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.
Remember Jay and the Techniques? Odds are you don’t. If you’re a fan of classic rock from the early ’60s, you might recognize the title, “Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie.”
I’ve grown apples and pumpkins, and I know a few people with green enough thumbs to grow a few peaches here in Fremont County, but regularly harvesting these three was something we once did when I lived with my parents in Arkansas and later California.
This isn’t about gardening, but rather the image gardening often brings from urban dwellers who look down on the simple life here in the great vastness of the “Flyover Country.”
It’s a popular metaphor in films, since filming first began early in the last century. The country bumpkin comes to the big city and is overwhelmed by everything he sees. The simpleton is amazed by the most mundane experiences of the stylized urban dwellers.
The truth, as usual when it comes to Hollywood, is far removed. In fact, it’s often reversed. The city dweller is the one lost when they travel to the isolated world we call home.
Hallmark flipped the table with their endless romance tales of the big city lawyer who returns home to her little town and falls in love with the (fill in the blank…baker, farmer, fireman, lumberjack) and lives happily ever after in the place she once ridiculed.
Many of us can’t avoid feeling a bit contemptuous, a bit superior, and a bit better in every aspect of life than the denizens of metropolitan America.
Though Denver is barely in the top 30 of cities in the United States, it is the closest thing to a metropolitan area for us poor, isolated victims living in Wyoming. Each time I make the descent from Cheyenne or Laramie, I pity the people forced to live in this modern version of rats in a cage.
A good guess would estimate that most Wyomingites feel the same way. Yes, we need metropolitan areas to produce the things we can’t make for ourselves out here in the wilderness. With UPS, FedEx, and North Park just a phone call away, and Amazon orders taking just a click on your phone, there aren’t many things we or a local retailer can’t get delivered in just a few days.
In short, we have the best of both worlds: access to the same material possessions that make up Madison Avenue’s version of the great American life and the opportunity to actually live it here in Fremont County.
It wasn’t always this way. In the late 19th century, living on the Great Plains or in the Rockies was a matter of a constant struggle to survive. There weren’t many amenities, especially for women trapped inside homes made of prairie sod, crawling with spiders and snakes. The work never ended, and the isolation was similar to solitary confinement, only with the added element of a room full of needy infants and small children.
When a family had a successful crop or the chance to make a little extra cash, the railroad quickly ate the profit with shipping costs designed to keep the farmer barely in business, but to never let him get ahead.
Life was tough.
Enterprising ranchers in Eastern Wyoming trailed their herds just across the border to a place called Coffee Siding, located between Van Tassell, Wyoming, and Harrison, Nebraska. The owner of the Coffee Ranch built the siding so his Wyoming neighbors could skip the added shipping cost depots along the Fremont Elkhorn and Missouri Railroads (later the Chicago and North Western) were charging Wyoming ranchers. There was nothing the railroad could do since raising prices at one depot resulted in raising them at all the others, and they depended on the Omaha Stockyards as much as the Wyoming ranchers did.
The Union and Central Pacific railroads met at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869, but the rapid pace of construction forced an additional three years of repairs before the transcontinental railroad became a day-to-day reality.
American industry always relies on the creativity of its citizens. With this coast-to-coast shipping industry finally a reality, a young man from Monroe, Wisconsin, came up with a unique idea. Aaron Montgomery Ward found suppliers and created the world’s first mail-order company, Montgomery Ward. “Monkey Wards’ as many people came to call it, brought the latest fashions, appliances, and even cars, tractors, and machinery to the people living far away in the hinterland.
The company brought rural America on an even par with urban America for the first time in our history. Montgomery Ward existed from its inception in 1872 until it closed in 2001. Another American innovation, the Internet, finally put the catalog giant out of business.
Expedience, impulse, and impatience can’t take the place of making something with your own hands. It’s a feeling many modern Americans will never know. An experience common to their grandparents and previous generations.
One Sunday, Sue prepared a meal unique to rural America. She fried a large filet, taken from a Rainbow trout I caught in the Wind River Canyon earlier in the week. We had zucchini from my dad’s garden. He always had a bountiful vegetable crop, and dessert was an apple pie she made from apples I harvested, peeled, and quartered from one of the trees in our yard.
You could do that in Detroit, Atlanta, or Phoenix, but the odds would be against you. In Fremont County, we take it for granted.
There is something special in eating beef you raised yourself, taking eggs from your own hens, buying a bag of potatoes grown by a neighbor, or getting 50 pounds of pinto beans raised just down the road. Raising your own food is the essence of the good life.
As a teenager, we milked our own cows, separated the whole milk into cream, and made our own butter. I became adept at rolling a quart jar of cream with one foot while reading a book. When the jar started to bounce and not roll smoothly, the milk fat had solidified into pale, white butter. I always added a little salt, but that was just personal taste.
If the federal transportation system were to shut down tomorrow, if all the trucks, trains, ships, and planes were sidelined for as few as three days, food riots would consume America’s cities.
The food supply in America’s metropolitan areas is so slim that it has just a 72-hour window before food supplies run out. The shipping industry is America’s lifeline, and the United States has the most efficient food supply system among the hundreds of nations on the planet.
Wealth was once measured by the number of cattle in your fields, the fullness of your granaries, and the vastness of the food in your personal storehouse.
Money has replaced the need to grow your own food, but a ripple in supply could end that in the wink of an eye.
Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie; why not?