Good morning!
I hope you're well and enjoying a beautiful summer!
I'm remembering the freedom we celebrate this July and a different kind of freedom I found when I moved to Wyoming.
It was forty years ago, July fifth, that I moved from New Hampshire to Wyoming. As you may remember, my Mom advised me to give it a year before I decided if I'd stay forever. That was in 1980.
My move was actually my second trip to Wyoming. Everything went smoothly in 1980 when I made my move. But it hadn't been so on my first trip.
I found Wyoming in 1977 behind the wheel of a 1970-something VW Bug, along with two friends, and, if I remember right, two dogs.
We coasted into Douglas, with an empty gas tank and empty pockets, in search of a friend from New Hampshire, who had come out a year before to work in the oil field.
A couple of weeks before we had had car trouble in Oklahoma. We spent a few days camping in the junk yard (yes, a junk yard) the Bug was being repaired at. That took a sizable chunk of our money, but undaunted we journeyed on. As I remember, we were just out exploring The West.
We made it to Colorado. In Boulder I called home and asked my Mom to wire some money. We spent a week camping at a rest stop outside Boulder, making daily trips to the Western Union office.
After about five days of no money from home arriving, the gal who worked there felt sorry for us and gave us $5 to get some food. (We'd been subsisting on potatoes cooked in a campfire for the past week). We abandoned the food idea and filled the gas tank. Wow! Gas was cheap back then!
We headed to Douglas, Wyoming, which my Mom had estimated to be about 150 miles away. It's more like 250 miles. We made it to Douglas on fumes and a few pennies left in our pockets.
My friend from home who had come out here a few years earlier to work in the oil field, had left "instructions" for anyone coming to visit, to ask for him in the bars. They would know when he'd be in. (Are you gasping? This was not my ordinary way of doing things, but what was a girl to do)?
The College Inn Bar was the third one I tried (my timid friends stayed in the car). The nice bartender said my friend would be in around five. We followed him to his place in the tiny town of Orin Junction, which was home to one gas station and several mobile homes.
We stayed about a month. I found a waitressing job in Glendo, where there were two bars, a gas station, a cafe, a post office and about a fifty houses. There, I made enough money to get back home.
It was during this brief stay that I fell in love with Wyoming. Three years later I moved to Glendo, where I found that sense of freedom in the wide open spaces. It was solace for my soul, music to my ears, and a feast for my eyes.
The color, the texture, the vast distance. It took me years to finally endeavor to paint it.
The soft gray greens that are almost blue on some days. The mysterious shadows from bluffs that beckon for a closer look. The wild yellow rose and riotous, colorful, Chimisa when it blooms in the late summer. Meadowlarks and crickets in the summer. And outrageous sunrises and sunsets, from one end of the horizon to the other.
