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.
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