Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
With Sue’s 16 chemotherapy sessions at Rocky Mountain Oncology, additional tests and treatments, and now physical therapy at Elevate Rehab, along with my mom’s four-month stay at Westward Heights, we’ve been to Lander more often in the last eight months than I’ve made in the previous 54 years.
Your mind wanders when you drive a route this often. Many call it “windshield time.” I had the experience when I commuted to Shoshoni 200+ times a year for 15 years, had it again on the 66-mile round trip, 240 days a year for four years to Ethete, and even during the much shorter commute to Arapahoe in the final three years of my educational career.
The strange thing about commuting is that things suddenly appear that you’ve never seen before. They’ve always been there, you just don’t notice.
It’s like buying a new car. You can drive for decades and never notice a GMC pickup, but once you buy one, they’re suddenly everywhere. It’s a type of “same state awareness” that I studied in my psychology minor at the University of Wyoming.
Sometimes it has nothing to do with awareness and everything to do with a sense of history.
Each time I approach Hudson from Riverton, whether on 17 Mile then to the road below Araphoe School or on the main highway, I spot the old iron railroad bridge over the Popo Agie east of Hudson. My mind wanders back in time over a century, and I visualize a coal-powered locomotive with a huge plume of coal smoke and steam blasting out of the cylinders pulling into the busy railyard in the little coal mining town.
It is an era long departed, but one that fascinates me.
The same held true when I’d go pronghorn or mule deer hunting near the forgotten town of Node, east of Lusk. It was once a thriving community of 1500 people. A town that grew along the tracks of the Chicago North Western, just like Moneta, Shoshoni, Riverton, Arapahoe, Hudson, and finally Lander.
A massive tornado in the 1920s destroyed Node, a tragic weather event that destroyed much of the town, ended the lives of several people, and laid waste to the surrounding farms and ranches.
If you’re a student of history, you can see it everywhere, and sense it when you walk along a path that others tread long ago.
The summer after I graduated from the University of Wyoming, I worked tying iron and pouring concrete at the Riverton Water Treatment Plant near the Central Wyoming College Campus. As I hung off a 25-foot-high wall, tying rebar before we clamped on forms and poured the walls, I had trepidations about my upcoming educational career.
I was making more money in the three months between graduation and reporting to football practice, working construction, than I would in a full year of teaching and coaching at Lusk. It was a time for reflection, and I almost turned down my contract.
It was one of those forks in the road we all experience in life. Making the correct run made all the difference. Yes, Robert Frost was onto something universal with his classic poem, “The Road Not Taken.”
In early August, just before football season began, I made a trip back east to Washington, D.C., with stops at Martha’s Vineyard and finally, Gettysburg.
It was at Gettysburg that I realized I’d made the correct decision to become a history teacher and coach.
I met my longtime friend Scott Hartwig in Gettysburg. He graduated a year before me with a degree in parks and recreation. Scott wanted to work at the Gettysburg National Battlefield as a ranger and interpreter, but he had to wait. He took a job at the nearby Eisenhower Memorial and waited for a position to open on the battlefield.
On a Sunday afternoon, with no one else in the park, Scott and I walked the battlefield. We stood where George Pickett assembled his men for the most insane, disastrous charge in American History.
We walked up Little Round Top and found the same woods, the very same trees, that grew 117 years before when Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th Maine held their ground against a much larger Confederate force. The 20th Maine held the ground, won the battle, and prevented the rebels from flanking the Union Army, saving the Union in the process.
All was well with two college-aged friends until we approached the unique rock formation that forms “Devil’s Den.” Devil’s Den was the location of some of the most vicious fighting of the battle, a place where raw brutality and hand-to-hand combat decided the day.
I was 23 years old, Scott 24; we grew silent as we felt the presence of the place and the history it held.
My ancestors fought here as part of an Arkansas Brigade under General John Bell Hood’s Texans.
Scott’s ancestors were there as well, part of the New York 101st, the “Iron Brigade.”
We both felt the weight of history, of our shared heritage and the sacrifice men our age and younger made at this spot five generations ago.
After a few moments, Scott broke the silence. “I would have killed you,” he said.
“No, no way, we won this one,” I replied.
Yes, Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia lost the battle of Gettysburg, and ultimately the Civil War, but those boys from Arkansas and Texas won the fight at Devil’s Den.
History surrounds us; it’s a tangible thing to me, it’s a tangible thing to many people who hold history near to their hearts.
That locomotive pulling into Hudson disappeared almost a century ago, replaced by more modern diesel locomotives, and the tracks were ultimately removed as well, the victim of improved highways, larger trucks, and centralized shipping.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t important. Every step towards the future leaves a track in time, a track that some of us relish, while others blindly walk by, ignoring what once was and worrying only about the present.
I’ll take the sense of history every time.
My great friend Chico Her Many Horses shares that same sense of time and place. If you ever have the chance to speak with him, take it. His views on the past are remarkable, the stuff of legend in a man who knows the value of people and their struggle and triumph over time.
Yes, sometimes my mind wanders.