Notes on Wyoming

One thing being here for three weeks (one week left to go!) has brought home for me is that passing through this summer, I didn’t get to know Wyoming at all. Which is to say that I didn’t get to know Minnesota or Utah or Arizona or Missouri either. The trip was more about the moving than the stopping, something abundantly clear as I start writing the book. Like the thrill of car ownership in contemporary China, where the miles of highway have doubled in the past five years, driving in 1946 was an end in itself. If you saw some of the country along the way, even better.

This summer I spent two days in Wyoming. This fall I’ll spend 30. I’ve seen how the brown hills turn colors, how the wind blows the trees sideways. I’ve danced at the White Buffalo with a 90-year-old man from Cheyenne named Merlin, a man with a bent body and a Band-aid across his forehead who still knows how to lead a lady in the two-step. I’ve had a drink at a bar where Butch Cassidy and Calamity Jane each drank. The bartender pointed out just two of the 26 bullet holes in the room. I’ve walked up a snowy trail to a crystal blue lake in the Big Horns. I know Wyoming better, but still I don’t know Wyoming. I know that it’s big. And that it’s good to wear an orange vest.



It’s in Wyoming that I’ve started to write a book, and that I’m learning how to go about doing so. I’m taking it a day at a time, a sentence at a time, but also trying to learn to plow through and revise later. I’m writing letters. I’m surrounding myself with photos. But I’m not blogging.

It had seemed that the blog would be a way of moving through this process, but this week it isn’t. I’m unplugging the Internet. I’m staying offline. I’m hanging out instead with Jennie and Pauline and Norma and Marie, or alternately with Kirk and Ginny and Laurie and FG. Or with my own ideas of travel and roadtripping, of the lives of women. In the very least, I'm hanging with my homesickness, which is very convenient as I write about those solitary stretches on the road.

So here in Wyoming for my last week of residency, I’m checking out. If you think about me, imagine me here, in this studio. Wish me good writing. Out the window is Wyoming, with its rabbits, deer, and the sad, knowing eyes of the cows.