I met “Jack” in the park on Saturday evening because our dogs wanted to play together. Otherwise I’m sure he would have left me alone.
Jack is clearly into privacy. That’s fine in Dubois. We understand that some people prefer solitude and a certain degree of anonymity. We’re good with you whoever you are, as long as you have a decent character.
I can’t give him a cowboy name like Dustin or Cody. He’s clearly not a cowboy type. He’s young, but he doesn’t walk with a swagger and a smile. He and “Lynn” weren’t on their way to the Dubois Outfitters’ annual benefit pig roast and auction in the nearby Headwaters Center, as I was. That wouldn’t be their kind of scene.
At first I thought Jack and Lynn were visitors, because I’ve never seen them before. But they’ve been here for three years, hanging out in a house up in the hills near town.
They’d stopped in the park to give “Rusty” a romp after waiting in the car while they bought groceries. Normally they just hike in the public land right outside their door, but it’s been really muddy there after the recent snowmelt, so (like me) they’ve been using the paved Riverwalk in the park lately.
Both dogs were on the leash, but jumping around and eager to play. So we walked over the bridge to the large empty patch of sage and sand, at the back side of the Riverwalk, where they could be free.
“What brought you to Dubois?” I asked.
“We wanted a house in Wyoming,” Jack said simply.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
They’re from Los Angeles, but wanted to get away from the noise and the density. First they moved to Laramie, but they found Laramie also too crowded and noisy. Somehow, they discovered Dubois. (I didn’t ask how.)
“It’s really nice in Dubois,” Lynn volunteered.
Even in tax-free, low-cost Wyoming, I figure, the only way that two people that young could afford to live for three years in a house in the woods would be on a trust fund, or telecommuting.
“So what do you do?” I persisted.
(I cringed; that’s a New York City question, but enthusiasm got the best of me. I’d like to think I’m not naturally nosy, just a bit too friendly with strangers in Dubois. In any case, Jack seemed willing to be tolerant as long as I behaved myself, so I think he will fit in well here.)
Jack told me he makes his income doing computer coding. Lynn is an attorney, still working for clients back in LA.
She also volunteered shyly that she’s expecting her first child in a few months. I couldn’t have guessed. Her shirt was loose. I asked if she had family nearby. “Chicago,” she said. We had a little polite girl-talk about babies, and then I asked them how it was going, this Internet life in the backwoods.
“Fine,” Jack said. He told me that DTE installed high-speed Internet service at 10 megabytes per second (Mbps) almost immediately after they moved into their new mountainside home, and he praised their customer service.
Mike Kenney at DTE has told me that they can provide 10 Mbps service to anyone who wants is, and if it isn’t easy, they’ll find a way.
There are several dozen people working remotely around Dubois, according to DTE, but of course DTE won’t share their identities. I already knew about a few; now I’ve stumbled on two more.
If you just want to be alone while you’re connected, we’re good with that too.
The dog and I hope I we run into Jack and Lynn again, but we’ll leave them to themselves.
(Lynn: I’m sure you know how to take care of yourself. But if you need something as that baby comes closer, please send an email. We’re here for you.)
© Lois Wingerson, 2017
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Returning after our brief escape from the land of snow and ice, I’m struck by the contrast between two places we visited.
We stayed with friends in their short-term rental, part of another new development of hopes unrealized. Those condos are being rented because they have not sold. Walking the dog, I wondered how many blinds were drawn for shade and how many to disguise vacancy.
The edge of an RV park that used to be waterfront is now hundreds of yards from the shoreline of Lake Mead. The Alfred Merritt Smith Water Treatment Facility, opened in 1971 to improve the lake water, is now located nearly a mile from the water’s edge.
The brilliant blue water line of Lake Mead is also bordered by a white stripe, so that it looks from a distance like a fancy swimming pool. What they call the “bathtub rim” clearly marks how much the lake has fallen. Above the bathtub rim, and on the edges of that island in the left of the picture, the landscape is striped in hues of brown and gray.
We first came to Dubois to get away from the big city. Every once in a while, even when living in Dubois, we have an urge to get away from it all. So we’ve come far to the south, where New Mexico borders Arizona and both border on Mexico.
A cautionary tale for me: Our friends talk too much and too eagerly about this place they’ve adopted, assuming I’ll be deeply interested. They praise the natural beauty and recount the local history: Who lives where, who does what.
Before we depart, our host insists on taking me out just beyond the gate to show me the “maze,” which we had missed on our hikes. A man who used to own that property came out from England every summer and erected a huge rock pile with boulders, carrying each of them by hand, sometimes with the help of his wife.
10:45 AM: The state trooper was adamant, like they are. “I’m reopening it at four.”
11:00 AM: “Get a room,” texted my husband from Dubois, where it had been snowing steadily all day. “Before they are all gone.” Of course I complied, but I would cancel it shortly.
Just beyond the Red Rocks, a herd of bighorn sheep skedaddled across the road in the swirling powder in front of me. I braked in time, and then smiled. Welcome home.
I looked out the front door at bedtime to find a new work of art in the garage light.
After three days of whiteout and steady snowfall, we woke up this morning to a crystalline vista beneath blue skies–just as the forecast promised.
To the old homesteaders like Clark, this was just the way it was in winter. They had no weather apps to warn them of what was coming, either.
Meanwhile, they might have to dig their way out of the cabin each morning to get to work and school. (This shows what remained of one tie-hack cabin last summer.)
At work one day in the middle of a very cold winter, Boedeker was trapped under a rolling log and injured so badly he couldn’t mount his horse. Cassidy came along the trail and helped him back to his cabin, Boedeker said. Cassidy stocked the cabin with food and firewood, cooked the meals, and stayed until Boedeker was well enough to work again.
Back east visiting my aged mother, I find myself again in that verdant country in high summer.
Today, I took a short hike in the woods behind that meadow. For many years, it seemed like a luxury to take a long walk under such a canopy of trees, with the crunch of dead leaves underfoot and the wisps of fragile greenery brushing at my ankles.
A few years ago, shoving our rusty wheelbarrow across the rocky ground beside the house, I suddenly had a vision of an old picture I had seen of my grandmother. She was a Nebraska farmwife, and told me about the land of coyotes and rattlesnakes, and about leading my young mother and her brother on hikes for picnics on top of the tall bluff. I learned a few years ago (to my surprised delight) that her husband, my grandfather, grew up in Casper, in northeast Wyoming.
I found this review article, which I got around to reading while my husband was somewhere out there on Brooks Lake fishing with friends.
The Joneses stayed there as well, and remained in town long enough to notice the oversized jackalope and eat at the Cowboy Cafe. “On the way,” he adds, “we found ourselves on a busy, motel-strewn street called Ramshorn — the name Nabokov modified into Ramsdale, the name of Lolita’s fictional hometown.”
In the end, I’m not sorry I scanned through Lolita. The story left me cold, or much worse, but Nabokov does write quite beautifully about my favorite haunts: “red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream.”
It’s that time again. The cyclists begin laboring up the hill along the highway in front of our house. For those pedaling westward, this slope is the first real hint of the challenge that faces them in the Rockies.
Why do they go through this ordeal? Some of them are cycling for a cause: a cure for cancer, or houses for the homeless. Others are doing it for the challenge.
Last summer, someone installed this bike repair station in the center of town, in the parking lot in front of the Opportunity Shop.
I’m a bit worried about Becki, who is not only my yoga instructor but a dear friend from way back. I shouldn’t be.
She raised funds for the trip by selling her art, hand-appliqued T-shirts, and block-printed cards. (Who knew she is also an artist?)
I have heard people say there is no proper spring in Dubois.
The females are soft gray. The males always look to me like tiny pieces of the sky, broken off and soaring about at ground level.
(I’ve commented before about the false equivalence many people make between Dubois and Jackson. There’s enough snow over there to serve the ski resorts for the rest of the season, I hear. We can see plenty of it on the mountain peaks here as well, but around town it’s totally dry, as you can see.)
In the afternoon, lacking a plan but determined not to stay indoors, we took a drive up Horse Creek Road just to see what it looks like over there right now. We took the chance to leave the car and explore some cave-like formations. Just the perfect day for spring jackets.
I needed to run some errands “down county” in Riverton, about an hour away. It was almost balmy spring, and a different experience altogether from the wintry drive over the mountain pass to Jackson a few weeks ago.
I’ve met a few of these distant neighbors, but I don’t have any friends among them. “The Rez” feels like foreign territory, which I suppose it actually is.
The most prominent landmark on the drive is Crowheart Butte. You can see it in this picture, rising from the valley floor. I have no idea how the butte came to be on that flat plain, but nearly everyone here knows how it got its name.
My mother, who grew up in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, often lamented the travesty our ancestors had done to the Native Americans. But I was a child growing up in the Midwest when she raised me. I never saw a Native American (to my knowledge), or a reservation. Her words meant almost nothing to me then. I understood them, but I did not.
