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.

Out in Places Like Wyoming

Coming in out of the rain

It had been raining in Wyoming and more rain was forecast. Through the little windows of the plane even as we descended in sunshine for landing, our view was of clouds, irregular and continuous.  Here and there the clouds opened and we glimpsed the broad, nearly flat, immense plains. Then as if by slight of hand we dropped and the clouds were above us.  Below, the grasslands, the black cattle, the pronghorn we call antelope, the long straight fences, and we were settling onto the runway of the Laramie Regional Airport. Drops of rainwater streaked the windows, blurring the view as we slowed, braking hard, and taxied what seemed like miles back to the small group of small buildings that comprise the terminal.

The trip to Wyoming, to Laramie, my home town, had been my son Stefan's idea. He had expressed his interest early in the year and proposed that he and I do a tour of places he had never seen. Laramie is background that figures into much of my extended family narrative. My parents were both UW graduates, and UW is where my father taught after he returned from the Pacific theater after the war. Three of my four brothers and I are Wyomingites by birth. The landscape is part of our DNA, as it were.

Still, I confess to being a bit surprised to actually walk out of that little airport in Laramie into the wind, toward our rental car.

The wind is different here, as strange as that may sound.  As is the sky.  Even overcast with rain clouds the Wyoming sky is impressive.

Traveling to Wyoming is chancy near the end of October. The rain that had been forecast for our first full day, Thursday, could be, might be, should probably actually turn out to be snow. The woman at the Hertz counter said as much. She wanted to know if we wanted to upgrade our rental to a 4-wheel drive jeep. The rancher from whom we were renting a little cabin said, "we are overdue."

Originally we thought to come in August, before the school year started. But that plan had not worked out, so we settled on the third week of October, which we figured ought to allow us to see what we wanted to see before winter settled in.

Because it was early afternoon and because we had not eaten since very early in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, we decided to drive into Laramie to look around, get a feel for the town, eat lunch, before driving out onto the high plains where Stefan had booked us a cabin on a working cattle ranch.

So we did that.

I had picked up a street map at the airport, but once we crossed the bridge (the viaduct) over the railroad tracks on the western edge of town, the streets opened up for me pretty much as I had remembered them, even though we moved to the east coast when I was nine.

We followed Third Street for a few blocks and then turned East onto Grand Avenue, which still appears to be the main thoroughfare through town. Like most towns in "the west" Laramie was laid out in a grid, with streets running north-south or east-west. Follow Grand Avenue east and you eventually wind up in Cheyenne, after climbing through the Laramie mountain range and crossing lots of prairie, of course.  Follow it west and you wind up in the rail yards. Look to the horizon at that point and you can see the Snowy Range in the Medicine Bow National Forest some fifty miles away.

North of Grand Avenue from about 10th Street on is the University.  Another nine blocks down Grand and three or four blocks south is the street I knew as a kid, where the house my father built is located.  We found it easily and then found the park where my brothers and friends and I played and then drove by the school we all attended during our first school years. Because it was still raining sporadically, we decided to explore on foot another day.  Besides we were starved.  So we went to lunch and then drove out to the ranch, fifteen miles west of town, across the grasslands.

When we got out of the car, finally, all my senses told me we were back in Wyoming -- the wind, the smell of sage, the sounds of cattle a half-mile away, the visceral sense of distances, and the incredible play of light everywhere.