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.
It didn’t feel much like five days before Christmas when I drove out to the J J Ranch to write a story on the Corbett ranching family last Friday morning. There was the usual wind on top of Beaver Rim, aside from July and August, when isn’t it windy on the rim?
The trip from Sweetwater Station to Jeffrey City was uneventful aside from the weather which was more along the lines of early May than late December.
Global warming? Maybe, maybe not, but it is on pace to be the warmest December on record and portends a dry summer. Hopefully not as dry as the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, or the “Little Dust Bowl” of the 1950s, but who knows? The mountains aren’t exactly white with snow and it’s not going to be a “White Christmas” this year.
I never experienced snow at Christmas until my parents flew us from San Francisco International Airport to Riverton in 1968.
We landed in Salt Lake City, then followed the highway over South Pass. I can still remember the headlights of cars below us on the frozen ground and the crisscrossed Christmas lights on Main Street in Riverton as we approached the airport.
Louisianna doesn’t get snow, neither does Puerto Rico, the first two places I lived. Though I enjoyed the day off from school in second grade when a half inch fell on our house outside Blytheville Air Force Base in northeast Arkansas, it wasn’t at Christmas and I was barely able to make a tiny snowman before it all melted.
We’ve had some wing dingers of snow during the holidays over the years, but our big storms almost always arrive either in October or March and April.
There were many years when we should have had track season in January with 50-degree temps, no snow or wind rather than the howling blizzards that awaited us few months later.
SiriusXM is almost always playing in one of our vehicles, usually 60s, 70s, Yacht Rock or some other easy listening rock station.
Around the Ice Slough, “The Year of the Cat,” Al Stewart’s monster hit of 1976 came on. As happens with many of us, I was transported back to being a 19-year-old college student. There was no XM in those days, and FM was spotty at best with low powered, line of site reception.
I listened to KVOW or KOVE until the static became too much, then grabbed KTWO for most of the rest of my trips to Laramie.
It’s been almost 50 years since I first heard the song, and while many things have changed, many haven’t. Like most older people, I wonder where the years went. Inside I’m still 21, at times still 16, but the exterior tells another story.
The mind is a strange thing, and for some reason, my thoughts turned to the film “Casablanca” as Stewart’s classic filled the Terrain with sounds of another era.
It’s not that big a jump, when the opening lyrics played it was easy to see if you’re a fan of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime
Peter Lorre always played a creepy, sinister little guy with a voice that was made for narrating the villain in a cartoon. Many people remember the classic lines of this 1942 classic set in war torn Morrocco with the Nazis closing in.
“We’ll always have Paris” is one memorable line, but the final phrase, “Here’s looking at you kid,” is perhaps the most famous.
I like another line uttered by French Moroccan Police Chief Captain Louis Renault after Rick, played by Bogart, shoots a Nazi officer to allow his girlfriend Ilsa to escape on the last plane to the United States.
“Major Strasser has been shot! Round up the usual suspects!” says Renault.
Rounding up the usual suspects is the modern mantra of American politics. If a bridge collapses, a dam breaks, an ocean liner capsizes or a building floods the first question is never about how the victims of these accidents are faring, but who is to blame.
The blame is always directed at the “usual suspects.” The suspects are always the other party in our idiotic, fractured, over-politicized nation. It must be the Democrats at fault, nope, it must be those right wing nutjobs.
It is exasperating.
But what wasn’t exasperating, but rather exhilarating, was this little mental journey back in time prodded by a song written a half-century ago.
It was doubly insightful to me, since I was on my way to interview a family about a ranch that was established in 1892, another trip to an even more distant past.
Before Spotify and Amazon Music which allow you to hear any song, ever written from any era for a small monthly fee, we had to collect records, tapes, CDs or download illegal MP3s from Chinese servers to listen to sometimes obscure songs from our youth.
I was looking for the CD of Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat back in 1997 in Denver, on a day when the springtime temperature in the Mile High City was warmer than Los Angeles that afternoon. The DJ I was listening to on a classic Denver oldies station couldn’t get over how it was warmer than the usually sunny Inland Empire that afternoon.
I found a record shop in southeast Denver that was a marvel. I wanted to buy a CD, and would have settled for an LP, but he didn’t have either one in stock. He did have an 8-track of “Year of the Cat.”
For $38 I purchased my last 8-track tape.
I still have it somewhere, but I don’t have an 8-track player anymore, and I’m not likely to hit eBay to buy one.
That was the story last Friday morning on the highway to the once booming uranium town of Jeffrey City. So much history, so many memories and so many connections, all tied into one random song playing on the radio.
It could be the soundtrack of our lives, not the song, but the process.
Here’s to a bright, happy, family-oriented Christmas for everyone. It doesn’t matter if we have snow or not, it’s the people, not the weather that make the holiday.
Merry Christmas.