Red Politics And Blue In Wyoming

An Introduction To The State

I’ve spent many years repairing windmills with my father-in-law at his Four Mile Ranch. The mills pump water to the surface for cattle and sheep to drink. There are nineteen of these windmills on this broken patch of land, which looks west to the Bighorn Mountains and east to Powder River. The repair is mostly grunt-and-sweat labor done by hand, though we’ve got an old rig truck that we use to pull the galvanized pipe out of the deep wells. At the top of each well tower is a platform where a single person can stand to work. The two-by-six floorboards are saturated with oil and grease, and I have to twist around like a contortionist to get at some of the windmill parts. In high winds the fantail brakes on the mills sometimes slip, and the assembly swings around and hits me. I wear a heavy belt clipped to the tower so that I can’t be knocked to the ground, though I still get pushed off the platform once in a while and dangle there a moment or two before I can scramble back up along the belt line. When the winds are calm and I’m changing the oil in a wellhead, there’s time to stare out into space and think while the oil quietly flows into the gear-box reservoir. After a day of such work, I’m worn out and fall into bed early. I close my eyes, and for a few minutes, before I drift off into what I think of as practice for dying, I’m inexplicably happy.

In the brief Wyoming summer, my wife and I sit in the shade of an apple tree that I planted too close to our deck, at an outdoor table made from the cover to the old coal chute. We don’t heat with coal anymore, but instead use natural gas and logs from the cottonwood trees along the banks of Four Mile Creek. The whole family goes there in September: my wife and our daughter, my mother-in-law and father-in-law, my sister-in-law, and my two nephews. We park a six-horse trailer beside the creek and set up a thirty-six-inch circular saw driven by the power take-off of our ancient tractor, then spend the day dragging storm-downed branches over to the saw to cut them, throwing the cut wood into the horse trailer. At the end of the day we haul the wood to town, toss it back out of the trailer, and stack it in the garage and shed. After that, I sweep the trailer clean for the horses. When the work’s finished, I pull two apples off the tree beside the deck. This early in the fall, they’re just starting to turn red and are still a little sour. I give an apple to one of the horses and eat the second apple myself.

I’ve been thinking lately about the colors red and blue. One October morning, a few weeks before the last presidential election, I was shoveling deep, wet snow off the deck. The trees still hadn’t dropped all their leaves, and the snow weighed so heavily on the branches that some gave up and snapped off. One tree split in two, the downed half nearly filling the yard. In a hurry to clear the snow, I somehow cut my left hand while shoveling. When I came back in, the hand warmed up, and the cut began to throb. I took off my glove and saw bright red blood smeared over my skin.

My life in Wyoming has many brilliant blues: the sky as it stretches down to touch the mountain peaks; the cold water of Meadowlark Lake; the shirt my mother-in-law gave me for my birthday. But on televised maps following the 2004 election, the great square of Wyoming was shown all red, among a sea of other red states.

When I first moved to Wyoming, long before I’d ever worked on a windmill, I was invited to participate in a statewide literary conference that included an open-mike poetry reading. Anyone could sign up to read for five minutes before an audience of fellow writers. The first reader was a white woman in her seventies who walked slowly, her bearing upright and dignified. She explained that she was the reincarnation of an eighteenth-century Indian maiden whose spirit had given her the poems she was about to read. She turned in a circle, showing off the buckskin fringe on her dress, then closed her eyes and began to chant. When she’d finished, a young woman dressed completely in black approached the lectern. Her short, spiked hair was streaked with green, and her jewelry appeared to be made of extruded aluminum. She announced that she was a feminist, activist lesbian poet, then read a poem of “social outrage,” during which she repeatedly lunged forward as if she might leap into the audience. Now and again, she pushed her glasses up on her nose. Next came a middle-aged man wearing bluejeans, a cowboy hat, hand-tooled boots, and a belt buckle that was, as we say in Wyoming, “as big as a dinner plate.” He read a rhymed cowboy poem concerning stock tanks, coffee on winter mornings, and the good old days when people took care of each other.

The open-mike session went on like this for two hours. Everyone listened respectfully and, it seemed to me, happily to poems they must have detested. Or did they like each other’s work? In the cities where I’ve lived, the cowboy poets would have had their cowboy-poetry gathering, and the angry young lesbian poets their angry-young-lesbian poetry event. The reincarnated Indians would have met at a private weekend workshop. In the city you’d need free drinks just to get these people in a room together, and then you’d need a cop to do crowd control. The congeniality those poets showed at that reading is one of the best features of Wyoming. Here’s my point: Coding our states red or blue according to whether they have given their electoral-college votes to a Republican or a Democratic candidate tells us very little about the people who live there and with whom we pass our lives. This simple-minded labeling is degrading. It isolates us and forces us to lead lives that are intellectually and emotionally impoverished. Worse, it is an early symptom of the thinking that led to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and to the restructuring of Baghdad into separate Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods.

I understand the tendency to generalize, but I’m impatient with it, because my experience in Wyoming has allowed me to see the strange beauty of each person. There are so few of us here that we are given the gift of being able to live this way.

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