The UK conversations, Part I

 Sometime last school year while I was working the front desk at our university Writing Center, an email appeared in my Inbox with the following message: 

I'm an actor in [city in SE England]  embarking on rehearsal of The Laramie Project. I've been reading your blog and enjoying your insight into the town. I'd love to chat online with you about the issues around the play, and also about your experience as a Wyoming native!

I had gotten several requests for pictures thus far from different productions of TLP, but this was the first time anybody wanted to have an online exchange so far.  I sent back a reply, and I found the cast member to talked to me (who asked for anonymity and so will be dubbed "Andrew") was a pleasant and curious fellow.  What his production was seeking, he told me, was an attempt to get a sense of the larger backdrop of the play-- things like landscape, religion, and ethnic tensions, chiefly.  We had an interesting time of it.   

Andrew gave me permission to put these conversations online after their performance, and so, several months after the original performance, I'd like to do that now. 

The first conversation focused on my favorite topic-- the landscape.  Here was the first comment:   

A few topics off the top of my head- the detail of everyday life in the town. Sensually- the feel of the air, the landscape, the wildlife, the smells. The interaction between students and Laramie natives. The lay of the land- are there the snowy range mountains to the West? Can you always see them? Or is it flat plains in all directions as far as the eye can see? The hours of life of the town - a rush hour of sorts? What's the public transport situation? Socio-economic problems? And then of course anything you would like to share on the events closer to the play- the media circus, the vigils, the trials...

Dear Andrew, 

Well east of Laramie, into the pink granite mountains. 

I'll start off with your questions about the landscape. 

When I think of the landscape, I'd say that Laramie is characterized by an endless cobalt sky, yellow grassland plains, and a sharp delineation between them.  The Medicine Bow range to the west is, due to elevation differences, usually no more than a dark smudge on a golden horizon.  They really become visible only after a short drive into the open prairie towards Centennial.  These are our snowy-capped mountains— not necessarily snowy for the full year, but they stay very cold.  On the east side of town— where Matthew died— there is a steady rise in elevation up into a pink granite canyon and a slope terminating on the horizon into a pink granite canyon.  This is our main mountain range, the broken boulders of Telephone Canyon sliding up towards Pole Mountain and the Continental divide.  From our perspective, however, it is  a continuous steep slope, cut by erosion, dotted with twisted pines, and still dominated by the prairie grass.  It's beautiful in its own stark way, but quite different from the mountainous terrains most people think of.  By most outside standards, it's a place of stillness, one of quiet. 

The dominant Laramie plain.

Despite outside appearances, it is a landscape that never stays still.  Between the clouds, the wind, and the eternal shift in the weather, there is a dynamism to the environment that forces people to bend to its rules.  The storms roll through Laramie with the momentum of freight trains; you can see them build on the horizon sliding in on their own invisible tracks, just as powerful, and, after they pass with all their noisy might, just as quickly forgotten.  That the change is constant makes it easy to imagine that nothing ever changes; that we so completely accommodate our lives to the landscape that it fools us into thinking that it doesn't bother us at all. 

The town rhythms depend on whether you look at it from the inside or the outside.  I cannot speak to today— I would have to let my brother Coyote do that— but to those who grew up in areas like this, the town felt a little like a city during school sessions and a very empty place during university breaks.  Laramie has two main roads dividing the town, 3rd street and Grand Avenue, and at the conclusion of the work day, the university empties out and still clogs up the intersection every night.   Sometimes my friends and I would go grab pizza at a diner on the corner of 3rd and Grand just to watch all the  chaos when the lights changed. 

To an outsider, the traffic and speed doesn't seem all that strange-- sparse and lazy; but for someone used to small towns, it felt surprisingly "urban" and crowded to me.  In the summers, the town gets quite still, somehow slower and more intimate, more like a close-knit community.  Since I've left, however, summers are taking on a life of their own; much like Fort Collins, the town has cultivated more of an artisan and craft culture, and now the quiet summers have markets and festivals which shut down the old downtown area with booths, music, food, and artwork.  It's pretty neat. 

In my years there, Laramie had no real need for a bus system because I could bicycle anywhere in town in under 20 minutes, even in a blizzard.  The new Wal-Mart and eastward expansion of the town has changed that, and I think there's now a single bus line running down Grand Avenue.  (The Wal-Mart bought another newfangled concept to Laramie, and that was an acceleration lane.  Most of us had never seen one.)  That was one of the real charms to living in Laramie, as a person who grew up in a working-class family deeply tied to the land: I could pick a direction, and, in less than an hour on my bicycle, be the only person for a mile in any direction.  After week after week of crowded dorm life and deadlines, I needed distance from our quasi-urban university life to reacquaint myself to the land.  Laramie could provide me with that. 

In my head, I imagine that is exactly what Aaron Kreifels was doing that morning: he picked a direction and rode on his bike to get away from other people for a little while so he could just focus on a deep blue sky and that that three-inch strip of prairie running between his tires.  And that's where he found Matthew. 

I'll leave off there for today.  Let me know what else you'd like to talk about, and I'll be happy to answer. 


Regards,


Jackrabbit

The Airing of Grievances, Charge 3

Okay, so it's been a while since I've kept up with my Airing of Grievances, and the Festivus season has long since ended. That's what I get for being way too busy with school since January. In any case, let us proceed through the last two installments!

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To some degree, Laramie is indeed presented as a latter-day Grover's Corners, a cozy place where everyone appears to know everyone else's business and actually finds comfort in this. But if ''The Laramie Project'' nods conspicuously to Wilder, this play is ''Our Town'' with a question mark, as in ''Could this be our town?'' There are repeated variations by the citizens of Laramie on the statement ''It can't happen here,'' followed immediately by ''And yet it has.'' 

--Ben Brantley, New York Times

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Just for fun, and because I was avoiding reading things for my second field exam, I picked up a copy of Thornton Wilder's Our Town while I was staying with Coyote in Laramie.  Although I personally love drama (my only complaint as an Anglo-Saxonist is that there are no plays) I hadn't really read any of Wilder's work before.  My previous survey courses preferred the work of O' Neill and Arthur Miller, and so Wilder was squeezed out.

I found that I enjoyed Our Town more than I thought I would.  Wilder takes a blank stage and fills it with all the imaginary geology, history and even shop fronts of a tiny New Hampshire town; then he populates that specific space with a strange allegory of individual lives.  The Webbs and the Gibbs could be any two families in America, even though we know exactly where (on stage at least) the Stage Manager positions them.  The Stage Manager even gives geographic coordinates for Grover's Corners; but its people are individuals only in how they relate to one another-- cousin, child, neighbor, parent, spouse-- and it is those relationships in the course of their lives that Wilder is interested in. 

But the reason that Our Town worked as an embodiment of the universal human experience was because it had an aura of utopia-- it seemed to be a "good place" [eu-topia in Greek] that reflected all the best parts of the American dream (and some of its problems) at the turn of the previous century.  But, more importantly, for all its specificity and regional connection to New Hampshire, it was a "no-place" [ou-topia] that had no specific cultural coloring other than the ones which Thornton Wilder wanted it to have.  Grover's Corners was a symbol; it was a specific but fictional community existing at coordinates well off the map of America which could hold all of the nation's ideals and faults in the same space and reflect them back on the culture as a whole.  That was Wilder's genius: the landscape is American and it's real, but the specific location is not. 

But Laramie, Wyoming is neither of these things, really; it has too many of its own idiosyncrasies and small town problems to really be a utopia in the sense of a good place (although it is very good.)  And it is a real location.   I know that was part of the appeal for using Laramie as a backdrop for the national dialogue on homosexuality for Kaufman, but I'm interested in the complicated mess it makes of things as I think about TLP.  In what way does the factual location of Laramie, Wyoming complicate the kind of theater that Kaufman's striving for?  In what ways does the town resist any translation into a symbolic space, and is it a good idea at all? 

I would hereby like to submit charge number three in the Airing of Grievances:

3. Laramie is not Our Town. 

We need to understand that this is, in some ways, an unfair question.  Of course Laramie isn't Grover's Corners; it was never supposed to be.  But it's still a natural enough association I want to look at the consequences.  I don't know if this is going to be a real "grievance" by the time I'm done here, but I'm interested in what comes of it nonetheless.  And so, on to the analysis!  

A Winter Sunset in Laramie

So, it's been a week since I turned in my second field exam, and I'm finally feeling like I'm "recovered" from the experience. Due to some medical quirks, stress just tends to wipe me out physically, and when I turned in my exam I went back home and slept for eleven hours. So that was my convenient excuse to sit on my butt most of the following week and do nothing.

Well, I didn't exactly do nothing.  In the last week I went to two SEC basketball games with my husband, a choir concert, and a friend's birthday party.  I finally got to go to my liturgical prayer group, get back involved with the LGBTA, and even do a little curling.  After months of doing nothing but school nonstop, I feel like such a hedonist.  And I discovered that it feels pretty nice.

The only thing I'm missing in this sudden glut of Appalachian spring are the sunsets.  Normally, we have simply amazing sunsets here in the evenings, full of blazing deep oranges and fuschia, but they haven't been living up to expectations recently.  The afternoon clouds roll in like the tide and stifle the twilight sky.  So, that naturally means I'm longing for some wide, open vistas with color.  So, I thought I'd share the ones I keep sticking on my computer while I'm supposed to be working. 

I'll start from north-central Wyoming, not terribly far from where some of my relatives live:

That's still not as deep as it looked from the top of this pasture.  My dad and I were just speechless at how vibrant the pink clouds looked. 

This is from Bosler as I approached Laramie from the North back in January.  The sky had a nice, deep set of salmon and yellow to it:

Sometimes, even Bosler can be pretty. Both summer storm-clouds and twilight skies  suit it admirably. A little farther down the road I stopped and snapped this one:

This one is from Laramie, about eight miles or so north of town.  Yes, the color vibrance has been adjusted in this photo, but not as near as much as you'd think. That tiny purple streak along the very edge of the horizon wasn't showing up as well as I could see it with my eyes. I hope you enjoy!

Laramie in Pictures: Vedauwoo and Ames Monument

Where have all the railroads gone?
asks the Ames monument...

If you follow I-80 to the east of Laramie towards Cheyenne for about twenty miles, one will see two extremely odd sights on either side of the highway. To the left is Vedauwoo, and to the right, the enigmatic Ames Monument-- neither of which seem to quite fit into the prairie landscape that normally defines Laramie's spaces.

Vedauwoo is one of my favorite places because of its strange geologic architecture. The bright pink granite that makes up most of the range between Cheyenne and Laramie is stacked up in these massive, huge boulders which attract rock climbers from all over the nation. It's a popular camping, recreation, and picnic spot for the UW students.  In the dusk, the landscape looks almost mystical. 

Ames Monument is a stranger, more enigmatic spot. A three minutes' ride down a rose-colored gravel road and through a horse pasture will lead you to a massive pyramid built out in the middle of nowhere, a monument to the wealth and influence of the Union Pacific Railroad financiers Oakes and Oliver Ames (two brothers, and rather shady figures.) Oakes was eventually censured by Congress for fraud and died in disgrace. 

The monument to Oakes and Oliver Ames was built to mark the highest point of the UP transcontinental railroad lines, which were then promptly moved elsewhere; the monument therefore now stands alone, marking the point of an amazing accomplishment now tarnished by corruption and diminished by the Interstate system.   For decades it has sat undisturbed near an abandoned town, but there are signs of development nearby now-- a possible high-end subdivision, it looks like.  (blech.) It seems like no patch of land is safe from breaking out in residential, picket-fenced pimples anymore.

Anyhow, here are a few pictures I took (and a couple I didn't) of these two strange, mythical spots on the edge of the Laramie landscape! 

The weather erodes the pink Sherman granite into the most strange shapes, as seen here.
I wanted to show you the larger stuff, but I didn't have time to venture far into the park.  So, here are two pictures from Flickr to give you the feel:

Photo by Coulter Sunderman, via Flickr. I'm jealous...

This one's also by Coulter Sunderman, from Flickr.  This might be my favorite photo I've seen. 

As with a lot of public lands, the areas outside Vedauwoo are often rented for pasture. Here's a trio of Angus bullocks who came to check me out as I drove to the entrance...

And here are two views of the Ames monument for you:  

This one comes from Lord the air smells good today's Flickr photostream.
(I just love that name.) 

I'd like to give a special shout out to both Coulter Sunderman and Lord the Air Smells Good Today for sharing their photos via Creative Commons. Thanks!

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:

Laramie in Pictures: Curt Gowdy State Park

East of the Laramie city limits is a vast state park named after Curt Gowdy, a former Wyoming native, UW graduate and sportscaster for the Boston Red Sox. The park is especially notable for its varied landscape ranging from prairie to pink boulder hills to mountain forest. It also sports some of the most awesome twisted trees in the state.  It's extremely popular with the locals for camping, four-wheeling, and hiking.  On many days, you can see cattle roaming through the back stretches of the park.  

Even though this is a space heavily used by humans, in a sense, this is the landscape that probably defines Laramie as a natural space.  On my very last day in Laramie I took some pictures of the park's strange, ethereal beauty from the top of a ridge to give you a sample.  I hope you enjoy it! 

Laramie in Pictures: Medicine Bow Natural Forest

Back on July third of this year when I was in Laramie,  I found my bother Coyote lounging outside of his little apartment, watching the traffic go by.  As usual, he looked a little underfed (he prefers to live off of coffee and cigarettes) but nonetheless happy, surrounded by loyal and oddball friends.  I'm rather used to his strange, bifurcated life.  On the one hand, he sincerely believes he's living life on his own terms; on the other hand, this is not the life he would prefer to live into his forties.  When I asked if he had any plans, the first thing he said was he wanted to go ride the Centennial highway into the Medicine Bow National Forest. 

While his request surprised me at first (I was expecting a restaurant request), it makes perfect sense for Coyote.  In some ways, he's more tied to the land than I am, and his only transportation right now is a borrowed bicycle.  He can't ever really get out, get alone and spend some time with nature.  And while I dearly love the plains as well, what Coyote really craves are the high places, where the tree lines thin out and the stark rocks of an ancient geology tower over his head.  What he craves is the smell of the wind combed by pine trees.  So, we hopped in my borrowed car and cruised up past Centennial into the frigid mountain air and threw snowballs at each other the day before Independence Day. 

So, here are some pictures from out west of Centennial in the Medicine Bow national forest. I hope you enjoy them (but especially Lake Marie.)

When you get this high, cold and windy, the trees start doing some funny things to adapt.  You know, like only growing in the direction of the wind.

These are dog-tooth violets, found just off of the summit.  I took this picture of them, and the snowdrift behind them, on July 3rd.  Then Coyote and I threw snowballs at each other. 

Here we have an extremely bold yellow-bellied marmot hanging out on the white granite boulders around Lake Marie.  He was so close to me that I took this without a telephoto. 

...and here is tiny Lake Marie, which is so beautiful it leaves me speechless. I hope you have a great day.

The bench: Matthew Shepard's memorial and its landscape

In The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later,  we learned about the Shepard memorial bench on the University of Wyoming campus, which is parked at the front of the Arts and Sciences building.  (That's A&S there at the right.)  In addition to holding the university's main concert hall venue, A&S is also home to the Political Science department (Matt's university home) and a lot of administration.
A&S holds a privileged location on campus, too: of all the enormous buildings which ring Prexy's Pasture, the functional center of the university, A&S occupies the entire western end, and the pasture in front of it sometimes feels like a grassy mall leading up to its front steps.  (The bench is basically right behind that maroon van.) 

So, without any further ado, here's the bench, with a closeup of the plaque:

It really is a sweet gesture, I think. It gives Matt an important place on campus to permanently commemorate his life, and it's both right in front of the A&S college and in a high traffic area when the A&S auditorium is being used.  I especially like the positive message of the plaque.  It commemorates Matt, not as a victim, but one who made a positive impact.  After so much bad press after his murder, I think reminding the campus that Matt was a person, and one who has made a positive difference on everyone there is important.  And, doing it on a piece of furniture means that people will actually interact with the memorial is a great way to set the right tone. This isn't a cumbersome monolith that forces an ambivalent memory upon a campus still covering its scars. Rather, it invites remembrance to those who stop to enjoy its presence.

So, yes, I rather like the placement and wording of the Shepard memorial, but if someone took a brisk walk around camps and even around town, she would realize that Shepard's commemoration is hardly unique.  For instance:

 Here we have an identical bench dedicated to former UW president Phil Dubois and donated by the Trustees. It's located a little farther up Prexy's pasture, on the side nearest to A&S.   

This one is dedicated to former president Dubois' mother (complete with crow droppings from the flock of crows roosting on A&S):

This one was paid for by the Dubois family, as she passed away in 1999.  The former Mrs. Dubois has her bench only about seventy-five feet from the plaza in front of A&S, sort of between A&S and Merica Hall just to the south.

There are lots of these benches around campus, and I'm willing to bet at least a dozen of them have memorial plaques, to everyone from beloved former professors to admins.  (I think one I saw was for a donor, but I have no idea, really.)  So, at this point I bet you're thinking, "Wow, the Shepard memorial bench isn't unique at all!"  I'm afraid so-- in fact, these benches are not just a campus phenomenon.  Here's one dedicated to Cal Rerucha, the former DA who prosecuted both McKinney and Henderson in 1999-2000:

You can tell from the picture that these are not the same kind of benches; I think they're part of a city rather than a university project.  These benches, which sit on the north (Ivinson Avenue) side of the county courthouse, are not really reserved as memorial markers, judging by the presence of a bench with a plaque for Wal-Mart stores (I think it's the one just past the upper left-hand corner of this photo.  Rather, they're more like tiny billboards.  I think that's the point of the Reruchas' plaque on this one: it simply names himself and his wife as "attorneys at law."  What better place for a lawyer to hang out his shingle than in front of the courthouse, eh? 

So, I guess there are two different ways to look at Matt's bench in the context of the surrounding environment.  The negative one might complain that Matt's memorial isn't really all that special, and the only way they managed to get on campus was to sneak it in under a campus beautification project.  It's almost like saying, "Okay, we'll actually let you mark the campus with his memory, but his memorial can't draw attention to itself..." Honestly, I suppose that's how I felt about it when I first wandered about the campus that afternoon, but I think that there's a second, positive way to think about the bench. 

What helped me change my mind?  On the way back to my car one afternoon, I was walking back towards Prexy's in the direction of my car when I saw this fellow chatting on the phone:

Seeing this student casually tracing his hands down the bench as he talked on his phone made me stop to think: what are the chances that this kid will look down and see the plaque? Maybe he will, but he might not, either.  Even though this student's act of remembrance isn't what most people think when they try to picture commemoration, this interaction with Shepard's memory on his own terms shows how the bench incorporates Matthew's memory into the very fabric of UW's landscape.   This is unlike a normal memorial marker, like the one for the Challenger explosion on the west side of campus.  When I lived on campus, the Challenger astronauts' stone and bronze marker only really got any attention when someone used it as a hole for Frisbee golf.  Then some of us felt a little queasy about the idea of slapping the Challenger astronauts in the face with a golf disc, and eventually we moved the hole.  After that, none of us really even noticed it anymore. 

 In contrast to the Challenger memorial, Matt's bench gets a lot of daily interaction because it's designed for interactive experience.  As students look for a quiet spot to read and bask in the sun, they seek it out.  And, since it's part of a larger network of memorial benches to other beloved people, the bench presents who he really was to the campus:  someone who was a part of the UW community and whose life has indelibly left its mark on us all.

One evening after photographing Old Main, I stopped to have a seat on the memorial bench myself.  As I sat in the lengthening shadows of A&S, I could gaze upward to its highest floors dressed in sandstone, or the huge, stately pines which dominate the green spaces on the north side.  To my left was Prexy's Pasture, with its diamond pattern of walkways leading to the family/unity statue in the center, and the flagpoles for the university, state, and nation beyond.  It's a good place to sit and ponder, I decided, and as students do that, they meet with a little piece of Shepard's life.  And every time we do, we remember a little piece of Matt.

Laramie in Pictures: Lincoln Highway

To be honest, I don't really know why somebody felt like naming the highway running from Evanston to Cheyenne after Abraham Lincoln, but the state of Wyoming has always had some sort of Lincoln fetish; we were almost named "Lincoln" instead of Wyoming, there's a Lincoln county.  As far as I've figured out, it's had that name at least since 1913, and that original road became the route for Interstate 80 some decades later.

At the highest point of the pass and just off of Happy Jack Road is an enormous, random monument for Lincoln, standing next to the Interstate named after him.
It's one of the more eerie feelings as you're driving along on I-80.  You're surrounded by tractor-trailers going twenty miles under the speed limit as they limp their way up the deadly incline, there's nothing but high pink granite walls on both sides, and then, startled, you jerk your head up and say, 

"Oh look, there's an enormous disembodied head of Abraham Lincoln."  

Once you see that behemoth for yourself and the way he hunches over to observe the traffic, usually the second thought in your head (and everyone else's) is this:

"What a minute... um, Mister Lincoln looks like he's standing at a urinal..."

You can see it, can't you?   I guess that the designers of the statue never really considered that most adults have exactly the same imagination as a twelve year-old boy.  

All immature giggling aside, this really is an impressive piece of statuary.  The monument's placement makes it absolutely dominate the landscape, but the natural rock of the pedestal asserts that it is nevertheless a part of the land he gazes upon.  For many this monument is a symbol of Laramie's values.   Some even appeal to the monument to appeal to The Equality State's values of freedom and tolerance.

To be honest, until recently, all I could ever see when I looked at this statue was a giant herma, and that always made me break out into infantile giggles.  (I blame Dr. H., my Laramie Classics professor.  Man, I love that guy.)

I finally had an experience on the Fourth of July this year that forced me to look at the monument in a new light.  I had brought some cool new toys with me to Laramie, a tripod and a remote shutter release, and I wanted to try taking some long exposures of the stars.  I headed up to Happy Jack to my favorite stargazing place only to find that the entire canyon was locked up in heavy, super-low clouds almost brushing the ground.  Rats.

So, I grumbled and stomped my way back to the car, and when I turned around I saw President Lincoln bathed in an eerie orange glow from the sodium lights, with rays of light shooting out of his head.  So, without further ado, here's a view of the Lincoln Monument like you may never see again:

This is hands-down my favorite picture I've ever taken.  I just love the rays of sodium light shooting out of his head, like Moses, which light up the world.
 
Next is a picture of the otherworldly Lincoln from the front:

You don't normally think of sky shadows at night. Here's a clearer picture of old Abe's shadow carving shadows on the surface of the fog.  In person it looked more like a deeply layered, three dimensional hole in the sky.

After about an hour, the clouds cleared and I finally had a chance to try some night sky shooting.  I'm standing about a mile away from the monument when I took this, which is creating the orange glow at left:

I hope you enjoy them!

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PHOTO CREDIT:

the first picture taken of Lincoln during the daytime comes from Steve-stevens' Flickr photostream, and is available under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Laramie in Pictures: By Night

Most of my memories of Laramie are by night.  Evenings were the only time I had to get off campus most days, so the landscape I most commonly knew as an undergraduate was one lit by the streetlight rather than the sun.  The town has a completely different character under the moonlight, and one that, I have to admit, I rather fancy.  So, on July 3rd this year, I was wandering around downtown Laramie, Wyoming with a camera and a tripod taking night pictures of the city.  

I know these streets look completely deserted for a Saturday night, but you have to understand Laramie culture (and its climate) to realize how busy things actually were. I was walking around town in a thick hoodie and a coat, and I was still shivering because it dropped down into the fifties that night; if you're smart, you were indoors.  Late at night, the streets are deserted because all of the bars are packed; the next morning when I took pictures, the streets were deserted because all the churches were full. It's an interesting little social comment on Laramie culture.  Enjoy!