Saturday, July 31, 2021
The landscape has changed dramatically over three days. The shifting horizons play out like background characters in our family adventure comedy. Adam and I take turns driving, so when he’s at the wheel, I’m afforded the pleasure of being still and quiet while watching the countryside roll by.
The boys have been incredibly good . . . annoying at times, as all good road tripping kids ought, of course. For a brief period, all of those in the vehicle with XY chromosomes saw fit to yell out, “Corn!” when they spotted swathes of corn fields to our left and right. Do you know what the main crops of Nebraska and Wyoming are? The strategist part of my parenting brain kicked in: “Don’t react; don’t react; don’t react. You’ll only encourage them.” I gritted my teeth and gazed out the window again until the crops changed to “Hay!”
Mad props to Nebraska and Wyoming: these are two huge and beautiful states. It was a constant showcase of Andrew Wyeth landscapes: so vast and empty and bereft of humans (yay). Yet, the space is full up with the cowboy’s ennui. It’s all around, and now, at age 47, I understand a little better why my father’s mother made her yearly summer pilgrimage to Montana alone: to seek space, to be somewhere where nobody else is, and to see and make sense of oneself outside the context of other people. More on my Buddhist cowboy grandmother later, I assure you.
We stopped for the night in Rawlins, Wyoming, arriving early around 4:30 in the afternoon. That gave us time to settle in and stretch out. Oh, I can report our first non-serious injury. As we unpacked what we needed from Natasha under the hotel’s portico, the wind whipped around us and slammed the car door on Adam’s calf, leaving a rude and unsightly gash. He’s fine but refuses to apply a band-aid because, as he says, “It’s superficial; it’ll dry up.” Instinct tells me it’s because he doesn’t want to pull off a band-aid and all the leg hair attached to it.
With just under 10,000 people, Rawlins represents the ghost of small-town America’s past. The wide, main street with its four-way stop (not even a stoplight, mind you) features more closed or for rent buildings than active, open businesses. Surely, some of those closures are pandemic-related, but more likely, it’s just another symbol of America’s shifting priorities and needs. I mean, there’s a gargantuan box store just outside of town (and within eyesight of our hotel room, I might add). The store itself is practically the size of downtown Rawlins and has everything a person could need under a single roof. Perhaps it’s time to dispense with the polite fiction of a charming downtown?
American downtowns are wonderful places. I really enjoy them. They provide the theatrical backdrop and historical backbone for the people who live in and around them. And, it would seem, contemporary downtowns still represent the spirit of our nation: struggling, scrappy, and holding on, but still yearning for larger, emptier spaces.
