The joy of open spaces (Road note 3: Wyoming)

Updating an old image, re-discovering an old question.

I expected Wyoming, the ‘Cowboy State’, to be a near-mystical experience. Endless open land. Echoes of the Wild West. Instead, I felt distant.

My preparation had been Gretel Ehrlich’s book The Solace of Open Spaces. The writer-turned-rancher didn’t exactly pitch the place. She recounted one brutal winter when a cowboy lit a fire underneath his pickup truck to unfreeze the fluids. That’s a hard no thank you from me. Luckily, I am visiting in June.

It’s an evocative place. Lonely¹ and rugged, dry and very windy. I expected flat prairie but was rewarded with hills and canyons. The endless sky seemed to always be doing something interesting. On my first night, I watched as much lightning as in all my years in New York.

Sky above the Muddy Guard reservoir near the Bighorns

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“People here still feel pride because they live in such a harsh place,” writes Ehrlich. The locals strike me as both proud and quiet. When I mention that I lived in Manhattan, they simply respond “sorry.”

On the way to Yellowstone, I stop in Cody and attend the rodeo. “Where are my Californians?” the host asks the crowd. Cheers from the stands. “Welcome to America!” he cries. The crow laughs.

It’s funny. Also, ridiculous. What makes Wyoming, population 600,000, so American compared to California, population 39 million? It’s an old idea that refuses to fade. The American West, a dreamscape in which the indigenous are no more than an afterthought. Does this outdated image feel more vivid now that our eyes are glued to screens? I certainly yearned for open space after a decade in a maze of glass and concrete.

But things were more complicated than I, in my ignorance, had expected.

My Subaru joined a herd of fellow steel beasts, a mere pony among the bison-like trucks. We roared westward, cutting through the country in straight lanes. Oh, how I wanted to exit and wander. Turns out there are fences nearly everywhere. Fences and dreaded letters spelling No Trespassing.

This consistent reminder stuck with me.

Move along. Can’t you see? This belongs to me!

Move along, don’t you dare, I’m armed and free.

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Historians relegate the “Wild West” to a tidy twenty-year span when rangeland was unfenced and youngsters signed on with the trail herds moving north from Texas, but the West, however disfigured, persists.

Cowboys still drift from outfit to outfit, riding the rough string, calving heifers, making fifty-mile circles during fall roundup; and year around, the sheepherders—what’s left of them—stay out with their sheep. But ranchers who cherish the western life and its values may also pray for oil wells in their calving pasture or a coal lease on prime grassland. — Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

What do you mean, I can’t walk here?!

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I get it. We don’t want cattle to stray into traffic. Nobody wants wild camping or hunting on their property. But I can’t shake the feeling that this glorious land has been subdued, that its spirit is tangled up in barbed wire like a deer trying to cross the road.

There is an escape: public land.