Dubois Cowboys: Still at Work

A morning’s effort, evoking many recollections

Cowboys2014Once in a while, on a summer morning, I awaken to what sounds like cattle in the living room.

There aren’t really cattle in the living room. The first time I heard this, however, I did leap out of bed to check.

It was just the clamor of cattle complaining loudly as they were being driven down the highway in front of the house, from a pasture uphill to the valley below. When one wandered onto our driveway, a cowboy rode over to steer it back.

Cattle trucks drive down the highway past the house all the time. But for a city girl, my first sight of these cowboys at work was pretty thrilling.

cowboysOne afternoon last week, I came home to the sound of whoops, whistles, and loud mooing in the valley. I ran over to take this picture.

They were driving these cattle into a corral from which they would be urged into a cattle truck, which would drive them elsewhere by other means.

I feel silly about it, having absolutely no personal experience about the life of a cowboy. But I still get excited at this sight.

This is an entirely different process than the one that inspired the term “cattle drive,” of course. This is a mere morning’s effort for these cowboys.

The original cattle drives, as anyone who has seen “Rawhide” will understand, were brutal and grueling months-long endeavors that somehow led to the idealized nostalgia that the term “cowboy” evokes today.

Smokey-hill-river-cattle-driveRecounted in the book Recollections of the Upper Wind River Valley, tales from the first cowboy in the area, Andy Manseau, make clear what it meant to be a cowboy in the old days. “In the fall of [18]98 I ran the J.K. Moore cattle,” he recalled. “… We were through rounding up and night herding them to be ready the next morning to drive them to the railroad at Casper.”

Two horses got away from one of the wranglers, and Manseau went after them. His horse tripped on a loose rope and Andy fell off, landing on his head and shoulders.

“I was unconscious for 24 hours. No one expected me to live….The doctor couldn’t do anything for me. My left arm was paralyzed and I had hurt my spine and lost my equilibrium. But I got over it!”

More recently, cowboys, Boyd told me, cowboys drove the cattle all the way to Hudson, where they’d be loaded onto cattle cars on the train. The cowboys had to return afterwards on horseback, of course.

But there were compensations: A string of bars at regular intervals along the highway once offered a place where cowboys could stop en route home. They’re all vacant now, obviously long since gone out of business. These days, the cattle truck drivers pass right on through to the next town.

Evidently I’m not the only person here to be excited at the sight of cowboys driving cattle. When I told Sandy about the tiny roundup next door to our house, she recalled the days before the cattle trucks, when the ranchers used to drive the cattle right through town in the fall and on down-county.

It was very exciting for the school children, she recalled, but the streets were very messy afterwards.

My friend Mary Ellen remembers that St. Thomas Church would halt services so the parishioners could go outside and watch the cattle drive through town. No doubt the cattle were so loud that they would have made the service inaudible anyway.

This brought back to her mind a tourist, an older woman driving a little sports car, whose progress was also halted by the cattle drive. Mary Ellen recalls that she was wearing white sneakers.

Cattle_BearBasinShe leaped out of the car, all excited, and began taking photographs. After the cattle had passed, there was no way to keep her sneakers clean when she returned to the car.

The cowboys are enchanting, but I often find the cattle an irritation. They might break through a fence and cause trouble. They sometimes get slow my progress on hikes.

© Lois Wingerson, 2018
You can see new entries of Living Dubois every week if you sign up at the top of the right column at www.livingdubois.com.

So the Doctor Came Over the Pass in the Snow …

Another blessing for our health on the heels of the new pharmacy.

IMG_1782“What happened to your hand?” friends were asking yesterday.

I explained that it’s really nothing, and then we tried to come up with an amusing answer. I got injured fending off a grizzly attack? (Not funny.) Got caught up when I was dallying the lasso? (Not even remotely plausible.)

In fact, the bandage is there to protect the minor laser burns sustained during my latest biannual ritual at the skin doctor. She found more of those pre-cancerous spots, and zapped them away. It’s ugly, but not painful, and it will heal quickly.

Why am I sharing this? Because of another blessing that has come to town, hot on the heels of our new pharmacy.

PassHighway022514_2For this visit, I didn’t have to take the usual 90-minute drive over Togwotee Pass to Jackson to see the dermatologist. This time (on the morning of our first snowfall, as it happens), the dermatologist and the rest of her team came to me.

This could have been their last monthly visit at the end of a six-month experiment. But they’ve decided to keep coming every month, year-round.

This is no small favor. That a specialist and her team will come over the Pass to spare dozens of us driving the other way in order to detect early skin cancer is a very important benefit in this remote town. At around 7000 feet, the sun is deceptively brutal here. It’s not hot, but it’s dangerous–especially for someone with a family history of skin cancer, but actually for anyone. I never go outdoors without a generous application of sunscreen and a hat with a brim.

Grandad_BarnDoorThere would not have been any sunscreen available to my grandfather, who was a Nebraska farmer with fair skin. I’m guessing there were no public-health messages about the risks of the sun during the Great Depression, and as you see him standing here in the barn door, he was not wearing a hat.

He died from melanoma that arose on the back of his neck. I envision him laboring for hours on his tractor, head bare, sun at his back as he plowed the furrows.

My mother (not a rancher but a teacher) regularly had pre-cancerous lesions taken off her skin. Now so do I, as do many of my neighbors. Thank heaven.

And thanks to Storey Donaldson, office manager of Western Wyoming Dermatology & Surgery, who proposed adding Dubois to their satellite offices in Pinedale and Afton.

IMG_1784_editedThis week was the end of a six-month pilot project to see whether the practice would attract enough patients in Dubois to justify the effort. Not only have they gained new patients from our town, Storey told me; about half of their visits in Dubois are from people farther down the valley, in Lander and Riverton, who would not want to make a 3-hour trip all the way over to Jackson.

Back in the day, someone would ride on horseback all day and hope to be able to bring a doctor back in time before the injured person died. Today, we have two clinics and regular access to preventive care. One clinic now offers dermatology visits once a month; the other offers telemedicine links to specialists at the best hospital in the state. There’s also an ambulance service with response times that match national standards, air lifts to regional intensive care centers, and search and rescue crews that venture out to help people injured in our wilderness.

IMG_1778In New York City, I left behind some of the best medical care in the world. But I don’t spend much time even thinking about that.

So what did I do after seeing the dermatologist on Wednesday, instead of spending 90 minutes driving back from Jackson? I put on my hat, of course, and took the dog for a ramble.

© Lois Wingerson, 2018
You can see new entries of Living Dubois every week if you sign up at the top of the right column at www.livingdubois.com.

Reveries and Memories as Days Grow Short in Dubois

High time to get to the bucket list.

AutumnCloudsThe autumn solstice passes. The days of daylight savings time are numbered.

But the days are still warm and bright. The crowds are gone, our days are not so busy any more. It’s time to enjoy those pleasures we promised ourselves back in midsummer, when we were just too busy.

High time to get to the bucket list.

I’ve been looking forward to this item on my list for more than a year. Finally I’m in repose, on the warm bed in the tiny log cabin at the back of the property on Mercantile Street, surrounded by lace and fabrics with fields of roses. I’ve been far too busy to take time for this, and she far too busy to accommodate me, but now we’re not.

MassageCabinThe wise and knowing hands of Helping Hands Massage Therapy are exploring and unwinding the knots and kinks in my muscle tissue. I have been to some of the best musculoskeletal specialists at the best hospitals in New York City, but Reenie’s exquisite skill has done more for my particular woes than all of them combined, and she is doing it now. What a blessing for me that she found her way here, before I even came.

There’s the comforting fragrance of oils. An endless loop of lyrical melodies spins gently in the background: Flute, harp, cello. I am lost in a reverie, half attentive to my body and half asleep.

LakeLouiseStream_MomentSomewhere there’s also the sound of trickling water, which brings me back to one reason why I’m here now: The mingled joy and stress of my last serious hike. A friend and I took the day off and clambered up to Lake Louise, a hidden glacial lake which is the splendid reward after more than an hour of trekking, much of it straight uphill on rocky ground.

It’s been years since either of us came this way, and we both have pleasant memories to revisit. For her, it is passing through a quiet glade carpeted in pine duff, after a long stretch of trudging uphill on a path littered with boulders the size of bricks that here and there becomes a stairway for giants. Often we have to step carefully; sometimes we halt to take in the ever-higher view across the valley.

The vision I want to relive is the broad stream that tumbles merrily and noisily down a channel of rocks beside the trail, toward a splendid waterfall at the bottom. The clamor is wonderful as we approach, and we can’t help but pause to enjoy it and the fragrance of pine. I’ve dreamed of that sight and that sound for years, and the little fountain in the massage cabin brings it back.

LakeLouiseHere’s one reason I need a massage today: The hike to Lake Louise ends in a rising field of solid granite, where the trail vanishes . You’re left on your own to clamber up any way you can, on hands and feet if all else fails. At the top, it’s so windy I fear I might be pitched over the edge. My friend remembers that, years ago, they brought fishing rods but could not fish. It was too windy.

But that view at the top! Breathing hard, we stop and stare, buffeted by the warm wind. Then we creep forward and downward to find a sheltered place where we can unpack our lunch. We are alone, in a patch of heaven at the top of the world.

Clambering, creeping, and holding yourself erect against a stiff wind does take its toll, which Reenie undoes oh, so slowly and carefully, in the little cabin. I wonder and dread when she is going to finish and I will have to rise from the table. Eventually she leaves the cabin, and then so do I. Checking my watch as I close the door behind me, I see that she has graciously given me two hours of her time, for less than the price of a dinner for two in New York.
Rainbow_100218_2
There’s no chance of a hike afterwards: Heavy, black clouds are speeding toward me as I drive home. I try to take the dog outside, but he looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind, and I turn back.

The drops beat on the roof for a few minutes, but as I’m starting to make salad the house suddenly glows with light. Out the window, I see a pair of rainbows that rise from the aspens and soar all the way across the valley, plummeting into a pasture full of cattle.

Beyond every challenge, ache, and disappointment here, I find a blessing.

© Lois Wingerson, 2018
You can see new entries of Living Dubois every week if you sign up at the top of the right column at www.livingdubois.com.

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