“I think in 10 years the meaning of cities will change,” David Tabachnikov is saying. “Today, cities are focused on as places of work. The faster data improves, the more you can work remotely.”
Ah, yes, places of work. My mind wanders back to noisy newsrooms in the suburbs, and to skyscraper offices with an eagle’s view over the city to the river. Back over the miles and the years, to the place where “So what do you do?” was the first question, and the answer was always full of portent.
David is speaking with a Russian accent, but he’s somewhere in Belgrade, Serbia. I am sitting in my office upstairs in rural Dubois, Wyoming, looking at my monitor all morning for a second day. I’m bounded on all sides by a frame of large logs made of lodgepole pines, but I’m not really here.
As David speaks, the other participants in the Remote-First Online Conference chat with each other soundlessly, filling in a stream that flows down the right side of the screen. We are in Portugal, in China, in Virginia, in Moscow, in Brazil, in South Africa, in Utah, in the Ukraine. Everywhere and nowhere, because we could be anywhere. We’re in cyberspace.
“People can have the benefits of the city while far away from the city,” David continues. “You drive to a city an hour or so away two or three times a month to go shopping. But your cost of living is way lower. And your quality of living is way higher.”
Precisely.
“And it’s not just computer engineers any more,” he adds. “It’s architects. Psychiatrists. Even fortune tellers work on Skype. The most amazing this is that even medicine goes in this direction.”
(One of our family practitioners does telemedicine, I type down the chat stream. So does our drugstore.)
Being in rural Wyoming, I’m the novelty in this online conference of “digital nomads,” most of whom seem to be sitting in some city or other.
How matters have evolved since I first began to explore the telecommuter community about five years ago! Back then, there were a few weekly “tweetups,” where a host would struggle to inspire a few lonely outsourced freelances in chats dominated by marketing messages from startups that hoped to sell them software.
This year, there are at least 3 “off-line” (e.g., participants physically present) conferences specifically for remote workers. One begins tomorrow in Chang Mai, Thailand. A second will be in Austin, Texas, in April and a third in November in the Canary Islands.
The chat turns to climate–to how cold it is right now, in late evening in Moscow, compared to afternoon in Montreal. I lean back, rest my feet on the heated baseboard, and look away briefly, out the window. The ideas that keep floating toward me through the ether almost take my breath away.
For instance: Some new Internet companies explode the barriers of space and time, because by having people work across many time zones they can have 24/7 productivity all year. Hiring remotely allows them to find the best employees regardless of where people live, rather than competing in the relatively small talent pool wherever the firm is located.
Salaries for computer engineers who work remotely from, say, India, are considerably higher than their own local firms will pay, because most companies that employ remote workers pay close to US salaries. (I type into the chat stream: What are the implications for third world economies?)
Someone types in a note of sympathy for our moderator over there in China, charming Ksenia, whose accent suggests Eastern European origins. Working for the second day at 3 AM, she’s looking tired. We wish her a cup of coffee. She says she doesn’t drink coffee; she likes tea. We ask her to hang in there. Someone recommends trying loud background music, and she asks what kind we’d like to hear.
Teamwork takes on a different form for digital nomads. Many of the speakers stress that good communication is of paramount importance, and technology to enhance it is evolving rapidly. One speaker demonstrates his new app, an online whiteboard. We try it out together, posting our ideas on virtual multicolored “Post-Its.” The chat stream applauds it loudly with emojis.
New forms of mingling go far beyond online meetings. I hear about an online pizza delivery service that will send pizzas to whole teams of remote workers, wherever they are, at the same time. Some remote-work teams have after-work happy hours on Zoom or Skype, when everyone brings a drink to the webcam.
The most successful all-remote firms, I hear, get together once or twice a year in what they call “off-site” retreats–an odd term for companies that no longer have a site. The idea of physical retreats may seem counter-intuitive for remote-work employers, but they do have benefits in terms of productivity. Communication improves greatly, speakers say, after people have spent a week in each other’s presence discussing the past year, planning the next year, and then getting outdoors together.
How it would inspire communications to hike in our wilderness! My best ideas don’t come during hikes, but they surely help to clear my head and I have some great conversations with my hiking buddy who likes to talk philosophy.
I think in 10 years the meaning of a mountain village will change too. We will no longer be a mere gas stop on the way to Yellowstone Park. The Park will just be one of the jewels in our crown, an ace in our hand.
Another will be our flawless Internet service, which is already world-class. A third will be that same beautiful seclusion that for so long has seemed a problem. Still another could be the very fact that we are not a city, not just a “place of work.”
Our industry will not be hewing giant logs from the forest, as it once was, but hewing concepts and designs from thin air and floating them down quite a different kind of stream to be processed further. This is quite clear to me now.
© Lois Wingerson, 2020
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Local historian Steve Banks gave another riveting talk a few weeks ago, this one about the history of traffic across this valley. Since then, I’ve been caught up in a sort of time travel.
The brownstone is 4 stories tall, has 4 bedrooms, and originally had a dining room and a receiving room for guests waiting to be admitted to the living room. It was remarkably modern for having central heating, fired by a coal furnace at the bottom.
According to Steve Banks, the first white man to visit the valley was probably a Kentuckian named John Dougherty. A fur trapper and trader, he fled south in 1810 from what is now Montana to escape an attack by Blackfoot Indians, crossing Shoshone Pass close to Ramshorn Peak and continuing down the Dunoir Valley to the Wind River. (This picture shows that valley.) A bullet from the attack remained in his side for the rest of his life.
In 1811, a year after John Dougherty came down the Dunoir Valley with a bullet in his side, Wilson Price Hunt came through with a party of 68 people and 200 horses. Hunt was a co-owner of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company, headed toward Fort Astoria on the Columbia River in the northwest, hoping to establish fur trade with Russia and China.
He also described our valley. “From thence across the 2d range of mountains to Wind River Valley …” he wrote in a 
Twelve years after that, “Old Man” Clark froze to death, alone in his cabin, during a winter storm. His grave sits atop a small hill, marked by an obelisk and surrounded by a wrought iron fence.
Author Henry Grabar on the website citylab.com looked into which towns were most remote by the criterion of being 
closer than any other town in the United States to the spot in the lower 48 that is most remote from any road, and therefore reachable only on foot or by horseback. This is Two Ocean Plateau in the southeastern corner of Yellowstone Park.
Once in a while, on a summer morning, I awaken to what sounds like cattle in the living room.
One 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.
Recounted 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.”
She 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.
“What happened to your hand?” friends were asking yesterday.
For 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.
There 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.
This 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.
In 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.
Returning from a brief trip to Montana, our southward route down Interstate 15 took us straight past that other Dubois across the border, in Idaho. I couldn’t resist paying a visit.
I’ve been curious about Dubois, Idaho, because understandably some people confuse our Dubois with this Dubois on the other side of Jackson Hole. A tourist once told me that a shop clerk in Jackson told her to stock up on groceries and gas before heading over the Pass to Dubois because there’s nothing there. I had to laugh, thinking of our large grocery store and four gas stations. In this Dubois, the one gas station is boarded up and there’s no supermarket.
I stepped out of the car to take a photo of the water tower, and had a brief chat with two town workers who were mapping water lines, standing inside the stone traffic circle at left. (Another difference: Not being transected by a Federal highway as Dubois, Wyoming, is, I’d guess this town is free to direct traffic flow any way it chooses.)
I noticed in passing that Dubois has its own visitor center housed in the small town library, but that was closed as we came through on a Wednesday afternoon.
Once beyond Jackson and the construction at the new roundabout south of the airport, we were slowed only by a few out-of-state cars dawdling to look for bison or enjoy the view.
I used to love scrutinizing the rocks as I hiked. I hoped to find something important.
Two days earlier, the crew of the Nobby Knob Triassic Expedition had covered over their site southeast of Dubois to leave it behind for the winter. They have spent this past summer excavating a trove of remains from what So called “the dawn of the dinosaurs,” between 230 and 200 million years ago, during the Late Triassic.
After finding a tantalizing whole phytosaur skull near Lander, where a few Triassic finds were reported in the early 1900s, the team began to explore the red dirt on public land almost within view of structures in Dubois. In 2014, they found fossil fragments of extinct salamander-like creatures known as temnospondyls. The next year they determined where those fragments had been eroding from. This summer, the crew was digging at that spot for two months.
Extracting the fossils can be brutal work. To extract the fossils from the dirt, they cover them with plaster. One plaster “jacket” containing dozens of stone-covered fossils weighed 500 pounds, So said. It took about 400 hours of work to chip away painstakingly at the surrounding rock in order to expose the fossilized bones. Another weighed about 1000 pounds.
Now this site is changing the way we think about some of the earliest vertebrates. There are enough late Triassic fossils just east of town to classify Dubois as a “world-class vertebrate paleontology locality,” Lovelace told me.
Cowboys roping in baseball caps, and empty spaces on McNally Maps. Dry creeks and history on the page. Sycamores and prickly pear. Barrel racers with great big hair. Horses swishing flies out in the sun.
“These songs were not written by cowboys,” Stamey adds. “These songs were written by little bald men at their pianos back in New York.”
I’ve always found it ironic that New York is where I ended up spending most of my life. Being the only child of two classical musicians, of course I grew up loving that kind of music. I learned several instruments. I used to play in string quartets and orchestras.
I truly don’t miss living in Germany at all, but (as for many people who admire Mahler) the music overwhelmed me with feeling. He swept me back to Germany and into the mountain woodlands, leaving me with a feeling that I had experienced and gained something profound. (But what?)