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Hoping for the Best on a Drive from Dubois

Fearing danger, I found delight instead

Clock next to a window at dusk

As I wrote last time, it’s difficult to adjust when suddenly daylight begins disappearing before dinner.

November was unseasonably cold, snowy, and depressing. I couldn’t imagine why I ever said winters here are beautiful.

Then, after we flew south to spend the holidays with family, on Christmas morning I came down with the virus I had caught from the five-year-old. The test showed it wasn’t COVID, but it was awful anyway. The cough lasted forever.

Even after returning home, when I felt better physically, I was not well in spirit. Nothing seemed worth the effort any more.

“Come on,” said my husband one evening. “Get out of this post-viral depression. Pull up your socks.”

Antler arch in Dubois, Wyoming

The next morning, I not only pulled up my socks but put on extra layers before leaving for a meeting in Lander. I wasn’t looking forward to the drive: Dubois had little snow, but everywhere down-county past Crowheart had been dumped on the previous day.

Not a great day for travel in a Wyoming winter. Would drifts block the road? Would I get trapped or need to turn around? I made sure I had blankets, water, and snacks in the car. I allowed extra time, switched on the seat heater, and set off, hoping for the best.

The road was dry as I passed the red rocks. Climbing past the curves, where the highway straightens, I began to cross patches of snow, but the surface wasn’t bad. I felt safe enough to turn the cruise control on.

The highway was empty. Here and there, a few horses stood motionless at fences, waiting for their hay. As I drove, even I wasn’t moving bodily, thanks to cruise control. It felt as if my car was the only movement in a vast, flat channel of white enclosed by distant walls of mountain. I could almost see the silence.

Crossing that corner of the Reservation, I thought: This is part of the small parcel of land we gave back after taking so much more. Suddenly the smooth jazz I was hearing felt wrong, so I loaded a CD by Carlos Nakai, who plays Native American flute on a background of haunting symphonic harmonies.

Just right for a stranger in a now-familiar land. I sat back and enjoyed the sights and the sound.

Highway in snow

Rising up from the valley after I turned right where the highways divide, I came to that long stretch across the plain that leads to Lander. This was where I most feared that dangerous or impassible drifts might rise as uninterrupted winds swept the soft snow across the highway.

But the air was still, and the road nearly clear. The only other vehicles I met were snowplows.

The sky ahead, beneath a layer of clouds, loomed softly pink and blue on the horizon. Beside the highway, the white of snow was dappled with the black-green of distant sagebrush and the beige of dried grass. On one side, low hills billowed gently beyond the wide fields. The magnificent Wind River Range rose on the other.

So silent, so beautiful, and I was alone to see it. My apprehension gave way to a sense of calm, and of healing.

Small houses in snow

Slowing before the small square houses at Fort Washakie, I wondered what life is like for the people who live there. Sharing a heritage of conflict, we certainly see the world from different perspectives. But there is one other thing that we share, I thought.  We love this land. We arrived here by different routes. But it sustains us all.

Driving home later, I listened to a CD of Beethoven’s Ninth that our son gave us for Christmas. It was quite a different kind of symphonic harmony than Nakai, hardly as evocative in this landscape. But the long drive was a good opportunity to enjoy the gift.

As I turned down the switchbacks and passed the red rocks again, heading west toward home, Beethoven’s symphony was also nearing its conclusion. The sopranos kept repeating the same refrain, at a pitch that the deaf composer no longer realized that no human voice can reach without strain.

“Alle menschen werden Brüder,” they shrieked at me, over and over.

All people will be brothers. A very lofty idea, I said to the ghost of the deaf, depressed Beethoven who had basically chosen those as his last words to humanity.

Maybe, I added, but maybe not. Always worth a try, though.

It had been a very good meeting in Lander. I arrived home with my sense of hope and purpose restored.

I knew it was not the meeting or the music that had lifted my spirits. It was the drive.

© Lois Wingerson, 2023

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Dear readers: What was I thinking?

My previous post went out with a subject line that read “Status Report: Dubois June 2019.”

I can’t imagine why on earth I happened to propel myself two years backwards, pre-pandemic. The mind boggles.

No matter how often I re-read the text (and I did so, many times, with this post), something quirky often happens. This was that, this time. I blipped right over the headline.

Apologies for the confusion. I have re-titled the post as June 2021, but if you’re a prompt reader, the damage is done. Sorry.

Postill’s Believe-It-Or-Not: Construction Projects and Remote Work

Many tasks could be done remotely (and often more safely) by leveraging technology.

Is there any industry for which #remotework is irrelevant? Well, you might say … construction.

Chris Postill would respectfully disagree—as I learned when he reached out to me on LinkedIn last week, to learn about networking with other #remoteleaders.

Potential clients sometimes look at him like he’s crazy, he told me, when he explains about doing construction-project planning and oversight via remote work. They will chuckle at him, he said, like you would chuckle at the old codger at the end of the bar in some old movie who tells tall tales that nobody believes – until it turns out he was telling the truth.

“As an industry,” he told me on a Zoom call, “we are spending millions of dollars just making sure people are at work 10 hours a day, when we could save 30% of our costs by having people working from home.”

Not for hammering or welding, obviously, but for many other aspects of the work: accounting, cost tracking, project planning and management, scheduling, reviewing bids. Particularly for admin staff, he asked, “why are you forcing people to work onsite, and then sending them emails? If they’re only there for meetings, why can’t they be happily working at home? It blows my mind.”

As the conversation began, he apologized for the sound of a child crying in the background. “It’s bedtime,” he said. “They don’t want to go to bed.” I told him not to worry, that this is the new normal.

Like me, Postill lives and works in a remote rural location. He’s a mile and a half away from the highway, 15 minutes away from a town about 30 miles north of Edmonton. His region sounded a lot like my home in Wyoming: Rodeos, cattle, oil and gas, cold winters.

The longer Chris Postill spoke, the closer I listened. How many times have I heard about people in this part of Wyoming drifting away for a while, to work on a rig somewhere else in the state, or maybe way down in Texas? Or driving an oil tanker just to make ends meet? Could they learn project management skills online and work remotely for the same companies, working from home right here in the Valley of the Warm Winds in the company of  their friends and families?

Postill began as a steam-fitter and worked his way up to project manager in industries including oil and gas, chemicals, fertilizers, and uranium mining. Today he calls himself a “master planner and scheduler”.

He and his partner, Curtis Hermans, began promoting remote work in 2019, before the pandemic, when they realized it could save companies money while giving many employees a better life. The firm, Progressive Plan Inc., serves primarily the major industries in his part of Canada: energy and agriculture.

Of course, actual construction and safety control do have to take place onsite, he said. But many of the job functions that might seem to demand in-person presence could be done remotely, he added, by leveraging technology that is already available.

“With 3D onsite imaging and drone technology, you can send a drone into the site, put [its data] into a program and view it on something kind of like Google maps, that looks just like you’re there. If you can get 2 mm. accuracy, which is about as good as you can get with a tape measure–and you’re not endangering people–it’s insane not to use it.”

The word “outsourcing” can be a stopper for some clients, he admitted. But besides offering consulting by experts in planning and scheduling, Progressive Plan Inc. also provides scheduling software and certification courses in skills such as project management and team leadership for clients’ employees. These can be taken, of course, online.

The object is to focus on efficiency, not just clocking employees in and out, and avoiding the kind of mistakes that lead to people standing around idly or just doing busy work while waiting for something else to happen. “If you can schedule around having the managers and teams only go in when necessary,” Postill said, “it’s a no-brainer for me.”

Postill told me that the firm has quadrupled in size since 2019 — although many people in the industry are still stuck in the past when it comes to planning and scheduling construction projects.

“This is how we do it,” he hears over and over. “This is how we have always done it.”

Recently, representatives from a large fertilizer company were just that kind of skeptical at a meeting when they learned about the new concept. They had expected to see a proposal with nothing but numbers, Postill told me. Instead, they got a look at a drone image of a construction project with detail so clear they could make out the rungs on the ladders.

“Hold on!” they said. “If we can get that kind of detail, maybe we can plan remotely.”

Postill said that he and Hermans started their company partly because they were “tired of seeing people being treated like numbers” in an industry that often operates as much on blame as on finding solutions to cost and time overruns.

“We’re starting to get some traction now, people realizing maybe it makes sense,” he told me. “We’re betting we will win in the long run.”

© Lois Wingerson, 2021

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Want To Advance Your Teamwork? Retreat to Dubois

Cancer survivors, veterans, artists, photographers — why not coders and other techies?

The idea is so obvious I’m annoyed that I didn’t think of it myself.

How can we reach remote workers who would be grateful to know about Dubois, our charming Wyoming village surrounded by wilderness, with world-class Internet service?

How, indeed? Invite remote-work employers to hold their team retreats here.

Duhhhhhh …….

Dubois has all the facilities for these retreats–many different options–and unmatched opportunities for activities to inspire innovative ideas and team-building after the day’s work is done.

The suggestion came from Highest Peak Consulting, a marketing firm that doesn’t actually exist. It was invented as part of a senior-year project by a team of marketing students at the University of Wyoming, whose professor kindly offered me the opportunity to present our challenge to her class.

Four young people put their heads together and came up with a very bright idea.

What’s most irritating is that I already knew what they didn’t: Dubois has been a retreat center for generations. Some groups come back every year, drawn by our very remoteness, our spectacular and varied landscape, and our charming facilities.

Most of these events are sponsored by nonprofits, not businesses. The participants are cancer survivors, veterans with PTSD, songwriters, photographers, dancers, and people in search of spiritual renewal.

Why not also remote-work teams? It is becoming a best business practice to hold remote-team retreats at least once a year, to improve communication and instill collaboration among coworkers who meet most often via email, Slack, and Zoom.

Probably the first “retreat” sponsor in the Dubois area was Charles Moore. The son of a local trader, he returned to Wyoming after graduating law school in Michigan and founded the Ramshorn Ranch and Yellowstone Camp in 1912. Meant to inspire citified boys with the wonders of the West, the ranch sat in a stream-side grove of trees that happens to be visible from my dining room.

Years later, when that burned down, he founded the CM Ranch, a few miles to the east, which has hosted generations of families every summer for welcome escapes from the madness of city life. These aren’t actually retreats; they’re vacations. But the impulse and the outcome are similar.

One of the longest-running retreats in the area is the artists’ workshop run by the Susan K. Black Foundation, held every year in September at the Headwaters Center. After their first workshop in Colorado, they’ve been coming here for 20 years.

The Foundation’s board had planned to travel to a different location every year. But after coming to Dubois, “we enjoyed it so much we never left,” said director of education Wanda Mumm.

What keeps drawing them back? The diversity of the landscape, she said, all the history of the region, the fact that every year she wants to find a different kind of landscape to paint and “it never fails me.”

There’s also the reality that “we need a reasonably priced area for artists who don’t have a lot of money. Dubois allows us to do that.”

Many organizations retreat to guest ranches in the back country. Others, like the Susan K. Black artists, meet at the Headwaters Center and stay at one of the many motels in town. Their annual workshop usually draws about 125 participants, Mumm told me, about 75-80% of whom are repeat attendees.

“They’re always so enthusiastic about coming to the area,” she added. “It’s interesting how even after 20 years, the artists keep looking forward to it.”

For many of them, she said, “It’s kind of like a family reunion.”

Of course, software engineers and IT consultants need to regroup and renew their inspiration and creativity every bit as much as writers, painters, sculptors. The magic in these mountains can work for anyone.

© Lois Wingerson, 2021

Thanks for reading! You can see every new entry of Living Dubois by email if you sign up at the top of the right column at www.livingdubois.com. Who’s writing? Check out About Me.

Dubois in Pandemic: Where’s the Nearest Human?

An unexpected reason that I’m pleased we left the city.

“I am vilified for being motherly,” I texted my son in New York City. Not vilified, probably. But I think I have become a laughingstock of sorts.

I paid an outrageous amount to send him a four-pack of toilet paper by Express Mail, and other people in the Post Office overheard my remark about the cost.

He was running out, and he said there was no more to be had anywhere reasonably nearby in Manhattan. He’s not supposed to be wandering around looking for it, anyway.

I don’t really care if some people in this little town out west think I’m a little nutty. I love him and want to do what I can to help in a terrible situation. If all I can do is ship toilet paper, that’s what I’ll do.

“Maybe they will understand how bad it is here,” he texted back. “People are just dying.”

It’s true. Nobody has died from COVID-19 yet in Wyoming. But he says he has two friends who have lost their fathers, and he’s just one of how many thousands of people in the city?

He is anxious about his distant parents, who might be at risk in this pandemic. “Don’t go outdoors!” he orders via text message. “Don’t be in contact with anyone! Disinfect all surfaces at home!”

I can understand why he says this, trapped in his typically tiny apartment in Manhattan. Like so many people elsewhere, he has absolutely no concept what it is like where we are.

“I’m taking my life in my hands and going out to walk the dog,” I texted my son yesterday.

“As long as you’re not within 6 feet of anyone,” he wrote back.

Across the highway, I sent back this picture. “Nearest human,” I wrote. “Can you find him?”

He didn’t reply, so I don’t know whether he was able to find the man working up the ladder on that new cabin perhaps 200 yards away.

This week, I hosted a video call with a former team of coworkers whom I managed during the 9/11 crisis in New York. I thought it would be interesting to compare the experiences.

It was so good to see them again!

Over the years, I’d totally forgotten what Josh was like. On the video we saw him taking his temperature now and again, as he proudly told us about his real estate coup. He and his wife had scored a penthouse atop a large apartment building, not far from our former home in Brooklyn.

Unlike most others living in the building, they have a large outdoor deck that allows them to get outside under New York’s lockdown conditions.  But as elevator trips are limited to one family per ride, the waits are interminable and he has taken to walking up and down the 17 floors when he needs to pick up a delivery.

Immediately I thought of the others trapped on the floors below, without roof decks,  and those in the countless other high-rise buildings in New York City who live in small apartments that are stacked up like shoeboxes on shelves in a warehouse. Many of them have children who are confined inside, kept home from school. And as we know, they are running out of toilet paper.

And then there’s where I live.

A recent article in the Washington Post infuriated me so much that I actually posted on Facebook about it, which I normally resist. It described a geotargeting study based on cellphone data that claimed to measure how well people were complying with social distancing, by analyzing how much their movements have changed since the pandemic began. It graded all of the states. Wyoming got an F.

That’s yet another example of how the rest of the world has no clue what it’s like here, I wrote. Have ranchers changed their rounds when they feed the cattle? Have folks like us who live outside town changed our habits about driving in for mail and groceries? Have I suddenly stopped driving 10 minutes up-mountain to go walking with the dog at Sheridan Creek, just beyond the boundary of the Shoshone National Forest? Would it even make a difference?

Wyoming is the least densely populated state in the nation, and it has the second-lowest number of COVID-19 cases (after South Dakota). There are currently 70 cases in the state, and no deaths. The nearest documented cases are 75 miles away, and they are in a town of some size worth talking about. We are in a tiny village, at the edge of the wilderness.

Two friends Dubois who are sick may be affected and are quarantined, but we don’t know because they can’t get tested yet.

One of my quarantined friends lets her dog out the door and looks across a long lawn shaded by huge trees toward the river. The other looks out her window at the mountains in the distance and the field between, where she can watch the new calves as they romp.

Many people in this town can’t work just now and are doubtless concerned for the future. The Governor has ordered us just to stay at home. We don’t always.

We go for hikes alone on the Scenic Overlook or stroll on the riverwalk, and chat from several feet away if a friend appears coming in the other direction. We wave from our cars and sidle past each other somewhat awkwardly when saying hello in the Post Office and the supermarket. It’s strange, but it’s not awful.

As usual, whatever the current uncertainty, we are protected from much of the stress that currently darkens the lives of people who are living in cities.

Whatever my pleasure at being able to hike as far as I want in the sunshine outdoors, I feel sad to call this a “joy” of living in this remote wilderness location, because there actually isn’t much joy in the current situation. But it is certainly a comfort at a difficult time.

© Lois Wingerson, 2020

Thanks for reading! You can see new entries of Living Dubois if you sign up at the top of the right column at www.livingdubois.com.

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Dubois in 5-7-5 Time

Images in words and pixels …

As the snow builds outside and we settle in to await the end of winter, take a deep breath and enjoy a few vivid haiku poems inspired by life in Dubois. Thanks to Mary Ellen Honsaker for the privilege of posting them.

 

 

Fingers spread, stove’s warmth,
curled dog at feet in fire’s glow
log’s gift understood

 

 

redrocks

 

Red cliffs lead sheep down
like a shepherd from the fold
watered, fed, they climb

 

Gorge

 

 

 

River, glacier, wind
each flowed through my valley home
sculptors of my heart

A New Image for Dubois: Antiquarian Armory

As the new museum rises, we ask ourselves …

Tanks070417The 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.

Starks has about 250 US military vehicles dating back to World War II, the largest private collection in the country and perhaps the world. When he decided to open most of it to public view in a new museum just down the river, this has understandably provoked some conversation.

What effect will this have on our town? How will this fit with our shared image of Dubois: Remote, quiet, rustic, peaceful?

Will this be the “making” of Dubois, as the Buffalo Bill Center of the West made a boom town of Cody? (And are we comfortable with that?)

TankMuseum_1018Will 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)?

Whatever our questions, the National Museum of Military Vehicles is rising rapidly from its foundations–all 144,000 square feet of it (so far), to exhibit 107 vehicles from World War II, with a second building coming later to house about another 80 post-WWII vehicles, as well as two additional exhibits, a library, a theater, and two classrooms.  The first building should be completed next May, and some of the exhibits should be more or less in place for a “soft launch” next September. After a winter of finalizing the exhibits and training staff, a grand opening is scheduled for May 2020.

Dan Starks and his wife moved to Dubois from Minneapolis several years ago, finding this to be “a private remote area where we could build a home and have a lot of privacy,” Starks said. “When we first came here, it was for the view, and the privacy, and the freedom.”

Starks said he started his work life harvesting beans and working in warehouses, and eventually turned a bankrupt medical device company into a Fortune 500 firm with $6 billion in annual sales in 130 countries. Starks6He has bought up a great deal of property in the area, and reportedly contributed large amounts anonymously for various charitable causes here.

Gradually, Starks began bringing his collection of tanks, trucks, ambulances, and other military vehicles to his property near town. Some visiting friends who saw them urged Starks to share the huge collection with others, and eventually he decided to do so.

This is not a commercial venture; he portrays it more as a tribute to the troops. “Of course, the place we should be doing this to get the most visitors would be a large metropolitan area,” he said last spring. “The main reason it’s here is because we live here … I sure as heck don’t want to have to travel to see it.”

Starks was speaking at a public forum on May 31, co-chaired by Dubois resident and Wyoming state Congressman Tim Salazar, a member of the legislative task force created to study whether the state could or should be involved in the private enterprise.

Starks very pleasantly made it clear that he was grateful but didn’t really need any help. He said that the project had already cost $20 million and would probably cost $50 million in the long run. He added that he had created a large endowment so that “this asset [will] be here when we’re in our graves.”

Starks2Earlier 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.

He told how the rivets in the earliest tanks could pop inward under fire, turning them into deadly weapons that doomed their operators. He described the progress in tank technology throughout World War II—the lower profile, the increases in the armor, improvements in welding and casting, engines and transmissions and weaponry, and what this all meant to protecting the troops and to victory.

Starks pointed out a tank that was involved in the Battle of the Bulge, and went on to talk about the history of that battle. Because the US military gave most vehicles to the Allies after the war or abandoned them in Europe, he said, it’s rare to acquire one that can be definitively traced to a particular battle in this way. (He is committed to documentation. He has manuals for all vehicles in the collection, and they will be kept in a library in the museum, along with oral history information.)

Starks7I 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.

“You see, that’s what I’m hoping for,” Starks remarked. He wants to tell the stories around the vehicles, and to prompt memories from veterans who see the displays.

“There’s recognition,” he had said. “There’s honor. There’s remembrance. There’s a level of healing we hope to get at in the modest way that we can.”

Later, I approached a woman standing toward the back to ask what she thought. She paused. “I’m offended,” she replied after a moment. “This is so contrary to the character of the country, to freedom. To the wildlife.”

During the public forum that afternoon, she raised her concern that the museum would glorify war in a landscape of quiet and refuge. Starks (who is not himself a veteran) replied quietly and respectfully, saying that he would like to speak more with her about that in private. A politician at the dais remarked that, done well, the stories behind the machinery could bring to life the true costs of war–and might therefore help to deter it.

Starks13_reworkedThe 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.

Already, they have made some firm decisions about what they will not do, Cubbison told me.

  • They will not open a restaurant or lodging as part of the museum complex, to avoid to avoid competing with the businesses in town, and they plan to coordinate with the Chamber of Commerce to direct visitors to services in Dubois. The most refreshment offered in the museum will be beverages such as water and soft drinks.
  • They will institute an entry fee for general admission (veterans excepted), to avoid unfair competition with the Dubois Museum and the National Bighorn Sheep Interpretive Center. (Starks committed to this during the May forum.)
  • The gift shop will sell only books and other objects related to military vehicles and their history, to avoid competing with other shops in town.

“He’s willing to talk to anyone,” Representative Salazar said at the forum last May. “And he’s willing to listen. Someone opening a private [museum] could easily do otherwise.”

© Lois Wingerson, 2018
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Dubois and the Myth of Remoteness

Is Dubois really the most remote town in the lower 48?

I’ve been in recovery this week after supervising Frontier Fest. So for the first time I will repeat an earlier blog in this series, for those who missed it 18 months ago.

Here, I ponder the assertion that Dubois is the most remote town in the lower 48 states. What I don’t explore here are the implications of that word “remote,” which is a subject of other blogs and one I’m still pondering. In my opinion, Dubois is just remote enough but not too remote. I can leave the world behind but still buy a mocha frappe or a tuna sashimi.

HighwayGoogle “Dubois WY” and you’ll soon encounter a statement that it has been designated the most remote town (or sometimes the second remotest town) in the lower 48 states. Often this distinction is attributed to National Geographic.

When we moved to Dubois, my husband and I quickly took up calling it one of the most remote towns in the lower 48 when we described it to friends. We even trotted out some criteria, whose origin I no longer recall: Farthest from the nearest Interstate, fewest traffic lights (none), fewest number of highways that run through it (one), distance to the nearest large town (about 70 miles), or proportion of land within a 360-degree radius that is publicly owned (who knows, but lots).

But is this distinction actually deserved? How remote is Dubois, and compared to what and by which criteria? Last summer I began to study the question, with interesting results.

First, I couldn’t find any such statement about Dubois in the archives of National Geographic. And many other towns lay claim to the distinction of being most remote.

I turned to local sources, Dubois town hall and the library. Sandy Hurst at town hall offered up text from a 2011 press release about Dubois:

“A place considered by National Geographic as the most remote town in the lower 48 states… it perches on the edge of several wilderness areas and is surrounded by national forests.”

This traced back to a strategic plan for Dubois by the Foundation for Urban & Neighborhood Development of Denver, Colorado, dated 1986. The report said that Dubois had been “recently identified in national news media coverage” as the most remote location in the lower 48–the same unconfirmed designation that I was already seeing, albeit even older.

Anna Moscicki at the library turned up a wonderful quote from the memoir of Ethel Waxham, mother of the geologist David Love who defined the geological history of the Yellowstone region. Waxham wrote about her arrival in Wyoming by stagecoach in 1905:

“The other passenger beside myself was a woman of fifty or sixty, white-haired, face weather worn, bright brown eyes, Mrs. Welty. She was post mistress at Dubois, the post office farthest from the railroad of any in the U.S.”

Delightful, written when the railroads were still expanding, and perhaps an insight into the town’s perception of isolation. But not that relevant today.

In the course of promoting Living Dubois on Twitter, I was fortunate to gain the interest of Marilyn Terrell, chief researcher for National Geographic, who has also been unable to find any source for that attribution of Dubois’ remoteness by her publication (so we ought to stop using it). But she did point me to an article in Smithsonian magazine describing what truly may be the most remote settlement in the lower 48: the community of Supai, Arizona, located at the base of the Grand Canyon. At the bottom of that 3,000-foot crevasse, it is reachable only by mule train, which is how they get their mail.

But Supai isn’t really a town: It’s designated by the US Census Bureau as a “census-designated place,” which is the Bureau’s term for a populated place that is not an incorporated village and has no municipal government. So does Dubois still qualify?

Overlook7Author Henry Grabar on the website citylab.com looked into which towns were most remote by the criterion of being farthest from the nearest Interstate highway, honoring Key West, Florida, as being farthest as the crow flies, and Copper Harbor and Eagle Harbor, Michigan, (251 and 238 driving miles from the nearest Interstate), with an honorable mention to Paisley, Oregon (209 miles) due to the sheer difficulty of driving to the big highway.

Dubois is “only” about 173 miles from the nearest Interstate, at Idaho Falls, and is interestingly equidistant from Interstates at Rawlins, Casper, and Livingston MT (200, 199, and 199 miles, respectively). But considering only towns that are completely surrounded by Interstates (rather than having a national border or large body of water on at least one side), I do wonder whether Dubois might qualify as having the largest average distance to the Interstate in all 4 directions (193 miles).

If you aren’t familiar with Dubois, please be assured that you can buy plenty of groceries and hardware supplies in town, and it’s even easy to find a cafe latte. And by that other criterion of remoteness, Internet access, Dubois is marvellously well-connected. You feel the remoteness mostly by your proximity to all that wilderness.

Speaking of which, there is one remoteness criterion Dubois can legitimately claim without dispute: It is TwoOceanPasscloser 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.

This spot has been designated by the United States Geological Service as the location in the “coterminous” United States that is most distant from any road (the trailhead is at Moran, an unincorporated community). Dubois is 44.1 miles from Two Ocean Pass as the crow flies, and the plateau is farther north. Jackson is 48.8 miles away.

There is one criterion for remoteness by which Dubois fails miserably. The residents are hardly remote in their behavior toward other people. It’s one of the friendliest places I’ve ever encountered, which is one reason we go all that way to get there.

@ Lois Wingerson, 2016

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Telecommuter Appreciation Town: Dubois WY

Tools down, but back up leaving time for a hike.

ModemWho knew that I had chosen to down tools and leave town during Telecommuter Appreciation Week, which is set for the first week in March? Instead, I’m celebrating TelecommutING Appreciation Week.

I returned to find that my best tool, the Internet, was also surprisingly down. I recycled the modem several times, but that little light never flashed. My husband settled down to watch ordinary cable.

“Customer service won’t answer in the evening,” he said, but he was wrong. A nice fellow speaking from somewhere else walked me through the usual user-error tests, declared me correct, and gave me a work-order number.

“They should call you by early afternoon,” he said.

“Early afternoon? Forget that!” I replied. “I’ll just call DTE myself at 8 AM.”

But I never did. A nice rep from the local DTE office reached me instead, at 8:10. “I hear your Internet isn’t working?”

I laughed, and told her the last thing I’d said to the man from customer service.

SheridanSlush“Yeah, we upgraded your broadband, and your old modem won’t work any more,” she said. “Can you drop by to pick up the new one? Just give me a name and a password and we’ll set it up for you.”

I know I’m not the only lucky person who benefits from this kind of service. There are dozens or scores of others clacking away in these hills. DTE knows who they are, but won’t tell, of course. And we “digitanomads” aren’t much for socializing with each other.

Back to the routine: Early workout, then hit the desk. Work through until about 3:30 and then get out for a hike while it’s still light out.

There was a melt while we were away. The back road is packed by snowmobile tracks, but still really slushy. A much better workout than the elliptical, as usual.

As I trudged along, I heard the exuberant roar of snowmobiles up in the hills.

The dog zoomed around too, joyous in his untethered freedom. After a while, I caught up and found him enjoying a very large treat.

(Benny appreciates telecommuting too.)

BennywithCarcass
© Lois Wingerson, 2017
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