I previously wrote about how I found my spot living on the Big Island of Hawaii. I absolutely love it here for many, many reasons. But you might be surprised that people who live in paradise want to leave for vacation. “Island Fever” can be a very real thing. That is when you start to feel trapped on your beautiful island. It starts with irritation, moves to restlessness, and finishes up with all outrage. So what do you do to deal with the problem? You go on a vacation (probably to a place that is not tropical). This is how I found my other, very unexpected spot: Wyoming.
In the winter of 2010, I was living in Louisiana and I got it in my head that I wanted to spend a weekend at the beach in the Florida panhandle. They have absolutely beautiful beaches and it was only a couple hours away. Then on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred. The oil rig was only 41 miles off the coast of Louisiana and the spill was the largest in history. It was a huge ecological disaster and it squashed my plans for a weekend at the beach.
A buddy and I started looking for somewhere else to visit. I wanted to try something new and at the time said, “I’ll go to Des Moines if there is a good concert there.” It must have been a quiet summer for concerts because we could not find anything. Then my buddy said, “What do you think about digging for fossils in Wyoming?” I laughed, but then started check Wyoming out on the internet. We planned a trip pretty quickly.
Twenty minutes after arriving at the Jackson, WY airport, I was looking on my cell phone to see how expensive it was to move to Wyoming. The mountains were absolutely stunning. I was impressed with the raw beauty of the land. Endless plains of sagebrush. Harsh mountain cliffs. The land called to me in a way that I had never experienced before. Maybe it traced back to watching reruns of westerns while growing up. Unfortunately, my internet research also uncovered something else about Wyoming: huge amounts of snow, and very cold winters. Ugh. I had had my share of that, so moving there was out. But as soon as I got home from that vacation (where, by the way, we found a bunch of fossils), I started planning my next trip.
For my second round in Wyoming, I discovered the Big Horn Mountains. This time I stayed at a working cattle ranch. OK, it is a dude ranch. But it is still part of a working ranch, and I got to help move about 300 head of cattle out of the mountains to the winter feed lot. This was the moment that Wyoming became “my spot” (for vacation, anyway).
We prepared for the ride into the mountains: cowboy hats, boots, and chaps. I’ve always worn boots, and had a cowboy hat. But this trip showed me how essential these things are if you’re going to be on a horse in the mountains. The hat kept my head warm and the boots protected my ankles. The chaps? Absolutely necessary when you are going through sagebrush that scrapes your legs.
Once we were “cowboy’d up,” we mounted up and headed into the mountains. I have ridden horses on and off for years, but what I found was that when I was actually working on horseback, my skills increased dramatically. Cattle are not necessarily very smart, so most of them just follow the herd. But for the same reason, they sometimes wander off. Rounding them up and getting them back to the herd honed my skills on the horse. By the end of the week, I felt like a real cowboy.
We spent part of the week working cattle and part of the week just riding. One of the things about Wyoming is that the landscape can dramatically change very quickly. One morning we started out in a lush valley. A little stream flowed through the middle so trees and brush grew heavily around it. The sheer cliff walls included very old carvings from Native American tribes. There was also “graffiti” from cowboys who had carved their names in the wall in the mid-1800s. It was fascinating that although they were defacing the Native American work, their carvings were now part of history. We left the valley and rode onto windswept plain. The dirt and rocks were all red and I could see the red dust sticking to my jacket. One of the wranglers rode up to me laughing: my white beard was now red. We rode over the hills and entered another valley. This one was straight out of an oil painting from a western artist. Tall grass swayed back and forth and the two dogs who accompanied us quickly vanished as they ran circles around us. A herd of Pronghorn Elk watched us from the distance. Wary, but brave. It was like they knew that hunting season did not start for another 24 hours. The Elk were gone quickly once the dogs noticed them.
The other appeal that Wyoming had to me was the people. One of my reasons for moving to Hawaii was the “Aloha Spirt:” an innate friendliness in the people. Wyoming has something very different, but equally appealing. The people are very direct and very straight-forward. I think some of it comes from spending a lifetime working on cattle ranches. It is never-ending hard work in weather that can be brutal. But the beauty of the land brings about a sort of peace. It settles over you quietly. The result: the people are pleasant and friendly, but they are not going to waste time. There are no mean intentions here: I think it is just a settled in peace.
In Wyoming, I have found my spot. Or at least my vacation spot. It is a place I will travel to yearly. In fact, many visitors to the dude ranches out there do visit every year. Because after only a few visits, I have made that special connection with the area. I feel like I’m coming home when I get off the plane at the tiny airport in Cody. Hawaii is still my special spot, but who says you can’t have two.
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