June 21, 2005
Tuesday 

I arrived in Lander, Wyoming just before four o’clock yesterday afternoon. After five nights in commercial budget hotels, I was ready for the homey comforts of a bed and breakfast.

The Blue Spruce Inn is a spacious old house built in 1919 by a Wyoming sheep baron. The proprietors are a retired Air Force officer and his wife who have operated the place as a bed and breakfast for about ten years. I’d made almost all of my arrangements for this trip online, but the Blue Spruce didn’t have that option, so I had to call. Mrs. Brown was the first actual person in Wyoming that I ever talked to.

The brochure she’d sent me noted that check-in was “after 4:00.” So did the little sign on the doorbell that I rang at about 3:45. Through the gauzy curtains I could see the people who would be my hosts sitting in the office area just inside the door. When no one moved to answer my ring, I sat down in one of the 50s-style metal lawn chairs on the porch and just waited.

At precisely 4:00 the door was opened and I was welcomed in.

“Is that grease on your shirt?” the woman said to me with some alarm.

I was wearing a beige t-shirt I’d gotten three years ago at Walden Pond (“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” – Henry David Thoreau.) It was, I now discovered from twisting around to see it in the mirror over the fireplace, streaked with black on the back.

“Oh, that’s soot, I think,” I said. “I had to keep moving back to get a good angle for a photograph at the Washakie cemetery, and I sort of fell into a patch of bushes that looked like they’d been burned.”

“Well,” she said, sounding unconvinced. “I don’t want you lying down on my bedspreads with grease on your shirt.”

In my sunny room I carefully removed my carbon-streaked shirt and took a shower before lying down for a nap. I spent the evening checking out Sinks Canyon State Park in preparation for completion of one of the goals of my trip.

Sinks Canyon is so named because the middle fork of the Popo Agie River flows out of the Wind River mountains and through the canyon. Halfway down, the riverbed abruptly turns into a large limestone cavern and the crashing water sinks into fissures and cracks at the back of the cave. The river then travels underground for a quarter mile until it emerges in a large calm pool called “The Rise,” and then continues its course into the valley below.

Popo Agie (pronounced “Po-PO’-zhia”) is a Crow phrase meaning “river of tall grass.” Early in my planning for this trip I learned that the Popo Agie Falls trail offered a “spectacular short hike” of one and a half miles described as an “easy-to-moderate climb.” Since at the time I was finding the trek from the parking lot into the supermarket something of an ordeal, I determined to change my habits and get into shape to accomplish this.

The ranger at the visitors’ center gave me a map of the various trails and agreed that the first mile of the falls trail was easy, with the last part moving through moderate to fairly strenuous at the end.

So this morning, after a communal breakfast at the Blue Spruce, I put on my Columbia Razor Ridge boots and my Fox River wool socks, grabbed my Tilley hat and my Stoney Point Polecat collapsible adjustable hiking staff, and set out for adventure. (All these items were bought new at Cabela’s in Berks County on June 9. Everything about me said “TOURIST!!” I’m sure I looked ridiculous.)

I’m not sure now I was on the right trail. The markings provided by the park service tend to differ from the titles used by the guide books. I might indeed have been on the Middle Fork trail, described as “a more rugged six miles.” It occurred to me that the guide book’s “1.5 miles” meant it was that far to the falls. One would then have to backtrack over the same distance to reach the parking area again, for a total of three miles.

In any case, I started out. I wound along a narrow trail that began close to the river’s edge but moved both up and away as I climbed. The river rushed, every square inch of it a frothy white. The water roared, the sound muffled sometimes by thick stands of trees between the trail and the river’s edge. Nevertheless, above the roar I could hear bird calls I never heard at home and the wind, the constant Wyoming wind, more of a rumble here than the whoosh out on the plains.

I’ve often said that somebody like me can buy better pictures than she can take. I’d picked up some nice postcards at the visitors’ center, but I had my camera with me anyway. I tried to take pictures that said something to me about the nature of this trip. I’d photograph an outcropping of rocks maybe 200 feet ahead, and when I got there, I’d turn around to capture the sweep of the climb I’d just made. I snapped banks of wildflowers and a rock formation that made a natural bench in a shady place just off the trail.

After about an hour I felt the climb suddenly turn more difficult. I’d regarded the first part of the trek as more moderate than easy. I’d probably gone less than a mile and a half because I moved slowly and stopped a lot, not because I had to rest but because I wanted to reflect and take pictures. I’d consumed the two bottles of water I’d brought and was beginning to feel thirsty again. The scenery was not changing and I knew I was reaching my limit. So I turned back.

Although I had not reached the falls, I consider the trip to have been a success. I completed a “short spectacular hike” that I could not have endured just twelve weeks before.

This evening I returned to the visitors’ center for a program called “Small Town USA: The Heaven We Dream Of, The Prison We Escape.” Chris Kennedy, a singer-songwriter who teaches at Western Wyoming Community College, and Mike Hensley, who retired from the school, presented an hour and a half of song, statistics, and literary references that had me enthralled. “Nothing is more responsible for nostalgia than a bad memory,” they said. More than half of all Americans live in big cities of more than half a million (which happens to be the entire population of Wyoming), yet we long for the romance of a place where everybody knows your name and people don’t lock their doors.

I arrived back in Lander as the dusk was deepening. I’d climbed a mountain (sort of), eaten at a place called “Mom’s Malt Shop,” and been entertained by clever artists who fed my own desire to capture my ideas. Before bed I took a walk around the neighborhood to ponder the day’s achievements. People were watering their lawns and walking their dogs, or sitting on their porches while the children caught fireflies in the side yards. They smiled and called out hello to me. Everything had a 1950s feel to it and I felt young and fit and strong. It was a heaven I didn’t have to dream of.

To be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)