From a Window in Wyoming
Sometimes life remembers you back to a moment, the story you’ve told and told — and now you realize with your body that you were actually there. Me in Lost Cabin, Wyoming, 1972. Straight outta Beverly Hills. The only greater culture shock would have been me in my bellbottoms, flower power tank top, and false eyelashes, at the Taliban headquarters. But you get the idea.
It was the decade of women’s liberation, and yet if you went far enough into back country of Wyoming, everyone pretty much had the same rights. I mean, everyone helped with running the cattle to their next pasture. And everyone contributed to surviving a brutal winter.
I remember one January, it was fifty-eight below zero. Without the wind chill factor. In the parking lot of Ace Hardware, I saw a man trying to light a fire under his pickup to get it warm enough to start. Days later, two hearty, Wyoming-born, 18-year-olds ran out of gas a quarter mile from a gas station on the road to Thermop. It was an easy walk. They died on their way there.
During that famous winter, we kept our wood-burning stove going all the time. One night, the power went out, and everyone came over to our house — the Keller family, and then Sissy Green and Howard McCrory.They all slept on the floor in our room off the kitchen. Sleeping bags…
