July 26, 2006--Wednesday In Wyoming: "Life or Meth?"
Though there is effectively no speed limit, everything says slow down. On the back roads it says, yield to tractors, yield to hikers, yield to bikers, and of course yield to horses. In the State of Wyoming, everything yields to horses. Even babies in strollers. In their mind, it’s still the cowboy state. Check out the license plate.
And when you do that yielding, when you do slow down, you begin to notice smaller things that are invisible at 70 or 80 or more than 90 miles per hour, which the roads and local practice allow. The quake of Aspens, the hawks riding the thermals, the just-beginning-to-redden Thimble Berries, the squadrons of grasshoppers and butterflies living a full mad lifetime in just three days, and the signs that ask, “Life or Meth?” At just 60, I had thought they read “Life or Death?” So you see what you can miss when you rip along?
In town after town, homemade signs and murals that look as if they were painted by high school kids, all including images of gaunt, haunted faces, pose the same question. Not just in Dubois or in Afton or, yes Cokeville, but everywhere: “Life or Meth?”
When we began to notice how widespread these ominous signs and murals were, we assumed that they must be the work of some End-Of-Times fundamentalist group that had conjured up yet another boogeyman to scare people into their broken-down, heat-baked churches. After all, who would need all this Meth, this Speed in small-town Wyoming? How could there possibly be this big-city epidemic here where most towns have populations in the hundreds? And where you can drive 100 MPH without amphetamines.
So without having figured this out, we settled into our cabin for ten days, right up against the Teton range, that perfect set of mountains so massive and peaked yet also so compact that they bring comfort as much as awe. You can hold them all in one view and believe you can embrace them as they in fact embrace you. Just the right kind of mountains for city folks who want to know and see in advance just what they’re getting.
Here we take to horses more than our rental car and walk the same trails we ride. In this way we get a chance to slow down in a place that also allows for speed. There is thus a kind of triple perspective that can be gathered—the first, that which you can take in from a hurtling car; the second from horseback on mountain trails that loop around lakes and amble across streams; and then that which you can see right there on the ground in front of you on foot at one mile per hour.
In this latter mode, especially if you seek variety in the familiar and do not insist on a new and different trail every day (we have been shunning that—trolling for serial experiences alas awaits back in the City), you get retrained to, like children, notice minute differences and changes. So along the Jenny Lake Backside Trail, which we have now ridden and walked three times over four days we have identified a favorite huckleberry bush, not a grove but just one bush, on the north side of the Lake that gets more sun than most (it has been the beneficiary of a 1995 fire that cleared away a growth of Lodgepole Pines that previously had allowed just dappled light), and thus its berries have been ripening at a faster rate than most. On our first pass, when we first noticed the bush, the berries were still quite green; two days later they had reddened; and today we found them beyond red toward their final purple perfection. Knowing the local bears have also been monitoring this bush, we preemptively today picked a few handfuls and made them our Trail Mix snack. Just as Wine Nazis can make distinctions in Pinots at which the rest of us can only wonder; we are now self-confessed Huckleberry Nazis—feeling adept at describing the nuances of flavor that get released from the berries from our bush.
Back in the cabin, after a lunch of grilled fresh trout, we picked up the paper at the Lodge and found another, very different kind of Wyoming story—about a horrendous and shocking murder-suicide in Laramie in which three students at the University there were found shot to death in an apartment just blocks from campus.
The Laramie of big cattle drives and wide-open spaces is now feeling it’s not so different from Detroit or LA. And, the people there, who are speculating about what happened, before having anything definitive from the coroner or police, are talking about “the scourge of Methamphetamine.”
They are saying that even if Meth was not involved in this crime, nonetheless it has become a plague across the state. They blame it on, yes, the, immigrants who are here to take advantage of the economy that is booming because of the ballooning value of Wyoming’s natural gas and oil reserves.
So the whole world is here to mess with our huckleberries—the instability in the Middle East reaches right to here, as does what one finds more and more on the streets of Miami and New York.
I guess that too awaits us in a week or so.
And when you do that yielding, when you do slow down, you begin to notice smaller things that are invisible at 70 or 80 or more than 90 miles per hour, which the roads and local practice allow. The quake of Aspens, the hawks riding the thermals, the just-beginning-to-redden Thimble Berries, the squadrons of grasshoppers and butterflies living a full mad lifetime in just three days, and the signs that ask, “Life or Meth?” At just 60, I had thought they read “Life or Death?” So you see what you can miss when you rip along?
In town after town, homemade signs and murals that look as if they were painted by high school kids, all including images of gaunt, haunted faces, pose the same question. Not just in Dubois or in Afton or, yes Cokeville, but everywhere: “Life or Meth?”
When we began to notice how widespread these ominous signs and murals were, we assumed that they must be the work of some End-Of-Times fundamentalist group that had conjured up yet another boogeyman to scare people into their broken-down, heat-baked churches. After all, who would need all this Meth, this Speed in small-town Wyoming? How could there possibly be this big-city epidemic here where most towns have populations in the hundreds? And where you can drive 100 MPH without amphetamines.
So without having figured this out, we settled into our cabin for ten days, right up against the Teton range, that perfect set of mountains so massive and peaked yet also so compact that they bring comfort as much as awe. You can hold them all in one view and believe you can embrace them as they in fact embrace you. Just the right kind of mountains for city folks who want to know and see in advance just what they’re getting.
Here we take to horses more than our rental car and walk the same trails we ride. In this way we get a chance to slow down in a place that also allows for speed. There is thus a kind of triple perspective that can be gathered—the first, that which you can take in from a hurtling car; the second from horseback on mountain trails that loop around lakes and amble across streams; and then that which you can see right there on the ground in front of you on foot at one mile per hour.
In this latter mode, especially if you seek variety in the familiar and do not insist on a new and different trail every day (we have been shunning that—trolling for serial experiences alas awaits back in the City), you get retrained to, like children, notice minute differences and changes. So along the Jenny Lake Backside Trail, which we have now ridden and walked three times over four days we have identified a favorite huckleberry bush, not a grove but just one bush, on the north side of the Lake that gets more sun than most (it has been the beneficiary of a 1995 fire that cleared away a growth of Lodgepole Pines that previously had allowed just dappled light), and thus its berries have been ripening at a faster rate than most. On our first pass, when we first noticed the bush, the berries were still quite green; two days later they had reddened; and today we found them beyond red toward their final purple perfection. Knowing the local bears have also been monitoring this bush, we preemptively today picked a few handfuls and made them our Trail Mix snack. Just as Wine Nazis can make distinctions in Pinots at which the rest of us can only wonder; we are now self-confessed Huckleberry Nazis—feeling adept at describing the nuances of flavor that get released from the berries from our bush.
Back in the cabin, after a lunch of grilled fresh trout, we picked up the paper at the Lodge and found another, very different kind of Wyoming story—about a horrendous and shocking murder-suicide in Laramie in which three students at the University there were found shot to death in an apartment just blocks from campus.
The Laramie of big cattle drives and wide-open spaces is now feeling it’s not so different from Detroit or LA. And, the people there, who are speculating about what happened, before having anything definitive from the coroner or police, are talking about “the scourge of Methamphetamine.”
They are saying that even if Meth was not involved in this crime, nonetheless it has become a plague across the state. They blame it on, yes, the, immigrants who are here to take advantage of the economy that is booming because of the ballooning value of Wyoming’s natural gas and oil reserves.
So the whole world is here to mess with our huckleberries—the instability in the Middle East reaches right to here, as does what one finds more and more on the streets of Miami and New York.
I guess that too awaits us in a week or so.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:48 PM
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