December 8, 2007
Saturday

Horses Standing About on Lower Piney Creek Road, Banner, Wyoming
December 8, 2007

The signs are familiar to travellers on the rough roads of the Wyoming backcountry: Open Range, Loose Stock, Elk Crossing. This morning when I set out for Story, Wyoming, I encountered the individuals pictured above about two miles from Jentel. They were standing in the roadway, outside the fence that had enclosed them all the other times I’d passed by. I slowed, and stopped. In Vermont, when you come upon a moose standing in the road like that, you stop, and wait for the moose to decide its next move, hoping it will go quietly into the woods and not charge at you.

I waited, half a minute, a bit longer. The horses remained where they were. Finally, very cautiously, I moved forward and around them. (You can see my tire tracks curving around at the left.) The horse closest to me turned its head and watched me as I rolled by. When I got past them I stopped again. The one in the middle had remained motionless and was still standing and staring off toward the east. The other two had turned and were still watching me. I snapped the picture, and continued on my way.

As I have said before, the two places I like to visit in an unfamiliar town are the cemetery and the library. There’s been snow on the ground and temperatures in the single digits on the days when I had time to visit cemeteries on this trip, so I haven’t been to any of them. But libraries are warm and dry, and it was Christmas Open House at the Story Library this morning. The library is right across the street from the Piney Creek General Store and Restrunt (and the United States Post Office, which has a blackboard out front that people write notes to each other on — this is a very small town).

What can I say about this place? It’s not the smallest library I’ve ever been to (that would be the one in Hancock, Vermont, about the size of a single car garage), but it is small, at least in square footage. The front part of the building houses the collection. The back part, which I assume on normal days holds the tables and chairs at which one can sit to work or read, was given over today to the party. There were cookies, fudge, spicy cheese pinwheels, nut-covered cheese balls and crackers, coffee, cider, milk for the children. The dozen or so students in the town’s K-5 rural school had contributed artwork for the bulletin board, and a local woman’s collection of sheep-themed items (figurines, ornaments, hand-knitted socks) was on display.

In such a small town a stranger is quickly spotted. Except I wasn’t a stranger, I was a visitor, a guest. People greeted me, asked me where I was from. I met a woman who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and one whose husband was from Annville, a town twenty miles from where I live.

A man sat down at the piano and began to play Christmas songs, from the very traditional and sacred (Coventry Carol, I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In) to the less so (Jingle Bell Rock, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree). A woman sang most of the selections solo in a high sweet soprano. Finally, she asked for everyone’s attention. “Let’s sing this one together, for all our military personnel serving far away from home.”

It was the song that soldiers and civilians alike requested most frequently in 1943, the year Bing Crosby recorded it. In 1965, astronauts Frank Borman and James Lovell asked that it be played for them as they returned from the longest flight to date of the U.S. space program. I sang this morning for all the brave men and women for whom the wish is but a dream this year. And I suspect that my new friends in the library at Story and on the road outside Banner knew that I was also singing for myself, grateful that I will have my wish:

I’ll be home for Christmas,
You can count on me.
Please have snow, and mistletoe,
And presents on the tree.
Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love-light gleams.
I’ll be home for Christmas . . .

. . . and Wyoming will be in my dreams.

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