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.