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I’ve been back East for a long visit with my aged mother, which is how we will continue contact after  the great leap westward. Instead of driving from New York once a month, I’ll fly out from Dubois to see her regularly, and stay for a while.

Of course there are trade-offs to choosing a life in Dubois, however wonderful its benefits. This is one of them.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t think of bringing your mother with you!” said a good friend when she heard about the move. This sent me into a frenzy of inquiries.

No, I hadn’t considered it. Mom is no longer mobile. The nurses use a lift to transfer her from chair to bed.

Just transporting her to Dubois, I found, would probably require a medical airlift. Then how would we care for her? Dubois has a wonderful assisted living facility, but the nearest skilled nursing units are an hour away (and have waiting lists with indeterminate endpoints). Finding or importing private day nurses  would be a tremendous chore–not to mention an impossible expense.

I agonized for a while, and then decided it truly doesn’t make sense. Mom lives in an exemplary facility. She chose this retirement community for herself to limit the burden on me, her only child, after living with our family for decades. Back when it would have been possible for her to rejoin us, Mom wanted to be independent. Now that she can’t be, it’s no longer possible.

I chose to extend my visit through Labor Day weekend, to see how she fared over a holiday break. (The usual staff weren’t all replaced with strangers, and the weekend was fine.) What I saw was what happens when adult children stop by for the day to visit to Dad or Mom, as we used to do before the move.

The usual peace and quiet gives way to a frenzy of activity. There are earnest, all-too-public updates on events in the family and entreaties to finish meals. There’s a pause from the TV noise in the lounge while someone’s daughter plays piano, too loudly and too long. (“This is truly awful,” remarked one resident who usually can’t find the right words.)

Today it will return to the day-to-day rhythm of events, and the regular flow of visitors. Some residents go for weeks without seeing anyone from outside the unit. A few, whose spouses live elsewhere in this planned village, have a visit every day.

It’s not necessarily uncaring neglect that leaves some residents without visitors. One woman here has a son whose job took him to the West coast (and who phones often). Her widowed daughter-in-law comes as often as she can, while also tending to her father who has dementia. An adult grandchild lives nearby but is institutionalized with a severe disability.

I will continue my flying visits as long as Mom needs me. It’s one cost of living in Dubois that I will gladly pay.

I’ve spent the past month going through photo albums with Mom, discovering heart-stopping old snapshots I never knew existed. We’ve eaten many meals together (although I eat far more than she does). I’ve been reading to her (either from the Bible or a travel book, as she chooses), bringing her wildflowers from the roadside, taking her outdoors in her wheelchair, talking to her (and interpreting for her in conversations with others now that she can’t speak for herself), and reading what she writes to me in her notebook.

The words “remote” and “distance” have two meanings, it occurred to me. One of them describes my relationship to my mother. The other does not.
© Lois Wingerson, 2016

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The wind is up again, driving the snow flurries sideways. It has pushed a steady bank of snow clouds across the Absarokas, and the Ramshorn peak up the valley has vanished again.

The trucks struggle even harder up the hill. Birds flap valiantly to stay on course, and soon drop out of sight to rest somewhere. The shingles on our roof rattle, and some of them fall.

It creates remarkable drifts in the snow, so deep that our dog may almost lose himself briefly while trying to run across an open field.

Full disclosure: Of course we have winds here. They did call it the Wind River Valley for a reason.

Here’s a local version of a verse from a popular folk song:

From this valley they say you are going.
Please do say it’s not something I said
But the fact that it never stops blowing
And you can’t keep your hat on your head.

Like much doggerel, those words are somewhat in jest. These are not the unceasing winds of the dust bowl.

About 15 years before that infamous dust bowl of the 1930s, in his novel The Prairie Wife,  Arthur Stringer described the prairie wind like this:

“Oh, such a wind! It made a whining and wailing noise, with each note higher, and when you felt that it couldn’t possibly increase, that it simply must ease off or the whole world would go smash, why that whining note merely grew tenser and the wind grew stronger. How it lashed things! How it shook and flailed and trampled this poor old earth of ours!”

It usually isn’t like that here. In the Wind River Valley, much of the time there is almost no wind at all. We know to expect it around 11 am if it’s going to blow up, and we know that it usually dies down in the evening (if not sooner).

Like the bears in summer, the wind in winter is a factor in where I choose to hike. I know there’s much less wind in the tree-sheltered back roads along the river across the highway than on the high flats of the scenic overlook in town.

Writing in 2001 in the Great Plains Quarterly, cultural geographer Cary DeWit described his field studies of modern women living on the high plains of Kansas and Colorado. The wind bothered many of them a great deal, he reported, and much more than it seemed to trouble the men (unless it hindered their ability to deal with crops or the stock).

“I always hated the wind,” said one woman. “I like to say it blows cobwebs around in my mind.”

“I don’t like the wind,” another told him. “It doesn’t just mess up your hair; you have to hang on to your car door. It makes me grumpy and makes me angry.”

One of the first comments I ever received to an entry in Living Dubois also mentioned the wind, as one factor that drove its author (a woman) away from town. “I raved like this for my first three or four years in Dubois, until what you call a steady breeze nearly drove me out of my mind.”

As for me, in a way I enjoy the wind (which I can hear even as I write). I’ve lasted nearly 10 years now, and it still hasn’t blown me away. Far from it.

The wind isn’t always pleasant, no more so than any other potentially dangerous and adverse weather phenomenon. You have to treat it with respect, for sure.

I’m glad very glad that our chinking is sound and that I don’t have to sleep outdoors in a tent during this wind. It worries me greatly when there are forest fires nearby.

We often choose to avoid driving northbound between I-80 and Lander, because out there on the sage flats the wind is often so strong and incessant that your hands eventually cramp holding the steering wheel.

But here in Dubois, especially in mild weather, I actually find the periods of wind a little exhilarating, as I might if I were on a sailboat in a sheltered bay somewhere.

Here’s what I feel about it: The wind will always bring something new from the horizon. It drove these clouds in, and it will drive them away, sooner or later. Then it will surely blow away itself.

@ Lois Wingerson, 2016

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“Did you decide when you’re coming back?” my good friend Karen texted yesterday.

“Oh good!” she responded  after my reply, adding a smiley face. “Everyone keeps on asking when you are coming home.”

She’s got it right: home. At first, we viewed Dubois as the place we could go in the summer, to avoid the city heat and humidity. Now it’s the place we leave and return to.

Here in Brooklyn, our Wyoming plates no longer attract much attention from neighbors. People may comment on our absence, but rarely with as much fondness as my Dubois friends like Karen express.

None of them has responded to our repeated invitations to visit us out West. (All it takes is a flight to Jackson. We’ll take care of the rest. There’s so much to do and see!) It’s a tough sell here in Brooklyn, which considers itself the coolest place on earth.

Do they think we’re nuts to keep going back and forth like this?

Quite often, despite what’s clearly visible on our license plate, neighbors ask when we’re planning to go back to Montana.

I continue to wonder why Wyoming has such a low profile. After all, last year the financial planning website bankrate.com declared Wyoming the best state in the nation for retirement, not just for its uniquely low cost of living, but also for its natural beauty and low crime rates.

The long commute to and from Dubois takes three and a half days in the summer when days are long, if we’re in a hurry. If we’re not, we mosey. Once we stretched it to 10 days with a detour to Austin and New Orleans.

En route, we’re totally wired with broadband, with 3 or 4 devices (phones, tablets, a laptop) to consult. Often it feels I spend the entire trip looking at a screen to check the weather (most importantly in winter) or the price of gas, or to look for a good restaurant or motel.

Why do we drive rather than fly? Partly because we always seem to be transporting stuff back to Dubois (much of it donations for the Opportunity Shop) but also, importantly, because of the dog. I never wanted to put him on a plane in the first place, and now I definitely won’t, after a Dubois friend told me at happy hour that her dog became lost luggage. (It survived.)

My husband and I like each other’s company, and we truly enjoy the trip. It’s a privilege to watch the nation unfold before us, to see the well-kept farms of the Midwest (or the sad abandoned clapboard farmhouses) giving way to huge skies and broad prairies, and them being gradually overtaken by outrageously huge natural sculptures of rock.

To answer the first question: Why bother (especially in winter)? We have needed to return east to check on our rented house and to visit family. Now we absolutely must go home to Dubois.

By why in the winter?

For one thing, because it’s home. Also, we will leave the view at left for the one at right. Any other questions?

© Lois Wingerson 2016

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One of the great things about Dubois is how great it is to get away.

Please don’t get me wrong. There’s probably not a minute when I want to escape.

A few weeks ago my husband asked whether I’d mind missing our annual road trip if he couldn’t fulfill his commitments before the holidays. I said I really didn’t mind.

Living in Dubois is sort of like a vacation anyway.

We did get away after all, and we chose the right time. Whatever it may say in “Home on the Range,” the skies were predicted to be cloudy all day on the day we left, and they did stay that way all day as we headed south.

What I meant in the first sentence was that it’s almost the perfect place to start from on a road trip to somewhere else in the American West. Especially for someone like me, a retired Easterner who saw the West only via airports during business trips, it’s the ideal jumping-off point from which to explore.

Here’s a map of places we’ve visited by highway since moving to Dubois. The red line heading straight east is sort of a cheat, because it roughly describes the commute back to New York City which we take now and again. But those are road trips too, and I enjoy them.

Skies were clearing as we reached our first campsite, in northern Utah.

Since then we have seen massive 1000-foot ridges of red stone that stayed with us for hours. We’ve dropped through vertiginous canyons and followed tortuous switchbacks. Nothing thousands of other tourists haven’t done — but it’s so easy to get home!

En route I’ve met several people who have taken months away from whatever to tour the American West by car. Lucky, lucky me. I can do it at my leisure.

I can also take great hikes in a different location. The pictures at right are from a 3-mile loop the dog and I reached out the back entrance of our KOA campground in Flagstaff. It was a magical uphill scramble over many boulders, along a very well-maiintained trail, with the reward you see at the top.

On the left there you can see a long-dead, black volcano.

So much for what I’ve done on my vacation. What I’ve learned on my vacation is this: You can drive for many days around the American West, and see many unforgettable sights.

But I have yet to see any location in the American West that has so many of those remarkable sights — red rocks, massive vistas, huge rock formations, deep canyons, dark pine forests, hidden lakes — within such a relatively compact space.

In Sedona, all you see is red rocks. In Crater Lake, what you see is a high mountain lake. In Dubois, I can hike the red rock badlands or the pine forests. It just depends which way I turn onto the highway.

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© Lois Wingerson 2015

Both days began the same, wonderfully–a flawless blue sky and the kind of mildly warm weather that make you wistful at the loss of summer. One moment, it was a bittersweet and beautiful day. In the next, I saw devastation.

Both times the sign was a column of smoke.

On that first September day, 14 years ago, I turned a corner in Manhattan and watched, dreamlike, as the huge cloud of smoke surged up into that blue sky. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, but I also couldn’t watch too long.

Last Monday, I was on the phone at my desk. I turned toward the window. This cloud of smoke didn’t so much surge as billow upwards. After a summer of fire catastrophes in the West, forest fire had come home to me–or nearly so.

Much as I loathe using the Nazi Holocaust as a literary gimmick to generate pathos, I resist comparing these two fires. Nothing in my life compares to 9/11. However, experiences during one inevitably bring back images and emotions from the other.

First, the smell. In both cases, our house was downwind only a few miles from the fire. The days and months after 9/11 were redolent with the inescapable odor of burning plastic and something else, unidentifiable and acrid. As Ground Zero smoldered, seemingly forever, we could not get away for a moment from that reminder of tragedy, and the knowledge that life had changed incalculably.

The smell of this week’s Crooked Creek fire was, of course, burning wood. Even as I was hosing off our shingle roof to deter sparks from the fire that could in theory destroy our log house, I was smelling memories of campfires, of sitting around the firepit on our own deck with a glass of wine.

This was threatening to be sure, and a call to urgent action by me and–far more important–a small and well-organized battalion of brave firefighters. But it was also, most of us assumed, merely the result of one human’s careless action combined with the results of misguided forest-management policy. Nature, benign and dispassionate, combined with mere human stupidity. Not colossal malevolence.

Next, the airplanes. All that night, September 11, I could not sleep for the sound of airplanes clattering over the house. I knew these were military aircraft, that all other flights over the area had been banned. Still, I found the sound deeply frightening. Even now, when I see a commercial jetliner soaring high over Prospect Park in Brooklyn, I remember how that looked to me in the months after that event.

Two days ago, my annual autumn hike up the tall ridge beside our valley was unusual for the constant sound of aircraft nearby. The noise went on all week, small planes and helicopters doing reconnaissance, dropping off fire jumpers, lobbing “bombs” of fire retardant slurry over the fire that puffed and fumed two ridges away, off to the southwest. I could easily see them, flying low and circling back, over and over. The sound of planes was reassuring, wonderful.

And above all, the nature of the fear. Fourteen years ago I lived through days and months of gradually waning terror. I’ll never forget the sight and sound of deserted Manhattan that evening, as if someone had dropped a neutron bomb and only the (rest of the) buildings survived. All of the people had gone underground, or at least home. There was almost nobody on the streets. Midtown Manhattan, the city that never sleeps, was literally silent.

We didn’t see the cleanup crews. Who would enter that area voluntarily, even if we could? In a sense, in the following weeks, we also didn’t see each other. Yes, the city pulled together as it always does in crisis. On the other hand, back then you wondered who the other person really was.

This week, the first responders were, of course, our own highly prized volunteer firefighters. We know who they are. They’re friends. And look at this: The teams that came in later put up pup tents in our town park and ate their meals in the same Headwaters Center where we have our own community events, all the time.

They didn’t camp in the ball field, so as not to interfere with practice. The cost unit leader for the incident management team actually lives in town. I see her at church. The public information officer for the team comes from Melrose, Colorado, but he has come here to fish.

The team had nearly vanquished the Crooked Creek fire when I took this picture in the park, and a few days of rain have certainly doused it for good. It’s all over, I’m sure.

That’s the real difference between those two different events on two beautiful September days. This one is certainly over, thank heaven. I wonder if that other one will ever be.

Want to read more about living in Dubois WY? You can read weekly updates via email using the link at the top of the right column.

© Lois Wingerson 2015

Most of the “snowbird” summer residents are gone now, back to warmer climates. But the motels still have the No Vacancy signs on. With cooler weather, hunting is in season.

Time to change my ways. My hiking range is more confined. I have to add a vest of bright orange, a color no game would wear.

Am I annoyed? Not much.

Once I was flat-out, knee-jerk anti-hunting. I still have some trouble with the idea of flying off to an exotic location to stalk and decapitate a trophy animal. But now I have too many friends who need that license for their daily meat course to claim the moral high ground here.

Someone killed a fellow creature so I could have chicken breast, too, and I didn’t have to do it. I didn’t even have to watch. The sight of the deer carcass hanging in Pete’s garage is startling, yes, but I hardly disapprove.

Living part time in Dubois and part time in Brooklyn has made a schizophrenic of me, but (I would argue) not a hypocrite. Back East, I am a staunch supporter of gun control. In that high-pressure melting pot metropolis, anything that makes it more difficult to retaliate with escalating violence in a New York minute seems like a great idea to me.

But Dubois, as I often say, is the perfect contrast. I’m hardly Annie Oakley myself, and would most likely shoot off my foot rather than any target I might aim at. But here, I do support the right to bear arms, if only so that those who know how to use them can feel safe while hiking deep in grizzly country–let alone putting meat on the table the way people have done here for generations. It’s not the same place at all.

Only a few months ago, I found good, rational support for my my split personality about gun laws. I saw an article in a local news site, bemoaning the fact that Wyoming has eighth-lowest record in the nation for carrying out mental-health background checks before issuing gun licenses.

What does this really mean? Seeing that report, I thought about other the weekly news I read here in the Wind River Valley, compared to that I see in New York City. Then I decided to dig up some context. Here’s what I found (according to recent data from the US Census Bureau and the FBI as quoted in Wikipedia). I turned the data into a graph:

Sorry if the image is difficult to read. That’s gun-related murders per capita, by state. Wyoming is the pair of bars at the far right of the graph.

The orange bars are gun murders/100,000 residents, and the blue bars are the percentage of state residents who own firearms.

The tall orange bar in the middle is Louisiana.

Even at a glance, you can see that even though it has the highest rate of gun ownership in the country (60%), Wyoming has one of the lowest gun-related murder rates (1.4/100,000 population, or #46 out of 51, including the District of Columbia).

So you’re very likely to own a gun in Dubois, as I suspected. But you’re extremely unlikely to have another human being as your target.

I couldn’t include Washington DC in the graph. The stats for DC are so far off the charts that the other bars would have shrunk to invisibility on the same scale. DC has the lowest rate of gun ownership in the nation (3.6%) and by far the highest murder rate involving firearms (16.5/100,000).

Pay no attention to what the screenwriters portray on the latest series of Longmire on Netflix, therefore.  Read the books by Craig Johnson instead.

Want to read more about living in Dubois WY? You can read weekly updates via email using the link at the top of the right column.

© Lois Wingerson 2015