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The history of Wyoming is one of passing through. I always joke that the big empty is like Australia, and that nobody ever got here by accident, but a lot of us did-we were on our way to somewhere else; Louis, Clark, misguided missionaries, lost trappers and mountain men who didn't really care where they were made up the first influx of outsiders who moved on. Only the Indians stayed here for months at a time, and they were proudly nomadic. I wonder if any of their travois had beaded bumper stickers that said NATIVE.
The Oregon Trail went through Wyoming along with about a half-million immigrants who never thought once about staying. Stage lines and the Pony Express traveled through, along with the Bozeman Trail, the Union Pacific rail lines and finally the interstate highways.
In a boom-bust culture, people come and people go that being mostly dependant on the economy. I remember seeing a bumper sticker in Gillette that read, GIVE US ONE MORE BOOM AND WE WON"T SCREW IT UP. Well they got it, and with the current state of methane drilling, and the highest exportation of coal in the country, Wyoming has had a budgetary surplus of over a billion dollars for a few years now.
Over a billion dollars.
When governor Dave was asked what he planned to do with all that money, he stated pretty simply that he intended to spend it on the decaying infrastructure, on schools, bridges and libraries-things of permanence. But all that withstanding, there's something about the high plains that makes you want to move on. Maybe it's the horizon stretching the corners of your eyes, or that, with the ability to see so far, there must be something more out there to see. Those of us who've stayed deliberately build houses, barns, and fences. Anything to give 98,000 square miles scale-but it doesn't always work.
Maybe it's the wind, that siren song of the high desert that blows under your heels and reminds you what it's like to be moving again. Or maybe the Shoshone, the Arapaho, the Crow, the Lakota, and the Cheyenne had it right in the first place-some loves are too great to sustain. Perhaps in all our scrambling attempts to build, drill, graze, till and manage, our endeavors to shape the land only allow the land to shape us. Time passes and we become more like those distant hills; like the wind.
Some of my friends have left, and their faces still haunt me when I see crowds, no matter how small, or receive Christmas cards from places like Maine, California, and the Falkland Islands. To me, they are now the ghosts of Wyoming-having taken the wings of the wind and alighted somewhere else.
I am not sure that that will not be the case for all of us-that when the time comes and this place wearies of us all, that it might rise, stretch and shake, sending us all away.
Best,
Craig
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