by Matt Weiland
So he shut the washing machine door and sat back on his heels to take the strain off his hemorrhoids. He hung his great ham hands over his knees and squinted at me over the plastic laundry basket like we had put fresh wood in the fire and were waiting for the smoke to die down before he could start.
“This was some few years back,” he said, when he was young and crazy and working for an outfit up near here (he waved toward our kitchen where the baby was putting finishing touches on some wall art with her porridge). He said it was their third straight day getting the cows onto the desert allotments and so the cowboys had smoked a little pot and dropped a little acid that morning to make the drive more interesting because there is nothing quite so sweetly boring as watching the rear ends of a thousand cows—manure-smeared and as stupid as mule crap, is about all there is to say about that—sauntering a mile or two in as many hours, even if the mountains were back-lit at dawn in a velvet sky like Elvis was about to be announced on some great celestial stage. And the way they saw it that morning, with the mist coming up off the Green River and hugging on the lower end of the Wind River Range for all the world like baggy underwear with the lace stretched all the hell out of it, it was a raucous old world.
He said, “To tell you the God’s honest truth, I was higher than an angel and tripping like a debutante in a hay field by the time we got ‘er started.”
Then, he told me, just as they were riding along like that waiting for Elvis to appear in the sky and what have you, he saw Wyoming as it had been in the olden days when it was dinosaur-infested and humid with rain forests and swamps. There were beaches.
“It was Mexico with teeth,” he said.
It just about scared the living crap outta him although he figured his horse didn’t seem to mind too badly about any of it, not even the dinosaurs.
“The horse wasn’t on acid,” I pointed out.
“True,” said the cowboy-turned-washing-machine-repair man.
“Carry on,” I said. “I interrupted you.”
But then the sea drained and the dinosaurs died and the rain forests rotted. The planet spun around the sun a few thousand million times. The earth crumpled into mountains and rolled out into plains—he saw all this happen right in front of his very eyes, mind you—the land grew purple and beaver-dammed and was fed by rivers and springs, sunk by high alpine lakes and gouged by glaciers the size of battleships. In the meantime the decomposing dinosaurs and rain forests and boggy swamps compressed into oil and the oil bubbled up out of the ground and soaked his horses hooves black as blood.
“Wow,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “Then people happened.” The Indians first, followed (after a longish pause during which time the cowboy-turned-washing-machine-repair man had to get off his horse and hide in some willows until the Indian Wars had died down) by everyone else. And so that was that. Then he said an Indian came out of the ground, like he’d been waiting down a good-sized badger hole all these last one hundred years, and he said that his name was Crazy Horse and that he spoke not only for the Sioux, but for all the high plains nations when he said, “One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.”
“Wow,” I said.
“So, that’s a lesson to you right there,” said the cowboy-turned-washing-machine-repair man
“Don’t do drugs?” I guessed.
“Well, sure,” he said. “That was one for-sure lesson.”
It is true that Wyoming is a very high state, and it gets crazy-feeling, as if there is no end to the place and no end to the secrets of the place. For example, it looks as if there is nowhere to hide but in reality land is furled into land and the sky is bigger than all the land put together and you can hide in plain sight just like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who used to exchange a silver dollar for a fresh horse whenever they needed one. The homesteaders thoughtfully kept a couple of mounts tied up at all times. It would have been like listening for Santa. Imagine! The kids waking up in the morning and running outside, their bare feet making damp stains on the blanket of white frost and there’s a pair of tired horses, head-hanging at the hitching post, their coats in dreadlocks of freeze-dried sweat, fresh horses gone.
They were here! They came to us! The kids are doing cartwheels with the silver dollar between their teeth. They really came here!
It was early August in the mid-1990s the first time I drove halfway across Wyoming from Jackson Hole, through Pinedale and then up into Hole in the Wall country (as they call it), where a cleft in the sage-dotted red cliffs near the little town of Kaycee made a hiding place for those outlaws.
The scenery on that drive was so rollicking, so sure of itself, so unblemished that I felt as if I was discovering a whole new territory. These days whole wide worlds of Wyoming—even some of the crazy-beautiful parts—are tamed and saddled with oil or natural gas rigs and housing developments, and there’s roadkill in some places the length and breadth of three football fields and so the beauty of the land has been put in its place, which is to say it is no longer everywhere. But back then it made me feel positively Lewis-n-Clark, Annie-Get-Your-Gun, Grizzly Adams, and I guess I’ll never leave the state now, addicted as I am to the idea that if I stay here long enough I’ll feel that way again someday.
There were even a dozen horses running back and forth along a buck-rail fence against a backdrop of snow-covered mountain peaks, which you never see except in television advertisements, so I stopped the car and got out and was immediately hit by a wind so strong it knocked my teeth to the back of my mind and the only thing stronger than the wind were the mosquitoes, which were of such mass-murderous intent that I jogged around for quite some time trying to shake them out of my clothes before I got back into the car. Then I spent a good five minutes swatting the windows. The mosquitoes plus the wind, I supposed, explained both the running horses and the unpeopled landscape.
But then a man whose elbow had worn a groove in the bar of the Cowboy Bar in downtown Pinedale told me, “No, it isn’t the mosquitoes so much—although it is true they can stand flat-footed and procreate with a turkey. And it isn’t the wind, although for sure it sucks more than it blows. It’s the nine-month-long winters that keep the population of Wyoming the lowest in the nation.”
The man’s name was something I don’t remember now, but he said that everyone called him Captain because once he’d accidentally landed a job on a fishing vessel in Alaska. It had something to do, inevitably, with a bar and a bet and maybe a gun. In any case, there he was, scared witless for six weeks on the throwing, cold sea and after he got off the boat, just glad to be alive, he came on back to landlocked Wyoming and told everyone about the horror of his salty, wet experience, and earned the nickname Captain because although plenty of folks out here have been on rigs and bucking animals and the great plains in a white out, almost no one has been on open water.
“Nine-month-long winters,” I scoffed. “Surely not.”
“Just come back tomorrow,” Captain said. “This here today, this day right here, is all we get of summer.”
I lifted up my beer to see its Born On Date. Born on the Fourth of July, it said. “Look at that,” I said. “A patriotic beer.”
“After all,” said Captain, “there’s mosquitoes in Florida and you can’t keep the hordes out of there.”
“That seems true,” I agreed.
“Whereas,” said Captain, “there is a pronghorn antelope for every person in Wyoming.”
“And how many antelope is that?” I asked.
“Well,” said Captain, “hard to tell exactly. The more people there are, the less antelope.”
A little over ten years after I met Captain humans finally outnumbered antelope in the state of Wyoming. And in January, 2007, just to tip the balance even farther in that direction, twenty-one pronghorn antelope were killed in a single collision with an oil-field service truck just east of Pinedale and in the photographs I have seen they lie all tangled up in snow and sagebrush like a Damien Hirst scu
lpture (work that is supposed to raise questions about death and life in a way that reality normally does not).
It’s no single thing—this energy boom that has turned great chunks of the open range into a spider web of roads and rigs and frozen animal sculptures—but an accidental coincidence of politics and climate and appetite. A place doesn’t just get paved under in little over a decade without all the wrong things happening just right; an advance in drilling techniques, an administration friendly to mineral development, a war, a hurricane. And they say this boom will go on for another seventy years or more, so I don’t guess there’s any turning back the clock.
Maybe someone told me this, or I read it somewhere: There was an Indian explaining to a white man about how ghosts were a fairly ordinary experience and a white man explaining to an Indian about how ghosts didn’t exist.
The white man said, “We don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Why not?” asked the Indian (who may or may not have been an Arapahoe or a Shoshone).
“Because ghosts can’t be seen,” said the white man.
“But you believe in time,” asked the Indian, “don’t you?”
Our cabin sits at over eight thousand feet and it is always summertime there because we leave for lower elevations before we turn the clocks back and we can’t get back into the place until the clocks (everywhere else) have leapt forward again. So all through the slow months of winter when nothing but foxes and the odd coyote are trying to make a living off the scant debris of fall, the clock in the cabin kitchen steadfastly keeps summer time, like winter isn’t happening at all.
Of course winter is happening even if the clock doesn’t pay attention. To prove it, when I first come back to the mountains at the end of May, there are layers of living and dead flies on every windowsill and there are dead mice dried into the corners of the log walls and mouse droppings wherever the mice have run, which is everywhere. There is a mold of old snow, a white series of receding high tides from the cabin into the forest. The water reeks of sulfur when the faucets are first opened and the laundry smells like rotten eggs for days.
In 1910 (or thereabout), the last group of Indians ever seen in this part of the country came through, right here, looking to hunt elk, and they were like ghosts themselves, astonished at the seasonal pull that had brought them back here twenty or so years after the Indian Wars had ended (or at least the Indian Wars in this part of the country). When the game warden and ranger arrived to read the hunters a list of broken regulations, the Indians locked the law-enforcement officers in a cabin at a bend in the river and nowhere is it written how the game warden or the ranger escaped. When they did they went running about hollering that there was a party of Indians on the warpath. But the Indians weren’t on a warpath, they had come to hunt and to skin on their ancestral hunting grounds. So they went, women and children and men, to the Simmons place and I guess Simmons understood about a man’s need to hunt because he let them stay there for a month, taking elk and deer and antelope. And all around the camping site the hides were laid out flat while women rubbed brains on them, since brains contain exactly the right kind of emulsified oils needed to cure skin. And did you know that a deer’s brain is exactly big enough to tan its own hide? After that, they went back to the Wind River Reservation. No one who saw them ever said if the Indians were Arapahoe or Shoshone or what they were.
I think about those Indians when I catch that clock in the kitchen unawares. Like the one time we skied up to the cabin to spend Valentine’s Day far away from tinsel hearts and every time I glanced at that clock my heart sped forward an hour.
The first time I met our neighbor, John Fandek, he told me, “Used to be, you couldn’t see a single light when you looked out there at night.” His arm made a sweeping gesture in the general direction of our cabin. Now there are so many lights that the whole sky glows orange all night as if there was a sunrise fighting to burst out of the high plains. The natural gas field east of Pinedale is covered in blazing drilling rigs. The Sublette flats are trampled with trailers and tract housing (and each house’s security light searching into the night sky). There are new hotels in town for all the gas-field workers, and they are lit up all the time, because the drilling never stops.
John is a man who tries not to spook animals, so he does everything right the first time. In winter he is paid by the Game and Fish Department to provision one of Wyoming’s many so-called wild elk feedgrounds.
I asked John, “Have you always moved like this?”
“Like what?”
“Unhurried,” I said.
John thought about it. “Probably just my arthritic knees.”
Captain—the drifter from the Cowboy Bar in Pinedale—didn’t exaggerate so much. In the mountains it is real winter for about eight months, from late September until early July. In the high plains that make up the world between the mountains, winter lasts from mid-October to May. Every day for those six months of winter, through wind-chills that will freeze your bare skin to a burn, John hooks up two of his four draft horses to a sleigh, loads the sleigh with hay, and then drives out onto fresh snow and throws ninety 100-pound bales to 900 wild elk in a feedground just about three miles, as the crow flies, from our cabin.
It’s not as easy as it looks staying upright on a horse-drawn sleigh with alfalfa-sanded boards surfing over snow whales. John moves back and forth over the sleigh like a sailor on a small boat. He snips the twine off the hay and knots it into bundles, then he kicks one flake (a slab of hay is called a flake) onto fresh snow every ten feet or so. Once in a while he tells the horses, conversationally, “Whoa,” and “OK,” and they stop and go like that. Everyone knows the routine. No need to go any faster than the turn of the earth. No need for raised voices.
About every two weeks or so, wolves come through the feedground. They work the ragged edges of the herd: a hunter-maimed three-legged elk, a diseased animal, an elk whose jaw has been shot away.
There are common bumper stickers in this state: WYOMING WOLVES—SMOKE A PACK A DAY; SAVE A RANCHER, SHOOT A WOLF. Everyone in rural Wyoming has a wolf story it seems, more embellished every time you hear it: A wolf jumped clear over a man on a snowmobile; a pack of wolves tore through a herd of horses and ran them into barbed wire; a wolf was seen eyeing a child. Wolves are what people in Wyoming believe in, instead of the devil.
In the Rocky Mountains there are now a total of 1,264 wolves. Somewhere around 350 of those live in Wyoming. A quarter of the wolves that leave Yellowstone National Park and stray into Wyoming are killed, mostly by federal officials (in Idaho and Montana, only 12 percent of wolf populations are killed). The Wyoming legislature spends days debating “the wolf issue” and Wyoming newspapers feature a wolf controversy almost weekly. In reality, in 2005 (the last year for which total records were available), 42,000 cattle died in Wyoming. Of those, about 4,000 were killed by predators (2,200 by coyotes, 700 by wolves, 500 by mountain lions, 200 by grizzlies, 100 by dogs and black bears, 200 by other predators). The majority of cows (8,700) died from respiratory problems. Calving accounted for another 7,800 deaths and weather killed 7,000. In other words, ten times as many cows died from weather as from wolves. (Ranchers are compensated for predator attacks, but not for the weather, maybe because, although men and women have tried, you can’t shoot the wind.)
The way our neighbor John sees it, he’d rather have a pack of wolves run through a herd of elk than a pack of hunters. “At least wolves finish what they start,” he says.
One morning in late spring, a big bull with a massive rack comes up to the sleigh and starts ripping hay from the stack. If John puts out his hand, he could touch the elk’s nose. He’s a six-pointer, a beautiful trophy bull that someone will likely have mounted on their wall by this time next year. The other elk are calling one another, a mewling noise like a goat might make, but shorter and deeper, and trotting to keep up with the sleigh, their heads held up and back in a way that gives them the impression of royalty at a soup kitchen.
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John looks at the bull’s antlers and gets to thinking that they must feel like loose teeth right about now, all wobbly and ready to come off. He has an urge to tug the antlers and relieve the bull of all that weight. So he leans over and gives the bull’s antlers a tug. Nothing happens. He gives the antlers a hard jerk. The bull takes it as a challenge and leaps onto the sleigh sending John flying off the side into the snow.
So this is how things are for a moment: The bull elk is on the sleigh with the hay, his head thrown back, like an actual king. John is off guard, trying to find purchase in the snow and wondering what will happen next. Harley and Sophie stand in their harnesses and do nothing in particular. It’s only humans who think it matters that they are in charge. The world moves at the same speed, whether the sleigh is being driven by John or by a bull elk. Either way works for John and when he sees it that way, he starts to laugh and laugh and it’s the sound of him laughing that finally startles the horses.
Afterword
WASHINGTON, D.C.
A Conversation with Edward P. Jones
In December, 1999, some pay stubs from the 1790s were discovered in the National Archives. The stubs, found among Treasury Department papers, authorized the commissioners overseeing the development of the nation’s new capital to recompense slave owners five dollars a month for the use of their slaves in the construction of the Capitol building and the White House. At least a hundred and twenty slaves and a handful of free blacks worked on the buildings in the years spent preparing the federal district for its politicians. Nothing is known about these men beyond a first name—Peter, Nace, Abram, Charles, Jack—and their designation as Negro hires.
From Washington, D.C.’s earliest days, there has been a second history entwined with its political one—the story of the growth of one of America’s most significant cities with a black majority. Slave trading was legal in Washington, D.C., until 1850. Slavery itself was abolished in the capital in April, 1862, several months before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The city swelled with refugees from neighboring states during the Civil War, and by the early 1870s, a quarter of the city’s population was black. Within a hundred years, Washington, D.C., was a majority black city. In 1970, in the wake of the riots of 1968, seventy-one percent of its residents were African-American. Today, the figure is fifty-seven percent.