Laramie in Pictures: The fences of Laramie

Ever since the Shepard murder, most people can only imagine a single fence in Laramie, Wyoming: the buck fence, specifically the one used in the beating. Strangely, that fence has become an indelible part of the landscape, and yet it no longer exists. In reality, fences do often define prairie landscapes like Laramie, but not just one kind. There are a complex of different fences which all come together to give our limitless, rolling landscape a false sense of borders and edges. Some of those borders are exclusive. Some are meant to protect, shelter, or include. And all of them have strong cultural valences to them just like the buck fence.

So, I didn't get a really broad survey of fences over my short stay, but here's a few shots of the variety which fences bring to our landscape. Yes, buck fences are included. But they are only one kind of sign in a whole system of signs which impress upon our imaginations. I hope you enjoy!



I will forever have a soft spot for snow fences. Here's a couple more in the off-season:





The next few are from around the enormous rail-yard running through Laramie's downtown district:





Oh, buck fences.  How you continue to beguile and yet horrify me...

And of course, the ubiquitous barbwire fence, the most common sight outside of the town spaces:

The Buck Fence and Place

 Since I was in Laramie, did I go to "the spot" while I was there, some might ask?  No.  I'm not going to further that landowner's angst and resentment by trooping through his private property to gawk at a murder site.   My respect for private property is too strong to do so, and I don't need to get arrested for trespassing.  But I did drive through the Sherman Hills subdivision just to see how much it has changed in the last ten years.

As the Vanity Fair article (March '99) on the Shepard murder made clear, and as Beth Loffreda talks about in her book, Matt was murdered basically in between two subdivisions still under construction at the time; the empty field between them, stretching a little more than a half mile wide in either direction, buts up against the rolling hills of the more expensive district of Sherman Hills.  These foothills roll straight into the walls of Telephone Canyon, the Medicine Bow National Forest, and a large, beautiful state park about nine miles up the road.   

The two subdivisions couldn't be more different.  The first one is everything that gives me nightmares about subdivisions: large, overpriced houses so close together you can listen to your neighbor breathe at night, tiny yards, even less privacy...  just an upper middle-class nightmare.  It's still growing, too-- you can see dirt in some of these yards and a couple of unfinished frames at the end of the street.  (And yes, that is a throw pillow on the sidewalk.  I have no clue.)  No trees or room for lawns, but wide, overdone infrastructure: wide, paved streets, street lights, sidewalks.  I pass kids on plastic Power Wheels and playing horse with their friends in the driveways, bouncing their basketballs off of garage doors.  It's about as close to a pre-fab middle class Americana as you'd ever want to see. Give me west Laramie any day. 

Take a bit of a drive down Grand Avenue one more street to the east and you end up in Sherman Hills, which is a bit of a mixed neighborhood.  It started out as just a normal neighborhood on the edge of town, but a large tract behind it was bought by developers and turned into houses that run into the upper six figures to a low million.  The houses to the north and east of Sherman Hills are all enormous, high-windowed affairs that no one in their right mind would want to heat in the middle of the winter.  They have more rooms than most families could possibly need, and many sit right on the top of these low, rolling hills, where the view is spectacular but the raging winter winds sometimes blow hard enough to knock the fillings out of your teeth.  (This is why older homes are often nestled on slopes and low-lying areas, or alternately, have tree breaks around them.)

The houses themselves are massive, grandiose-- and yet they try to keep an "out of town" profile as well.  Unlike the area around Bill Nye, in this stretch of the subdivision there are few paved roads, and the few that are there are one-laners, winding and narrow, with no shoulder to speak of.  They're barely marked with street signs, even.  The landscaping around them is heavily manicured but natural: scrub juniper and cedars, imported granite rock, deer antlers.  One yard has a four-foot sculpture made out of what looks like old elk antlers twisting up into the air, perfectly positioned on a gently sloping hill of native grass.   The main colors are deep cedar green, prairie yellow, pink feldspar boulders accented with lichen.  There are no livestock, feed pens or horse sheds like in the liminal neighborhoods on the other side of Grand Avenue, either; you'll see no llamas here.  Offhand, I don't even see a watered lawn within eyesight. There might be some, but I'll be darned if I drove by any.

Those gravel roads aren't a sign of recent development, either; the house near the murder scene was under construction when Matt was murdered.  It was graded as a gravel road, and it has remained one still. And, every one of these enormous, beautiful houses sits on up to an acre of land.  Many of them are far enough apart to give the illusion that they have no neighbors, even though they might be just on the other side of the same hill.  While the newspaper reports used words like "lonely and "deserted" in their descriptions of this area on the night Matt died, the real estate catalog probably calls it "private" and "secluded." 

There's a strange, careful construction of identity in this area: they want to live in opulence and they want to live sequestered from the rest of town in their own private luxury, but they want to maintain the illusion of a rugged, rural existence. This isn't town space, the landscape proclaims.  And yet, it cannot really be anything else.

And yet, this is where I finally start seeing buck-and-rail fences in Laramie, Wyoming-- dozens of them, essentially, and I see some in both of these neighborhoods.  (The most are in Sherman Hills, however.)  Normally, the only place you'll ever consistently see buck fences is around state maintained areas, like city or state parks and rest areas, or around monuments like up on the Lincoln Highway just to the east.  And yet here, every fifth house or so has some kind of wooden or split-rail fence around it, and the buck-and-rail is one of the most popular I see. 

As I stare at the landscape around me and take in the aura, it strikes me how different my perception of this place is from my students, from the thousands of people who have tried to imagine what this spot is like and what that buck fence represents.   That fence wasn't there because this was the Wild West.  It was there precisely because this place wasn't the Wild West.  For me at least, the buck fence was a sign of class difference and exclusion, not small town ideals, or cowboy morality, or even rural existence.  The buck fence was there because this land had been co-opted to create a middle class utopia and an upper class getaway community; it was there because the wilderness and rural edges of Laramie were squeezed out and they wanted to create the illusion that they had never disappeared.  When look at these fences, I don't see of a story of western outlawry, but a story of two poverty-class men who kidnapped a rich kid because he was gay and murdered him on the site where the difference between them was still under construction, in the secluded red earth hills east of Laramie, on shaggy pine rails.

What's in a fence?

Okay, so I was wandering around in the subdivision just across from the Laramie Wal-Mart a while back, just a stone's throw from the city limits sign you see on the Vintage edition of The Laramie Project.   It's exactly what I have nightmares about when it comes to subdivisions: rubber-stamp versions of the American Dream with almost nonexistent lawns, people made out of ticky-tack and all look the same...  (oh, wait.  That's a Joan Baez song.)  I hate neighborhoods that are all stacked together like frosted cupcakes all popped from the same pan: identical, crowded, tiny, with only the sprinkles indicating their difference.  They just feel soul-killing to me. 

Anyhow, I was tootling my way up the roads to the end of the subdivision to get a better look at this new church just off of Grand Avenue, as I had been taking pictures of churches that day, and here's what I saw:

Oh, wait-- my bad.  That's not what I really saw when I dropped by this church.  The first thing I actually saw was this:

**shiver**

I can remember this congregation from my undergraduate days at UW.  This is a reformed church for sure, and might even be Baptist (I'm pretty sure it used to be, but I can't remember if they changed.)  A friend of mine went to this church when they were still in a tiny stucco white building not far from campus, and they tended to run conservative to fundamentalist back then.  Then the church split over some doctrinal issues which were never really clear to me, although they seemed really important to my friend at the time.  This building is new to me, constructed sometime after 2000 because I can remember the flap about the remaining members selling their old building to the Islamic association.  It was built at least two years after Matt Shepard was killed-- and they chose to put a buck fence around it.  Um, what am I supposed to do with this?

Okay, so I know I'm the same person who thinks that the demonizing of buck fences is unfair, because I've always rather liked them, and they're unique to my home territory.  (I mean, imagine how pissed off the French would be if for some reason the Eiffel Tower suddenly became an international symbol of hate.  That's how I feel.)  This fence wouldn't bother me near so much if it weren't for the location.  You see, If I turn my back on this church and look away from their roundabout, I can sight my eyes down this road like the barrel of a gun and see the exact spot where Matt was murdered.   They're on the same damn road.   The only difference is that it turns to a dirt track about a third of the way down its length.  This church sits on the pavement, tucked back in the corner of the cookie-cutter subdivision; Matt was beaten just off of to one side of a the dirt track in the scrub.  

Okay, so I have to confess-- my ambivalence meter hit the roof when I saw this.  On the one hand, it's their land and they can put up whatever the heck kind of fence they want, I guess.  And, up to this point, I suppose I would have even applauded someone who fought the stereotype and reinforced the good side, the rugged and beautiful side, to the buck fence.  There are, after all, a lot of split-rail fences in this neighborhood, so maybe they're just trying to blend in, right?  Right? 

There are a lot of reasons to choose a buck fence.  For one, it is rather decorative, and it adds to the "little white chapel in the wilderness" motif (although the church is too big and modern to really pull it off.)  Maybe there's a neighborhood association covenant that says you can't have chain-link or picket for all I know.  And, you don't have to paint it, and there's no maintenance needed... and maybe they don't buy into the buck fence as a symbol of hate.  I kind of wish I didn't either, so that's understandable.  And, maybe they don't know where Matt died, though I find this impossible.  If you have an infamous crime scene practically in your neighborhood, you know. 

All these justifications aside, one thing seems clear to me regardless: they don't give a crap whether or not a gay person feels welcome at their church, because regardless of how the congregation might feel about buck fences, the GLBT community in Laramie has one very big, negative association with them.  And for a community with an already embattled relationship to the church, walking up to a church with a symbol of a gay bashing encircling it (and a fifteen minute walk away from the murder location) certainly isn't going to make it any easier.  To be honest, that probably never even occurred to them because, in my experience, most of the churches on my end of the faith spectrum don't spend much time thinking about gay people at all.  Maybe the nice people in this particular church would prove me wrong; I'm certainly open to the possibility, but after ten years of battling it out with others, I'm not holding my breath. 

I would have to sit down with the pastor or a couple of deacons over a cup of coffee and chat candidly with them to really see what their thought process was when they decided to mark off their property with that fence; and to be honest, I would really welcome the possibility of that kind of conversation if they'd be interested.  I bet they have a unique perspective on that location, how the neighborhood relates to it, and how they negotiate with the space where they live and the knowledge of what happened down the road.  And that conversation would be far more productive than assuming terrible things of people I don't really know, especially when they might have very complicated and interesting things to say if I'd let them. And, since they still live in that community and I don't, they might have a much, much more nuanced and interesting approach to all this.  I can't really know until I let them speak for themselves, and at the moment I can't.

The only thing I can really know for certain is this: for all my pontificating about buck fences and disliking what they've come to symbolize for so many, apparently I can't escape that association between the buck-and-rail and brutality, either.  I can dislike the association, but I can't get rid of it.  It's a part of my imagination now, making me flinch at something as seemingly innocent and picturesque as a rustic fence in front of a clean, white mission church.

A Piece of Rope

I've been thinking a lot recently about what we learn in the Epilogue from Henderson and McKinney about Matt's murder.  I saw some interesting things come out of those two interviews, such as McKinney's sociopathic lack of sympathy and the way Henderson believes he's eternally helpless over his own fate.  Tonight I guess that I'm interested in something else entirely: in the Epilogue, Henderson and McKinney's stories about who tied up Shepard to the buck fence simply don't line up.  This isn't entirely surprising; it would make at least the second time that McKinney has changed his story about that night.  It's easy enough to just assume that they're both lying, but what if one or both of them are sincere?   If we picture that scene eleven years ago, who was holding the end of that piece of rope? 

Getting into the vagaries of personal memory usually makes me want to beat my head against a wall because the more I read into the psychological and philosophical perspectives on memory, the murkier it gets.  Right now, I tend to side with St. Augustine; in his view, all of our experience, past and future, only exist on the "knife's edge" of the present.   Since the past can never exist except as a memory in the present, we can only access them in the present-- by reaching through our current perspective and experiences to grasp at the point in the past.  The past becomes, in a sense, eternally colored by all the things which proceeded from that point and our current, present experience.  When it comes to memory, you really can never go home again; just as our present eternally changes, so does our perception of the past along with it.

But what can this tell us about the extent of Henderson's culpability in Matt's murder?  Probably nothing factual; but we might, however, tease something out about the narratives McKinney and Henderson have told themselves over the last ten years since their convictions.  This single piece of rope, stretched through ten years of retrospect-- tied by whom, and in what manner-- can tell us a lot about the nature of our memories, and perhaps how McKinney and Henderson try to understand their own histories as well.

Plan-B Theater Company Remembers TLP

The Laramie Project, originally uploaded by planbtheatreco.

Plan-B Theatre company is a Salt Lake City-based theatre troupe who, according to their website, "develops and produces unique and socially conscious theatre." Considering their social mission, then, it's no surprise that they were also the first independent company licensed to produce The Laramie Project after the Tectonic run was complete in late 2001.   The theatre company has a blog post looking back on their own personal recollections of the Shepard case and the staging of that monumental run of performances in 2001.  It's a pretty moving story-- especially when you read who showed up to watch their performance (and I'm not going to spoil it for you by telling you who...)

In addition, they have a series of photos from the theater company on Flickr so you can see their body of work over the last decade or so-- and let me tell you, it's pretty impressive.  Their repertoire since 2000 has ranged through a wide range of thought-provoking drama about everything from GLBT issues (like this one) to race to terrorism. 

 There is a set of stills for The Laramie Project as well in the Flickr set, but I'm having trouble from the context of the pictures telling whether or not they're from this original run in 2001 (pictured left) or if they're from a later run, possibly in celebration of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later.  They weren't uploaded until a month ago and there are no descriptions, so I'm not going to venture a guess.  I will say, however, that it looks like it was brilliantly staged. 

In any case, I wanted to share with you their poster for the run, which is a fascinating piece of artwork from both a symbolic and an aesthetic point of view.  I love their view of the sky-- literally boiling in the turmoil of a prairie sunset, crashing down and yet opening an escape-- and the double image of both Shepard's binding and release.   The artist is playing around with some great imagery of social turmoil, freedom, and hope. 

But of course, the thing that most clearly catches my eye is that fence.  They didn't design the scene with a buck fence in it, and being a good Utah company in an area with lots of rural landscapes and wilderness, I have to wonder if that was on purpose because I simply can't imagine they wouldn't know what a buck fence looks like.   Perhaps it's not too strange to read their choice as a refusal to participate in the grisly symbolism that had, by the time of this run, built up around buck fence where Matt was beaten.  If so, that's an impulse I can completely understand and actually sort of appreciate.

In any case, you now have four links above to explore and play with.  If nothing else, check out that blog post!  It's fascinating for a lot of reasons-- especially with tidbits of things that were in the original TT run but then were edited out by the time the Vintage edition was released, nearly at the same time as this theater run.  Please, check them out!

Fosco Lives! Talks about visiting the fence

California Blogspot blogger Fosco (of Fosco Lives!) drove through Wyoming back in 2006 and went to visit the fence site.  He wrote up his experience (and a short reaction to Beth Loffreda's book) on his blog later.  Actually, if you'd happen to like the perspective of an intellectual hedonist driving through the most desolate patch of Western Americana, Fosco's writeup of the entire trip makes for some hilarious (and scathing) social commentary.  But, his perspective on the fence is interesting, and it's one of the last references I've found so far to the fence actually being up.

Since I recently wrote on the fence, I thought I'd include it here.  You can visit the page at:
http://foscolives.blogspot.com/2006/07/my-laramie-project.html

Let me warn you ahead of time: Fosco writes for mature readers with a sharp sense of humor (and he gets very sharp with the west).  Don't wander by the way if you can't handle it...

Fences, cont.: Memory, Tragedy and Entropy

The fence is gone.  

I can't really explain my feelings when I found out.  I saw in a photo essay shortly before watching Ten Years Later that the buck fence where Matt Shepard was beaten had been torn down, and I gasped.  From the picture I saw, it looks like it had been replaced with a single-rail,  low, log zipper fence just to mark the boundary, something I hadn't actually seen much out west.   It was a weird sensation; I had never specifically been out to the fence (I didn't want to be one of the gawkers) so I had no personal frame of reference.  And yet, taking it down felt like an affront, or admitting defeat, or something-- I don't know what.  All I know is that I didn't like it. 

My husband and I had a long conversation about the fence that evening when we were getting ready for bed.  When I told him about it, I was a little offended; it seemed like a deliberate attempt to efface Matt's memory from that area.  My husband, however, disagreed.  "Well, why shouldn't the landowner take down the fence?"  He asked me.  "It's his property." 

"Well, because he's just trying to forget what happened there,"  I grumbled.  "That's not right.  There are too many people trying to just forget it." 
"But when does the landowner get to move on?"  He insisted.  "He didn't have anything to do with this.  When can he stop having people show up unannounced on his property, respectfully or otherwise?  Does he ever get to stop having that crime brought to mind when he's on that property?  Does  that spot ever get to be something besides a memorial?"  I gave him a glare.   "Moving on doesn't necessarily mean forgetting," he insisted. 

I still don't know for sure what I think, but my husband has a point.   Just because the fence is gone doesn't mean that Matt's memory is lessened, and it might have honestly been necessary.  Let me see if I can explain to you why...

Fences

I grew up clambering over barbed wire, buck fences and snow fences as a kid, and in my childhood imagination I played favorites between them. I never liked barbed wire, first because I always ran the danger of a tri-corner rip in my jeans (and therefore my mother's wrath) every time I squeezed through them. It was an aesthetic dislike, too: barbed wire is too impersonal. It's a cheap fence, metal, thrown up and pounded in without the slightest thought other than to carve the wilderness into parcels. A forcible mark of ownership. And, it's hard to climb.

 

Buck fences are more conciliatory, I had always thought. They're made from the wilderness itself, more organic, lying on top of rather than punched within the ground. To me, they suggested a more symbiotic relationship between man and land, a way of showing a stretch of land as  both "home" and "habitat" at the same time.  Snow fences, however, were always my favorite because they don't actually "fence in" anything-- just long, parallel stretches of tall rails that comb the Wyoming wind to steal its snow. You climbed a snow fence just to climb, not to get anywhere.

The fences of my childhood never registered as being something worth any particular comment-- just another part of the landscape-- but living in the South has taught me to look at them differently.  For instance, it had never occurred to me that one's relationship fences might be cultural, that that relationship might need to be taught.  One of my favorite conversations so far at my new college has been trying to explain in detail how a "snow fence" works to a friend of mine from the southwest. I eventually had to resort to pictures. He was enthralled.