Making up for lost time

I have neglected to document my experiences in Wyoming up until now, so I will do my best to retell some of the adventures I have had in a truly awesome natural environment inhabited by a rugged people with a sense of community such as I have never before witnessed. I live in Basin, Wyoming, population 1216. While it is the Big Horn County seat, it lacks a single stop light. It is a lonely town surrounded by barren badlands void of vegetation save for the plentiful sagebrush and the irrigated farmlands that line the Big Horn River. My daily commute north to Greybull, a somewhat larger town which locals describe as a city, affords a comforting visage of livestock grazing in pastures clawed from the otherwise uninhabitable austere landscape. It is dry and it is cold.

At regular intervals the Burlington Northern Santa Fe locomotives rumble through the eastern end of town. Most trains haul cars laden with Bentonite, ash leftover from the last eruption of the Yellowstone super volcano. Past the railroad tracks lie the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains, a northern branch of the Rockies. One can venture on dirt and gravel roads up the initial inclines and find vast still landscapes interrupted by pivoting horse's heads, the ever present conventional oil and gas wells. Further still are the rounded peaks of the elderly mountains which segregate this community from the lush fields of Dayton and Sheridan to the east.

To live here requires a certain morality which I was not familiar with until now. Certain experiences have encouraged a fear of God in me which is a welcome development in my life. While modern technology allows me to communicate regularly with family and friends, they can do little to alter my relationship with neighbors and coworkers and faith is a bond shared by the vast majority of people I interact with on a regular basis.

I am happy here. I have had weekend forays onto public land in search of mule deer, big horn sheep, cuthroat trout, and frozen waterfalls. In many ways it is what I have always dreamed of finding, and now that I am presented with it I am determined to take advantage of its proximity. There is a natural beauty which defies initial inspection, a welcome repellent protecting the community from people like me, although I am beginning to see that there are many people like me, transplants from other lands and lives, and I think I may in fact survive here.