Out in Places Like Wyoming

Hay Bales and Cloud Studies: Art is Where you Find It

Despite the brevity of our visit to Wyoming at the end of October, Stefan and I fell into a routine that allowed us to work out of a kind of rooted-ness. We were as absorbed in our little cabin on the range as much as we were in our short excursions. And we worked well together.

Back at the ranch at the end of our drive to Saratoga on our third and last evening in Wyoming, we carried chairs from the kitchen of our little cabin onto the gravel drive in front. I sat in the westering sun to stay warm and make notes. Stefan set up an easel twenty feet away and began to work with watercolors. It was cold in the shade that grew from every raised surface. But it was quite nice in the sun.

As I wrote I listened to the raucous bellowing of the cattle pastured a half mile away. Their voices are most noticeable near sunrise and sunset.

Leah, our ranch landlord, had said when we arrived on Thursday that it was time for her to begin weaning the calves so we should not be surprised if the bellowing grew more intense.  But she hadn't gotten to the weaning yet; other things needed attending first. The bellowing we heard was just end-of-the-day chit-chat, cattle being cattle.

We saw her ride out in the late afternoon several different days to check on the herd. One or more of her dogs always seemed to run ahead of her on their way out, as in this picture, and frequently trotted behind on the way back in.

There were many things we found interesting on the premises, many things to photograph or paint or wonder about in addition to the mountains to the west and to the east. Stefan painted a series of watercolors that brought out the layering of the landscape visible from the kitchen door: grassland, foothills, mountains, horizon, sky, clouds, in gradations of color.

I found the fog that hung over the river beyond the trees in early morning to be particularly telling. It was as if an artificial gap or void had been created between the flat grassland and the highlands that rose into the sky.

One of the things that had attracted our particular attention when we arrived was a large stack of hay bales some one hundred feet from our cabin door. Here it provides a kind of natural border and gives a sense of perspective to the mountains rising in the distances.

The hay bales made an interesting study almost any time of day since they offered both an array of color variations that changed with the sunlight and an assortment of textured surfaces. The cattle who would eventually eat these bales would not have been interested in such distinctions, I am sure, but I was much taken by them if for no other reason than that they seemed to offer in an abstracted way the kinds of color and texture variations one sees in the grassland itself.

Well, perhaps hay bales are an acquired taste. I don't imagine just anyone would find them fascinating or would be patient if they had to wait while someone else photographed or painted the bales; but for us it was engrossing.

When we returned to New York, Stefan incorporated his watercolors and photographs of hay bales with other images and impressions of southeastern Wyoming into the MFA thesis project he had been working on.

Another way of understanding this fascination is to connect it to my family origins in this place. The hay bales, common and unremarkable though they are, have narrative value that resembles the story of our coming and going from Wyoming.

One particular naturally occurring feature of this landscape that attracted our attention were the clouds.  On our last morning, I watched and photographed a small formation over the ranch as it reflected the changing light from the rising sun.

The clouds turned pink before the sun breached the horizon. As it began to appear in the east, the Medicine Bow Range to the west turned pink as well. The clouds shifted from blue-grey to vivid pink to white in a matter of minutes. Once the sun was sending rays across the grassland, a treat in itself, the cloud show was over.

It was a lot to take in in just a handful of days. In short order the sun went down, we took our chairs back into the kitchen, and headed into Laramie to eat.   In those few days we felt very much at home in that cabin. Our hosts had afforded us a memorable experience.

The next morning we flew out of the little airport in Laramie in the dark and watched the sun come up at the airport in Denver. We were both sorry to leave so soon, but happy to have gotten out before the snows came.

Out in Places Like Wyoming

Looking West

On Saturday, the morning after we made our loop east to find Albin and Golden Prairie, we planned to head west into the Medicine Bow.

I got up early as I had the day before to see the sunrise. This time the sky was essentially clear. To step out into the yard in the cold, dark air at first is just an astonishing experience; the sounds of cattle lowing a half mile away and the stark contrasts between the dark and light colors as the sun approaches are nothing short of thrilling.
Overhead the sky was deep blue, gradually moderating to yellow-gold along the nearly black horizon.

Stefan was up too, both of us taking pictures in every direction. I walked up the road several hundred yards to a rise to catch the first splintering of sun and watch the colors of the grassland come alive.

The lively richness of color is astonishing. Behind me the mountains and clouds shifted colors minute by minute from blues turning to deep red hues, then to softer pastels.  Notions that this countryside is essentially monochromatic and featureless is just flat-out wrong.

We had chosen this day to drive into the mountains to see the Snowy Range up close and the Medicine Bow Peak in the Medicine Bow National Forest.


So after Stefan cooked up our eggs we drove out.

We arrived at Centennial at about 10. Not much was happening. Like our experience in Albin, no one seemed to be around. Most businesses were closed because of the lateness of the season.

Centennial is famous most recently, I suppose, because of the James Michener novel bearing its name. But it is hardly a town at all, more to my eye like a frontier settlement with trailers, ramshackle houses, and a handful of businesses -- garages, restaurants, western souvenir stores, gas station/convenience stores -- scattered along a bend in the highway just about where it begins a fairly steep ascent into the mountains.  There seemed to be a lot of "junk" lying about.

I don't want to be unfair in my description -- every tourist town has its less than pristine sections.  And perhaps there was more to the town than we could see, or perhaps things get cleaned up in the spring when the new tourist season starts. We stopped at the Centennial Museum but found it, too, closed for the season.  We went into one store and had a good look around at the assortment of western souvenirs. We decided not to buy anything, but I did find a rather interesting sign in the Men's room.

The clerk told us that a foot of new snow had fallen in the mountains the night before but the roads should be open. We thanked him and left















We drove up through the Snowy Range on Wyoming 130.  There had, indeed, been new snow, and the road was, in fact, clear and dry.



Just minutes after we left Centennial in the dun foothills, we were winding through high mountain, snow-covered woodlands. The road above Centennial actually has a gate that can be closed during bad winter weather.  They can literally "close" the road.

For a while we were stopping frequently to take pictures, to admire the long view, to feel the wildness that still characterizes much of this land.

Then we realized we would never make it to the top if we stopped every time we thought we could get a good picture. There was just too much gorgeous scenery for one short trip. Besides, the wind was blowing pretty hard and the cold quickly invaded our jackets and gloves and got under our hats. So we became more selective, stopping less frequently, viewing more from the car.

We did stop at the summit for a quick taste of arctic air and at a viewing spot facing the Medicine Bow rock face where a plane had crashed sixty years ago.  I have a vague memory of my parents discussing the plane crash, but it's one of a handful of memories from that time when my parents talked in hushed, serious voices. I remember generalized sadness detached from specific circumstance rather than a clear memory of tragedy.

My father used to hunt up in these mountains and fish in these rivers.



The landscape is different on the west side, more rolling plains with sharper features, rock outcroppings, rivers with their groves of trees.







As with our trip to Albin and Golden Prairie the day before, these childhood trips had always seemed too long and tiresome; I was too young to appreciate them. It was almost shocking to discover just how close these places actually were, how quickly one could drive there from Laramie.

We had lunch at the Wolf Hotel in Saratoga, a nicely kept, late 19th Century building.  Saratoga itself is pretty close to what I imagine a stereotypical "western town" would look like, with wide streets that formed a grid, wide sidewalks, old small-town store with facades.

After lunch we visited a few of these stores that sold western items, and bought ourselves some touristy things to take home, including  arrowheads for $1 each.





Then we headed back the way we had come, stopping again to take pictures at different spots.  We drove right through Centennial this time without stopping.








 We got back to the ranch by 4 or so to recover and work. Stefan got out his watercolors and I got out my journal. And then we had one more sunset to catch before heading into Laramie for dinner.

Out in Places Like Wyoming

The Neighborhood

My mother died this past July, three months before Stefan and I made our trip to Laramie.  News of our trip likely would have made no impression on her since her mind had pretty much been lost to dementia. But in her younger mind she would have loved a conversation about this trip, in part because, while my father's life and livelihood can be attached easily to tangible things -- the Engineering Building, the house on Custer Street, the view of the Medicine Bow Range where he used to hunt and fish -- my mother is somehow part of the place itself. At least for me, in a thousand little ways and in countless remembered moments, it was my mother who gave this place to us, who made it our first indelible home.


So it was that while Stefan and I wandered about my Laramie neighborhood after visiting the house my father built, it was my mother who was summoned by what we saw.


About a block away is "the park," which was not only our frequent playground but also our route to and from school. In almost any weather we would leave the sidewalks, cross the street and take a direct route through the park, heading in the direction of the white band shell in the corner because directly behind it (across an intersection) was our school.

The band shell is the most distinguishing feature of the park, which still has towering trees, bushes, and grass, a playground area with a new generation of swings and climbing bars, and lots of open space. It is three blocks long and a block deep.  At one end, where as a Little Leaguer playing for Big Buy Burgers, I reached the pinnacle of my baseball career by hitting a home run. The ball, as I remember, bounced through the infield and rolled across the hard dirt beyond the reach of the distracted outfielders. I rounded the bases at a gallop. It provided me with a few moments of unadulterated joy and dreams of future baseball glory that somehow never panned out.

That hard dirt ball field is now open lawn.  Whether it is still used for Little League or not is not evident to the casual observer.

But the band shell, like so many things, seems to me to be alive with my mother's cautions and warnings. I can recall, for example, when Mom asked me why I was late coming home from school, saying that I was playing in the park, a true though evasive answer.  But what I was actually doing in the park was trying to hit the light bulbs along the inside rim of the band shell with rocks.

I was never able to hit the bulbs, by the way, a natural consequence of age, size, and general inaccuracy.  Had I been stronger or more accurate the temptation of the band shell bulbs might have turned my nascent attempts at vandalism to a life of dissipation and crime.  Who knows.

At any rate, in the summer my mother would make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches so we could eat lunch with our friends in the park.  The sandwiches she would wrap in waxed paper, and then pour Kool Aid into a mason jar, in those innocent days before plastic containers took over.

The schoolyard, too, was dirt in those olden days.  We played tackle football in the dust at the near end of the school, ruining the knees of our school clothes and scuffing school shoes that had to be polished on Saturday night. The line between school clothes and play clothes has disappeared in the sixty years since I changed the minute I got home, as has the ritual of polishing shoes for Sunday.

This serious business of directing her four Wyoming sons fell, naturally, I always supposed, to my mother. When I think back on things I could do or things I had to ask permission for, it is always my mother I asked. It was always my mother who scolded us for the torn, stained school pants and then mended the ripped pocket, patched the holes, reattached the buttons.It was always Mom who washed and bandaged the scraps on elbows and knuckles and knees.  It was, as I have always thought, a golden childhood.  And she would have loved to hear about the memories this quick trip with own son brought back to me.

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.