I really, really needed my sleep last night. But when my mind came close to the surface at 4 AM, the Geminid meteor shower drifted in.
I had read about the event in my news feed, and had wished I could witness it.
After a while, I gave up trying to sleep. I got up, made a cup of herbal tea, and drew a chair up to the window.
These are the dark times in Dubois, when daylight ends in late afternoon and we try to find ways to stay alert through the long dark evenings until bedtime. There are two compensations for this: 1. It’s also the holidays, and 2. We’re blessed to live in a dark sky location. The sky is not just dark; it’s profoundly dark. It feels as if you can see all the stars there are.
Back in Brooklyn, when I thought of God’s promise to Abraham that his descendants would number like the stars, I had the impression that God meant he’d have 3 or 4 grandchildren. But as I approached the window last night, in every direction I looked, the sky above our wilderness was a riot of stars. They glittered in the windy air.
Out to the east, one star — or was it a planet? — gleamed especially bright and steady. I thought of the Wise Men. How long, I wondered, would I have to wait to see a “shooting star”? Would this be a fool’s errand, a waste of perfectly good sleep time?
The news site had warned us to dress warmly, as this is December. But the night sky here is so dark I could sit cozily indoors, in the dining room, wrapped only in my bathrobe.
I’m not very good at patience, but it was silent and dark and I had nothing else to do at that moment if I wasn’t going to sleep. I sat looking out the window with the largest view — the one that faces Cody and Saskatchewan — and soon a narrow flash of brilliance zoomed past, low on the horizon, just above the windowsill. A good omen.
Were those faint swipes in my peripheral vision tiny meteors, or just my imagination? Giving Nature the benefit of the doubt, I counted both of them: Two. Three. Then, closer to my center of vision, numbers 4 and 5.
My neighbor, who began watching at 2 AM (having set an alarm), told me she saw 61 in an hour or so. I began later. My count was a mere 17, but then I spent some time making more tea and trying without success to get a picture of the stars on my phone. (These images are public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.)
This image does look very similar to the night view from my window, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a fireworks display.
A meteor shower isn’t like what you take in the bathroom after a hard hike, I discovered. It’s a drop here, a splash there.
As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I began to trust the fainter flashes that would travel about a millimeter’s apparent distance across my field of vision. They vanished much too quickly to be wished upon.
But meteor number 10 was a superstar of falling debris: It began above my head and swooped slowly “northward,” toward the horizon, blazing downward for 2 or 3 whole seconds. I almost imagined I could hear a whooshing sound.
I was too amazed to make a wish.
©Lois Wingerson, 2018
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The sight of tanks rolling down the main street of Dubois would be jarring if we did not know the context: the Independence Day parade. Every July, we have been seeing just a few of the tanks, trucks, and ambulances brought out for the day by a local landowner, Dan Starks, an engineer who is fascinated by the machinery and its history.
Will it be the long-sought “draw” that lures people to stop overnight n Dubois on their way to Yellowstone? Will this all overwhelm us, as the Total Eclipse did last year (but only for a few days)?
He has bought up a great deal of property in the area, and reportedly contributed large amounts anonymously for various charitable causes here.
Earlier that day, Starks had welcomed the public to his property, to view at least part of the collection. Speaking in a rapid-fire monologue, and naming the vehicles by model number, he spoke about them with some passion.
I asked about the truck standing next to it, and Starks described why a new delivery/artillery hybrid was needed in the Vietnam, where it was easy to lob a grenade at a supply vehicle. An onlooker spoke up to say that he had actually used a truck like that in ‘Nam.
The new curator of the museum, Doug Cubbison, who comes here directly from 5 years at the Veterans Museum in Casper, has been working quietly in town since last August to begin the massive effort of creating and staffing a huge and unique institution in one of the most remote towns in the country.
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.
