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CHAPTER 10
WYOMING
June 26 – July 6
(159 Miles)

The sign said, “Welcome to Big Wonderful Wyoming!” above the silhouette of a cowboy on a bucking bronco. I was now incontrovertibly in the WEST!! Immediately I sensed a change; it was in the air. The land was more vast, less tamed. The occasional dusty towns in sharp contrast to Nebraska’s, had a saloon on every corner and the “hard drinkin’” saloon ritual was reflected in the aggressive swagger of the cowboys. Cowboy boots, cowboy hats, cowboy belts and a marked decrease in the ratio of women to men lent the land a distinctive masculine air. The neat streets and flowerbeds gave way to dry grasses and dust. Gone were the section line roads. Distances between towns increased. The biggest change, however, was in the sudden lack of people. I was in a time machine, catapulted back to the days of the pioneers. For hundreds of miles in Wyoming, one can follow the ruts and trail of the emigrants and see virtually unchanged, the scenery they saw, feel the heat and storms they felt, smell their sage and alkali dust. Wyoming, wild and empty is the closest thing to the way it was.

But my first couple of days in Wyoming were colored sour. As I reread my journal, it becomes obvious that those days had their usual share of good and bad, but because I was physically sick, my view of the world was skewed by self pity and bitter defensiveness. It is true that in Torrington I was eyed with suspicion and disgust and turned away by the managers of the seediest trailer park I ever saw, but it is also true that a kind and supportive woman named Betty gave me a discount on the health foods I bought from her store. It is true and I was not allowed to stay overnight at Fort Laramie by a cynical bureaucrat who turned me away in a thunderstorm. And admittedly I was later overcharged for a filthy motel room, but it is also true that people stopped me along the road and shook hands and wished me well with effusive enthusiasm. Here are my confused and jumbled journal entries for those days.

Before the day went sour, I did enjoy the Wyoming west look. The grasses dry and tan and lots of blowouts and bluffs and dust. Why is it that as soon as one crossed a state border things seem so different? Is it really so? No tears at all in leaving Nebraska compared to Kansas.

This has been a bad day. The walk wasn’t too hard except that I had diarrhea and stomachache and nausea and a backache. Thank heaven that most of the time it was breezy from behind. A crop duster type was spraying heavily for grasshoppers and I kept getting caught in the smelly white cloud. Some very nice people stopped and talked.
Late in the day with a thunderstorm rapidly coming on, sick, miserable, hurt by the ranger’s refusal to let me camp, a heavy, matronly, powdered, proper woman asked if I was the woman walking… and “was I ALONE?” When I said Yes, she shook her head in utter disgust to the flock of similar woman around her. I asked her if she’d go with me and when she said no, I said, “that’s why I’m alone.”

These are the times when the trip is the hardest. I’m absolutely alone in an unfriendly town with nowhere to turn. I’ve been treated like dirty and been forced to overpay for this horrible room. I know no one ahead and don’t feel well (just noticed I have a rash covering both legs completely). I feel helpless to strike back and feel no protection. Pulling a cart a thousand miles is nothing compared to pulling my bruised and battered feelings through a bad day. There is one antidote, however, and that’s the realization that people have been nice, even today, lots of them.
Another old Mexican stopped in his jalopy and wanted to give me a ride. His pants were holely and held together with pins, but he surely had a good heart. I feel sick. I wish my backache would go away. Ahhhh misery, I’ve counted six different kinds of bugs in this bed.

When some people are so nice to me it makes me a million times more outraged at the repulsive ones. I’m frustrated. There must be some way I could reward the nice ones and punish the mean ones. It just doesn’t seem right that the contrast is so great but there are no consequences fitting to each. What’s wrong with me. There are nice people all around but I’m letting the jackasses get me down.

I do think I’m overdosed with experiences. Apparently the pioneers also became so jaded with new astounding sights that they barely mentioned the Rocky Mountains. I am in sight of Laramie Peak and other mountains, and it gives a shivering thrill of getting somewhere and leaving the plains behind, but I’m too saturated with experiences to really groove on it for a long high.

I can feel I’m recovering. I always do in the evening as the sun sinks low. It is the sun which gets me tetched every day, anxious, confused, and embattled.

Fort Laramie had been the major stopping place along the Emigrant Trail and the Donners mentioned it in their diaries, but I couldn’t get away from that place fast enough. “Surely I’ll come back another year.” I rationalized. Oh well, the Donners had found it disappointing and so did I. (A year later when I returned by car I tensed up expecting the same critical treatment as a park official ran toward me in the pouring rain. To my astonishment, he wasn’t coming to chase me away as I expected, but rather handed me a park information pamphlet and said a few words of welcome!)

     As I approached Guernesey many miles later, a strange man in an expensive car pulled up and said in an Italian accent, “BarBarA! I saw a friend of yours last night. Father Russo!” (The effervescent priest from Yonkers, New York who had sent me off on my journey on his bubble of enthusiasm.) My day suddenly turned bright with the anticipation of seeing a familiar face. Indeed Father Russo had hit the town only the night before but the place was in an uproar in the wake of his dynamic blitz. As I walked through the little village, people came up and actually smiled warmly saying, “We’ve heard about you.” “How ya doin?” “How far’d ya come today?” To my inquiries they responded, “Father Russo? Oh he moves fast but I think you’ll find him down at Crazy Tony’s” or “The Bunk House Motel” or “the Catholic Rectory.” I ran from spot to spot with mounting excitement and anticipation, thrilled with the prospect of seeing a familiar face until the last lead fell through. Apparently he’d gone on. My bubble burst. I was lost and crestfallen. I walked through town toward the famous Register Cliffs.
     Virtually within the shadow of Register Cliffs sits Fredericks Ranch, a shining example of the best of the western ranching tradition. Descendents of the original pioneer homesteaders of the area, the Fredericks today are pillars of their community (and state), and leaders of modern ranching yet still preserve the original relics and buildings of their ancestors. Their property and lives are a tradition rooted blend of the old and new, of the rough and the cultured. Frederico, “the super duper million dollar bull, and Italian exotic, lounges in the dappled shadows of the weathered 100 year old barn. The restrained and elegant new ranch house rests gracefully beside the original log homestead of their ancestors. Modern pivot irrigators send their lacy spray above the Platte River which encircles the ranch and its historic fields. Those fields and pastures once twinkled with the glow of pioneer campfires. Looming above all of it is Register Cliffs, the sandstone rock face on which the immigrants carved their names and dates in a wonderful testimony of their endurance. “The old names look strong as if written by capable competent people. After all, they did find the time and energy to carve them.”
     But as I approached the Fredericks ranch on that blisteringly hot afternoon, I was still carrying the defensive paranoia of the past few days.
     As I approached Frederick’s ranch I screwed up my courage. A bustling pleasant woman answered my knock, “You must be the lady walking the Oregon Trail,” warmly. “Come right in and have some iced tea.” A rush of gratefulness and relief floods through me. Wiped away is the frequent early suspicious sparring and battle to gain acceptance. Smiling, warm, western, bathed in safety and good will. I’ll never get used to the contrasts which follow so closely, yesterday treated like dirt, turned away sick, today welcomed without inspection.

     While I was gulping iced tea, a car roared up to the house in a flurry of dust and out hopped Father Russo followed by two young tourists he’d found somewhere. They had obviously been swept away by his euphoria; they wore that overwhelmed glazed look that we all get in the presence of this human dynamo as they repeatedly embraced all of us strangers. Father Russo, short as a peanut, looked so vulnerable in this outlandish cowboy outfit with the vivid huge kerchief, the fringed leather vest covered with badges and pins and the leather pony express hat, also smothered in memorabilia and braids. He sort of levitated into the house as we all formed an awed entourage hovering around him. We all beamed the laughed with this more vivid than life character who rattled on with engaging explosive mania. He left in a flurry of haste with plans to drive many hundreds of miles yet that day, but his sense of presence lingered on.
     Harriet Frederick offered me her heart as she spent the rest of that day giving me a tour of the area. We saw Warm Springs where the pioneers did their laundry. We saw her mother-in-law’s private museum of Indian and pioneer relics. We saw the old iron ore mining town of Hartville where EVERYTHING was coated, incorporated, with red greasy dust, tree trunks, roads, building, sidewalks, EVERYTHING! We toured the Greek goat areas from the past, the Italian, Mexican and sheepherder areas. In Crazy Tony’s Café we bumped into two old timers more colorful and authentic than any characters in westerns with weathered leathery skin, squinting eyes and cowboy clothes. They greeted Mrs. Frederick with a familiar yet respectful demeanor (as did everyone). Incredibly one of the men had supplied the horses for a TV documentary about the Donner Party. An independent old cuss, he cared and knew nothing about the Donner Party or the show. Although he was unimpressed, I found my chance meeting with him as amazing coincidence.
     Harriet Frederick drove past the Guernsey Cemetery. She mused a bit with her memories of when she first came to Guernsey as a bride. “When I saw that cemetery sitting out here with no trees and nothing but dry brown grass and dust all around, I thought “my my, what kind of uncivilized place have I gotten myself into.” The thought of being buried in that awful place seemed like the end of the world to me. I just wanted to turn around and go right back home again.”
     The little graveyard has changed over the years, probably largely due to the taming influence of gentle women like Harriet Frederick. As we drove by, the green grass was being watered with sprinklers and small shade trees were holding their own against the open range. “How do you feel about it now?” I asked. “Oh, why it’s just fine now,” she said. “I’ve accepted this as my home. I’ve raised three sons here. The town has changed and so have I.”

In the evening Mr. Frederick took us across his pastures to turn on the pivot irrigators and show off their exotic grianina herds (super duper exotic bull, Frederico) and simply exult in the beauty of his farm tucked between the Platte and Register Cliffs in the cool soft evening air. Quiet pride, understated importance, low key confidence, history. That night I slept in an antique bed in an elegant room after a luxurious bath. Next morning a gift of jerky from the shy ancient hired hand who’d been on the ranch in the same log building since 1926, a heartfelt honest emotional goodbye from Mrs. Frederick and I was on my way, alive and able to soak up the western beauty, wide vistas of space over each long hill, miles and miles of ranch land.

The trail ruts in Guernsey are the most dramatic of the trail. Worn into sandstone over rough terrain, they cut a swath up to four feet deep in some places. Each wheel line cuts narrowly into the trail and the outer sides of the wheels’ grooves are lined with the side gouges made by the axles. I was touched and moved by how small and frail the ghostly wagons seemed as I stood in their path. The wheels themselves were skinny and the axle width almost like a child’s wagon. There in the vastness of Wyoming I asked myself for the thousandth time, “How did they ever do it?”

As I walked deeper into Wyoming the grandeur of the western scene carried me out of the deadening self preoccupation that had threatened to plague me a few days earlier.

Ahead was the nine mile trail shortcut that I’d worried about for days every time I’d looked at the map. Before the day was over, I’d have received 20 different stories from 20 different people as to whether it was a road, whether it was passable, whether it was dangerous, etc. I tried it and then turned back in uncertainty. I feared rattlesnakes alone in the wilderness. If I got bit help was out of reach.

I met a bearded recently matured and transplanted hippy type who assured me with the certain superiority only a youth can show that rattlesnakes were NOTHING to be afraid of. “Why my three year old carried one into the house just last week!” he fairly snorted.

I walked across a high plateau with distant strip wheat farming stretching to distant horizons becoming indistinct in the haze against the dark far away mountains. A tumultuous storm in the northwest streaked lightening and downward smears of gray and white (hail?) and another dark mass gathered to the southeast. I kept an anxious eye on both, seemingly destined to be caught as the two came together over me. It had been a long day of exposure in the brilliant western sun, and despite wearing my big hat all day, my face and arms were badly burned and swollen.

Walked on next morning still uncommonly gray outside. Later the sun held sway but the rare humidity stayed, enervating. The road dipped into a canyon right out of a cowboy movie. The gulch where the rocky ledges and bluffs provided hiding places as the posse rode by the hidden heroes. Suddenly the contrast between the west and east became clear. Here in the west there are no soft broad leafed plants or trees. Everything is stingy with its surface grasses, stiff and sharp yucca, long needled scrub pines, even the milky blue green sagebrush leaves are smoky silver slivers. The sandstone ledges and blowouts and bare ground are a pale beige baked abode shade. The coloring is stingy with its greens, the effect dramatic and lovely, austere and ascetic.
At one point a Vietnam veteran (I learned later) nudged his wife and pointed to me in the distance walking along with my flowing white pants and shirt topped with a wide straw hat. “That looks like a Vietnamese peasant!” he exclaimed. Their curiosity won and they drove to catch me and invited me to stay the night with them.

At a horse farm far from any town I learned how extremely spotty and select a western thunderstorm can be. While eating in the old dining room we sat and looked out the back window as the skies opened and poured a heavy shower in long streaming lines onto the back pasture and dripping off the house roof. We looked out the front window where the sun shone brightly without a single drop of water to be seen. Some eastern house guests and I leaped up in amazement and ran back and forth from front to back scarcely believing our eyes. The difference was not a matter of degrees or a gentle taper. It really was pouring out the back while clear and brilliantly sunny out the front.

I had trouble getting into the swing of walking. I kept stopping to eat, to change pants, to pee (in sight of the interstate requires waiting till no cars are in sight), to put on sun lotion and then to adjust pack on cart and retie shoes, recheck maps, drink, eat and then repeat all these again and again. I kept thinking I was at Oren Junction but was at least 8 miles off. Finally I noticed, with a disgusted alarmed start, that my hubcap was gone and my wheel about to fall off. What good incredible luck, a gas station one mile ahead! What bad luck, no welding there. What good luck, a friendly young man said he was a metal worker and would fix it! What bad luck, his shop was 50 miles back in Guernsey. In the end the friendly young man drove me ahead to Douglas where we found a welder. We then returned to Oren and together walked the 13 miles back to Douglas in the evening.

     The “friendly young man” looked to me like a chubby 15 year old with pale red hair and tender skin. As usual my first impressing was wrong. He was 30, a journeyman, iron worker, Vietnam vet, twice married, educated and a profoundly complex person. His name was Mark and the fates couldn’t have conspired to send a more welcome companion for the next two days. Mark was an instant soul mate, the only person on the entire trip with whom I felt to be me, the puzzled, sometimes angry, sometimes irritable, sometimes prejudiced, sometimes unreasonable me. I started right off by grumbling about the unbroken façade of the macho cowboy image in Wyoming. “I know,” he said, “which is why I’m wearing these,” pointing to his work boots, not cowboy boots, “and this,” pointing to his fishing hat, not a cowboy hat. “And my recreational thing is pot, not liquor. It’s just my way of not knuckling under to the cowboy attitude around here.” Later when we went into a café Mark left thousands of dollars of camera equipment lying on the seat of his unlocked truck. When I exclaimed about this he said, “There is one thing to realize about the western cowboy and that is their code of honor. They’d never touch another man’s property. And that goes for women too,” he added with a glance at me. “They are touch macho and heavy drinkers and carry on noisily, but they’d never touch a honorable woman.” I assumed his stereotype description was not universal, but it was nice to hear anyway.
     That evening we walked the 13 miles into town. At the end Mark was wincing with blisters, but I was OK and delighted to make it my 32 mile day, longest of the trip. The evening walk was cool and like a fresh start. The sunset was peaceful and the antelope posed in perfect silhouettes against the sky. Herds of Hereford cattle mooed and the little calves stampeded in the dark. Over one final rise and the tiny bright lights of Douglas sparkled in the distance invitingly, altogether a lovely walk. I would walk every evening if I had a partner.
     I listened in rapt attention to Mark’s stories of his life, stories of his days living in a commune and how despite tones labor from all the good people, they steadily lost ground, stories of his nightmare of two years in the evacuation hospital in Japan where he carried amputated legs and arms to the incinerators and where he watched 26 men die of their wounds, stories of his satisfaction and fear working in the select fraternity of iron workers, stories of how he works on the power plant by day and attends citizens’ meetings to help try to stop its construction by night, stories of how he joined the motorcycle cult only to give it up suddenly when he found himself early one Sunday morning pointlessly making a racket through the center of town.
     Mark told about the dark streak within himself and about his violence toward his second wife. Once when I fulminated about the Bible he astonished me gently chiding me about my prejudice. He defended the Bible and Jesus and I felt properly chastened.
     I wrote the most poignant story in my Journal.
     The Vietnam war left Mark scared, withdrawn, isolated, alienated. He came home and wanted to hide in the woods. He had and antique gun collection. He went hunting. He shot a deer and it dropped. He ran to it in time to still see the shine in its eyes. Then before his own eyes the shine faded and the eyes glazed over, “and I would have done anything to make that shine come back.” So he went home and sold all his guns.

I was morbidly fascinated with his stories of the years in Vietnam. In the café at breakfast I pressed him for more and more details of the evacuation hospital. I felt ashamed of my snooping when in the middle of one account of a “young boy from Montana who used to show me pictures of his horses…” There was a pause and I looked up to see a tear spill over Mark’s face. He didn’t finish the story, there was no need to.
That night Mark slept on the floor in my sour moldy sleeping bag and I in the bed. He paid the hotel clerk for the second occupant, and it certainly had a suspicious look. I had rented the room alone earlier and later Mark came and we hauled a ton of his expensive camera equipment up there (before the startled eyes of the desk clerk) and then he stayed for the night. I learned one lesson clearly. Things are simply not always the way they look. And people are not what they may seem. I’m naïve and a poor judge of people, yet knowing this I still trust people according to my instincts. And I like me for that.

Mark stayed with me in the hotel all the next day and left in the evening. The friendship (not romance) for those two isolated days was real and valid. I look back with pride and satisfaction.

On the walk to Glenrock I descended into a pretty valley with a red ranch tucked in the treed oasis. Harsh dry mountains loomed to the north. Ahead I spotted a cowboy riding zigzag on a horse and then spotted the round gray-cream milling soft lumps that can only be sheep. I reached a narrow bridge from the east as the sheep did from the west. The cowboy herded them across, baaa, baaa, baaa, a real din. They trotted past me over the bridge, grains of sand slipping through an hourglass, the little black feet lambs wobbling right in with the crowd, one tiny, tiny lamb struggling in the rear trying to keep up. Then, in a cloud of dust, they were gone, but I could hear the vibrating quivering “baaa” long after they were out of sight.

     I walked 24 strenuous miles to Glenrock where I occupied the last vacant room in an old hotel. It was the 4th of July. I had come a long long way physically and mentally since April 28 when a frightened me started those first painful steps.
     The past few days it has suddenly dawned on me: this is the happiest, most satisfying time of my life. I’m in an old, old hotel, $8 a night, sharing a bathroom with a man next door and sleeping in an antique brass bed. There are fireworks outside that I see from my big old hotel window. Earlier I walked through town (population 1,000) and ate in the café. The deeply satisfying part of this life is that I’m completely at home and a ease in any town anytime. The hotel becomes an old familiar, comfortable dear home, even if only for one night. The strange people seem like not so strange friends and most of all, I’m alone but not lonely. I have no fears, love being far away and on my own, confident and comfortable with myself.
     The rewards I realized that evening were worth every inch of the struggle and went beyond all early expectations. The realization of my deep happiness came almost as a surprise revelation. It emerged uncovered in the Higgens Hotel but I now see clearly that it had started growing with my first scared steps in Independence, Missouri.

Today in the lounge the women were talking, almost proudly and fondly of their phobias, spiders for one, snakes for another. How strange it seemed to cling to these crippling irrational fears.

     Wyoming boom towns are something I never anticipated on this trip, the excess of transients and construction hard hat workers and low proportion of women, tight housing situation and high motel rates, all with the evening saloon ritual. It’s the kind of situation I should find threatening, but when I really look at the faces of the workers driving past me at 6 or 7 AM, I simply see a long parade of pleasant and often lonely faces, not the insensitive, tough and callous animals the cultural myth paints, creates and gets off on.
     Later in a very swank lounge in Casper, a very proper man, an author, asked loudly and eagerly if a lot of men had been really leaning on me heavily for sexual favors. I was disgusted with his vicarious fantasies and for his assumption of the slurring myth of the wicked construction worker.
     I was thinking of the woman who represents many who said, “ALONE!!!! Oh no, I wouldn’t do that, not in this day and age.” My unspoken question to her is, “Why aren’t you at the forefront of the woman’s movement, or do you accept the hobbling and crippling and restriction of free movement of women by culturally sanctioned fear? How can you accept a society where this restriction is so accepted?” Why aren’t all the women imprisoned by fear out demanding that this situation be changed?

I keep thinking of a newspaper story and TV report about an assaulted woman. The police or “authorities” say with much head shaking, “These women who get assaulted always think, ‘it won’t happen to me.’” The implication is that these sentiments are self deluding and stupid and in some way this stupidity led to their demise. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, surely the prison cell. Actually, those sentiments are perfectly rational. Percentage wise the odds are overwhelmingly against being victimized when one considers the thousands of women who do venture out. And yet society myth approves and rewards the sick irrational woman’s attitude of feeling, “if I venture out I’ll be assaulted.” Thus, once again, society condemns the rational healthy woman who ventures out and approves the unhealthy irrational fearful woman who hides in her prison of fear. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, surely the prison cell of fear.

As if to add to the confusion, there’s been a series of 7 rapes in Casper within the past two months, women from 16 to 74, cutting screens, posing as one wanting to use the telephone, climbing in unlocked windows, etc. I fear that the woman who let him in to use the phone will be made to feel guilty, stupid, or naïve, and that’s infuriating because women are already crippled by the sense of obligatory fear that society hangs on us. Just as there’s no way a president can be protected against a determined assassin, a woman should not be expected to imprison herself for life to foil society’s lunatics. The exercise is futile anyway, me 880 miles alone on the road, and the poor old lady in the nursing home gets attacked. There’s no logic. There’s no sane or healthy way to protect against insanity.

Entering Casper:
Glenda, a sexy blond grandmother, bursting with youth, swirling with effective energy, going many directions, editor of the woman’s page, stopped me along the highway in a wonderful assertive flurry and taped my story. She drove away only to return shortly to insist I go to lunch with her. She loaded my impossibly large golf cart into her impossibly small Pinto Ford car, by sheer force of will, unconcerned about the massive grease spots she got on her super pantsuit. She escorted a disheveled and tattered me into the plush restaurant where a beautiful gray haired (hair in a bun, I think I shall copy that dignity some day) woman waited for her interrupted interview with Glenda. Suddenly I was in the frenzied exciting tempo of the east, vibrant people pushing their exploding, expanding interests. Later Glenda dropped me off at her tiny cottage. How I loved the careless tumble and jumble of plants and books and warm pictures and bric-a brac and country fabric and, most endearing, an over-stuffed refrigerator smelling distinctly sour (no matter, just keep the door shut!).

Another reporter from a rival paper arrived. It seems there’s quite a competitive scramble to “get” me, two papers, radio, TV and I’m feeling that I should go on the radio talk show but that my battery is about drained---“trail”? “Donner Party?” “duh…” (blank look). I’ll probably skip the radio show, but maybe that’s being neurotic.

Inspiration
Getting Ready
Leaving Home
First Steps
Coping
Kansas
Nebraska
Along The Platte
North Platte
Wyoming
Family
South Pass
Utah
Great Salt Desert
Nevada
Humboldt
Reno
California
Epilogue