June 22, 2005
Wednesday 

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.
        – Anne Herbert, b. 1952
           American writer 
           [after Gilbert Shelton in The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers]

Everywhere I travel, I usually check two things: the local cemeteries, and the local libraries.

Lander’s cemetery is on a hill above the town. My hosts made reference to taking guests up there to look at the night sky. I really had no desire to go there myself. I’d been interested in the cemeteries at the mission and on the reservation because they showed me something of the native culture, but since the guidebooks didn’t call attention to the Lander town cemetery, I figured it probably wouldn’t be different enough from other cemeteries to visit in a short stay.

In the morning I went to Sinks Canyon State Park again, this time for a nature walk. This was a carefully-laid out course over fairly flat terrain, inviting to hikers of all skill levels. The informative signs helped me understand something of the natural history of the place, why certain plants and certain animals flourish there. I didn’t see any of the animals I learned about – no big horn sheep, no elk, no bears, no mountain lions. The animals are wary and like to keep their distance. The area is, after all, not a zoo, but a sanctuary, a preserve set aside and developed not to make things easier for humans to live as they like to in the twenty-first century, but for the animals to live as they have lived for thousands of years.

The road west of the park that completes the loop between the Popo Agie Falls and Louis Lake is still closed because of snow, so I couldn’t take that tour. Instead, I had lunch at Mom’s again, took another long nap, and then headed to the Lander branch of the Fremont County public library system.

Now I’m not saying that the guest house I’m staying in isn’t comfortable. It’s spacious, spotlessly clean, and in a quiet suburban neighborhood not very different from the one I live in. I have my own room and a private bath as well as a common lounge upstairs that has big comfy couches and lots of reading material.

But there is no place for me to write. The table in my room is the wrong height for the chair. The lounge area has a window air conditioner going full tilt that, combined with the rumble of the whole-house attic fan, gives the space something of the feel of an aircraft idling on the tarmac. The dining room has a broad table and good light but two — yes, two — ticking clocks that not only tick out of rhythm with each other but strike the hours and quarter hours at different times. The sun porch has wrought iron chairs around glass-topped tables that wobble.

The library, however, is just right.

The Lander branch is the headquarters for the Fremont County system. According to its website, “The library is fully automated, yet it still retains that friendly small town atmosphere, and you are welcomed with a warm greeting and smile.”

That promise was certainly fulfilled. I introduced myself at the desk as a visitor from Pennsylvania. Immediately I was invited to sign the guestbook and add a star to the map on the wall at the spot in that distant state where I live. I was given an access code to use with the wireless internet. I set up my laptop and my notebook at a comfortable table and made myself at home.

Libraries are not the silent stuffy places, and librarians not the cranky authoritarians, that popular stereotypes suggest. Libraries are vibrant communities that serve people who want information, or entertainment, or intellectual and social stimulation. Every library has its own personality, and the atmosphere at a general college library will differ from that in a research library dedicated to the needs of scholars in a particular field, which will in turn differ from that in a community library that serves the most diverse clientele. I’ve used huge public libraries in Boston and New York and tiny branches in Vermont and Virginia no bigger than our two-car garage. I’ve also used university libraries and historical society archives and private collections where you have to wear special gloves before you can touch the materials.

Everywhere, I’ve been accorded extraordinary hospitality and given help from librarians, almost all of them women, who never asked by what right I was in their facility nor why I wanted the information I requested. In Lander today I saw a girl about ten or eleven years old bring back several volumes and chat with the librarian about how much she’d enjoyed them and what she wanted to read next. I saw parents helping very young children choose books, elderly people and students working at the computers, other adults settled in chairs reading fiction and history and magazines and comics.

Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name . . .
You want to be where you can see
Our troubles are all the same
You want to be where everybody knows your name.

I came to Wyoming to see something different – mountains covered with snow in June, antelope and bison casually crossing a road, a sky you can walk into.

At the library in Lander I was reminded, and reassured, that in our essence we’re all the same.

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