Latest WyoFile review features biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings by Ann McCutchan

Check out my latest book review on WyoFile: "In new biography, Laramie writer McCutchan examines a different frontier."

Ann McCutchan's new book is The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of The Yearling. Ann told me about the upcoming book when we met for coffee when she was contemplating a move back to Laramie. I was fascinated by the story behind Ann's choice in bio subjects and her return to the state. She grew up on Florida's Atlantic coast not far from where I came of age. We both had similar nostalgic memories of life on and near the beach. We both landed in Wyoming as adults and shared a bit of surprise that this is where we spent so much of our lives. No beaches within miles, unless you count Garth Brooks' "The Beaches of Cheyenne."

WyoFile's articles can now be heard via audio from Ad Auris. They've been doing this for awhile but just noticed it when the site published my latest review. I listened to it and it's quite good. Tune in at the above link.

Boring old college lecturer responds to "The Chair"

Watched the last episode of "The Chair" this week. I laughed, I cried. Various faculty and administrators and students pissed me off.  All in all, a good investment of six Netflix hours. 

I have never served time on a college faculty and I've been an adjunct at community colleges. I was an undergrad English major at one community college and a land-grant university in the Palm Tree South and a grad student at a land-grant university in the Rocky Mountain West. I never got within spitting distance of a small liberal arts college such as Pembroke. 

But Pembroke's people seemed familiar. As a grad student T.A., I experienced some of the same frustrations of Pembroke faculty, those f*cking f*cks referenced in The Chair's (F*cker In Charge) desk sign. Some faculty members were old and stuck in their ways. The Literature, Composition and ESL faculty didn't like creative writing faculty and vice versa. The administration was always targeting the English Department for cuts due to the fact that we all speak English so why in the f*cking f*ck do we need an English Department? Shouldn't it be the  'Merican Department since we all speak 'Merican here? 

All an MFA grad student could do was teach our two sections of comp, keep our heads down and write a lot. We had regular classes to attend on top of writing workshops. And, in my case and some others, I had a family to support. 

One of my favorite aspects of "The Chair" are insights into faculty's families. Dr. Ji-Joon Kim has a daughter who is as argumentative as faculty ("You're not my real mom"). Dobson's wife died and his only daughter went off to college. No matter he gets stoned before and after class, and sometimes doesn't show up at all. Dr. Joan Hambling gave up her personal life and career advancement to prop of the fragile egos of male colleagues. She is working on a relationship with a college IT guy who is as much as a wise-ass as she is. Dr. Rentz (Bob Balaban) chats with his wife before a college event and we find out that she gave up her academic career to raise three kids. "Someone had to cook dinner," she says as she urges her aging husband to wear his Depends.

My daughter, an English major, is watching "The Chair" but I don't think she's finished. After a couple episodes she was angry at the students, which I thought was interesting since she is a student and a Millennial. I was angry at the students too but possibly for a different reason. They didn't want to learn Chaucer and Melville? I fondly recall my red-haired prof at UF who taught us Chaucer in Middle English. She spoke it like a native and there were times I imagined her as The Wyf of Bathe. 

The Pembroke students just didn't want to learn it the old-fashioned boring Boomer lecture way. They liked the way Moby Dick was taught by Dr. Yaz, a Millennial who approached it in a new way. By the end of the final episode, I was depressed about the state of academia. No surprise -- I was a boring old lecturer and probably still am. Back in my day, etc., etc., and so on. 

That summer day in Wyoming, that was some wonderful day

One of my favorite loop tours for visitors is Cheyenne to Saratoga via the Snow Range. And then back again. For me, this 300-mile round-trip is no big deal. During summer, the obstacles on this route are construction, poky RVers, and hailstorms. During winter, you have to add in "slick in spots" hazards along I-80s Elk Mountain route. 

My wife Chris and sister Eileen joined me in my car. Brother-in-law Brian, daughter Annie and sister Mary rode in the rental. We first drove to Laramie. Annie wanted to show off her future campus. We parked in the War Memorial Stadium lot. Our visitors were impressed with the "breaking through" monumental sculpture and the big motto writ on across the stadium wall: "The world needs more cowboys." I really didn't want to get into some of the blowback the phrase caused. What about cowgirls?  Will this turn off Native American and other minority students? And what cowboys, exactly, are you speaking of? Cowboy Joe? John Wayne? The drovers in "Lonesome Dove?" The thousands of UW grads who couldn't find jobs in their home state and fled to non-cowboy states such as Illinois and Florida? Who? What?

We toured the big welcome center named for a rich donor. This is how it is on college campuses and I have no problems with it. Inside, I saw names of patrons who also support the arts and that made me happy as UW has great arts facilities and faculty. 

I noticed the library in the fireplace room and settled in to read through some of the old UW annuals. I was taken with the 1954 volume. Its first eight pages were photos of campus and Wyoming scenes that looked like blueline prints of 3D film. There is a pocket in the book's inside front cover that once held 3D glasses. How fun is that? 3D movies had hit the market in the early 1950s and they were all the rage when UW students assembled the annual in 1954. "It Came from Outer Space" (1953) and "Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954). I was also surprised by some of the other 3D titles listed on IMBD, "Kiss Me Kate" and "Hondo" among them. I don't have a real good feeling about Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor and The Duke coming at me in three dimensions. "They called him Hondo -- hot-blooded as the Plains that bred him. silent as gunsmoke, a stranger to all but the surly dog at his side." OK by me, but the dog better not die.

We ate lunch under the trees and toured the UW Art Museum, one of my favorite places. Some exhibits were closing down to make room for the fall crop of artists. But the ones still up were fascinating. I really got a kick out of  David Bradley's 2001 panoramic and satiric painting of the Santa Fe Indian Market (going on now). I was entranced by Collin Parson's "Light Ellipse" at the entrance to the galleries. The 12-feet-high ellipse is made of PVC panel and backlit by LED lights and changes colors as you watch. Parson's exhibit is one of the museum's fall highlights which includes visits and talks by the Denver artist. "Blind" by Holly Roberts was part of the museum's horse exhibit. This was one of the more experimental works in "The West on Horseback" exhibit that included paintings by Hans Klieber and black-and-white ranch photos by Elsa Spear Byron.  

After a quick tour of downtown we headed for the mountains along Route 130 through Centennial. The high prairie seemed very green for the first week in August. It's usually lightly-browned as beach sand, sometimes as brown as the Wyoming Brown you see all across the UW campus. A summer squall cut into our sightseeing. Also, there was that brown cloud that has found its way here from Oregon and California. The rain let up when we reached Lake Marie so we released our visitors into the wild, now with that fresh post-rainstorm scent. Lake Marie probably one of the most photographed site in Wyoming outside our national parks and the country's first national monument. Sometimes you can catch it as still and mirror-lake and, if the light is just right, you can shoot a fit-for-framing reflection of the surrounding mountains. Laramie's Doc Thissen once showed me such a photo, one of his.

On the way downhill we passed Brush Creek Ranch and I thought about C.J. Box's novel "The Disappeared" in which some nefarious goings-on happen at a guest ranch eerily similar to Brush Creek. Other fictional nogoodniks are haunting the Wolf Hotel in downtown Saratoga, a place where Game Warden/Sleuth Joe Pickett bellies up to the bar on a frigid winter evening and sips a Black Tooth Saddle Bronc Ale. Eileen, Brian, and Mary toured the Wolf and the rest of the town. 

"So who lives here?" I've asked myself that question many times, usually when passing places such as Hanna and  Jeffrey City. I know writers from Hanna and people in Jeffrey City who kept its arts council alive even when the town was dying. These towns also house coal-miners, wind-farm workers, retirees and meth heads. Just like any place in the Rocky Mountain West. As I drive back to Cheyenne, I look out on the landscape and marvel that anyone can make a living in this place. It inspires -- I think of Linda Lillegraven's wonderful landscape paintings -- and it also causes people to lose their minds, as happens in real life and in Annie Proulx's short stories (Proulx spent many years in WYO and once lived in Centennial). 

The setting sun ignites the clouds over the Laramie Range as we drive the last miles to home. It occurs to me that nobody in our two-car caravan sees Wyoming as I do. We all see and experience life differently. Some of us translate it (or try to) in the work we do. For others, it is memories and stories, a photograph that they unearth decades later and remember that August day in Wyoming spent with family. 

That was some day. 

Meadowlarks, cabbage burgers, and Pine Bluffs experiences a nuke boom (the good kind)

So this is Nebraska

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday

afternoon; July. Driving along

with your hand out squeezing the air,

a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Third stanza of a poem by Ted Kooser of Nebraska, one-time U.S. Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. To hear him read the poem, prefaced with a short description of why he wrote it, go to  Poetry Foundation. To read in full, go to So this is Nebraska

I heard Kooser read this poem aloud along with other work at a Wyoming Writers, Inc., conference a few years ago. He's a short and unassuming man. You can't say the same adjectives for his poetry. His work tells stories of life in the Great Plains, Nebraska mainly. The poems are simple in construction but you can find worlds in "a meadowlark waiting on every post."

I traveled from Cheyenne to Nebraska last week, my first visit since before Covid-19 struck. It was a short visit. Family visitors who had never been to Nebraska wanted to see it, step foot in a foreign place. I told them Nebraska stories, how Chris and I got trapped in Kimball during a spring blizzard when lightning veined the sky and I skidded through mushy snow a foot deep on I-80 before snagging the last hotel room barely 60 miles from home. I gathered my family one spring break day and met friends from Lincoln in Red Cloud, Nebraska, home of Willa Cather. An odd choice for spring break if you're not an admirer of Cather and her work. But our friends got into the spirit of the day. The kids played in the playground while we toured Cather's old home undergoing restoration (I snagged a 100-year-old board) and poked around the library which checks out books, videos, and cake pans. Chris and I walked the quiet autumn streets of Lincoln, campus lights twinkling in the distance. I remarked that it took a victory by the visiting CU Buffaloes over the Mighty Cornhuskers to bring the silence of a graveyard to the capital city. 

We drove through Pine Bluffs and past the border into Nebraska. "Looks a lot like Wyoming," Eileen said.

We pull off at Bushnell. I glide to a stop on the paved road which probably morphs into a gravel road. Next to the sign for Bushnell (No Services!), with farm equipment clattering down the road, prairie grass waving in the hot wind, I read them Kooser's poem. Looking back, I should have dialed up the poet reading his work. His voice matches the scenery.

I hear traffic zipping down the interstate. Thousands pass this way every day bound for somewhere else. Those who do get off at this interchange take bio breaks and tend to a crying child. No need to seek succor in Bushnell (No Services). Winter winds or weather might cause high-profile vehicles to pull over. But a truck stop is just seven miles away across the border so why stop here? I can easily conjure a winter day near Bushnell because I have experienced them near Torrington and Muddy Gap and Sinclair and Meeteetse. 

But today it is summer and it's beautiful.

We get back in the car and stop for lunch at Sadie's. A big weekend ahead for the town with Texas Trail Days. A parade, rodeo, concerts and a mud volleyball tourney. I order a cabbage burger because I never see that on any restaurant menus. Only time I've eaten one was at Germans-from-Russia events that feature the Dutch Hop Polka. 

We tour the Texas Trail Museum and find out that we just missed the brief stop of UP's rebuilt Big Boy steam locomotive as it began its cross-country travels. We tour the gigantic Virgin Mary statue at the east end of town, and then the archaeological dig site on the way back to Cheyenne.

A school teacher tending the info booth at the rest area tells us that there isn't a single apartment or house to rent or buy in Pine Bluffs. The town expects an influx of workers set to begin the first phase of the renovation of the area's nuke missile sites. This is part of a multi-year $3 billion project to bring our "nuclear deterrent" up to 21st century requirements. Nobody ever talks about the "peace dividend" anymore. That's so late-20th century. Not sure what the nukes can do to help the Afghans about to regress into the 5th century. The Taliban, it seems, are not impressed with our nuclear might lurking in burrows on the prairie.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars, 

top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,

a pickup kicks its fender off

and settles back to read the clouds.

Savage Vedauwoo chipmunks, and other travel stories

Don’t get around much anymore. Not since March 2020 anyway. Guests arrive August 2021 and it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee and the buffalo chips.

My sisters Mary and Eileen and brother-in-law Brian ventured from Florida to Wyoming to visit their brother (me, he, him) and family (she, she) and take a look around the High Plains.

Wyoming and Florida are different places. For one thing, we are a big square state and Florida is shaped liked a human appendage. Wyoming high and dry; Florida low and wet. Blizzards generally don’t hit Florida. Hurricanes usually skip Wyoming.

Both places have lots to see and you have to get out and see them. In Wyoming, you get in the car, check the gas gauge, and drive to the mountains. In Florida, you get in the car, check your insurance, and drive to Orlando. If you survive that, you drive to the beach. I grew up in Daytona Beach in the 1960s and ‘70s. You could drive to the beach and on the beach. NASCAR races were once held on the beach’s hand-packed sand. Unique place. Beach-driving hours are now limited.

I drove my 2021 visitors first to Vedauwoo. We picnicked under pines and watched climbers negotiate the 1.4-billion-year-old chunks of granite. I remembered my young son and daughter clambering up the rocks and Chris and me down below, worrying but also impressed. Vedauwoo is usually one of the faves cited by visiting friends and family. What’s not to like? Gorgeous scenery, cool winds scented by pines, sunny skies. Add some snow to the Laramie Range and you get all this plus cross-country skiing or snowshoeing.

Chris and Annie hiked south. Eileen, Mary, and Brian decided to hike Turtle Rock Trail. I told them it was a fairly easy 3-mile trail. I forgot to mention that we were at 8,200 feet. This is approximately 8,150 feet higher that their homes in Florida. I also forgot to mention to drink plenty of water. I know, what kind of host am I? Altitude and hydration are always the first things you mention when travelers arrive from The World. I remember my first camping trip in Colorado after living at sea level for 14 years. Base camp for the Long’s Peak Trail in RMNP. Spent the first night with a raging headache. Nothing worked on it: Coors, Tylenol, wishful thinking. I just waited it out.

Everyone but me went hiking. I am partially disabled and use a walker so hiking is no longer my thing. I sat at the picnic table. Munched grapes, and read a book. At one point, chipmunks got brave enough to visit the table. Earlier, my patient daughter Annie fed a grape to a chipmunk. Apparently, they thought I also was a purveyor of grapes. At least one did. He skittered across my book several times. The next trip, he stopped, sniffed my thumb, and bit me. I yelped and he scampered into the underbrush. No blood, the bite not hard enough to break the skin. I moved away from chipmunk habitat and found a shady, secluded spot to continue reading.

The hikers all made it back. The Florida people were a bit winded and thirsty.

“That was a long three miles,” Brian said.

“Mountain miles are longer than sea-level miles.” I explained that mountain trails take twists and turns, they go up and they go down. Three miles can seem like six or even sixteen.

“So mountain miles seem longer than sea-level miles,” Brian surmised.

“I don’t get your point,” I said. “A chipmunk bit me.”  

Florida and Wyoming may never understand each other. Sign of the times.

On the next post, we journey east to Nebraska, where it was 98 freaking degrees, and west to the Snowies where it snowed.

History and storytelling in historical fiction

One of the great things about historical fiction is the discovery of familiar names whom I know little or nothing about. This, of course, makes me want to know more.

Dorothea Lange is known for the most famous photo of Depression America. You know the one – the portrait of the poor mother and child taken in a California work camp. The subject wears the gloom of the Depression in her eyes and her slumped shoulders. Something heroic about her, too, something almost mother-and-child Biblical. 

Lange took the photo in 1936 after gathering a lifetime of expertise and a lifetime of hurt, some of that at the hands of her husband, Maynard Dixon. I had heard Dixon’s name mentioned in arts circles and had seen some of his paintings at the Center of the West in Cody and the Denver Art Museum. I know nothing of the man.

Curiosity caused me to pick up the historical novel “The Bohemians” by Jasmin Darznik. It opens in 1918 San Francisco and I am curious about the era in American history because I am writing about it. I picked up the book from the seven-day shelf knowing I could not read it in seven days because I was guiding Florida family members around Wyoming for that week. Then I saw it was dedicated to California poet Rebecca Foust. I knew that if a fine poet such as Rebecca was attached to this book that it was a good one. So who cares about a late fee?

I’m only about two-thirds through the novel but know that Dixon plays a major role in Lange’s life and vice versa. I looked up Dixon to see some of his paintings and recognized several and his famous style. I looked up Lange to reacquaint myself with the famous photo. I didn’t want to read too much since I want to maintain the suspense that Darznik develops. Now I can continue…

How true is historical fiction? I fall back on this phrase: “This book (movie) is based on real events (real people) but is a work of fiction.” The fiction writer reserves the right to merge with their character’s protoplasm to bring them to life. It’s the writer’s view based on what may be years of research. The reader gets to decide if it’s a good and believable story.

“The Bohemians” seems believable. I’ll let you know my final thoughts when I finish.

I will tell you that “The Ridgeline” by Michael Punke is a true and believable story of the events in Wyoming during Red Cloud’s War in 1866. It focused on the characters involved in the Fetterman Fight. We see the Oglala side through Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, and some young warriors. We see the cavalry side from journal entries by a young bride who has accompanied her brash husband to Wyoming. Other “invader” voices include Lt. Crummond, the doomed Capt. Fetterman, the acerbic and aging Jim Bridger, several young soldiers, a camp follower, and an occasional snide look at policy-makers in D.C.

It’s a ripping yarn as I say in a review soon to be published on another online Wyocentric site. It’s cool that it was written by a Wyoming native but not necessary to the story. It’s a good read. Reminded me that the Fetterman Fight site (usually labeled “the Fetterman Massacre”) is preserved by the State of Wyoming as is the Wagon Box Fight and Fort Phil Kearny. Museums in Johnson and Sheridan counties have exhibits about the Indian wars. It’s often told from the conqueror’s POV. But remember: “Custer’s Last Stand” or the “Custer Massacre” used to be the terms for the famous national historic site in southern Montana. It was renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and was the first NPS entity to hire a Native American superintendent. To the Lakota or Sioux Nation, June 25 is Victory Day in the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass.

Reading “The Ridgeline” helped me see the Fetterman Fight as a military encounter and a battle between opposing cultures. It’s the most notable event in a long line of battles between U.S. horse soldiers and the native horse soldiers of the Northern Plains. As a kid in the 1950s in the Rocky Mountain West, I was steeped in the glory of Custer’s Last Stand. As an adult, I now get to see the encounter from the POV of all sides. I am a curious adult. Not sure what schoolkids are learning about the Plains Wars. Let’s hope that a bit of reality creeps into schools now being assaulted by right-wing zealots who believe in a whitewashed version of history.

Read my review of Anna North’s alternative historical novel “Outlawed” centered around the Sundance Kid and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang of Wyoming.

Reading Kooser during a short trip to Nebraska

My two sisters and brother-in-law from Florida had never been to Nebraska. To remedy this, I drove I-80 into Neb ("It looks a lot like Wyoming") and pulled off at the first exit. Next to the sign for Bushnell (No Services!), with farm equipment clattering down the road, prairie grass waving in the hot wind, I read them Ted Kooser. Seemed like the right thing to do. We then drove back to WYO and ate cabbage burgers at Sadie's Cafe in Pine Bluffs. A fine day.

Read Kooser's "So This is Nebraska"

Sunday morning round-up, Wild West edition

Cheyenne Frontier Days is underway. I live maybe a half-mile from Frontier Park, home of the rodeo and night concerts. On most nights, I can sit on my front porch and hear the concerts. Not so Friday night when Garth Brooks was on stage. I could hear a rumble way off in the distance but that's it. My wife and I saw Garth when he performed at the 100th anniversary of CFD. He's got that rock star in him, which sends him zooming all over the stage. One highlight of the performance is when Chris LeDoux joined him on stage. Chris was a country-singer who also rode the rodeo circuit. That gave him an edge on the CFD experience. Cancer took him in 2005. CFD celebrates him this year with a program and posters with original artwork of the LeDoux sculpture they unveiled this year. He means a lot to Wyoming. He bought his first guitar in Cheyenne as a kid whose father was stationed at Warren AFB. He later won at CFD and performed here. He bought a ranch near Kaycee in Powder River Country. Kaycee dedicated a pocket park to LeDoux after his untimely death. It's right off I-25. I used to stop there and sit by myself amongst the prairie flowers. Why? Peaceful. A great place to meditate. After awhile you don't even hear the trucks hauling goods from Denver to Sheridan. The birds, yes, and maybe a guitar note or two. 

I volunteered as greeter at the Botanic Gardens front desk yesterday. I volunteer Thursday and Saturday afternoons. Up until yesterday, the summer crowds have been heavy. Tourists are back on the road after the Covid hiatus and they are drawn to our fine gardens which includes the Conservatory, Children's Village, and nine acres of outdoor gardens. CFD claims most of the attention during the last week of July. The afternoon rodeo and the night concerts are packed. The Indian Village, the vendor fair, and Old Trail Town claim the rest. Yesterday I was on the lookout for visitors in western gear and only one family of six fit that description. Must you wear western gear to CFD? Not mandatory but expected. Kind of like Wyoming's face mask directive -- never mandatory but expected (kind-of). I don't go anywhere without my mask. The Botanic Gardens brought back its big plexiglass sneeze barrier for the duration. We volunteers, mostly seniors, urged the staff to take precautions in what could be a super-spreader event. The Conservatory also kept its distance protocol, although nobody pays it much attention. Covid cases are up in the county, most of the ruthless Delta Variant. But we can't let an invisible bug get in the way of the county's biggest revenue generator. I enjoy the excitement. But I was fully vaccinated back in February. I know that most CFD attendees are on the conservative side. They believe the virus is a hoax and part of a vast liberal conspiracy that includes election-rigging, defunding the police, putting an abortion mill and a taco truck on every corner, force-feeding the 1619 Project to innocent schoolkids, and removing statues of heroic traitors and Indian-killers from our public squares.

Early in the Covid shutdown, I kept track of the stats on these pages. I gave it up as I lost hope that it would never end or I was an optimistic fool believing it would run its course either tomorrow or the next day or certainly the day after that. I was wrong on both counts. Get the latest stats from the Wyoming Department of Health.     

Carbon County Museum lights up local history

Dino the Sinclair dinosaur and an unnamed mule deer in front of the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins. Photo by Annie Shay.

Daughter Annie and I traveled to Rawlins a few Fridays ago to cover a story on the Carbon County Museum. Annie's a photographer and this is the first story we worked together. I've watched her start her own photography business. She's assembled some good photo equipment. I've watched her edit her work on PhotoShop, a world of mystery to me. Photography has been a hobby and part of my job several times, including my time at the Wyoming Arts Council. My skills have always been rudimentary. Over the years, I've found that I can interview the subject or take photos but not both. I need to query the subject, watch their body language, and study the face. 

So it was a bonus for me to work with a photographer. We also traveled and had lunch together. How cool is that? It's fun to talk and negotiate the snowless Snow Chi Minh Trail over Elk Mountain, there and back again. Always a good stop at that rest area, although not so pleasant in January when frigid 80 mph winds freeze your hands and buffet you about. Annie shot photos of the mountain, free of snow in late June which I found odd but in keeping with climate change. 

But, summer. It's short but glorious.

Annie and I cruised to Anong's for lunch and then found the museum at 9th and Walnut. It's in an old LDS church and it looks church-like but for the museum's sign and the big green dinosaur staring off to the north and the mule deer lying in the shade. 

Annie: Is that real?

Me: Dinosaurs are extinct.

Annie: No, the deer.

Deer (looking at us): It's a damn sight cooler here in the shade. Think I want to be out on the parched prairie and its 95-degree heat and coyotes and rattlers and the sudden urge to dart into speeding traffic? I'd be inside if I could figure out a way to open the doors (raises hoofs) See?

Annie and Me: Oh

After our deer encounter and, equipped with opposable thumbs, we go inside. Dr. Steven Dinero sits behind the old bank teller's cage. He's the ED and serves some shifts as the official greeter and gift shop cashier. 

You have to read "From outlaw skulls to rail stories, Rawlins Museum animates history" on WyoFile's Studio Wyoming Review. Take a look at the accompanying photos and click on the captions so you can see Annie's credit line, her first-ever. She's proud of it and so am I. 

A note about museums: I've lived in Wyoming for 30 years but I'd never been to this museum. I've been to the Frontier Prison and the real prison south of town. I've toured the old train depot and stopped for food and bio breaks dozen of times. Weather stopped me one February day and I chose to go the northern route back to Cheyenne so I didn't miss Chris's birthday. I wonder how many other of the state's 100-plus museums have I passed by. Dozens, I suspect. Take an hour break on your summer sojourn and visit a museum. 

Author Anna North takes a new look at the Hole in the Wall Gang

A few months ago, I stumbled across an intriguing new Anna North novel courtesy of the hive mind of Kindle. Not sure if it picked up my online interests in Wyoming or in spec-fict novels or it planted a bug in my celebral cortex to monitor my every thought. But it showed up in Kindle's rec list. 

My reading tastes are catholic (small c) although occasionally Catholic (cap C). My Kindle Library lists titles as disparate as Michael Lewis's non-fiction and scarifying account of the pandemic ("The Premonition") to George Sands' odd novel of 1840s rural France, "La Petite Fadette" (see my March 13 post. Amazon doesn't get all the credit. I read physical books too. Just finished Ann McCutchan's intriguing biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and am deep into C.J. Box's Joe Pickett novel of intrigue in Carbon County, "The Disappeared." Both books by Wyoming writers. 

I was so impressed with "Outlawed" that I wrote a review and sent it off to my editor at Studio Wyoming Review, Camellia El-Antably. She liked it and fired it off to WyoFile where it landed today. Here's the opening with a link to the rest:

Imagine, if you will, that Wyoming’s infamous Hole in the Wall Gang in the late 1890s was composed of young women escaping a post-pandemic totalitarian society. 

That’s the scenario constructed by Anna North in her new revisionist historical novel, “Outlawed.” These “outlaws” were driven from their communities because they couldn't bear children.

North’s imagined society compels women to be fruitful and multiply (in the manner of “The Handmaid’s Tale”). Babies are crucial because, in the 1830s, a pandemic killed nine out of every 10 people. 

Not reproducing in 1894 is a crime, but sometimes nature intervenes in the form of infertility, disease or bad luck. The barren ones are banished or shunted off to convents. Sometimes, infertility coincides with a rash of infant deaths. Those young women get blamed and, when rumors reach a fever pitch, they are hanged as witches. 

So it’s off to Hole in the Wall. If you can arrange it.

Read the rest at Studio Wyoming Review on WyoFile.

Revisiting Lonesome Dove

I've been watching movies that paint a different portrait of the American West than I was taught in school. 

"Lonesome Dove" on Prime Video tells the tale of two aging Texas Rangers that drive some cattle to Montana. Cattle drives were mighty popular when I was a kid. "Rawhide" featured a young Clint Eastwood as cattle drover Rowdy Yates. "Red River" was a pretty good John Wayne movie about a cattle drive. I did my early growing up in Colorado where the stockyards employed many and the annual Stock Show was basically a promo for Eat More Beef.

I did not see "Lonesome Dove" when it was first aired in 1989. I didn't need another western as I'd seen them all. I was mistaken. "Lonesome Dove" is an eye-opener. Accurate about the violence that was the American West. The drovers die in terrible ways: death by water moccasins, death by hanging, death by Indians (of course), death by stupidity. Fine acting by Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and Diane Lane. 

It was based on Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of the same name. The late Texas author was known for vivid portrayals of the hard life faced by cowboys, Indians, women, and lawmen. I haven't read any of his books which I chalk up to ignorance. Most mainstream novels of the West are formulaic. That suited me fine when I was eight. I grew up and needed to know the real story.

Last night I watched "The Revenant" on commercial TV. The ads were annoying but I stuck with it. Brutal in its honesty of what it must have been like in the fur-trading days of the 1800s. Hugh Glass is leading a trapping expedition and is attacked by a grizzly. The almost-dead Glass is abandoned by his colleagues who want to flee an Arickaree war party. Glass doesn't die. He wants revenge and he eventually gets it as he struggles to get back to "civilization," which is not very civilized, where male Indians get hanged and females get raped. The setting is Wyoming and Montana and the scenery is beautiful. Bad things can happen in beautiful places.

Realistic westerns appeared before "Lonesome Dove," mostly in feature films. "The Wild Bunch," "The Outlaw Josey Wales," "Little Big Man," and "The Horse Soldiers," among others. Many came out of the ferment of the 1960s and '70s and may have been meant to reflect the nightly horror show from Vietnam. The Air Cav cowboys flew in on choppers and the setting was jungle instead of wide-open spaces. But we got the picture.

HBO brought us westerns that were more like gangster films, "Deadwood" and "Hell on Wheels" to name two. Deadwood's founding year of 1876 featured at least one murder a day. There would be hell to pay if Deadwood in 2020 had 365 murders. Deadwood's godfather was diabolical dance hall proprietor Al Swearengen. He liked to feed the pigs.

"Hell on Wheels" portrayed life in end-of-track towns along the UP line in the 1860s. People were shot regularly and there was evil afoot in the many bars and brothels that were the main features of these towns (Cheyenne was one). The "Hell on Wheels" burg of Benton 11 miles east of Rawlins consisted of 25 saloons, five dance halls and a place called "The Big Tent" where fornication went on in one part of the tent and, in the other, physicians treated diseases spawned on the premises. Benton's heyday was in the summer of '68 and is now officially a ghost town. 

Am I shocked that humans behaved like humans in the days of my great great grandparents? No, that's history. We all need to know that human misdeeds were not always chronicled in our fourth grade history books. In fact, the texts were whitewashed to tell a sanitized version of history. We need to know the details so we don't repeat them. We will, of course because that's what people do. The hope is that in the future we will be more like the space voyagers of "Star Trek" and its Prime Directive than the bastards who slaughtered Natives at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. Vietnam, too, and Iraq. Maybe we will learn. Maybe not. At least we will have somethings to guide us other than tired myths.

Many fine history-based books and poems have been written. We'll discuss those in a future post.

Every poetry book tells a story don't it

Chris and Annie decided to round-up boxes of books in the basement and bring them upstairs to me. Disability prevents me from diving into the dungeon's stacks but my wife and daughter are only too happy to do the work if I promise to get rid of books, some of which have been sitting in the basement for more than a decade. I have a keeper box and a give-away box which will go to Phoenix Books or the Laramie County Public Library store. I get a smaller box for the keepers in an effort to fool me into thinking it's a good idea to get rid of books when actually I believe the opposite. But we are downsizing, fixing up our house and cleaning the cobwebby places with an idea to sell and move in 2022. Over the years, I have moved many heavy boxes of books. I'm retired so I have some incentive to divest.

My wife, daughter, and sons all are readers. My grown children live in an e-world but they still read physical books. They know it pains me to decide what stays ands what goes. They also know that they will inherit my library and we all know that I should be the ones making the decisions. Before passing from prostate cancer, my father split up his presidential library into five sections, one for each of his sons. I got Reagan (very funny, Dad) but also Jefferson, Grant, and Kennedy. I will ask my two remaining brothers if they want them. If not, to my son will go the spoils.

I have seen wonderful personal libraries left behind when a dedicated reader dies suddenly. Cancer killed a CSU creative writing professor and friend a few years ago. His will sent his Vietnam War books to the CSU library's special collection on the war. Thousands of others remained. I was among his associates who were allowed to pick through the books. I could have filled boxes but I chose three volumes that I now will put in the keeper box..  

Every book tells a story. I met and worked with many of the authors after I switched careers in 1988. after stints as a sports reporter, weekly newspaper editor, and corporate writer, I went back to school in the CSU MFA program. As a teaching assistant, I got involved with the visiting writers program and eventually the CSU Fine Arts Series. I met many writers in my roles with the Wyoming Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and on planning committees for book festivals in Casper, Cheyenne, and Denver. 

I have signed books by Ethridge Knight and Gwendolyn Brooks. In 1990, I was only vaguely aware of Brooks and knew nothing about Knight. An ex-con who got hooked on drugs after being dosed with morphine for wounds in the Korean War, Knight wanted to speak to prisoners so I accompanied him to the county jail. He recited his poems filled with African-American vernacular, prisons slang, and voices of the streets. I heard a different poetry that day. Like rap and spoken word, it had its own rhythms. The inmates, many of them Black and Latino, paid attention, chatted with Knight when the performance was over. 

Knight spoke as a member of the Black Arts Movement. He found his voice based on his own experiences but also influenced by Brooks, Sonia Sanchez and other African-American voices of the 1950s and 60s. You could hear similar rhythms in Brooks' poetry. A prime example is her oft-anthologized poem "We real cool." You can hear Knight's influence in rap and hip hop and slam poetry.  You can hear it in groups such as San Diego's Taco Shop Poets and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in NYC. 

I have a signed copy of Knight's "Poems from Prison," published by Broadside Press the day he was released from prison. It's a keeper, as is Brooks' "The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems." Brooks won a Pulitzer for an earlier book, "Annie Allen."

I'm keeping Ernesto Cardenal's "With Walker in Nicaragua." Cardenal's life as interesting as his poetry. A priest de-priested by the Vatican when he got too close to the Sandinistas and liberation theology, his role was restored by Pope Francis in 2017. William Walker was a freebooter from Tennessee who conquered Nicaragua and served as its president prior to the U.S. Civil War. He legalized slavery and made English the official language in an effort to link Central America and Cuba with the South's slave states. Imagine if he had succeeded -- our country's politics would be even weirder than it is now. The book from Wesleyan University Press is bilingual with wonderful translations by Jonathan Cohen. 

"The Country Between Us" by Carolyn Forche goes in the keeper box. It includes the "The Colonel," her amazing remembrance poem of a dinner with an officer in El Salvador's death squads. Forche was a finalist in this year's Pulitzer poetry category. 

It breaks my heart when I place a pile of slim poetry books in the giveaway box. Nobody will value them like me. They may sit on the library store's shelves until its next clearance sale. Even then, they may remain unclaimed. Poetry is endangered. Much still is published but a lot of it is online and available only as e-books. The Death of Poetry has been foretold many times. Still, it persists.

Next up: What do I do with all of these novels, story collections, and memoirs? 

Sunday morning round-up: Flowers bloom, visitors swarm the Botanic Gardens, and a cop named Trampas gets busted for meth

A Sunday morning round-up.

I haven't written one of these in a long time. It's possible I lost interest during the plague year. The only things I seemed to have gained during that time was 20 pounds. 

But it's summer and much is happening. Outdoor events such as concerts and art festivals. Great weather prompts people to flock to the parks. I volunteered at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens front desk yesterday. Two weddings going on -- one inside and one outside in the Peace Garden. Large family groups trooped into the Conservatory. We don't ask people where they're from but talked to a lot of locals and Coloradans. Cars in the parking lot from Virginia, Illinois, and California. The gift shop rang up sales, including one for a fine Tara Pappas print. Her show will be in the second floor gallery through the summer.

BTW, the Botanic Gardens annual appeal aims to raise $75,000 to "renovate and enhance the beloved Women's Civic League Peace Garden for safety, accessibility, improved maintenance, and beauty." The Peace Garden is looking a bit beat up. If you donate a certain amount, you get a plaque by the reflecting pool. I look at the names etched in the remembrances scattered around the gardens. I don't recognize most of them but time passes and all that remains of a formerly vital gardening fan is a marker underneath a Prairie Fire Crabapple tree that once was a sapling and now is a human-sized tree with bright pinkish-red blooms. 

The seedlings in my garden look around and ask: so winter is over? And I reply yes, for now. My tomato plants are six inches tall and growing fast now that the sun's heat has returned. I grew my cherry tomatoes from seed last year and got a good yield, as they say in the farming biz. You never know. Results depend on so many factors.

It's usually not a good thing to see Wyoming in New York Times headlines. This morning was no exception. Here's the header: "How a Police Chief in Wyoming's Ranchlands Lost Her War on Drugs." The accompanying photo shows dismissed Guernsey police chief Terri VanDam and officer Misty Clevenger. Both women wear jeans and cowboy hats, the prairie stretching out behind them. You can't really get any more Wyoming than this. The story by Ali Watkins detailed Guernsey's Struggle with illicit drugs and how VanDam's and Clevenger's investigations got sidetracked by the Old Boys' Network. The women were replaced by male police. It didn't take long for one of the new hires, Trampas Glover, to be arrested for smoking meth in his garage while his children were present. Trampas, oddly enough, is the name of the bad guy in Owen Wister's "The Virginian." Best known for calling the title character a "son of a bitch." The Virginian places his pistol on the gambling table and replies, "When you call me that, smile." Thus starts the feud that ends in a climactic showdown.

So a Wyoming story, told remotely, becomes an even Wyominger story with a cop named Trampas busted for smoking meth in his Guernsey garage. 

Trampas: You son of a bitch!

The Virginian (putting gun on table): When you call me that, smile.

Trampas (reaching for meth pipe): Give me a few minutes.

Don't know if Trampas is still a law officer in Guernsey. But he probably is.

One more thing: I'm reading a fine book by Laramie's Ann McCutchan, "The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings." Rawlings, of course, wrote "The Yearling" and other books set in north-central Florida. I went to school nearby in Gainesville. An English major, I had very little interest in Rawlings. Now I do, thanks to Ann's book. 

It's the Wolverines vs. the 2020 Pandemic in Michael Lewis's new book, "The Premonition"

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center web site has become the key Covid-19 site in the U.S. and probably worldwide.

Stats as of 5/13/21:

160 million-plus cases worldwide and 3.3 million deaths.

32.8 million U.S. cases and 584,371 deaths.

And the numbers keep going up, dramatically in some countries such as India.

In the U.S., Connecticut leads the nation in percent of population vaccinated at 42.5% and Mississippi, as it often is, is at the bottom with 23.8%. Wyoming ain't much better at 27.8%. National average is 36.2%.

Statistics are sobering. 

It didn't have to be this way. That's what I kept muttering as I read Michael Lewis's "The Premonition." It traces what could have been if the U.S. had a health care system designed for emergencies like the pandemic and not one geared to profits. The book is not a polemic about a fractured system. Instead, Lewis tracks the efforts of an odd group of citizens forced to face the fact that one day, a plague would be loosed upon the land. They called themselves the Wolverines after the young rebels in 1984's "Red Dawn" who take to the Colorado mountains to fight a Soviet invasion. It's a bit jingoistic but a fun Cold War romp. 

Lewis gave us the insiders' look at the stock market in "The Big Short" and a group of geek baseball statisticians in "Moneyball." Lewis's forte is exploring the people behind big issues, people we may never have heard of but who played a big part in complicated events. Both were made into good movies and "The Premonition" will be one of a rash of pandemic-themed movies and streaming series in the next few years. Lewis is a master at character development and storytelling. "The Premonition" reads like a good thriller and its subtitle "A Pandemic Story" shows the focus. 

I did not have any premonitions as I read. The unpleasant event has already happened. But I did see the writing on the wall. As the Wolverines gathered and tried to come up with a pandemic plan, they knew something bad was on the way. They also knew that the U.S., despite its hubris, was not ready. These Cassandras had a plan but how to get the clueless to listen? The Centers for Disease Control had become a shadow of its former self. Most experts concentrated on vaccine development rather than what steps to take while awaiting a vaccine, steps that had proven effective in the past.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story is the origins of the core group. In 2005, an advisor to George W. Bush recommended a recently-published book to the president. The book was "The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History" by John M. Barry. I was surprised that Bush read it and convened a task force to plan for the next pandemic. It's not like he wasn't busy elsewhere in the world. But he gets credit for acting on a real threat. Plans were drafted and were refined during the Obama administration. We had a plan but then along came Trump.

Another eye-opener: leaders do not need all of the information when an emergency arises. They need to act, even in the face of massive criticism. The example that keeps cropping up is "Churchill vs. Chamberlain." As a leader, will you see the danger ahead, speak out, and eventually find yourself in a position to lead (Winston Churchill). Or do you see yourself as a Neville Chamberlain, more interested in maintaining the status quo, "peace in our time" in this case? As England's prime minister, he made mistakes but he led, pugnacious to the end of the war and the end of his political career.

In the face of the gathering storm, U.S. leaders in 2020 failed to act. For that, they should be judged harshly. Lewis could have spent 300 pages telling us about Trump's many missteps. Instead, he shows us that there was an alternative universe of statisticians, physicians, and civil servants convinced that a plague was coming and we could plan and we could act.

Lewis ends the book deep into the pandemic with the story of Carter Mecher's parents. Mecher is known as the "redneck epidemiologist" in the book and is a members of the Wolverines. After all his work on the disease, he is torn asunder when his aging father gets Covid-19, passes it on to his mother and she dies. In the epilogue, "Sins of Omission," the writer follows one of the main characters, physician and former county health officer Charity Dean, as she seeks the grave of a former patient in a vast California cemetery. We get into Dean's head as she ponders her ability to sense things. But now, late into the pandemic, she now knows that, with communicable diseases, we are always looking into the rearview mirror. 

Covid had given the country a glimpse of what Charity has always thought might be coming -- a pathogen that might move through the population with the help of asymptomatic spreaders, and it had a talent for floating on air.... Now that we knew how badly we responded to such a threat, we could begin to prepare for it.

The French have a term, apres nous, le deluge, supposedly uttered by the despot Charles XV. The basic translation is after we're gone, the flood will come but we don't care.

That could easily be a Trump phrase although it's a bit too poetic for him. It is reminiscent of the slogan written on the back of First Lady Melania Trump's coat: "I really don't care do U?

I prefer to leave with some lines from Jackson Browne's "Before the Deluge." He speaks of another crisis, the looming climate disaster, but it also applies to the current deluge: 

And when the sand was gone and the time arrived 

In the naked dawn only a few survived 

And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge 

Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge 

After the deluge, the Wolverines abide.

Remembering my mother on another birthday we can't celebrate with her

My mother's birthday is today. Anna Marie Shay would have been 95 had she lived. She died in 1986 at 59, 11 years younger than I am now. Ovarian cancer was the culprit and it was discovered too late to give her much hope. She was a fighter. I was able to get my family to Daytona to see her in February of that year, less than two months before she died. She got to meet my one-year-old son, Kevin. I'll always treasure the photos I have of the two of them together. She's looking out for him which is a good thing as he's needed a lot of looking-after. My daughter, Annie Marie, is named for her and her other grandma who also was born Anna Marie. 

Anne, Ann, and Anna are all English derivations of the Hebrew name, Hannah. It means favor or grace. English, French and Russian queens have been named Anne. One Anne (Boleyn) met a gruesome end at the hands of Henry VIII. Anne of Green Gables is a wonderful literary character. Novels feature many Annes. The name is featured in three Shakespeare plays: Henry VIII, Richard III, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Almost as popular as Elizabeth, Margaret and Valentine. Valentine?

My mother was a nurse. She mothered her hospital staff by day and her nine kids at night and weekends and in her sleep. I was 35 when she went to the hospital for the last time. That's half-a-life ago. My youngest sibling, Mary, was 20. It was hard on all of us but maybe most on Mary as she was still a kid. 

Mom's birthday always fell around Mother's Day, sometimes on Mother's Day. Chris and I were married on the Saturday after her 52nd birthday which we celebrated with a birthday party and rehearsal party in my parents' backyard. Coincidentally, Mom's2021 birthday is on a Friday just as it was in 1982, our anniversary is on a Saturday, followed by Sunday's Mother's Day. 

The years pass. Memories remain and many are painful. I retired five years ago and vibrant memories are part of every day. I am a writer so I invite those memories but as I write, they appear more real than the event itself. I remember moments with my grandparents, my parents, brothers and sisters, old friends. It's as if they were whispering in my ear. Mike, do you remember this? Your first dog, a surly Chihuahua named Pancho. Your first bicycle, a surprise from your grandparents. Firecracker wars in the neighborhood, the day you blew up all of your Mom's clothespins because Black Cats go so much farther when weight is added. All those great times with your cousins, back when everyone lived in Denver. The long winter drive from Denver to Washington state when Dad was transferred. I'll never forget the view of Wyoming's lonely wastes through the fogged-up window of a Ford Falcon station wagon. My first kiss. My first lonely day at college. My wedding. And now our 39th anniversary.

I remember Mama.

Writing and editing, editing and writing, writing and...

Editing and writing. Writing and editing. The two are inseparable. Younger writers, such as myself a half-century ago, write something down and pronounce it finished. I wrote my first novel that way. It got me an agent but it was never published due to the fact it was not a very good novel because it lacked a persnickety editor. If you insist on reading the manuscript, you can find it in the Colorado State University Library Special Collections under "Future Wars." It used to share a bunker with a very fine Vietnam War Literature section. Look for that under "Past but not Forgotten Wars."

I've edited many of my pieces since then. I've had others edit my work, profs and student colleagues in the CSU MFA program and the writing critique group I've belonged to for a dozen years. I wasn't always pleased with the comments. That's one of the things about the process. It's not always pleasant. It's the only way to grow.

For the pasty couple years, I've been writing art reviews for Wyofile's Studio Wyoming Review. It's a joy to go into a museum, gallery or studio and learn about art. You'd think that after 25 years at the Wyoming Arts Council where art was on the menu every day, I'd have enough art to last me during my dotage. But the life of an arts administrator features a lot of administration and very little time to appreciate art. These days, I can take on an assignment and spend plenty of time appreciating art and talking with the artists. A half-hour discussion with an artist can tell you so much more than any artist's statement plastered on a gallery wall. 

My final SWR piece appeared last Friday, a book review: Exploring the roots of Basque poetry from a Wyoming perspective. WyoFile editors are discontinuing SWR on June 30. They plan to devote more time and resources to features on the state's many daunting challenges. Recent examples are Dustin Bleizeffer's two stories:  'Love it or leave: The choices facing Wyoming's youth and Portraits of Wyo youth: Six visions of a future in the state. The brain drain of young people leaving the state has been going on for a long time but it may be about to be an epidemic. The articles left me depressed as I already have a son who sought opportunities in Tucson and my daughter looks outside Wyoming for her career as a photographer. Wyoming is one of the most photogenic places on the planet. But as a wise artist once said, "You can't eat the scenery." 

Fill out this short Facebook poll to give us some ideas about where SWR can go from here.

I came to today's blog with the idea to compare/contrast my latest review, the one I submitted and the edited one. I wondered if my version would be superior to the edited one. In some ways, I am still that sensitive young writer. I put both versions side-by-side on my big screen. I read each line. Damned if the revised version wasn't better. 

Blogs in their purest form are not supposed to be heavily edited. If I understand correctly the Blogosphere's many fungible rules, changes you make after a blog is posted must be noted. That is left entirely in the blogger's hands. We can be trusted with many things. Editing is a sacred trust and I treat it accordingly.

The story of the only 1960 Renault Dauphine in Daytona Beach

An April issue of UK’s Autocar featured the Renault Dauphine in its list of "22 Totally Charming Cars." It showed a still life photo of a powder blue Dauphine parked by the ocean. The car looked as if it had just left the 1960s showroom. I contrasted it with the sad photo of a derelict Dauphine in another issue of Autocar and the article "The Haunting Abandoned Wrecks of Rural France.," It showed a rusty shell of a Dauphine being swallowed up by undergrowth in "a remote field in the French Alps."

This tells the story of our family's 1960 Dauphine. I first saw it parked in our Wichita driveway in 1962. My father needed a car to commute to his job as a civilian accountant at the local air force base. That left our 1960 Ford Falcon station wagon at home with my mother who needed it to get us to school, haul us to doctor appointments and run off to the grocery store. I still can see the look of horror on the faces of grocery clerks as Mom hauled her eight children, two of them babies, into the store. My father went to the Totally Charming Yet Obscure Cars dealership and returned with Renault. It was an oddity in a world of Olds Cutlass Supremes and GTOs. Big powerful rides were the thing. The Dauphine was tiny looked almost the same from the front as it did from behind. The engine was in the rear and looked like something that might power a lawnmower. If it didn’t start, you could wake up the engine with a hand crank.

My father’s not around to ask but I do wonder why he chose such an impractical car when he headed a family of 10. He might have seen Renaults on the streets of Paris on leave during the war. He might have liked the two-tone horn (loud for city, soft for country) and the fact you could wind it up like a toy car if it refused to go. He never said. But they are some of the Dauphine traits I admired when I was gifted the car in 1967. 

The previous year, I had learned how to drive in it on Daytona's deserted winter beaches. I failed my first driving test in it when I arrived at city hall on Dec. 18, 1966, with a bum fuse. The DMV man asked if I wanted to take the test using hand signals or return on another day, fuse replaced. It was my birthday. I had a date that night with a girl I fancied as my girlfriend. I took the test and failed. I did OK with left and right turns but forgot to gesture down for stop. I was devastated. It was a long slow ride home with my father and am embarrassing phone call to my date. 

My father was transferred from Daytona to Cincinnati early in '67. The Dauphine had many miles and he didn't want to drive it north so he put it in my hands. The idea was to take my brothers and sisters to school and anywhere else they wanted to go. My mother still had toddlers and a baby (No. 9) to care for. We would finish the school year, sell the house, and then join our father in Cincy. My brother Dan and I had been most resistant to the move. We were surfers, for God's sake, and there was precious little surf in Ohio. I played JV basketball for the Father Lopez Green Wave and had high hopes of making the varsity in my junior year. And I had a girlfriend, sort of. 

I did OK bossing around my siblings. I was also OK with having a car. It was no prize after seven years of hard use and three years of assaults by rust spawned by the salt air. It had really earned its rusty-red color. My classmates began to know me as the guy with the French car which sounds pretty romantic until you got a look at it, especially after I ripped off a rear door backing out of the garage and could only find a powder-blue replacement at the junkyard. It looked like a high school kid's car but that was OK as I was a high school kid with a car.

I revel in all of the fun we had. We crammed into the car and rode The Loop around Tomoka State Park, turning off the headlights to admire the darkness and tempt fate. I bought a surf rack and we wandered up and down A1A searching for surf. Girls thought my car was cute and liked to ride. Meanwhile, I tried to find a girlfriend with a muscle car so I could feel like what it was like to drive American. I dated Darlene for a year and got to drive her canary yellow Chevy Chevelle SS 396 and later her canary yellow Pontiac GTO. She had a thing for yellow. Her father bought her a new car every year. She didn’t mind riding in my car and but liked it better when my father returned from Cincy and bought a white Plymouth Barracuda that he occasionally let me drive.

During high school graduation summer of 1969, my Dauphine died. Kind of a drag as I worked two jobs getting ready for college and had to bum rides. I sold my car cheap to a guy who planned to turn it into a dune buggy. I imagine my car’s stripped chassis blasting through the beachside sand dunes before they were replaced by condos. I can also imagine my two-toned car with the two-toned horn abandoned in a “remote field” somewhere in the Florida scrubland.

I am 70 now. I am always 16 driving my Renault down The Loop’s dark road. Sometimes the headlights are on and sometimes they are off. I am happy.

Pandemic tip: You can view most Wyoming public art from the comfort and safety of your car

I was noodling around on my PC and I clicked on the Cheyenne Arts web site. I was pleased to see an upgraded site now includes a Cheyenne Arts Public Art Tour. Kudos to Bill Lindstrom and the tech-savvy people who compiled the tour. Open the site and find a portfolio of the 82 registered public artworks. Click on the photo to go to the page to find more photos and some background on the piece. Location is listed at the bottom of the page. There's a link to a Google Maps which takes you to the map and lists the public art's latitude and longitude. This assists those touring with the help of GPS and also geocaching aficionados. When I was at the Wyoming Arts Council, I was part of many discussions for online tours in Cheyenne, other communities, and statewide. Locally, it never happened until Arts Cheyenne took it on. 

Sheridan Public Arts has been around since 1992. Its permanent collection boasts 59 pieces. Artists and museums loan pieces to exhibit on Grinnell Plaza and downtown. One of the latest is a sculpture by the late Native American artist Allan Houser. No better way to spend a summer day -- tour the art and wrap it up at Black Tooth Brewing Company for craft beers and discussion. 

Not sure if Casper has an online public art tour but the city has many pieces of representational and non-representational artwork. One of my faves is on the Casper College campus. It's "Man and Energy" by Robert Russin. Its somber nature flashed me back to my duck-and-cover nuke drill days. The artist, who died in 2007 was a New York transplant who taught at UW for almost four decades. He is best known for his massive bronze Lincoln head perched at the top of Sherman Hill. Visit Casper is developing an Arts & Culture Pass. Not many offerings yet but these things take time. 

Russin also is known for the playful family sculpture installed in 1983 on UW's Prexy's Pasture. "The University Family" represents a nuclear family of three in white marble. Recently, it has been criticized because it doesn't represent a broader range of UW students and family. One proposal is to move it indoors to protect it and replace it with a more monumental sculpture, such as a bronze of graduating students or a bucking horse and rider. As if the UW campus doesn't already have bucking horses and riders aplenty.

Here's the thing about public art: it's easy to criticize because it's so public. In our bitterly divided country, artwork can be attacked from many sides. And is. The coal/oil/gas lobby that pours millions into UW objected to a public artwork called "Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around" by Chris Drury. UW decided to spirit it away in the dead of night and allegedly burned its beetle-killed logs and chunks of coal in the campus furnace. Many art students were kept warm that night by a funeral pyre of public art.

Russin's "Fountainhead" sculpture outside of the Casper City Hall came under fire for its water feature. The sculpture shows three stylized red oilfield workers surrounding a pole that represents an oil well. Water once shot out of the top to represent oil but had the bad manners to dampen city bureaucrats on Casper's many windy days. Now the water feature ponds peacefully below the artwork.   

Get more on the Casper arts scene via the ARTCORE site. 

The best-known public art program in Wyoming is in Jackson. 

When I started making work trips to Teton County in 1991, the town's library was in a log cabin. A sleek new library replaced it and is now home to a unique public artwork, "Filament Mind." It's indoors so it's a bit less visible than most public art. But it's worth a visit. A short description:

Installed in January 2013, the sculpture is visually arresting: nearly 1,000 thread-like filaments cascade from a mainframe column. Transcending its technological sophistication, the sculpture exudes a life-like aesthetic, at times resembling a bird in flight, a waterfall, a mountain, a crater, even the willows that whistle around the valley. Each filament flows from the column to the wall and an anchor point tagged by a Dewey Decimal System section title.

 

When a visitor begins a search on WyldCat – the online inventory of the library organized by the Dewey Decimal System – a LED light glows on the filament corresponding with that Dewey Decimal section title – say “International Relations” – and related topics glow as well – like “Political Science.”

 

Filament Mind is designed to be the visual brain of the library and by extension, the community.

Wyomingites from less scenic parts of the state pick on Jackson Hole for its chi-chi attributes. See "Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West" by Justin Farrell and Tim Sandlin's "The Pyms: Unauthorized Tales of Jackson Hole." I've made my share of smart-ass remarks on the subject. 

But Teton County boosts Wyoming's stature as an arts-friendly state. Rich residents are arts patrons and assist arts orgs and facilities with generous donations. The annual Old Bill's Fun Run is a Teton County tradition and raises a ton of money for local orgs. Local, state, and federal funds are a part of the mix.

The Hole is home to the National Museum of Wildlife Art and its amazing collections. It hosts tours of its outdoor sculpture. Many artists and writers I know came to Jackson in the good ol' days of cheap, crowded housing (think ski bum) and many short-term service-industry jobs. Many fled as prices climbed but those creative people who stayed are a stubborn lot. 

For insight on the Teton County art scene, go to Tammy Christel's Jackson Hole Art Blog and Jackson Hole Public Art. 

The Wyoming Arts Council supervises the state's public art initiative. Go to https://wyoarts.state.wy.us for more info and calls for entries.

As the pandemic winds down (we hope), summer visitors may be feeling a bit skittish about touring Wyoming (see "Least Vaccinated U.S. Counties Have Something in Common: Trump Voters"). It may be tough to feel safe at a jam-packed music festival or brewfest. 

But no worries, as most public art can be viewed from the comfort and safety of your vehicle. My high-risk family and I cruised Cheyenne's Paint Slingers Art Festival last July. We watched many of the muralists at work, even shouted out questions to the artists and they shouted their answers. We also attended movies and concerts at the Terry Ranch's Chinook Drive-in. We viewed from our car and listened via a dedicated FM station. 

Covid-19 changed so much. We felt the absence of people gathering to enjoy music, dance, and theatre. It also showed us that creativity can bloom in hard times. 

Return to the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens

I returned to volunteer duties at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens this week. In March of 2020, volunteers were put on hiatus during the pandemic. A few months, is what I thought at the time. A few months turned into a year-plus. We're still not out of it but the vaccine and safety measures brought us to a point where we can return to some public activities. 

Touring the Botanic Gardens Conservatory and its grounds are among them. Hours are limited and safety protocols are in place. There is no mandatory mask policy but I wear one as do other staffers and volunteers. All three floors of the Conservatory are open. The Children's Village held its Color Festival yesterday. Based on the Holi Festival in India, it led to a bunch of very colorful families coming over for the tours once they painted themselves with colored chalk. They all looked so happy to be out doing fun things on a sunny spring day. It was a great day for me, too, as I was happy to be back at the Gardens introducing people to its treasures. 

I met a retired couple from Casper out with their adult daughter who now lives in Cheyenne. I met a young man from Massachusetts wearing an Orlando Jai Alai T-shirt and we talked jai alai and permaculture. A group of guitarists and wedding planners came by to practice songs for the upcoming wedding at the Gardens. A group trooped in to hold a baby shower. A middle-aged bearded man in his 40s from Santa Fe walked with a cane and we talked about heart conditions. His sounded a lot worse than mine. He may move to Cheyenne to be closer to family. 

Many young couples visited, some with babies and others looking like they were on their first dates and getting to know one another. I discussed growing giant sunflowers with a woman from Denver. At the close of day, a photographer came in with her model to shoot some scenic photos (the Gardens only allows photography before and after hours). She said she saw some photos taken at the Gardens by another FoCo photog and wanted to shoot the place herself.

I spent time acquainting myself with new procedures. I ate my bag lunch -- no more food items in the Tilted Tulip Gift Shop. I leafed through the binder of CBG memorials which had been assembled by staff during the break. Many trees and flowers dedicated to loved ones. Plaques and pavers and benches, all done as remembrances. 

I thought about my father, a dedicated gardener who learned from his gardener father when growing up in Denver and transferred his skills to a very different Central Florida climate. He enjoyed year-round gardening at home and tending the plants at St. Brendan the Navigator Catholic Church, the same one I was married in. Dad nurtured tropical plants and battled tropical bugs and diseases. Different challenges from those we face in Wyoming.

The Pandemic of 2020-21 is not over yet. Covid-19 may be with us forever, just like the common cold which is related to the current plague. Gardening provides hope as well as food. When you dig deeper into it, you learn about dirt and bacteria and chemicals and the origins of your plants and flowers. Covid emerged from the natural world to infect and kill millions. I was afraid at the beginning of the pandemic. Now that I've been injected with a vaccine that is based on dogged scientific research, I am less afraid. Messenger Ribonucleic Acid (mRNA) provides instructions to our body on how to make a viral protein to trigger an immune response.

At my front-desk station, I checked in more that 240 visitors. The second-largest count of 2021 after that wonderfully warm Saturday before Easter. I will be there every Thursday and Friday afternoon through April. Come by, tour the place, and talk to me about the art of growing things. 

In Trump Sonnets, poet Ken Waldman tracks how America lost its mind

I just received a copy of Ken Waldman's "Trump Sonnets, Volume 8: The Final Four Months."

This is good news/good news. Another book of Trump sonnets to read. And, as the title says, "final" four months of the Trump scourge. A traumatic four months. A traumatic four years. Poet M.L. Liebler, who published the book at his Ridgeway Press in Michigan, writes in the foreword:

Ken has successfully brought form to the most unformable and unformidable, mean-spirited, fly-by-the-seat-of-his pants scoundrel who did his damndest to take this country down.

Waldman takes us through the final four months through sonnets in the POV of Americans: a dog walker in Brooklyn, a prison guard in Lexington, Kentucky, and a house painter in Hilo, Hawaii. Closer to home are the words of a baker in Cheyenne and a locksmith in Casper. The baker rhapsodizes about the two Q Girls who are "both up for war against Democrats." The locksmith is more thoughtful. He (I think it's a he) says that a civil war may be on the horizon but is wary of "citizens desperate or angry enough" to assassinate a Supreme Court elder or "wayward" senator. There is also an architect in Fort Collins who blasts the "toxic idiocy" of those who believe that Trump won the election. The Brooklyn dog walker sums it up this way: "Put them behind bars -- him, Jared, the kids. Or send them to Mars."

We hear many voices. I've been reading the selections in a more lighthearted mood than I did the first seven "Trump Sonnets." That is because T has disappeared from public view and is no longer on Twitter to rattle my world. He also is gone from the White House which he treated like his own Scarface villa (he already has one of those in Mar-a-Lago).

As evident during Waldman's 35-year career as an itinerant poet and fiddler, he has a keen wit and is always busy creating. He's published 19 poetry and prose books and nine CDs that "mix Appalachian-style string band music with original poetry." As a touring artist whose home base is in Alaska, most of his gigs since March 2020 were cancelled or postponed. He's been featured at the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey, the Woodford Folk Festival in Queensland, Australia, and the Word of South Festival this weekend in Tallahassee, Fla. He's also conducted residencies in more than 200 schools, including ones in Casper and Cheyenne. He's also served as a judge for Wyoming Arts Council literary fellowships.

Front Range dwellers can see him on stage on May 22, 7 p.m., at the Lakewood Cultural Center in Lakewood, Colo. He will appear with Willi Carlisle and special guests Ben Guzman and Colin Gould. Tickets are $27 and you can get them here. 

I will file volume eight with Waldman's one through seven in my presidential library. My grandkids, if I ever have any, might like to read them and see how America lost its mind in the 21st century. 

You can't actually buy the book until September 1. Get more info at the Trump Sonnets site or Waldman's home page. The book will be distributed by nonprofit literary book distributor Small Press Distribution at orders@spdbooks.org.