Wyoming is weird

Wyoming is a weird place.  Not Portland weird, or Austin weird.  Wyoming is weird in its need to be anything but weird.  Of course, a state isn’t a sentient being; it can’t need anything; it can’t even really be weird, or not weird.  When I use “it,” I’m of course referring to the people, or the culture, or…soul…of this place.  But I’m going to keep talking about this place as if it is a living thing, because, for me, it is.  The place and the people and how they think and believe, and behave are intrinsically linked, at least in my mind.  My fiction and art are based on this idea.

I grew up here; it should be the stereotypical story of a kid who was born and raised in Wyoming—it should be what someone meeting me would expect:  My family owned (if, by “owned” we mean that the bank owned the ranch, and therefore, us) a small cattle operation in the southeast of the state.  I was a “ranch kid.”  The myth of Wyoming is that ranching is the backbone of the economy.  It might have been once, for a millisecond of the state’s history, but mostly ranching is something people do until they find a better way to make a living, or decide they like living in debt so much that they just keep doing it.  The real moneymakers here are coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium (off and on).  The engine of Wyoming is in extraction and pollution.  I love this place.  I had to get away from it for a while. I came back.  I hate it a lot of the time these days—we are the Trumpiest of the Trump states right now.  And I still love it. 

It is weird because the people here say that they don’t want to call attention to themselves, or at least, they didn’t used to want that. They want to claim to follow some kind of cowboy ethic (which, as far as I’ve ever been able to determine isn’t really a thing other than a kind of ‘leave us be and we’ll leave you be’ rhetoric). They claim that there’s some kind of generations long history here that has created a culture that just wants to be left alone:  a kind of western version of American exceptionalism, I guess. 

I don’t really enjoy people, as a rule, so there is something in the Wyoming myth of individualism, or isolationism even, that appeals to me.  I mostly want to be left to do want I want to do, which I guess does make me very much a Wyoming product.  I like living in the least populated state in the country; I like our big blue sky and mostly clean air (I’ll talk about global warming and wildfires in another post, maybe); I like not fighting traffic to get across town; I like the space, both physical and psychic, that can be found here.

But.

It’s small-minded individualism. It’s not exceptionalism at all.  People don’t keep out of others’ business.  It’s supposed to be the Equality State (I’ll explain how that happened so you understand the hypocrisy that started the whole shebang in a later post), but women are not paid nor treated equally here; the racism and nativism meant to protect the so-called white majority here is rampant throughout the state, even in the tiny corners of liberalism.  It’s weird in its quiet ugliness.