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.
The lights were a giveaway; we’d been down this road before. After a magnificent day on Boysen Reservoir, I sat down to write this column Sunday evening around 7 pm. I finished after dark and went to look out a window while I took a 10-minute break before cleaning up the story.
On the far side of the place, a little over half a mile away, there were four sets of emergency lights flashing at the intersection of Webbwood and North 8th West.
I called my neighbor Dan who lived nearby to see what he knew. In a few minutes his wife Jennifer called back, “Another drunk went through your fence.”
I drove over and spoke with the Riverton police officers. The guy was hammered and doing an estimated 80 mph when he flew through the buck and rail fence before coming to a stop two hundred yards later in the middle of a swampy drainage. He wasn’t hurt, “Not a scratch,” one of the officers said.
Oh well, it’s much better than having a drunk kill a family or injure someone. Since we purchased the land in 2001, we’ve had two dozen drivers fly through the intersection and into our field. Most were drunk, a few were teenagers texting and not paying attention, and a couple slid through on icy roads.
This time, the drunk took out the directional road sign the county installed 10 years ago, after another series of three drunks in two months had me switching from a wire fence to a buck and rail, since they can be repaired much quicker. Maybe some concrete barriers would solve the problem, it seems to have on the other end of Webbwood where it meets Smith Road.
Time will tell.
The world is a different place just before dawn. As a young man, the evening often didn’t begin until 10 pm, but those days are gone. In their place is the inevitable onslaught of early rising that first arises in early middle age and just seems to get worse over time.
One morning in the teacher’s lounge before school in Shoshoni I stopped for my usual cup of coffee. My day was beginning earlier and earlier. I couldn’t sleep past 5:30 am. When I mentioned it to my friends Harold Bailey, Jim Yager and Tim Ervin, I got a rounding chorus of laughter from all three guys.
In near unison, they said, “You’re getting older, welcome to the club.”
Now I’m lucky to make it to 4:15 am before I’m up and ready for the day. There are benefits to these changing hours of consciousness.
I get my best writing done between 4 and 6 am most mornings. As the sun rises earlier each day with the approach of summer, those hours have moved as well. Lately, it’s 3:30 to 5:30 am. When it gets light enough to see the road, and for cars and trucks to see me, I’m off on morning walks. I used a headlamp through the winter months when the sun slept in.
If I time my walks just right, I can walk to North 8th West and see the flashing red stoplight on Main Street about a mile to the south of the intersection with Sunset. A brisk 15 minutes later, and I’ve covered a mile along Sunset and can still see the red light flashing, only this time it’s at the College View intersection.
Part of the morning ritual is to listen for the 5:35 am United Flight from Riverton Regional Airport to take off. Some mornings the little jet springs into the sky directly over my head as I walk along the section of College View that remains gravel, but on other days I can hear the jet ascend but can’t see it until it’s much higher in the air after taking off to the west before turning southeast towards Denver.
On a pre-dawn walk a couple of weeks ago I’d just shut the headlamp off as I walked south on College View. There is a single cottonwood tree along the east side of the road about halfway along the gravel portion of the road. I was just enjoying the advancing orange of sunrise beginning to erase the purple tint of the eastern sky when the air exploded around me. No, it wasn’t anything sinister, unless you consider a pheasant rooster flying from zero to 60 in a second menacing.
The big rooster flushed from the roadside of the barbed wire fence encircling the field and nearly knocked my cap off as he broke just a couple of feet over my head. It was fabulous.
Sunday morning as I walked south on Major Avenue near the Riverton Middle School the world was silent. There isn’t any traffic at 5 am on a Sunday morning along my route. Breaking the silence was the plaintive call of a lone Canada goose. Canada geese normally fly in pairs, but his honker was alone, and loudly calling out to his missing partner, or perhaps her entire flock as it headed north at warp speed a few dozen yards over the prairie dog town across from the school. Just another joy of the early morning, this one with a soundtrack.
Many anthropologists speculate that man first learned to create music by listening to the songs of the birds around them. The first flutes mimicked birds. Eastern Native American hunters could call in ducks, geese, and turkeys with just their hands and voices, or in some cases with just a blade of grass.
I’ve used reeds, turkey boxes and calls to attract ducks, geese, and turkeys over the years. Occasionally with success, but just as often as naught, with the birds kicking it into high gear and going in the other direction.
The one “bird” I hate to hear, is the one my wife and I hear most often. It’s the thudding sound of heavy rotors flying in from the east. A few minutes later we hear the high-pitched whine of jet turbine engines as yet another helicopter airlifts some unfortunate soul for a quick flight to Casper.
The helipad is a busy place at all hours of the day but is most noticeable to me on those early morning walks. I’ve been blasted a few times by the wind and dust of a chopper dropping onto the helipad along Sunset and just as often by the blast as the pilot guns the engine for a quick dust off before returning to Natrona County.
It’s a service I’m glad we have, but I hope the steel skeleton rising from the earth on North Federal can abate some of those flights once the new hospital is completed.
Sunday, I spent a fabulous day on Boysen Reservoir with my son Brian and our mutual friend Trapper. The only sound you could hear were other boats roaring across the glasslike surface of the lake, or the distant rumble of semi-trucks rolling along the highway.
Interspersed with these gasoline and diesel guzzling machines was the call of the seagull, the unique cry of the loon, the same plaintive honking of geese, along with the silent, wingbeats of ducks sprinting off the water in front of us. It was magical.
Along the bluffs lining the reservoir we heard the strange sound of pigeons as their voices were altered by the cracks in the rocks where they were nesting.
Birds can’t be ventriloquists, but these pigeons were doing their best by calling inside small caves where they were nesting and letting the sound escape through the cracks connecting those private chambers to the outside world.
It was another unique sound of nature.
The early morning chill, or the heat of the afternoon all have their moments. As a slightly aging teenager, I relish the sound of the morning.
It’s the herald call to another day on earth.