Labor Day in the Hobo Pool

Spent Labor Day not laboring. I gassed up the mini-van (there goes the paycheck) and drove with my wife Chris and teen daughter Annie to Saratoga. The morning dawned foggy and cool in Cheyenne but we had this idea that it was still summer and we needed to swim. Saratoga has a heated pool and the Hobo Pool fed by hot springs. If you get bored, you can walk down to the North Platte and hang out in geothermal run-off cooled by river water. So we drove there, spending most of the two-and-one-half hour trip on I-80, crowded with trucks (as usual), RVs, and other Labor Day weekend travelers. We spent the afternoon swimming, and then I walked over to the Hobo Pool. A big crowd was gathered, people with the same getaway idea. A group of college kids tossed a frisbee, while post-college-age soakers gathered at the cooler end of the pool (105 degrees). I usually get into interesting conversations at the pool. On Labor Day, I talked with a Burlington-Northern engineer about unions. We agreed that the term "right to work state" (WYO is one) is a crock, on par with Clear Skies Initiative, which allows more pollution, and various other Bush-era nonsense terms. It means that employers are allowed to pay the lowest wages they can get away with. And they do. He serves as secretary-treasurer of his union in Casper, and I’m involved in the Wyoming Public Employees Association in Cheyenne. But Wyoming has been losing union jobs to other states and to automation. Most of the jobs being created in the coal-bed methane fields are non-union, but pay well, and will continue to as long as they last. It would be difficult to sit down with a high school grad in this twenties pulling down $50,000 a year and tell him why he needs to join a union. Anyway, we enjoyed some union solidarity there in the Hobo Pool before he took off to return to Casper for his late shift and I grabbed the family and we headed back to Cheyenne via the Snowy Range Road. I didn't think of it at the time, but it was ironic to be talking about unions and jobs in a pool named for vagabonds (hobos) best-known as out-of-work men who rode the rails during the Great Depression.