Wyoming's empty spaces

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

By Bill Sniffin

The vast panorama of Wyoming stretched out below me as I took a commercial flight over our state. My plane went from Riverton to Denver and Denver to Pierre, S.D., over much of Wyoming’s open country.

It always makes an impression on me when I look down and see so much land below me. Wyoming has such vastness. Critics might call it empty spaces; we locals prefer to call it open spaces.

The U. S. Census Bureau does not consider Wyoming to be rural, which is surprising, but it does call us “frontier.” Yes, that makes sense.

It’s difficult to write about Wyoming without talking about space and wind. A recent survey of newcomers to our state indicated that our open space is one of the biggest attractions to people coming here from more populated places. There are even documented cases of buses full of Japanese tourists pulling off the road between Gillette and Buffalo to take photos of “nothing.” So much space with seemingly nothing in it must be immensely impressive to visitors who live in often crowded conditions. There are reportedly also cases of those people suffering reverse claustrophobia, where they became ill from the strange feeling of being in a place so open.

Last week, I joined a friend scouting for game animals on a 140,000-acre swath of BLM land he leased along with two other ranchers in eastern Fremont County. We traveled for 25 miles through “nothing.” The little canyons, creeks, nooks and crannies of that area were endless and fascinating. It was a great time.

Such a place can spawn writers who try to capture the essence of the area. Here, for example, is “Wyoming Wind” by former state poet laureate Robert Roripaugh, a resident of windy Laramie:

Dead grass bends …
Dust clogs yellowish sky.
The hawks are down, dreaming in rock

We lie beside warped windows,
Hunt between seasons –
Something is eroding the screen.

Garbage cans roll off
Like huge wrecked drums
Banging fences, cowing children …

Shingles flutter, birds
Crash against windshields,
Drive-ins flower into paper seed.

Dry air takes the land,
Our mouths gray as solder
We listen to coyotes in bare trees,

Wire rivers. Outside is prairie
Obscured by dust and wind
Sound ghostly as screech owls.

We strain to hear, seeing
Curved horns . . . humped dark
Shapes swirling toward Medicine Bow

One of my all-time favorite Wyoming books is “The Solace of Open Spaces,” by Gretel Ehrlich, which discusses our vastness. “In all this open space values crystallize quickly,” she writes. “People are strong on scruples but tenderhearted about quirky behavior.”
Elsewhere she writes, “If anything is endemic to Wyoming, it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates and carcasses in every stage of decay.  Though it was water that initially shaped the state wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage.” Yes. “The emptiness of the West was for others a geography of possibility.”

And I love this quote: “The solitude in which westerners live makes them quiet. They telegraph thoughts and feelings by the way they tilt their heads and listen; pulling their Stetsons into a steep dive over their eyes or pigeon-toeing one boot over the other, they lean against a fence … and take in the whole scene.   These detached looks of quiet amusement are sometimes cynical but they can also come from a dry-eyed humility as lucid as the air is clear.”

But back to my vantage point from that airplane: Wyoming didn’t look empty to me. It looked like a kaleidoscope of colors, as river-formed valleys, mountains and hills jutted and swirled along. Furrows of moved dirt or rustling dust indicate how fast or how recently the wind had been blowing. My favorite term for our constant breeze is from a Kevin McNiven song, which talks about “Wyoming’s cleansing wind.”

Yes, there is a lot to talk about when you get on the subject of the nothingness that fills Wyoming.

PERMALINK:
Wyoming's empty spaces | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

Leave a Comment