too small to get on by himself, we would pretend he was being left behind.

I remember this game as enormous fun.  Perhaps Jerry remembers it with less affection.

My last previous memory of Golden Prairie was in early June of 1958.  My mother, 8 months pregnant with Jonas, my brothers John and Jerry, and I had moved to the parsonage while my father, my grandfather, and my oldest brother, Jay, packed our house in Laramie.  When they arrived, we were to leave for our new home in New Hampshire.

Although cautioned by my grandmother that my impatience would not bring them any sooner, I spent several days outside with my shirt off, watching the end of the road for signs of my father's trucks. In the end, they arrived when they were supposed to and I had a painful sunburn for the start of our journey east.

A

Stefan and I wandered around the yard a bit, took some pictures, discussed what might or might not be housed in the addition to the original church, before we decided to move on.  One thing I hadn't remembered is that the road hits a T about 150 feet beyond the church.  Both are ranch roads, one to the north and one to the south, about a mile and a half apart and each the better part of a mile from the church.


We got back on 213 heading south, absorbing what seemed familiar as an authentic feel of the west. We passed an abandoned barn at one point that made me want to hike out to look around a long freight train a bit further on.

I didn't climb the fence and wade through the tall grass, but I pulled it closer with my camera to have a look.

By the time we reached the interstate and headed west again, we had decided to skip Cheyenne for sure and to stop at Vedauwoo, provided the snow clouds had moved on and the roads were passable.

In the mean time, it was after 2 and we were just hoping to find a place to eat lunch.

Out in Places Like Wyoming [4,b]

PineBluffs, Albin, and Golden Prairie

For decades my Grandmother Nordstrom received the Pine Bluffs Post in the mail.  It would arrive, as I remember, in a roll with a paper sleeve, a band really, that carried my grandmother's name. In the years after we had moved to New Hampshire from Wyoming, my grandparents would come to stay for six or eight months at a time, splitting time between their daughter in New Hampshire, my mother, and their daughters in St. Paul, the twins.

Within two weeks of their arrival, the first Post would arrive with a yellow forwarding label pasted over the paper band.That small-format weekly newspaper carried mostly "local news" about the families and events in its readership area, which included Albin, where my grandparents built and served the Baptist Church. The Baptist Church and the Albin Cemetery were our furthest destination for the day.

After the Ames Monument, we drove out of the mountains into clear skies and warmer temperatures, we headed for Albin, via Pine Bluffs, a town of about 1,100. Some forty miles past Cheyenne the bluffs rise abruptly from the level plains and, sure enough, there are pine trees on its sides and along the top. I had an odd epiphany as we approached: despite knowing of Pine Bluffs for 60 plus years, I had never thought of the name in descriptive terms.

As I-80 reached the bluffs, we turned north toward Albin on state road 215, 17 perfectly straight miles of flat farmland. Huge fields of now-harvested wheat and fields of dried standing corn and sunflowers line both sides of the road. At the unmarked intersection where 215 meets 216 we stopped to inspect a small white frame church that we thought might be "the" church, but it was Roman Catholic not Baptist. It sat by itself among expansive fields. Albin, a small group of houses and buildings, is visible from that intersection, a half mile to the west.

On a list of Wyoming  towns listed by population, Albin ranks 130 out of 178. Dead last is a place called Lost Springs with four human beings. Size and scale are important factors out here.

We had wondered how difficult it might be to find the Baptist Church, but we shouldn't have worried. The town is about two blocks east to west with a paved side street running south and another, this one dirt, running north.  The Baptist Church is the last building on the west end of town.

The church lot was empty. We walked around the grounds a bit before I tried the door. It was unlocked so we went in calling "Hello? Hello-o!" We looked in the sanctuary and knocked on the door to the pastor's office. Above a flight of stairs to the lower level hung a quilt with "Welcome" in English, Swedish, and Spanish. The Swedish suggested we were on the right track.

Clearly someone had been working in the church during the morning and had, understandably, stepped out for lunch.

The wall to the right of the small foyer was full of photographs showing important stages of the church's history. The first of these photographs was one I recognized. It is a formal portrait of my grandparents with their four children taken in the early 1930s.

My mother and her older twin sisters are hard to tell apart at a quick glance, especially in a photograph of a photograph. [I believe my aunts were wearing dark scarves.] But this picture has particular significance for those of us who belong to this branch of the Nordstrom family; it is one of very few existing pictures of our uncle Dean.



It felt good to have found the right place, to have made this connection, even without someone to talk with.  Beside the photograph of my mother's family below a photograph of what I am guessing was the parsonage is a picture of the church building that my grandfather had built.  The current structure replaced the wood-frame sancturary in the 1951.

Beneath it is a photograph of the congregation gathered at the front of that church.


We took some pictures and then went outside for more. The view from the center of the street is nearly identical in both directions.

 Because the cemetery was not on church grounds as I had imagined, we needed directions to find it; so we crossed the street to the post office. It was 12:20. The post office had closed at 12:00, although we could see that there were two women sitting in a back room working at a table.  I rapped on the outer door until one of them came.  I introduced myself and asked about the town cemetery, where my uncle is buried. Turns out the town cemetery is not even in the town; it is 3 miles east of town among fields at a big bend in the road.

We drove out there and began our search.


The headstones are a roster of Swedish names -- Larson, Anderson, Sorensen, Palmquist, Pearson, and so on. It is likely my grandparents had known most of these folks or their parents.We looked at rows of these headstones reading the names aloud for about ten minutes before I found "Nordstrom -- Albert Dean -- 1923-1936" close to and partly obscured by a juniper tree.

We stood and looked at it for a few minutes. I was not sure what to think or how to feel now that I had found his marker since I knew my uncle only from a few photographs and from scraps of stories rarely told. He was gone long before I came of age.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, I found myself thinking not of my uncle at all but of my mother and of my grandparents, my grandmother especially. Dean is
the lone member of my mother's family to be buried here; the others are all in Minnesota or other distant places. He was a boy in another life -- a life before his sisters grew into women and married and had children of their own and grandchildren. Now, they are all gone after long lives, my grandfather in his 70's, then my grandmother and my aunts and recently my mother, all in their 90's.

I know I will have other, maybe better, responses after I process this small occasion.  But I think now I understand better why my grandmother kept subscribing to the Pine Bluffs Post all those years. She had known virtually everyone in town at one point and had wanted to keep up with their families, the graduations, the marriages, the births and death. She wanted to keep those things alive even if she could not be there.

But there was another reason I had not thought of before.  The Post was, in its way, a link of sorts, a connection with the boy she had had to bury so young and then to leave out on the prairie,so far away, in that earlier lifetime.

Out in Places Like Wyoming [4,a]

Heading East: The First Stop, Ames Monument.

On day two of our adventures in Wyoming, a Friday, we woke up early expecting to see snow on the ground.  We had been told it was overdue.  We had been told it was in the forecast. And when we came back to the cabin after dinner on Thursday evening, light rain was coming down as a kind of slush and temperatures had dropped into the low thirties. A part of me expected blizzard.

Though a thin film of ice coated the puddle outside our front door on Friday morning, there was no snow on the plains.  In the predawn light we could see snow in the Medicine Bow Range to the west and on the Laramie Mountains to the east, but not on the flat lands between.

The sky was still largely overcast except for a slight gap along the eastern horizon. So as the sun came up we had a brief opportunity -- five minutes or so -- to take pictures.

After breakfast we headed east. Our plan was to visit the two churches my grandfather Nordstrom had pastored and to stop at several spots along the way that my family had frequented when I was very young. Time permitting, we would drive into Cheyenne either coming or going. My father had lived in Cheyenne most of his years until he graduated high school.  My own solitary memory of Cheyenne was attending Frontier Days with my grandmother in July, once upon a time, although the exact year or my precise age is now beyond recall.

We took I-80 around Laramie and then after a drive through that the Laramie Mountains to the east we headed for Cheyenne. In the pre-Interstate era, those dark days of two-lane travel, the highway went through every town along its main street, which is why they are often called Main Street. In Laramie, the main street is called Grand Avenue.

When we traveled to visit my Nordstrom grandparents at their last church in Golden Prairie, driving through Cheyenne slowed the trip considerably.  I have vague recollections of stopping along a night darkened street at a particular store so that my father could buy various kinds of popcorn as a treat.  It is the popcorn, especially the caramel popcorn, that I remember, not the town. On drives like that my parents would sing together.

On one occasion I recall my parents having a sudden, hushed conversation about a sign they had seen in a store window that apparently said that Indians were not welcome. I cannot be certain about more details from that distant evening, but the fact that the sign created such immediate and deep concern for my parents made an impression on me that has not diminished. This would have been, perhaps, 1953 or 54, when I was four or five.

It had not snowed at the ranch, but it had snowed in the Laramie Mountains overnight. I estimated 3 or 4 inches where the wind had not swept it away. Temperatures recorded on the car thermometer dropped from 39 near Laramie to 33 as we reached the summit. The sky to the west and north was very dark and the wind was blowing. To the south was clear sky.

Just east of the summit we turned off  I-80 to see the Ames Monument, which is close to the interstate on a muddy unpaved road that had a serious washboard surface. The Ames Monument is a 60 foot granite pyramid built by the Union Pacific Railroad to honor the Ames Brothers, who were instrumental in the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 19th Century. It marks the highest elevation (8,247 feet) of the original route.

The Ames brothers, Oliver and Oaks, like many industrialists, especially from the 19th Century, were heroes to some and villains to others. While the brief accounts I have read all tell pretty much the same facts, the story is pretty much that the triumph of the transcontinental railroad was offset by the greed, corruption, and influence peddling that brought it into being.

A railroad town called Sherman was built near this spot; but when the railroad was rerouted several miles to the south in 1901, the town disappeared. Today the monument just seems to rise from the ground out in the middle of nowhere, fitting perhaps for the Ames brothers.  A telling footnote here: the plaques atop the monument intended to honor the brothers offer relief busts of Oliver and Oaks on opposite sides; in both cases, from what I could see, the noses have been shot off.

I remember the Ames Monument from childhood. We had stopped there on occasion although I cannot imagine why. Apart from its historic importance, which is fairly singular and would have been lost on small boys, all I remember is squinting for family pictures on the sunny side of the monument.

Stefan and I did a little picture taking as the pyramid is such a distinctive feature in this winter-bleak landscape.

A short distance away, on the other side of I-80 is a better spot for little boys, more fun and more memorable. Vedauwoo is an area of rock formations that offers incredible possibilities for climbing and exploring.

But as the weather was discouraging and we had planned to head toward the Nebraska border to see if we could find my grandfather's churches, we decided to catch Vedauwoo on the return trip. We got in the car and headed east.

Out in Places Like Wyoming [3]

Cowboy Culture

Stefan is in the final year of his MFA program at Syracuse, for which he is completing a senior project and writing a thesis. The project is a body of work, newly made art in his case. And the gist of the thesis is that the artist is constructing an artist's statement about that work. It can be fairly difficult to articulate what a body of work is intended to do, to provide theoretical underpinnings, and to explain methods. Even for representational art, paintings of landscapes, say, or portraits, the artist must translate layered emotions and impulses, as well as conceptual complexities, into common language, while trying to avoid reducing the work to over-simplification. It is no wonder we often find these statements difficult to understand.

But Stefan is not representational; he is an abstract painter.  The task of making an abstract artist's statement that will pass muster for a master's thesis has to be convincing as well.

When Stefan first suggested the trip to Wyoming, he noted that at some point he became aware of the family connections inherent in his paintings. His current work is suffused with these connections, and he wanted to find more, to research, if you will, by learning about a grandfather he had never met and by visiting places he had heard about but never seen, principally the old Zoller family stomping grounds out in Wyoming.

A few months later, I showed him some notebooks and drawings his grandfather had done as a young man in Wyoming, material that I had been keeping in a box. Stefan's grandfather had a long history in Wyoming and Colorado.  He was born in Boulder, Colorado, but raised principally in Cheyenne.  He had not only been a student at the University of Wyoming, where he met my mother, but he had also returned there  to teach Engineering after his war service.

From those years, what few things of his remain include a number of schematic drawings and a number of topographical elevations from his time as a surveyor. Stefan was excited by the prospect of incorporating elements of these line drawings and mathematical equations into his work. His first efforts clearly embodied the connections he was hoping for in a way that made representational explanations unnecessary and insufficient.

[See more at   stefanzoller.com  under 2015]

The trip to Wyoming would provide a different kind of material for this on-going project that I will characterize as narrative (mine, mostly), environmental (landscape and geography), and informational.

Once we arrived, the environmental and narrative elements of this material began to unfold.  We needed to be a little more intentional about gathering information, so we decided to spend the first day at the University to see what we could find concerning my father and his work there.

As we did all of our days on site, we got up early to see the sunrise. But there was no sun on the horizon, no long and haunting shadows.  It rained off and on the entire day.  Of Wyoming's three days of annual rainfall, we got two. I made this comment to our host, the rancher, who good-naturedly responded with a corrective about annual rainfall in eastern Wyoming. I'm still not sure whether he knew I was joking.

About 9:30, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, we headed into Laramie.

Following a city map we drove onto campus and found the Engineering building without any trouble. It is situated next to the Geology Building,where we decided to begin our search for information. I had assumed any records related to surveying would be housed there. Everywhere we went we found people eager to help us.  But information was not forthcoming. We learned two things at the Geology Building: that the surveying records it held pertained to the Wyoming Geological Survey and not to the US Geological Survey. No mention of J. Harold Zoller appeared in the state data base.

The other thing we learned is that there is a rock type called wyomingite. A box of samples sat on the counter for visitors to examine or to take, which I did.

Our tour of the Engineering Building had similar results.  We found people eager to help, but literally no mention of my father. There was considerable information available about the recent era in UWyo engineering but almost nothing of any help prior to the modern era.  The modern era apparently began in the 1970s. The Zollers moved from Wyoming in 1958.

But while the visit yielded no immediate information about my father, it did provide, via a cornerstone to the Engineering Building, a commentary on the nature of engineering, circa 1926, in the form of a cornerstone. The saying advances an aggressive posture toward the human struggle with the environment. We found evidence of that struggle everywhere.

The engineering folks sent us to the University archives, located on the top floor of the University art museum that stands within sight of the football stadium.  I remember that stadium, or a smaller version of it, from my early years. The stadium is three or four blocks from the house we lived in on Custer Street.  On occasion we were taken to the game on Saturday when my parents went.  They sat on the "home side" of the field with the other Cowboy fans. We boys sat for free on the small bleachers in the north end zone, in what was known as the "knot-hole" section. When the home team scored, the ROTC cadets fired a howitzer in the south end zone and a student dressed like a cowboy rode a brown and white spotted horse around the field, whooping and waving his hat. At the end of the game my parents collected us to go home.

On game days when we couldn't attend, we could tell by the noise of the crowd and by the boom of the howitzer just how well the home team was doing.

The archives proved just as disappointing as our endeavors in the engineering building had been. Yearbooks from the years my father taught at the University did not even carry pictures of faculty, so even that baseline source proved unhelpful. We spent a number of fruitless hours sorting through a box of papers and folders that "might" hold a clue, but found none.

When we reached the bottom of the box the archive staff had brought us, we decided to stop the search.  Outside it was raining harder.  We had lunch, visited a University themed store, and then headed back to the ranch.  On the way we stopped at the Wyoming Territorial Prison, which had once housed Butch Cassidy and other, less famous inmates. We learned that the territorial penal system was both harsh and, often, unfair. Not all deserved the punishments they were given, and few were as lucky as the young man below, who was free to leave after he had taken the self-guided tour.

Back at the ranch we spent the rest of the afternoon working. Stefan set up his water-color kit and began painting. I reviewed the day in my journal.  We hadn't made the information breakthrough we had been hoping for.  We learned what we already knew: it is tough for any individual to leave evidence of his journey. What we would hope now to gain would have to come from the environment itself.

On the other hand,  we had seen where Butch Cassidy had done time to pay for some of his crimes.  We were certainly starting to learn about cowboy culture.

Out in Places Like Wyoming [2]

360 Degree Horizon

Ten miles west of Laramie on highway 130 we turned left onto Brubaker Lane.  If your frame of reference is British, where "lane" refers to "a narrow way between hedges, walls, buildings," or if you live east of the Mississippi as we do and imagine lanes to be tree-lined country byways, you would have shot past Brubaker Lane without slowing.

But ten miles west of Laramie on highway 130 a little sign points left, so we turned. Brubaker Lane is a hard-packed red-dirt road that heads in a straight line toward the horizon, its rain-damped surface pounded into washboard by truck tires. Driving slowly in our small Hyunai rental, we were impressed with clear, flat line of the horizon and with the ruler-straight road that led toward it.

Five miles down this lane, according to our directions, we would find number 445, our ranch destination. It did not seem likely to us that we would find 444 addresses -- buildings, lanes, driveways, or turn-outs -- prior to 445. Clearly our eastern frame of reference wouldn't work here.

As we drove slowly, bouncing along the miles of ribs, what was immediately impressive to us was the magnitude, the scope, the abundance of both land and sky. In every direction, the land simply opened itself; it both drew us in and filled us up. Perhaps it was our eastern frame of reference again, where horizons are usually close and broken by hills and trees.

How can one be here and not stop to stare?

We did a lot of stopping and staring in those few days.  And snapping photographs. We had come in part to see the landscape, which the photographs can preserve after a fashion; but being on the open plains demands more than seeing.

In terms of Stefan's initial objectives for traveling with me to Wyoming -- to discover family connections -- these first views and impressions were more than confirmation that we were on the right track.  For him it was all discovery and first impressions. For me, it was rediscovery and affirmation.  It has occurred to me that my ability to find beauty in austere places and seasons may come from here.

Emptiness, which is part of this experience, is largely an illusion. 

In this environment, you find your eyes distinguish things that in other circumstances you would tend to overlook. It is in part the overwhelming dominance of the horizontal, in part the interplay between the expanse of sky and the expanse of land, in part the subtle complexity of colors, in part the constant restlessness of light.

It is also the prominence of objects that in other settings do not necessarily call attention to themselves, that are perhaps muted, insignificant or unremarkable.  Or maybe just harmoniously inconspicuous.

 

Once you see it, a horse grazing at sunrise, for example, is more than horse and pasture: it is an affirmation. 

Barren though it may appear, this is not a desolate, barren landscape in the way that, say, an urban street or a blighted neighborhood can be desolate.  Take fences as an example.  Wooden anchoring posts along a barbed-wire-and-steel-post fence have a certain gravity; they have a visual purpose as well as a practical, physical one, a meaning that is both obvious and elusive.

They are, at the very least, a reminder of human attempts to tame and domesticate and control the high plains.In places those attempts appear reasonably successful.  In other place, less so.

One of the conclusions I drew quite quickly is this: What appears to undifferentiated flatness is to some degree just a matter of distance -- the further your vantage point, the flatter the landscape.

What is, in fact, true, is that the landscape has plenty of ups and down, plenty of undulation. But to see it requires proximity; moving close to the ground changes one's illusion about what is barren and merely flat.

Even before we reached our cabin at 445 Brubaker Lane, we knew our journey was a success. To see this landscape is to be inspired.  To be there, to be in it is to be possessed, another dimension entirely.  Then you turn around for a look.  From the other end of that five mile drive, the view back is something else altogether.