Yesterday, bitter that I’d had to sell my tickets to the Water Liars reunion show at Proud Larry’s in Oxford because I couldn’t afford to make the trip, I read this 2016 review/essay amalgamation of their music by William Boyle, a writer acquaintance from Oxford. Bill’s writing always moves me, especially when he’s writing about art he loves, especially especially when it’s art I also love. The piece stirred a lot of feelings in me, particularly about feeling art-starved, about feeling an absence of artistic community, an absence of artist friends in my immediate vicinity. It didn’t help that while I was reading the piece, feeling my bones shift under my skin, people kept popping in and out of my office to talk about traffic and parking and copy paper, meaningless conversation that was too loud to not interrupt me.
But mostly, the piece made me think about Wyoming.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Wyoming lately. This podcast came out last month, The Coldest Case in Laramie, and I’ve been listening to that here and there. I find the reporter to be a bit insufferable in her descriptions of Laramie, though the case is interesting. She tries to make a lot out of a little, lays claim to the place with the fact that she spent a few high school years in Laramie, but you can hear in her voice how she looks down her nose at the place without understanding it, especially when she says, “surprisingly, they have a vegetarian restaurant.” What an astute observation, to be surprised by something you view as “evolved” in a place you view as “unevolved.”
She gets some things right though. The wind does blow impossibly hard, whipping pebbles at you and blowing over eighteen-wheelers. I saw the aftermath of that once on a drive to somewhere, one of the few times I was able to leave town to explore. At 7,000 feet with a rim of 8,000 around us, when it snowed, we did feel trapped, or at least I did. Oftentimes we were trapped, unable to leave town because the roads were closed because of too much snow or because the wind was too strong, and because the closest real town was an hour away.
When people hear I lived in Wyoming for two years, the first thing they always say is, “Oh it’s so beautiful there, it must’ve been so beautiful there,” and often they’ll throw something in about their visit to Jackson Hole. I was nowhere near Jackson, which is what people from Wyoming call it; I was in Albany County in the bottom right corner of the state, just an hour from the Colorado border, in what’s called the High Plains. You could see mountains in the distance, could climb rock formations thirty minutes outside of town, but mostly, everything was flat. Everything was brown too, with few trees to speak of. There was so little sun in the winter, it was recommended by everyone that you take Vitamin D pills, lest you find yourself depressed. There was little precipitation, rarely a rainstorm, and when it did rain, it was always ice cold, even in the summertime.
Most days, I found little about Laramie beautiful.
In a place that was already isolated and lonely, weathering the brunt of the pandemic was a Herculean task. In Wyoming, I was more or less always alone, save for five or so months when a boy I was dating essentially moved in without asking. My whole time in Wyoming, I took to clinging to a different lover every few months. I think I was worried that if I didn’t, I was going to disappear.
Wyoming had much working against it on my end, to be fair. There was the pandemic yes, but there was also the fact that I was running from something. A lot of somethings. I was running from a suicide attempt, from a bad reputation in a small town, from a year of working and drinking myself to death, from a feeling that I had failed over and over and over and that everyone had seen it, that everyone could tell. I ran right into a place where I was once again a hurricane, surrounded by three women several years older than me in steady relationships, who had had steady careers before the move here. Eventually, when more people arrived, I was surrounded by serious or sheltered individuals. I was loud and brash like a bull in a china shop. People took to describing me as “bold.” I felt like an outsider, separate and alone.
When I think of Laramie, lots of bad memories come up. I think of driving to the ranch of our dead mentor, then occupied solely by his widow, now occupied by no one at all, sitting between two people who talked past me about a party they had had the day before that they hadn’t invited me to. I think of trying to break up with the man I was seeing before the pandemic and him saying “no.” I think of the eventual break up much later, how I cried when it was over but mostly I was relieved, how I never locked my door and how that enabled him to come back into my house and climb into bed with me without asking. I think of how he was the one who called me, to tell me in flat monotone, “Brad’s dead,” and how he knew him better, how it felt like I wasn’t allowed to mourn. I think of feeling so desperately lonely I wandered into the Buckhorn before the vaccine was available and drank alone, made out with a woman on the dance floor and went home panicking, worried that everyone would hate me even more if they found out I had been so stupid and taken such a risk. I think of my first apartment with its plastic coded digital keys instead of traditional keys, how for some reason when the weather was coldest, mine wouldn't work, and I would stand in the cold for twenty minutes, unable to get inside. I think of my second apartment with the landlord I didn’t know lived on site, who made me so nervous I couldn’t even sit in the yard I had been so excited about because he was always there and I didn’t want him to talk to me. I think of seeing people from my program off on trips I couldn’t afford and hadn’t been invited to and throwing my phone at the wall, screaming. I called my parents and cried so much they told me to come home for a month because classes were still online and I actually did and I wanted to die a lot less.
And yet.
When I read Bill Boyle’s Water Liars piece, when he gets to the point where he’s naming books and music that also circle around Wyoming, I found myself doing the thing I always do with art that circles Mississippi – I cataloged it for later. Wyoming occupies the same sort of space in my mind that Mississippi does, partially because I view the two both as completely disparate and eerily similar. I research Wyoming, seek out its depiction, in the same obsessive way I do Mississippi. I think of Laramie and I daydream about the truckstop that served Indian food, about Front Street Tavern and the bartenders who always had my drink ready, who lit up when I walked in and who all hugged me when I left. I think about Bud’s Bar with its rough-edged bartenders and clientele over fifty and of course, it’s carpeted bar room. I think of my apartment with its yellow-textured walls. I think of my summer working on an organic farm, how I showed my coworkers how to salt and pepper a fresh tomato and pop it in your mouth, how my body grew strong from pulling weeds and tending to plants. I think of the farmer’s market, of the woman who sold kimchi and the Indian food truck and the roasted poblanos and the cool townies with their bikes and their outdoor gear and their flat-billed hats I hated.
What I regret most about Wyoming isn’t any of the things that happened or that I brought upon myself, but the pandemic preventing me from exploring more. Even with all of the pain I felt there, I still circle the place in my dreams. Yesterday, I looked at a loft apartment in Sheridan, WY, a town near the Bighorn Mountains close-ish to the Montana border that I visited once with a lover, the whole place soaked with the neon I grew so obsessed with while I was there. I don’t know what it is about the place. It could be some Western romanticism that hasn’t died, that horrible thing of viewing a place not as a place but as an idea.
Or it could be that, despite your best efforts, some things burrow into the marrow of your bones and force you to call them “home.”