Why-oh-Wyoming
- Oscar the Pooch
- Sep 22
- 9 min read
“HOLY CRAP, GET YOUR BUTTS OUT OF HERE BEFORE THE COUNTY CLOSES!” the Witch continued as the Wagon reached freeway speed. “AND DON’T YOU DARE COME BACK TO COLORADO!” she shouted before changing the subject. “Welcome to Wyoming!”
Back when the world was free and Mom believed she could predict the future, she aimed the farthest point in our trip at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. More than anything else, she was visiting for the punchline. We watched a movie starring the Tower once, and Mom thought it would be punny in a dad-joke way to spend a day searching for reasons to repeat the tagline, “This means something. This is important.”
As the Colorado border closed like the Red Sea in the Wagon’s back window, I searched for something meaningful and important in my first impression of Wyoming. The land couldn’t decide if it wanted to be prairie or high mountains, so it picked both. Prairie swallowed the mountains until only their sharp tips pierced the sheet of grassland, leaving the chopped-off peaks looking like a collection of busts in a museum. The sky sagged so low that anyone taller than Mom might bump their head on it.
I looked for a landmark, but my eyes slipped over the scenery like paws on a hardwood floor. The boogeyvirus would have to plan its campaign very carefully to go viral in a place like this. Except for the freeway, the empty land must have looked the same as it did to the first wagoneers a million years ago. The few hard-scrabble buildings stayed far apart out of habit. The windows were no darker than anywhere else we’d been, but here the empty car kennels were molting their pavement and hearty lawns grew in the cracks. Wood covered the windows and barred the doors, as if guarding against something more powerful than a hungry person in search of a hot dog.
“I see why you weren’t worried about the boogeyvirus here,” I said. “This place looks like it’s been abandoned since back when this was still America.”
Mom shuddered. “I can’t tell if it’s locked down because of the quarantine, for the offseason, or for good.”
Something else was missing from the landscape, too: People, and the things they leave behind. Other than the occasional billboard left over from The Before, the only human things here in the attic of the west were endless wire fences as long as the freeway. The fence was more of a notion than a thing, marking the line where the freeway litter ended and the wilder-ness began. It was practically invisible except where ragged plastic bags stuck to its thorns and stood straight out in the wind like battle flags.
“What in the world could a little fence like that do in all this emptiness?” I asked.
“Funny you mention it. Barbed wire fences played a bigger part in American history than people realize,” Professor Mom professed. “Barbed wire is how the pioneers brought private property to the west.”
“A puny fence did that?” I asked.
“Think about it, ranches go for miles. How are you going to block off an area that large?”
“Make a fence that someone can’t just walk through by ducking,” I suggested.
“Out of what? Wood? Where are you gonna find enough trees for that much fence?”
I checked out all the windows, but there were no trees left among all the grass and beheaded mountains. “Why bother? How many mailmans could there be in a place like this?”
“Not mailmen, cowboys. Before the pioneers came along, pretty much everything was public land. Cowboys and Indians alike roamed the western territories camping and… I don’t know, prospecting, or beaver hunting, or whatever. When the pioneers claimed the land, there was no way to protect their fields from the cowboys’ hungry cattle. Barbed wire gave farmers a cheap way to protect their crops from intruders. Cowboys had to walk their herds around the fences until there were so many barriers that long-distance travel became impractical. It’s just one more way that keeping strangers out shaped the country.”
I was about to point out that this wasn’t America anymore until I realized that this new not-America would probably be even more into fences.
“Look! There’s a wooden fence,” I said. And what a fence it was! It wasn’t wide, but it stood tall as a house and had barely a crack in it, so not even the tiniest cow could slip through.
“That’s not a fence, it’s a windbreak,” Mom corrected.
Ah. So it was supposed to stop the smell when someone broke wind.
But the fence was only about as wide as a billboard, not nearly big enough to stop all the wind in Wyoming. White dirt piled on one side, but I couldn’t tell if it was there to help the fence block the wind or help the wind knock down the fence. You could forgive the fence for thinking it was winning. The white dirt was packed so tightly into the gaps between planks that not even a puff could get through. But the fence tipped under the pressure of a winter’s worth of white dirt and wind. One determined gust could change everything.
Something about that little wall trying to catch all the wind in the sky while holding the weight of the world on its back reminded me of Mom.
“Is that what the veterinarian’s muzzles are for?” I asked. “To make the air private property?”
“I suppose. But air needs to flow like everything else. If you’re always rebreathing your own air, you suffocate eventually.”
With each state making its own rules about who was and wasn’t supposed to breathe their air, it probably wouldn’t be long before someone started building walls between them. I wasn’t sure if walls would stop people, or air, or ideas from crossing, but it seemed like something humans would try anyway. I didn’t ask Mom about it. Some questions were more fun when you didn’t know the answer.
At long last, Devil’s Tower sprouted out of the cowlands, giving my drifting eyes something to hang onto. When a hill shaped like a stump pokes out of the ground where it doesn’t belong, it’s called a butt. The southwestern butts in Utah and Arizona are all chewed up like a half-spent bone, but Devil’s Tower burst out of Wyoming like it was still reaching for the sky. It was the most magnificent butt I’d ever seen.
I was drawn to it.
“Can we get closer?” I asked.
Mom leaned forward to better see the future. “Let’s see.”
The Wagon turned and the Witch announced, “In three miles, you will arrive at your destination.”
The butt hooked onto Mom’s eyeballs and pulled them up from the road. When her eyes could roll no higher, the butt kept pulling her toward the front window for a better view until her chest was pressed to the driving wheel.
“It’s bigger than I thought,” she said. “I can see why people would think it means something; that it’s important.”
As she often does when she’s inspired, Mom asked the Witch what the internet had to say about Devil’s Tower. Just in case there was any news about UFOs or something.
“They just closed it this morning, you fools!” the Witch cackled.
Mom tore her eyes from the sky. “Seriously? It’s in the middle of nowhere and 3 miles around. Does it really get that many visitors that they can’t stay 6 feet apart? Sheesh.”
“Wasn’t that what the documentary was about?” I reminded her. “How people came here from all over the country to ride in the UFO? Spaceships are public transportation, so they’re closed.”
“Documentary?” She looked confused.
“Yeah. The one where the sculptor guy and the painter lady go on a road trip to Devil’s Tower. They play the alien mating song outside the spaceship, remember? Then the aliens accept the man as their own.”
“You mean Close Encounters?” she asked. “I can see how a situation like this would bring out the conspiracy theorists, I guess. Especially now that everyone has so much free time.”
“Yeah. I bet the first thing everyone thought when they had to quar-unseen was that they should head to Wyoming. Good thing we got a head start.”
“Maybe they’ll only close the visitor’s center and gift shop, not the trails.” Mom took a moment to appreciate the wisdom of her lawgic. “They can’t close nature, right?”
“We’ll never know if we don’t check. It’s probably a test. Only the bold get to ride the spaceship.”
The Wagon slowed to introduce itself at the entrance tardis, but there was wood in the window where a ranger should be. The Wagon nosed closer to the closed gate as Mom and I searched for a clue about what to do next.
A line of knives stuck out of the pavement outside Mom’s window, threatening to cut trespassers to ribbons. Outside the copilot’s window, a fence ran through the prairie in an unbroken line until it disappeared into the horizon. Between where the tardis gate ended and the fence began, there was just enough room for a Wagon to slip through. The only thing blocking the secret passageway between fence and gate was a cone with a sign sticking out of its neck hole.
“What does the sign say?” I asked.
“It says that the park is closed…” Mom’s voice trailed off as a thought interrupted her reading. In the same tone as she might say, and it just might work! she read, “… except for deliveries!”
“If a dog wanders into a park and no one’s there to see him, does he go to the pound?” I agreed.
Mom and I had a history of breaking in when we were locked out. Our rap sheet included “not noticing” when the Wagon “accidentally” drifted off the road right where a locked gate happened to be, and “thinking it was an entrance” when a sand doom spilled over a fence, giving us a secret passageway into a closed park. You can’t close nature, after all.
I studied the gap between the gate and the fence again, looking for a trap. It was big enough to drive a truck through. There were no knives, no invincible barricades, only a puny traffic cone guarding the secret passage. The coast was clear. Breaking in would be easier than the last time, when there were so many rocks and bushes in the way.
“This is gonna be a cinch,” I said. “Do you think we need delivery disguises, or will the mailman van be enough?”
“I don’t know if we should.” Mom looked puzzled. She’d never heard anything like that come out of her own mouth before.
“What do you mean? This road is healthy and strong, not broken like the one outside Death Valley. It’s covered in pavement and everything. You’re not gonna let a little cone boss you around, are you?”
Mom’s Code said that we could trespass with a clean conscience as long as we left no trace, trespassed only on public lands, and respected the rules about safety and tidiness, even when no one was watching.
“The other times we snuck in, the parks were closed because of a government shutdown. Rules like that don’t actually protect anyone. They’re like holding your breath when you don’t get your way. I don’t mind breaking rules created by people behaving like children, but this is different. It’s one thing to commit an act of civil disobedience when nobody can get hurt, but I’m not sure this is a statement I want to make.”
