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.
“Nothing makes a sound in the night like the wind does, but you’re not afraid if you’re washed in the blood like I was” It’s a lyric from one of my favorite songs, “Good Ole Boys Like Me,” by Don Williams.
Though its theme is set in the American South, it fits perfectly here in life on the high desert and the foothills of the Rockies.
There is something special about the wind, especially a night wind.
As youngsters, we’d drive up from Arkansas each summer where my day was stationed at Blytheville Air Force Base and spend a glorious four weeks at my grandma and grandpa Gasser’s house.
They only had two small bedrooms, and a bunkhouse out back. In later years my cousins and I stayed in the bunkhouse, but as a little kid, it was inside.
When I was six, I slept on the couch in the living room under a wall of sliding glass windows. They’d open those windows at night for circulation, and I’d fall asleep to the lullaby of rustling leaves from the black walnut, ash, linden, and pine trees.
My grandfather was a horticulturist at heart. He had a bachelor’s degree in botany and plant taxonomy from a university in Switzerland, and he dedicated his life to growing trees not intended to thrive in our harsh climate. In the process, his yard was full of leafy, non-native trees.
Those nights as an elementary-aged kid always ended the same. I’d listen to the leaves rustling outside the open window and drop off to sleep.
I’d try to wake up early enough to catch the Cream of Weber delivery man drop off milk, cheese and butter to the little metal-covered, insulated box on the front step, but I never woke up in time.
If I was lucky, a thunderstorm would roll through and I’d get a little light show to accompany the heavier sound of branches bending, and sometimes breaking in the high winds.
The sounds were magical.
A lifetime later I was 28 years old, and teaching in a second-floor classroom in Shoshoni. That first year I taught out of a briefcase without a classroom of my own, switching rooms with each passing period to teach while the regular classroom teacher had a planning period.
One day as I taught an 8th grade algebra class, the wind was howling outside. It can reach gale force on the edge of the vast emptiness east of Boysen Reservoir, and that day was one of those windy times.
The wind can channel your thoughts, in both positive and negative directions. I remember pondering why I was there.
I’d started making almost as much money running a construction company in the summer months and building computers as I did teaching the remaining nine and was seriously considering quitting education.
The window had a view of Highway 20/26 heading east towards Casper, and the melancholy washed over me as I watched cars and trucks traveling outside amidst the blowing clouds of dust and the random tumbleweeds rolling down Main Street. I almost resigned that afternoon before basketball practice.
Growing up in Louisiana, Puerto Rico and Arkansas, the wind wasn’t an issue most of the time. It could be deadly when manifested in the hurricanes we survived on the Enchanted Isle and down in the Bayou, and the few tornadoes in Arkansas, but most of the time the days were hot, calm, and without even the slightest breeze.
The California weather was perfect, that’s why so many people live there.
Living in Fremont County, we don’t get the wind that Wyoming is widely known for. Yes, it blows occasionally, but not with the gale force you get on the wind corridor stretching from Evanston northeast to Lusk.
My first experience with truly wicked, gale-force winds came as a college student in Laramie. As my friend Larry Singletary, from Chicago often said in the morning as we got ready for class, “Damn, the hawk is flying today.”
Larry hailed from the “Windy City” on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, but the Northern Illinois “hawk” couldn’t compare to the sideways hurricanes blowing in off the plains west of the Gem City.
As the winter moved into Laramie in late August (ok, maybe mid-September) it only got worse. The wind remained at the same 40, 50, or 60 mph speed, but ice soon covered the streets, making walking to class a dangerous challenge for girls or lighter weight guys.
Groups of students would congregate outside White Hall on 15th Street waiting for the crosswalk light to turn green. Offensive and defensive linemen, living in Crane and Orr Halls or the “Flunkhouse” as we called the small freshman football bunkhouse, would sometimes serve as anchors for girls and foreign exchange students as the wind howled across the ice.
Convoys of kids hanging onto the backpacks of the big Cowboy linemen trudged across the ice to firmer footing on the sidewalks near the Commerce and Industry College. A day didn’t go by that we didn’t get a good laugh as some guy was hit by a gust and slid backward across the street, slipping and sliding in a vain attempt to get footing.
I wonder why Wyoming has trouble recruiting athletes from California, Arizona, Texas, and the deep south?
I’ve been around the sun a few times since those days, but I still enjoy the wind at night.
When we built our house in 1995, there were only two tall pine trees planted by my grandfather back in the 1950s on the place, and a single ash tree to the north of them.
The yard is now full of cottonwood, ash, apple, pear, and apricot trees, with a few elms that sprang up where nothing else would grow.
The sound on a warm summer night when we have the windows open in our second-floor bedroom is as magical as it was six decades ago.
City dwellers talk about using white noise to help them get to sleep. It used to be a television when a station went off the air leaving just a fuzzy sound and picture. Later, they marketed white noise machines that produced low static that made you sleepy. You could even buy “New Age” devices that sounded like whales, babbling water, or yes, light breezes in leafy trees.
We don’t have to employ digital technology to get a little background music to sleep by all you have to do is open your window and let Wyoming do the work.
I’m Wyoming through and through, but there is still a bit of the Old South in my heritage that calls to me.
To add a little more from the Don Williams song:
I can still hear the soft southern winds in the live oak trees
And those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me Hank and Tennessee
I guess we’re all gonna be what we’re gonna be
So what do you do with good ole boys like me
Good ole boys and the wind, what a connection.