“I can’t believe all these people!” I said. “The last time I was here the woman who ran the little gift shop looked at me like I was insane.” I paused, taking in the extraordinary scene. Laura had once told Rose that she wanted to write for “prestige rather than money.” I wondered what she would make of this.
“What other woman do people drive across the country to visit?” I said to Jo. “Who inspires this level of devotion?”
Jo didn’t miss a beat. “Carrie Bradshaw.”
Two women famous for writing about their lives—one fictional, one not. It was amusing to consider and also a little sad—slim pickings. Here, too, was the answer to my question: the reason we were out here following Laura was that even after I reached adulthood I struggled to find anyone who could replace her. Hers was the only story of women on the road in America I could find that ended well.
I had missed the Sex and the City craze. I arrived in New York the year before it aired and didn’t own a television until years later (I was never home long enough in those years to watch anything anyway). But I remembered clearly the scorn heaped on women who took Carrie Bradshaw as a role model, as if there were so many other single women over thirty to choose from.
In the Little House books, the only single, independent adult woman to make an extended appearance is Laura’s sister-in-law Eliza Jane Wilder, who is portrayed as an object of great contempt. Some of the most dramatic scenes in the series involve showdowns between teenage Laura and her then-teacher in their tiny schoolhouse in South Dakota. These exchanges clearly stuck with Laura who, decades later (with the help of her daughter, Rose, who collaborated on the writing with her mother), made sure to unforgivingly cast Eliza as the adult Nellie Oleson, the villain to Laura’s hero. Eliza Jane is a pioneer harpy; the bossy and overbearing older sister; an angry and lonely spinster who bullies her students, hates Laura, and in the end is felled by the heroic all-male school board.
It’s entirely possible Eliza Jane Wilder was this terrible, but what was left out of the books, books that relentlessly celebrated Laura’s fight for and love of independence, was the fact that unmarried Eliza Jane, aged thirty-one, had come out West and taken her own claim, which she tended on her own while also teaching school. She was one of thousands of single women, largely unrecognized by history (and also by Laura, for that matter), who took advantage of the Homestead Act of 1863, which allowed women to claim land the same as men. Though, as was almost always the case, it was a claim made possible by the exploitation and suffering of yet another group; the same forward-thinking laws pertaining to women and power that briefly flourished in the West during the nineteenth-century land rush were directly aimed at further unsettling the native population.
Driving across the open land that was about to get even more open, I was struck yet again by who had actually built the country and who had received the credit and how both those things, including the fact that we used the word build in this context, were the direct result of who got to tell the stories and how they were told.
21. The Equality State
The following afternoon, we crossed into Wyoming. FOREVER WEST, said the sign.
We’d driven across the Buffalo Gap Grasslands the day before, spent the night in Wall. That morning we’d driven through the Badlands National Park and visited Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial, where a woman had asked me if her curly-haired daughter could touch my hair “so she can understand how cool it is.”
The emptiness in Wyoming felt like another language. There were no houses. No hint of them, even. Every five or ten minutes we’d pass a pickup truck coming in the opposite direction, but that was the only evidence we were not alone. Both our phones had lost their signals shortly after we’d crossed the state line. It was a different sort of emptiness than South Dakota: uncivilized emptiness. If something happened to us we’d have to drive hours to reach a hospital or airport. It was as if the vastness of the ocean had rippled into land, undulating away in greens and golds as far as the eye could see. We were now in a place of no options. Even if we wanted to pull over and drop this whole thing, for whatever reason, we couldn’t. It felt practically exotic. How many places was that even possible, after all?
We drove on in silence. Every ten minutes or so one of us would say, “It’s just so empty,” or “It looks like the moon.” Lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” flitted through my head: Through to the badlands of Wyoming. I’d been here once before, in 2008, when I’d driven with two fellow journalists from the Democratic National Convention in Denver to the Republican one in Saint Paul. The news about Sarah Palin had been announced shortly after we’d crossed the state line. I used the fact that Wyoming was both the first state to grant women the vote and to elect a female governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross in 1925, as the lede on a story I later filed.
A half hour later the empty land gave way to rows and rows of abandoned trailer parks. I picked up my phone intending to search “Wyoming and meth,” reminded of the cautionary posters featuring people with rotting teeth that I’d seen at gas stations in Arizona, but I still had no signal.
Mountains appeared on the horizon. Mountains or a storm cloud, I wasn’t sure. No, definitely mountains and possibly a storm cloud. A half hour later we pulled off the interstate into a place called Buffalo. It was quiet and the streets were empty. The large houses, on spacious yards with gracious sweeping trees, had lights on inside. The football stadium attached to the high school announced a rodeo for Saturday. I got that sense you can sometimes get passing through small towns in America, that time had collapsed. As if instead of across the country, we had driven back five or six decades. All it took was a trip into a gas station and a kid behind the counter playing games on his iPhone to dispel this, but from inside the car it was easy to get swept up in the nostalgia. As we drove through the center of town, my phone buzzed. I had a signal again.
“Look up the place we’re going, before you lose it,” said Jo.
I furiously typed it in. Jo had booked us into a dude ranch for the night, and it was located ahead of us somewhere in the Bighorn Mountains. Behind me Lady growled. I looked up. “Watch out!”
Ahead of us on the road three deer were calmly crossing. Bolts of lightning were illuminating the sky behind the mountains we were headed into.
“It’s a half-hour drive from here. You’re sure they know we’re coming?” I said to Jo, thinking in my head that the little motel we’d just driven past didn’t look half bad.
“I guess we’ll find out.” This mantra had attached itself to our trip like a slogan since our first day on the road, when we’d plunged into a series of lengthy Pennsylvania tunnels on I-76 with the gas gauge on empty. Jo accelerated as the road began to climb. I looked back down at my phone, hoping that if I zoomed in I’d see there was a road connecting the one we were on with the red pin that marked where we were headed, but it had lost the signal again.
Up we went into the Bighorns, the sky darkening, the flashes of lightning growing brighter, the road sharply curving as we zigzagged higher and higher. Even though I couldn’t get a signal, the GPS on my phone was still working, and I could see our glowing blue dot moving along the map I had open, but it showed no road between us and the location of the ranch in the middle of a great green expanse. Finally, in the dying light, we saw a hand-painted sign directing us to take the next turn. Jo pulled off. We rolled over metal bars I would later learn were guards to keep the cattle from wandering off the property, and the paved road promptly turned to gravel. In the back seat, Lady was rigid and her hackles up. The road, if that’s what you could call it, narrowed and twisted through tall pine trees that blocked out the sky. It started to rain. On and on we wound, the ground beneath us becoming rockier as we went. The car jolted back and forth as though we were at sea and made alarming scraping noises when the rocks jutted up and caught its belly. Suddenly, the trees parted and a huge shadow rose up ahead of us. I gasped and Jo slammed on the brakes. Lady whined. I
leaned forward; we had come face-to-face with an enormous rock face protruding out in the road like a sentinel. We crept around it. The thunder sounded like someone was beating an enormous drum in the distance. On we went. Back out into the open, the lines of the hills were outlined in the lightning flashes. As the road climbed on and on, with no sign of human life, I did begin to wonder whether we’d be spending the night in the car. But finally, after winding up a steep hillside and then twisting back down an even rougher gravel road that took us back into the woods, we spotted lights in the distance. Ten minutes later we drove through a gate, past a paddock of horses, and into a cluster of what appeared to be small houses. From the largest one, closest to us, emanated the muted sounds of music, and I could make out moving figures through the glow of the windows. We stopped. It was pouring out.
Before we’d made up our minds what to do, someone pounded on the window and we both jumped. Lady launched into a series of deep growls. Jo rolled down the window and a thin, angular, grinning cowboy wearing an enormous hat stuck his head in. “You guys the writers?”
“Yes!”
“Welcome! Sit tight, I’ll get someone to show you where to go. Or you can just come straight into the saloon; that’s where everyone is.” He disappeared back into the dark.
The saloon.
Five minutes later a pretty young woman with long, thick hair, who looked to be about twenty, ran out and directed us up a steep driveway to a parking spot and then down some steps into an empty log cabin. Inside we flicked on the lights and were immediately greeted by the head of an enormous steer mounted over a stone fireplace, the first of what would become an endless, and increasingly normal, stream of taxidermy. Everything was made out of logs, it seemed. I felt as if I’d walked into the cover of one of my Little House books.
•
I woke first. The window of my room backed directly into a hillside, but from the sliver of sky I could see, I knew the weather had passed and it was early dawn. I threw back the wool blanket covered in a 1950s cowboy print and walked out into the living room.
I gasped.
Outside the huge bay windows was a scene that did not seem like it could possibly be real. We were in a lush green valley. A stream separated the group of cabins from a pasture that gently rippled up and away into soaring green foothills, out of which fanned a curving rock face. Behind it, the rising sun was turning the sky mauve. I stepped out onto the porch. It was over ninety degrees in New York; here the air was so fresh and cool I needed a sweater. I heard a low rumble and turned to look. I gasped again; to my left, galloping down the pasture toward camp, were a hundred or so horses being urged on by riders in leather chaps and cowboy hats. I could hear one of the riders whooping. It was barely past 6:00 a.m.
I was at a dude ranch, which meant nothing to me beyond the fact that the entire scene left me speechless. Over breakfast I would learn that dude ranches had been popularized in the western states following the Second World War, catering to wealthy East Coasters looking for an “authentic” Western experience, but without any of the hardship. Dude was originally slang for Easterners who knew nothing, like the term city slicker, but more insulting. These days they were called guest ranches. I’d never heard of either. I had no idea they even existed. But apparently, plenty of other people did, because I learned the place we were at normally sold out the entire season six months in advance. Only because there had been a last-minute cancellation had they been able to slide us in for an overnight.
“Oh my God,” said Jo behind me, walking into the living room in her pajamas.
Our plan, established only a few hours ago, when we’d finally climbed into bed at midnight after hot showers, had been to spend the morning here and leave in the early afternoon. We were scheduled to be somewhere in Yellowstone by supper, a fact that I’d been grateful for as we’d careened through the stormy darkness. But taking in the view we immediately began to reconsider. We’d see how the morning went.
An hour after breakfast, I put on a spare set of cowboy boots and climbed up on a horse named Cisco.
“Have you ridden before?” asked Garrett, the lead wrangler. Long and lean, with high cheekbones and a swagger, he appeared to have been born in his cowboy boots, summoned out of a historical fiction about the West one might find in an airport paperback stand. I was reminded of Tallulah Bankhead. “I came to town to fuck that divine Gary Cooper,” she’d once said.
“Does riding my bike through New York City count?” I asked, only sort of joking.
“No.”
Okay then. “Well, not in a really long time.”
He put me on a test ride in the corral to see how I handled a horse. “Just move your hips in the saddle like you’re making love,” he said, before giving me the go-ahead.
Afterward I opted to do a “walking” ride, thinking perhaps in this case it was best to start slowly. All around me were young people moving about in cowboy hats and boots and Levi’s jeans, and they really meant it. It was how much they meant it that made it all so surreal. Where were these young people from? They seemed so much a part of the landscape it was like they’d sprung up from the ground here, honest-to-goodness cowboys and -girls. Technically they were called wranglers, and they led the rides and took care of the horses. But I would learn that later. For now, I simply sat on my horse trying to get a better view of the wrangler off to my left who looked older than the others and had the kind of red handlebar mustache I thought existed only in old Warner Bros. cartoons.
While Jo went for a lope—what they called cantering here—I went for a walk with a wrangler named Ivy. I didn’t have a cowboy hat so I wore my HONEY trucker hat and a long-sleeved silk pajama shirt, which was the only thing I had with me that would cover my arms but not be too hot. The ranch was at a seven-thousand-foot elevation, hot when the sun was out, chilly when it was not.
Ivy was in her early twenties, with long curly blond hair that fell down her back in a ponytail and a striking face it had been impossible to miss, even amid all the other strangeness of the morning. She led us directly up the side of a hill so thick with trees they kept rubbing up against the yoga leggings I was wearing, and so steep I practically had to lie on Cisco’s neck so I wouldn’t slide off the back of him.
Ivy, it turned out, was an Ivy League grad from Mississippi (“The bad state,” she said). She wanted to be a writer, or she wanted to go to grad school, or she wanted to stay in Wyoming and ride horses. By the time we reached the top of the hill and came out of the trees, I’d launched into my well-rehearsed so you are in your twenties talk that boiled down to some version of “go out and have fun.” Then I looked around. We were on top of the world. In every direction the land undulated away in great green and gold rolling hills, spotted by shadows of passing clouds.
“Incredible, isn’t it?” said Ivy, looking at my face. “I never get tired of it.”
I paused, struggling to put it into words. “It feels like the first time I came up from the subway in New York, the exact same intensity for the exact opposite reason.”
“I’m dying to go to New York,” said Ivy.
“I don’t know,” I said, for the first time in my life unsure of whether New York was the best decision a person could ever possibly make. “This is extraordinary.”
•
“Are you sure we have to leave?” I asked Jo when I spotted her at lunch.
“Let’s find out.”
We did not. The cabin, it turned out, was empty until Saturday. It was Wednesday noon. We needed to be in San Francisco by Sunday in order for me to catch my flight back the next morning. I pulled out my phone. The camp had hacked up a wireless system so that it was possible to get online if you were standing within five feet of the dining hall.
“It’s a nineteen-hour drive from here to San Francisco. If we leave Friday morning and skip the Tetons we can make it by Saturday night.”
We stared at each other, eyebrows raised.
“I mean, really, who needs the Te
tons anyway?” I finally said, grinning.
•
The next morning when the sun rose, I was twenty miles away from the ranch, sitting in a van with three bearded fishermen who were all singing along to Taylor Swift at the top of their lungs. We were going fly-fishing.
“You’re not allowed to write about where we’re going,” drawled Dustin, the twenty-eight-year-old head fishing guide from Georgia whom I’d been directed to the previous evening during the weekly talent show.
“Is it a secret?”
“Yes.”
I’d signed up to go fly-fishing, simply because I could. Because there’d been space, and because at what other point in my life was I going to get a chance to fly-fish? Also, Dustin was tall and handsome, with a scraggly beard; he had a deep voice with a strong Georgia accent I thought it would be nice to spend the day with. So far, though, he hadn’t smiled once.
An hour outside of camp, we pulled into a gas station for coffee.
“This is the last bathroom until the ride home,” Dustin said. Inside, the walls were blanketed with taxidermy. Over the deli where they made egg sandwiches was the head of an enormous buck, with antlers that were at least six feet long. In another corner was a seven-foot grizzly bear standing on his hind legs. I poured myself a hot chocolate from the machine; it was only 8:00 a.m. and I was still freezing.
An hour later, the landscape had turned from the gently rolling grasses to jagged red cliffs. I felt as if I’d gotten on a rocket ship or walked through a wardrobe door. I opened the window, letting the air mingle with Taylor Swift’s voice, and leaned back. I feel good, I thought. I don’t want to be anywhere else. It was a strange sensation and made me realize how not good I’d felt for so long. I’d had hints of it here and there on the road, and in the past few months, but now it settled on me, or I settled in it. Like a bathtub I could climb into and lie down in.
The road got bumpier and narrower, until we had to slow to a crawl to ease our way into the deep potholes and back out again. Distance is as relative in Wyoming as it is in New York; our destination was just around the next bend, forty-five minutes away (in New York, the same would be true except the next bend would be three blocks and not thirty miles). Finally, we stopped. We were parked on the lip of a canyon. Five hundred feet below roared the river we’d be fishing in. For the next half hour, I gave my full attention to hiking down the rocky path without falling on my face, only stopping to give my burning thighs a break and gaze at the jagged canyon walls rising up above us.
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