Category: Remoteness

Fake News About Dubois, and the Facts

Groceries, grizzlies, antelope farms, and more …

Still away from my desk for a while. Here for your amusement is something I wrote a while ago, when the misconceptions about Dubois began to pile up in my awareness. Can you think of any others? Please send a comment.

Most of what follows is hearsay. In the past few weeks, several people have told me about some remarkable comments they’ve heard from visitors to town. I’ve also run across some other amusing misconceptions on my own.

I decided I should set the record straight:

Outfit1. We don’t dress this way as part of a historic re-enactment. This is really how we like to dress, and for good reason. We wear brimmed hats and long-sleeved shirts for protection against the fierce sun. We wear vests because it’s just enough to keep us warm in the high-desert cool. We wear jeans because they’re comfortable and sturdy. We wear boots because they keep the rocks out. (Here’s what I might be wearing today, if I hadn’t chosen a different shirt, vest, and jeans.)

2. Whatever that person in Jackson may have said, there’s no need to stock up before heading this way. Dubois does have an amply stocked grocery store, a gas station (well, actually four of them), and many places to buy a cup of coffee (or even a latte, a cappuccino, or a chai).

3.  There probably isn’t a grizzly bear in the Town Park just now.  Our bear expert Brian does say that, in theory, except in the dead of winter, a grizzly could be anywhere. But a grizzly doesn’t want to see you any more than you want to see her. We know better than to leave trash around for her to find, and she prefers to be in the forest anyway. Everybody knows how to recognize the signs that a bear has been around, and if any had been seen recently, you can bet that (1) everybody would be talking about it and (2) it would have been taken care of long before they began talking.

Antelope_1006174. We do not “farm” deer, antelope, bighorn sheep, or other animals you may see behind fences near town. This is actually the wildlife you have come all this way to view. They come here of their own free will, probably because they like it around here as much as we do. They leap the fences, live in peace with the livestock, and like to graze our fields. (Please drive with care.)

5. We’re not all cowboys in Dubois. Indeed there are many working cowhands, retired cowboys, former cowboys, and would-be cowboys. But the population also includes (off the top of my head) a computer architect, a designer of medical devices, a lobbyist, and many painters and photographers.

stopsign6. Dubois does have stop signs.“There’s not even really a stop sign in town,” Jeda Higgs said on the video “Chasing Totality: Making the Eclipse Megamovie.” I probably would have been dazzled by the exposure too, but that was hyperbole. More accurately, there is no stop sign, yield sign, or traffic light for cars making the 90-degree turn on the highway as it passes through the center of town. They have the right of way (and locals know it). People do face stop signs as they enter the highway from many side streets in town, and there are more in the residential parts of the village.

7. Dubois is not the most remote town in the lower 48 states. I dealt with this long-held and much-quoted myth in a previous post. The following is true: Dubois is more than an hour’s drive from the nearest large towns. A remarkable proportion of the surrounding landscape is publicly owned wilderness. The nearest Interstate is about 3 hours away. On the other hand, goods and services are easily accessible and residents take the commute to big-box stores and other conveniences as a fact of life (just as people elsewhere endure traffic, which we don’t have). Besides, those “commutes” are unusually scenic. But by any published criterion, Dubois is not the most remote town in the US. Maybe the most interesting or most charming or most authentically Western or most friendly remote town in the lower 48, but not the remotest.

100_06658. Winters aren’t brutal in Dubois (generally). Last winter may have been tough, true. But in general, temperatures here are several degrees warmer than in Jackson. Most of the snow (usually) gets dumped on that side of Togwotee Pass or on the Pass itself, giving us wonderful opportunities for snowmobiling and snowshoeing. The dry climate keeps winter temperatures surprisingly tolerable. And the air is magically clean.

© Lois Wingerson, 2017
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.

Time Warps in the Old West Times Square

Dates and timelines offer up curious parallels.

Away from my desk for a while. So I’m offering up some previous posts you may not have seen. This one published last year is completely relevant, because thoughts of our life left behind in the Brooklyn house still pop up now and then. Enjoy!

BanksWarmValley_croppedLocal 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.

I used to have the feeling that this Old West was much younger than the Back East I left behind. It must be part of the pioneer spirit you still feel out here, a sense of freshness and opportunity that reaches back from today’s new arrivals to the first intrepid white explorers.

Lately, I’ve been checking dates and making timelines. They parallel each other and resonate in very odd ways.

These four walls account for part of my confusion about time. They’re  made of huge logs felled nearby and chinked warmly together, much as the original settlers made their cabins. Our new house looks historic, but it is only decades old — far younger than the Victorian brownstone we left behind, which was built in 1880.

BrooklynHouseThe 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.

In or around the same year it was built, Oran M. (“Old Man”) Clark, the first settler in this Wyoming valley, built his the first log cabin here — a windowless, one-room structure near the confluence of the Dunoir Creek and the Wind River. It too had “central heating,” People recalled that he often left the door open in winter so that he could run a huge log right across the middle of the room into the fireplace on the opposite wall. He would shift the log forward as it burned.

Clark didn’t file a homestead claim when he built the cabin, but he did claim to own the valley. Legend has it that in 1883, he raised his shotgun and ran off a party that included President Chester A. Arthur. He reportedly said that he had to give permission for anyone to enter the valley, and they didn’t have it. Wise men, they went to Yellowstone by another way.

For some reason he did, however, welcome John Burlingham and his son, who had come to Dubois to guide some dudes from Back East on a fishing trip. In fact, he coaxed the two men to return with their families, which they did in 1889.

For the first winter, the entire party stayed in Clark’s small, windowless log cabin. The following year they completed their own cabin, a few miles down the river. It was also windowless, with a dirt floor and a camp stove served by a pipe through the roof. A year later, Mahalia Burlingham gave birth to a stillborn daughter. Her husband John became the sought-after fiddler for dances across the entire region. He often left Mahalia alone with the children for months on end.

MabelsHill_1017According 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.

Steve says that location, at the confluence of the Dunoir Creek and the Wind River about 12 miles west of the current town of Dubois, was like the Times Square of the Old West. The Valley of the Dunoir had been the north-south artery toward the crossroads of a  trade and migration route used by native Americans for time unknown. (The area has been part of the migration route for ancestors of the Shoshone for thousands of years.)

Early fur traders and explorers — men such as John Colter, John Hoback, and Jedediah Smith — passed this way, often guided by the natives.

WilsonPriceHuntIn 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.

Steve pointed out that Hunt’s party and their horses would have filled two Greyhound buses and 6 semi trucks. It was probably the largest single group of people ever to visit this valley. No settlement existed here at the time, except for a small Shoshone village.

The party had run out of food by the time they reached the base of the Dunoir. The natives, ill-prepared to feed them, advised Hunt to continue southward, crossing the Wind River, and over the mountains toward the Green River, where there were plenty of bison. The hunting detour cost them two weeks of progress; they should have headed west, upriver, where a friendly fort was only a few days away.

Frontiersman and explorer Jedediah Smith came this way about a decade later, in the winter of 1823-24. He brought with him a fur trapper named Daniel Potts, whose family owned Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. Potts was the first man to record a description of the geysers in what is now Yellowstone.

RiverHe also described our valley. “From thence across the 2d range of mountains to Wind River Valley …” he wrote in a letter on July 16, 1826. “Wind River is a beautiful transparent stream, with hard gravel bottom about 70 or 80 yards wide, rising in the main range of Rocky Mountains … The valleys near the head of this river and its tributary streams are tolerably timbered with cotton wood, willow, &c. The grass and herbage are good and plenty, of all the varieties common to this country. In this valley the snow rarely falls more than three to four inches deep and never remains more than three or four days, although it is surrounded by stupendous mountains.”

The West was younger, yes, but not by as much as I thought. As Dougherty was fleeing down the Dunoir and Hunt’s party was pleading for food with Shoshones in a mountain village a year later, my former home town of Brooklyn was just a small settlement across a wide river from Manhattan.

It didn’t incorporate as a village until 1817, only about seven years before Potts crossed this valley and saw the geysers. In 1898, Brooklyn was swallowed up in the creation of the great city of New York.

OMClark_graveTwelve 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.

He had left money to buy ample whiskey for a wake. It took many tries for the mourners, who had stoked themselves well with his whiskey in front of his fireplace, to succeed  in sliding his coffin up that slope over the icy ground.

But they did. Here is his grave.

© 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.

Why a Cybersecurity Pro Chose a Cowboy Town

Working for a while on other projects and pleasures, I’m taking a brief break from Living Dubois. Meanwhile, please enjoy this post from last year. My friend the “geek” Gareth and his wife still enjoy living in Dubois, and we heartily enjoy knowing them.

GarethWhitePaperI ran into Gareth a few days ago at the Cowboy Café. Over breakfast he was working on a draft of a white paper.

“There are more technology choices than ever before,” it reads, “but little certainty around which are the best investment.” Not the kind of thing you’d expect to find someone poring over in a restaurant by that name in a remote Wyoming mountain town. But I wasn’t surprised. This is the new Dubois.

I know that most technology workers still go into concrete-block offices every day, and that the bright millennials who crowd the digital world prefer big cities with microbreweries and “coworking spaces.” But I also know that a fortunate few are finding their way here, where they can see mountains from their desks and find bald eagles and moose to post on Instagram. Gareth is one.

I met him last summer at a community meeting. I introduced myself to his wife Sharon, and was startled to hear her reply: “You want to meet my husband.” During the careful process of planning their relocation from Colorado, she had seen this blog and knew of my interest in telecommuting.

Mensing3The first step in investigating Dubois, Gareth told me this week, was contacting DTE, our Internet provider. This wasn’t so crucial for Sharon, the former head of a private school in Steamboat Springs. But it’s essential for Gareth, who is an information architect with a firm that provides cybersecurity services for large corporations around the world. His work demands peerless high-speed Internet, and the fact that DTE provides fiberoptic service in town was a strong selling point for Dubois.

Colorado’s new marijuana law was a prime reason for the relocation, Gareth told me. They had grown weary of Steamboat Springs, because it had quickly changed “from a funky family town to being party central.” This echoes what I’ve heard from tourists in Dubois over the past year: Traffic (the ordinary kind) is building in the state to the south, and it’s no longer easy to find a campsite on the spur of the moment there, or an uncrowded spot in those high Rocky Mountains.

Mensing1It’s only a six hour drive north through Baggs and Rawlins to reach Dubois, but for Gareth and Sharon, the trip took far longer. Finding their next home, Gareth said, required “a lot of traveling in our RV.”

Having lived in 17 other states, mostly in the East, Gareth had a fairly strong feeling for where he didn’t want to live. During our chat over breakfast, he recalled the daily commute that took place at 80 miles an hour. I get the picture.

They looked carefully at the West Coast. He kind of liked San Francisco, but Sharon hated it. They explored Oregon and Washington, but no place sat exactly right with them.

“We began to realize that the closer we got to the mountains, the happier we were,” Gareth said. “We could just feel it.”

What drew them to Wyoming, besides the mountains, was the fact that there are no taxes to speak of, and that the cost of living is generally low. But why Dubois?

“We’ve always liked small towns,” he said. “The fact that there’s no traffic. New York burned us out for that.”

They did look at Jackson Hole, but the sight of the real estate prices quickly inspired a look away. They drove over the Pass to Dubois, and came home.

Mensing4“Dubois has everything Jackson Hole has to offer,” Gareth told me. “You just hop into the car, and you’re in the Tetons. It’s all great.”

The move offers Gareth plenty of opportunity to pursue his off-duty passion: photography. As for Sharon, she has joined two nonprofit boards here as well as setting up www.wyophoto.com, a website that sells images of Wyoming. It’s the source of the beautiful pictures on this page.

© Lois Wingerson, 2017
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.

Bouquets for Dubois

Another city luxury pops up here in the wilderness.

One thing I will miss about Brooklyn (sometimes) are the masses of colorful cut flowers that that spill out from buckets in front of nearly every deli, all year round.

As there is about one deli per block on a shopping street in Brooklyn, that was plenty of opportunity to be tempted by flowers. And I succumbed, nearly every week.

I took this photo just before we began packing to move out of the house. (How different this looks than the rough-hewn charm of our Wyoming home!) If there wasn’t a bouquet on this dresser in the entryway, that probably meant I was sick or away on a trip.

Every Mother’s Day in Brooklyn, I could expect a bouquet like this from my son. Being on a budget, he would always choose a selection from a nearby deli and make it into an arrangement, rather than paying for a bouquet from a high-end New York florist.

I cropped an image of another one of his Mother’s Day bouquets, and I use it for the lock screen on my laptop.

So I would still see “fresh” flowers nearly every day, but I have not bought many bouquets in Dubois. The supermarket sells a few, but they are mostly carnations and daisies — nothing varied or exotic.

The flowers in my living room look nice, but they’re artificial. This is grass and sage country, I thought. Who needs flowers?

Besides, they’re so easy to find outdoors. I saw these masses of lupine among the sage up on Union Pass last week. It’s my favorite color combination. Someday I will paint a bathroom in those colors.

Nature grows flowers by the armful here in a dazzling array of colors, but that task is beyond me. To keep flowers alive in a garden near my house would mean constant watering, carrying them inside overnight when the weather is cool, and unyielding defensive efforts in the war against deer and ground squirrels. Simply not worth the effort.

So I gasped the first time I stepped out the side door last month, after returning from our final stay in Brooklyn. Arising from my years of sheer neglect was this utterly perfect iris.

I had seen the blade-like leaves for several years and not pulled them, because they looked too elegant to be a weed. I can’t even recall when, in a burst of naive enthusiasm, I must have planted that bulb.

That wasn’t the last of the pleasant surprises. Among the new storefronts that are springing up in the middle of town, I was pleased to find the Wilderness Flower Company.

Casey is new to Dubois. She worked for a while at Western Bouquet, the flower shop far up a side street in the old part of town. I rarely patronized it because it was out of the way. To be frank, I tended to forget that it existed.

The owner retired while I was away. Casey bought the business and relocated it to a prominent spot along the boardwalk in the center of Dubois, right next to the new old-fashioned drugstore. There she holds court with her two small children over the large refrigerator and its stock of tall, proud blossoms.

I need refrain from indulging myself no longer. Why should I not have my bouquet of fresh flowers each week, just because I’ve decamped to the remote high mountain desert?

I make it a practice to buy the oldest and least attention-grabbing of the blooms.. I want to leave the showier flowers there for other customers, because I want The Wilderness Flower Company to survive.

Just like the sage, the lupine, and my lovely, lone iris.

© Lois Wingerson, 2019

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.

Who’s writing? Check out About Me.

Previous entries are listed in the Archives at the bottom of the right column.

Field Report: Encounters With Migrating Bipedals

A lone male and a mating pair, taking a break from the Front Range.

One of the migratory creatures most often sighted in Dubois during the summer is that distinctive species, the heavy-laden touring cyclist Homo bipedalist.

As with other wild creatures, it is crucial that drivers be vigilant for the touring cyclist, in order to avoid striking one. Their behavior can be unpredictable.

When possible, courteous drivers give them a wide berth and veer far to the left when encountering H. bipedalist as it travels on the shoulder. As with deer, they often appear in groups, and the first one in view is a sign that others are nearby.

The reason we see so many cyclists is that, as with deer and elk, our region is along a major migration route. In fact, it’s at the crossroads of two: The Continental Divide Trail that runs north and south, and the TransAmerica Trail, heading east and west.

Many creatures have been following these routes for time immemorial. Our local historian Steve Banks says that Native Americans, who often used game trails to guide them, followed the Wind River east and west and the trail down the Dunoir valley and up Union Pass as trade routes and during their seasonal migration cycle. The first European explorers in this area used Native Americans as their guides in turn, passing through the same intersection.

Although I often see migrating cyclists, I seldom have an opportunity to get close. This summer I’ve been fortunate to have two enjoyable encounters, both times with cyclists traveling northward from the Front Range of Colorado. One was a solitary individual following the TransAmerica Trail; the second was a mating pair following the Continental Divide.

The migrating species metaphor isn’t entirely a joke. Although many years ago we took bicycle trips of our own, these individuals do seem exotic to me now. I admire their stamina, their strength, and their determination. I can’t imagine doing what they do.

While driving eastward toward town one day, I saw a lone male heavy-laden cyclist laboring slowly westward. As he did not seem aggressive, I determined to stop for a closer inspection if I saw him again when I came back the other way.

He had progressed only a few miles when I returned. Having no special obligations that day, I decided to save him the hard slog over Togwotee Pass toward Yellowstone Park, if he was willing. I pulled over and approached cautiously.

“Would it be against your philosophy to accept a ride?” I said. He thought about it, smiled, and said, “Not at all.”

After loading his bicycle in back of the car, we set off again.

This wasn’t a race or some sort of personal challenge, he told me. He had come north on his bicycle to escape the dull and stressful routine of his job. He wasn’t using his cellphone for information, but just accepting events as they came along — including offers of rides.

We discussed whether he should venture into Jackson for groceries. I advised against it, as his object was to avoid stress and crowds. Along the way, he realized that by giving him a lift I had saved the need to use the supplies he already had, so he had no need to take the busy road to Jackson and could head straight into Yellowstone.

As we approached the top of the Pass, a thought occurred to me. “How’d you like to cheat?” I said. “I could drop you at the Continental Divide and then you could sail downhill just as if you’d climbed all this way.”

“That would be great!” he said. I was amused that he wanted to unload his gear and set off again without being seen, so we waited for all traffic to pass before we parted.

I encountered the mating pair on Union Pass one day when I went up there for a hike. They and had come north from their home in Denver to celebrate their anniversary by cycling the Continental Divide Trail.

Here, you see them sharing information with a cyclist heading the other direction. (It’s a pretty long steep climb that way, they told him.)

The male had many questions for me: Was there water at the bottom of this slope? Is it fresh? What’s the road like afterwards? How far is it to Falls Campground?

I answered to the best of my knowledge (yes, plenty; absolutely fresh; not bad, just one gentle climb and then a long set of switchbacks down to the highway; not sure but maybe 20 miles along the highway, mostly uphill). A while later, having finished my hike, I saw them again and offered them a ride.

They declined, knowing that it was downhill from there all the way to the highway. “Well if you’d like a drink at the bottom, feel free to stop by my house,” I replied, and told them how to find it.

Not long after I got home, they turned into the driveway. I offered each a beer, and I joined them on the front porch as they took a break.

They noticed that the wind had picked up, and it would be pushing against them as they headed uphill.

“And now I have that buzz,” said the woman, finishing her beer. They didn’t seem eager to start off again. I offered them a ride up to Falls Campground, and they accepted with evident relief.

Suddenly the man leaped up and ran toward the yard at the east side of the porch. “I’ve lost a piece of paper!” he said. (I had just been joking about things that would blow into the next county.)

He returned a few minutes later, empty-handed.

He brushed the loss away with a wave of his hand, saying he could easily make another. But having found the paper a few days ago, snared in a sagebush, I respectfully disagree.

Reading the two-sided document, I could see how much work and care he had put into it as he planned each step of the journey from Steamboat Springs to Whitefish, Montana. I put a red box around their journey so far; they were only about halfway there.

Alas, our meeting as strangers was all too careful. I wished we had shared contact information so I could send him the paper, if only as a souvenir.

Their journey must be long finished by now. I hope they made it safely, and that it has blessed their marriage.

© Lois Wingerson, 2019

Thanks for reading! 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.

Who’s writing? Check out About Me.

Previous entries are listed in the Archives at the bottom of the right column.

Delight About Data in Dubois

Awaiting a decision about a merger, T-Mobile delivers in one remote rural area

Finally, the long wait was over. We locked the door behind us and went to close on the sale of our New York City house.

Afterwards we headed off in rush-hour traffic toward the Holland Tunnel. Four long days of driving later, we returned to the place we now call home, this small remote town in the mountains of Wyoming.

Stopping at Superfoods to buy a few essentials, what to my wondering eyes should appear! There at the upper left on my phone was the word “T-Mobile,” beside 3 splendid bars of signal.

Our impoverished, second-class-citizen roaming days were over. This wasn’t news as good as the long-awaited sale of our New York house, but it sure made me happy.

“The new T-Mobile is all about bringing value and accessibility to everyone,” T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted recently, “particularly underserved customers and their communities.”

His company awaits a decision from the Federal Communications Commission about a merger with Sprint that, T-Mobile says, would improve service to remote rural areas. But I feel like we’ve already won. It was as if he was waiting there for us, holding out a beautiful welcome-home gift.

I took the image above a few days later, during a hike way up-mountain, near the Continental Divide. Clearly the broadband reach is truly broad.

We switched to T-Mobile ages ago, back in New York, when we consolidated plans as our children got cellphones of their own. Moving to remote little Dubois years later was white-knuckle time. Would there be any coverage at all?

There was, but it was lame. T-Mobile had contracted with the local provider for roaming service, but clearly it was a stingy contract. We got unlimited phone service, but we’d be kicked off data service after only a day or two every month. No amount of complaining either explained or solved this problem. We had to content ourselves with Wifi in cafes when in town. When we traveled to a large city, we would revel in the full coverage.

Nokia 4G LTE cellspot

There was one compensation: the magnificent team of T-Mobile customer service agents in Meridian, Idaho. They truly get it about working remotely in a remote location, and they told me several very useful things.

First, and best of all, when I complained of lousy coverage at our house, an agent asked for my delivery address and promptly sent us a Nokia 4G LTE cellspot. It’s like a small short-range T-Mobile cell tower right inside our house.

(Now T-Mobile is selling the Coolpad Surf, a similar item run off a rechargeable battery. For $72 and a data plan, you can take your 600 MHz mobile tower anywhere. T-Mobile says its aim in selling the device is to bring service to rural areas.)

Digits app logo

They also told me about Digits. I wanted a new local cellphone number, so my Wyoming friends wouldn’t deny my calls that were coming from my unrecognizable New York area code. But I didn’t want to lose my old contacts in the 917 area either.

The T-Mobile folks in Meridian told me that the Digits app would allow me to have 2 lines on the same phone, with two different ring tones. I added a 307 line for another $10 a month. As they say in New York, bada-bing, bada-boom.

For many months, I’d been hearing rumors that T-Mobile was going to build a new tower here. The agents in Meridian, Idaho, even said so. But who knew where, or when?

According to PC Magazine, T-Mobile won licenses to serve many rural areas in a 2017 auction, but has had to wait for local TV stations to move their frequencies to lower channels in order to accommodate cell service. Judging from the company’s service-area map, we still don’t get full 4G LTE service in the area surrounding the town, but I can still browse websites while hiking in the badlands now or shopping in town.

Who knows when we might actually get the new super-fast 5G service here? Looking at the recent press about 5G, I’m not sure I really care. An article in CNET says that 5G is being built on a 4G backbone, which may only enhance the capabilities of the service we now already have. I don’t watch movies on my phone, and I work at home at my desk, so why do I need it?

What a charming coincidence that, in the very week that I left the city behind, I left behind the last vestige of any need to be there. To be fair, T-Mobile service was sub-par in our Brooklyn house anyway, blocked by God knows how many walls and tree trunks. It was pretty challenging to make phone calls once we ditched the land line. In this house, with our personal cell tower, it’s great.

Here we have unsurpassed Internet service, fast and convenient online shopping (and free delivery with Amazon Prime), and wilderness hikes a few miles away. Our neighbors are horses and eagles and sometimes moose. We also have solid cellphone service at last, here as well as almost anywhere else.

The word “remote” has lost its negative overtones, and now applies only to our mode of communication and physical distance from heavy traffic.

Why on earth would I live anywhere else?

© Lois Wingerson, 2019

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.

Escape From New York: A One in a Million Story

How the city of Brooklyn tried to prevent us from leaving

IMG_3107This has been our daytime view. We sit at the table by the window, gazing out toward the busy city street a few feet away, waiting. Beyond a certain point, all we could do was wait.

New York is not a bad place to hang out, truly. Millennial New Yorkers do it all the time. Countless tourists come here to enjoy doing that.

But we’re not tourists, though in a way we are behaving that way. We’re expatriates already gone, yet even now, as we count the remaining days, we’re still waiting.

It ain’t over till the fat lady sings, says the old operatic adage. She’s still only vocalizing in the wings, after we have dedicated two whole months to learning the fine art of waiting.

We’re part of a mass exodus. Since 2010, more than a million people have left New York City, according to an article in the New York Post headlined “People Are Fleeing New York At An Alarming Rate.”

After raising our children in Brooklyn (during which we spent four vacations in Wyoming), we bought a second home in Dubois more than a decade ago and began driving back and forth twice each year. We’d live the summers and winters in Wyoming, spending the rest of our time in the garden-level apartment on the ground floor of our townhouse.

Three years ago, much to the amusement and perplexity of many neighbors in New York, we relocated to Wyoming full time. A year ago, we decided to leave entirely, and we put our 1880 townhouse on the market. We were “so over” New York, as the saying goes.

Another article in the Post named some of the reasons. It’s noisy. It’s dirty. And it’s darned expensive, especially compared to the remarkably low cost of living in Dubois.

Bleak House

This must be a long story, because the progress toward our final farewell has been painfully slow and involved. It was a process of Dickensian proportions, as I keep saying, because the legal proceedings bring to mind the evidently endless and pointless lawsuit in Dickens’ Bleak House. Alas, I have come to think of our lovely Victorian brownstone by that same name. It’s been bleak.

Living_Room0716At last, sometime last winter, our buyers materialized. We signed a contract. My husband arrived at the empty house the day before Easter, after a four-day drive eastward, and set about helping our son move out of the garden apartment, clearing out the basement and making other changes that had been agreed.

He started “glamping” in our former home with a few sticks of our orphaned furniture, an inflatable mattress, and some excess-to-needs cookware and cutlery. He had dinner with some neighbors. He spent a weekend with old friends in the suburbs. He repaired the dryer. He swept the basement clean.

The inflatable mattress sprang a leak. He had to buy another.

I began to receive images texted from New York with questions: Do you want the crèche? Do you want these old curtains? And, so often, do you want this framed picture or child’s drawing?

At first, I’d intended to go to New York to help in this process. But other commitments intervened, and we decided I’d simply fly out for the closing a few weeks later, and drive back with him. Then came the jolt: It would not be “a few weeks later”. We could not know when the sale might be closed.

Dickens and Kafka

Back in January we had learned of an obstacle deep in the records of the Brooklyn buildings department. A contractor who renovated the kitchen and bathroom in the garden apartment in 2003 had not closed the books on the work permit. He had since gone out of business and could not be contacted.

What one does in this situation, our lawyer said, was to (a) hire an “architect-expediter”—an architect who would file the same plans all over again, (b) hire a new contractor to pretend to do the demolition/construction all over again (and take responsibility before the Department of Buildings inspector for the work), and (c) hire a new plumber to pretend to do the plumbing all over again (and take responsibility before the Department of Buildings inspector for the work).  The architect also has to file with the Landmark’s Commission.  After the “work” is done there are multiple inspections by the Department of Buildings which may result, eventually in either the 2019 application being closed, or an audit of the whole mess, delaying things further.

You didn’t know you were in the clear until the buildings department posted a notice on their website. But you were not allowed to inquire when that might happen.

“This can take months,” the expediter told us. But there is a limit to how long a prospective buyer must wait between contract and closing before walking away from the deal.

Katies_RoomThe expediter, meanwhile, seemed to have no urgency about completing the paperwork or coordinating the contractor and plumber. My husband came to New York three weeks before the scheduled closing (and three and a half months after hiring the architect) primarily to push the process forward.

He began visiting the architect’s office every day, just to inquire about his progress. At one point, the architect took off on a vacation overseas.

One day in May, my husband texted that the new job application had been successfully closed (without the dreaded audit).  Both buyers and sellers thought the story was over.   I cheered – and then the other shoe fell.

“The fat lady has laryngitis,” he texted a day later. The so-called expediter had failed to tell us at the outset that he then had to apply to the buildings department for permission to rescind the original 2003 work order, and then do so. This could also take months.

As ever, he showed no inclination to hurry. Assistants in his office apologized and said they were doing all that could be done.

Neighbors in Brooklyn rolled their eyes and said they’d never heard of such a debacle. It seemed as though the city of New York was actually trying to prevent us from leaving.

Back in Dubois, of course, I began to feel lonely and to miss my husband intensely. In early June, I proposed to fly to New York to join him. We argued about the timing. Who knew how long this would take? Should I buy a one-way ticket or a round trip refundable fare? Should I leave from Riverton or Jackson or Denver, and if so, how would I get there? Could I drive myself there, and leave the car in long-term parking until who knew when? Who would take care of the dog with an indeterminate conclusion to his stay?

The last thing I wanted to do was argue. I wanted to give him a big hug. I wanted to share his vigil in that empty house full of memories.

One evening on the phone he sounded especially depressed and despairing. I went to bed very troubled, and couldn’t sleep. What should I do? This had gone on too long!

Suddenly it came to me: I have a car. I have the dog. I have a driver’s license. I have credit cards. I know the way. This had gone on too long.

The next morning, I set off on the days-long journey east on I-80, without even telling him. During our next phone call, the dog and I were taking a break in a state park in Iowa. It was too late to turn back.

Like a Free Airbnb

Thus I joined the long farewell to our former home and home town. Doubtless many other empty-nesters have had the same nostalgic moments, pausing in a doorway to recall what a child once did inside, or watching as other mothers take their turn at duty in a playground that has special meaning to me.

IMG_2991I met former coworkers for drinks. I smiled at people on the street whose faces seemed familiar, and some greeted me. “I don’t see you in three years, and now I see you three times in a week,” said a woman whose name I recalled with effort. “What’s up?”

I would try to explain about the lure of Wyoming, but the words fall flat here. Somehow Brooklyn feels even more remote than Dubois, populated with fairly friendly people who don’t care to imagine being somewhere quite different and can’t really do so. These were odd conversations

We acted like residents in an unfurnished airbnb, pretend-living like locals in a city that we knew all too well in a former life. We noted which shops had come, and which had gone. I bought flowers from a street vendor and vegetables from the produce market. We revisited favorite restaurants. We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and took the ferry back. We heard folk music in a bar. We saw Shakespeare in the park. It was pleasant, but it’s been weird.

My husband continued to haunt the architect’s office. One day the architect barked back at him: “You know, owners can go to the buildings department too. I’ll just give the papers back, and you can take care of it!” (I won’t say how much we are paying this man to complete the process.)

IMG_3004An assistant in the office may have been so embarrassed at this outburst that she took charge of the problem. She spoke to a public-advocate consultant in the buildings department, and got the job done at last, within a few days. We saw the final clearance on the website.

Then we waited yet again while the lawyers and bankers settled on a closing date. And now we wait for that.

It’s been poignantly pleasant, bittersweet, and awkward, like an unexpected encounter with a lover you jilted long ago. “I’m so sorry,” you want to say (though really, you’re not). “It was good, but nothing good lasts forever.”

Not even, we hope, the final farewell.

© Lois Wingerson, 2019

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