The more time I spend in Dubois, the less remote it feels.
The other day I asked my friend Chris how his son Caleb is doing. Caleb is in Spain for a semester abroad.
Chris told me he heard from Caleb last Friday while he was at the high school watching the Lady Rams, the girls’ volleyball team.
“I’m looking at Mom,” Caleb texted.
“How are you looking at your mother?” Chris asked.
“I’m watching the game on the Internet,” Caleb replied. His mother, who was there as a line judge, was distantly visible on the screen.
Chris passed a message to the announcer, Bill Guthrie of DTE, who was live-streaming the game up in the projection booth. Bill gave a shout-out to Caleb, and later took a closeup of Caleb’s Mom, who smiled and waved. The news about Caleb spread back through the stands.
“Right away I texted my brother in Australia about it,” Chris told me. “Just think about it. Spain, Australia and Wyoming. It’s amazing how the world has changed.”
I watched the footage for a long time, but I didn’t hear the shout-out or see Paula wave. However I did catch the screaming and foot-stamping, the leaps and the dives, and all the raw excitement of high school varsity sports.
DTE (Dubois Telephone) has been live-streaming high school games for several years, not just volleyball but also basketball and football. Caleb is hardly the first long-distance viewer, Bill told me.
Jeff was watching football games while he was serving in Iraq, he said. Someone else’s Dad has been watching from an oil rig in the Bering Sea.
The service is also handy for parents supporting a visiting team if they can’t get to Dubois to catch the game, Bill said.
The games are archived and can be watched on a YouStream subchannel on Roku.
You can also watch DTE’s webcams online to see what’s happening downtown, out west at the base of Union Pass Road, or at the top of Union Pass.
© Lois Wingerson, 2016
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I sat at the Nostalgia Bistro one recent evening, waxing nostalgic about our wonderful trip to Sicily. I was remembering another restaurant, in the ancient city of Siracusa. We had been celebrating our 40th anniversary.
Unlike that night in Sicily, at the Bistro I always recognize the person who’s “going to be my server tonight,” and they recognize me. I can joke with Bigi or talk with Norman about something that has happened recently in town. They’re friends.
My husband has observed that Dubois is missing a Thai restaurant. But I like the Thai steak salad at the Bistro so much that I have to resist defaulting to that order every time.
For a larger variety of choices or a more exotic option, we can always travel to Jackson or Lander, which takes about an hour – not that much longer than a trip into midtown Manhattan from our former home in Brooklyn. But there’s no reason to travel all the way to Jackson to spoil ourselves. The new restaurant at Turpin Meadows Lodge, closer than the entrance to Grand Teton National Park, served up the best meals we’ve ever had on that side of Togwotee Pass.
We never kept any horses, even though our daughter fell seriously in love with them at the Lazy L&B Ranch here, many years ago. You simply can’t keep a horse in the tiny back garden of a Brooklyn townhouse.
We generally stay out of each other’s way, but not last week.
Later, I walked over to the fence to take a picture of the corral in the valley, to text on over to my Philadelphia friend. One of my neighbors trotted up and poked her nose at me over the fence.
That same evening, I took the dog for a walk on the back road across the highway. He wandered over to sniff at something near Billy’s barn door, and leaped aside when it began to open.
“If I get this one, the others will follow,” Billy said, walking toward one of the three.
Probably the best sight to greet folks downtown these days is the rank of strong steel girders rising on our main street. This is the site of the 
Meanwhile, another sweet facade has appeared in town, just west of the SuperFoods. It’s a face-lift on the boring old brown box that used to be the Visitor Center (which has relocated to the Headwaters).
It was a good evening, that pig roast last Friday at the Rustic Pine. People were in a great mood.
If I’ve learned one thing about Dubois, it’s this: If someone is in crisis, we’re supposed to do something about it.
Years ago, before we bought our house in Dubois, we spent a few days here evaluating the town as a place to settle in rather than just visit over and over. That weekend, I saw posters for a fund-raiser to help a young mother who needed a transplant. This wasn’t an appeal to pay her medical costs, but to allow her family to stay nearby during the far-away operation and recovery.