I don’t get sick much, but when I do it’s operatic. This one first came on in the Loveland Library with a sharp flash in my throat. Libraries are germ factories and I always feel susceptible when I go into them. I got up to clear it but it would not be cleared. I knew right away I was in trouble. I drove up US 287 to Fort Collins, malls and shopping centers galore. I spotted a Great Harvest and figured I was likely to see a Whole Foods and a few blocks later I saw a Whole Foods. I had gotten good at that sort of thing. I stopped and got some hot spinach udon, hoping it might head off what felt like a building fever. The soup didn't taste very good but it did feel healthy. If it were going to work it would work right away, and I could tell right away that it was not going to work.
I saw on the road map that I could just drive through Fort Collins and pick up the highway to Laramie, but the map didn’t provide enough detail to show me how, and what signs I could see through the road construction and rush hour traffic just didn’t help at all. You’d think maybe I’d stop and get a local map, but if you do you haven’t been paying much attention. Here was the town, the mountains were up that way, the sun was setting over there, so this road was surely the one I wanted. But when the road opened up into highway it didn’t bend toward the mountains like it was supposed to. I drove until it was obvious it never would and then I stopped at a 7-11 for directions and learned that after an hour of driving I was back in Loveland where I started. So back up 287 through Fort Collins, past Great Harvest and Whole Foods, and this time I drove a couple of miles west to the interstate, which at least was on my map. This worked perfectly and just like that I crossed into Wyoming and then was in Laramie and finally in a Motel 6 off the freeway, hoping that a good night’s sleep would fix me up.
It did not. I woke up at 6:40 Friday morning with a painful throat that drained both my energy and my thinking. The idea of pitching a tent in a campground was gruesome, so I signed up for another night in the motel, where I could read in bed, do some laundry and sleep. First, though, I needed to run some errands. I drove out to the Medicine Bow National Forest Supervisors Office to get some hiking information. The office was busy but I was the only one interested in recreation. Everyone else was there for wood-cutting permits. Thanks to pine beetle infestation, the Forest Service had cut down a lot of trees at various campgrounds and was allowing people to go out and take generous amounts of wood home for free. It wasn’t a carte blanche permit. People had to register for which campground they wanted to go to, and the party in front of me was getting surly with the Forest Service staffer, wanting to know why they had to declare where they were going to go, why they had to know now, why they couldn’t just go where they wanted. These were middle age adults expressing their pro-forma anti-government attitude, and they seemed like spoiled teenagers to me.
Next I headed out to the Art Museum on the University of Wyoming campus, which was showing an exhibition of Thomas Moran. It was cold and wet and miserable out, the campus was largely deserted under a big dark gray sky and I felt lousy. The museum is housed in the Centennial Complex, a nice little piece of architecture. The show was lots of small Thomas Morans, but I didn’t have a spark of life in me and they wouldn’t let me take pictures for later (I did not harangue the staff). They did have Jules Dupree's "Summer Landscape" and it felt like a drink of soothing water!
Art Interlude: Alfred Jacob Miller
The art museum shared the Centennial Complex with the American Heritage Center, a historical archive and research facility, and there in one dimly lit room I found a small treasure: eight oil paintings by Alfred Jacob Miller, one of the most prominent painters of the 19th century American West. I had seen his pictures in reproduction - everyone has - but most of his work is in far-flung Western museums collections in Tulsa Oklahoma, Stark Texas, Omaha Nebraska - places I had not yet had the opportunity to visit. So finding myself all alone in a quiet room in Laramie Wyoming, far-flung in itself I suppose, was quite a little treat. Here I was able to take pictures and thus later contemplate them at night in my tent in the glow of my LCD.
Despite being one of the most famous and prolific painters of Western scenes, Miller traveled West just once, in 1837, and then only for a couple of months. He went earlier than most though; he was in the Wind River Mountains several years before Fremont the Pathfinder got there. He traveled as the hired artist for a Scottish aristocrat by the name of William Stewart. Stewart’s father was the 17th Laird and 5th Baronet of Grandtully, but Stewart was his father’s second son, which meant he was not the prime heir to the family estate. In compensation he got to drink, gamble, and traipse the world, hunting in Turkey, fighting with Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, and finally heading into the American West to get a good look at the American Indian and the Rocky Mountains.
Just about the only way to safely see either of those in the 1830s was to accompany a caravan of fur traders, so in 1833 Stewart paid $500 for a place with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company brigade of Robert Campbell and William Sublette. The caravan was heading out to resupply the fur trappers in the field with the necessities for work in the wilderness and to bring back to civilization the object of this work, valuable beaver pelts for fashionable men’s hats. This exchange was conducted at a prearranged central location known as the rendezvous, where in addition to conducting business, men who spent most of the year alone or in small groups in the middle of the wilderness got to drink, gamble, race horses, and generally party wildly. All the big names were there - Jim Bridger, Joseph Meek, Kit Carson - and Stewart had such a great time that rather than return to the castle in Scotland as his friends and family expected, he stayed in North America and returned to the rendezvous for the next five years.
In 1836, after his fourth rendezvous, Stewart received news that his older brother, the 18th Laird of Grandtully and 6th Baronet, was slowly dying, leaving Stewart the likely heir. So in preparation for his future as a lord, Stewart hired Miller - then an unknown painter working in New Orleans - to accompany him and document what would likely be his last trip out West. Miller traveled with Stewart and the caravan to the rendezvous along the Green River, and then with Stewart and a smaller party to Wyoming’s Wind River Range. Miller’s field sketches mostly featured Stewart and the native tribes in action, but also included some broader landscapes and a few classic portraits of the fur trappers. He was not only the first painter to portray first-hand real-life scenes of the American fur trappers, he would prove to be the only one, as this culture, too, was facing its demise due to changes in hat fashion among the American and European elite.
Miller returned with Stewart to the East Coast and worked his sketches into finished pictures. He had a brief exhibition of 18 oil paintings in New York City in 1839, and easterners responded rapturously to their first painted views of the West. But this success did not mark the beginning of a brilliant career. The paintings belonged to Stewart, who was now, yes, the 19th Laird of Grandtully and the 7th Baronet, and he soon shipped them off to decorate his Scottish castle. Miller also shipped off to the castle and stayed for a year and a half, working up even grander paintings for the Murthy walls.
Miller returned to the US in 1841, leaving his paintings behind to hang in increasing obscurity for the enjoyment of a dwindling and diminishing Scottish aristocracy. He spent the rest of his life working as a provincial painter in Baltimore, little known even in that city, painting for a small group of wealthy clients what he did best - countless reworkings of the Indians, fur trappers, and mountains from the field sketches and memories of his one 1837 western journey. He lived until 1874, so when he was rediscovered in the late 1940s, there were a lot of paintings to go around.
William Stewart, by now William Drummond Stewart thanks to an inheritance from his mother, died in 1871. His estate was quickly auctioned off, scattering Miller‘s paintings off on any number of paths through the intervening years before they’d regain value and significance. The eight that I was looking at in Laramie in August 2009 were from the original 18 oils Miller exhibited in New York City in 1839. Somewhat against the odds, I was looking at the largest single collection of original Murthly paintings.
While I find this historically exciting, the fact is the paintings I was looking at caught Miller in the early years of his artistic development. The compositions were somewhat odd and cramped, and the figures of men and animals were rather awkwardly-drawn. Miller greatly improved over the years as an artist, and while the subjects themselves must have gotten somewhat stale for him, his later reworkings provide far more aesthetic satisfaction. This is particularly true of those he did in watercolor, a medium he grew quite skilled with. I can say this mostly because watercolors also reproduce better than oils, and having not yet made it to the Gilchrist, Stark, Amon Carter, or Walters (in Miller’s home town of Baltimore) museums, reproductions are mostly what I have to compare.
The Snowy Range
At any rate, I was soon back at the Motel 6, sitting on the second floor balcony, my bare feet on top of the motel sign, looking out to the Snowy Range. Looking out over the parking lot, that is, and the weedy dirt patch separating Motel 6 from the Ramada Inn next door, which was showing me the ventilators, storage sheds, and TV satellites of its back, and then across the Highway 287 overpass with its telephone poles and flood lamps, thankfully not yet turned on. Then came the line and lump of the Snowy Mountain range beneath a huge cloudy, hazy, back lit thunderstorm-filled sky. Interstate 80 was just a few hundred yards to my right, the interstate of my youth, albeit a couple thousand miles down the road. A lot of freeway but I barely heard the traffic, I’m not sure why. A train track ran through that picture somewhere, and the lonely whistle blew a couple of times during the night.
The parking lot remained empty most of the afternoon but at 5:00 PM the cars started streaming in. Mostly workers it would seem, but some travelers as well. One car filled to the brim with people pulled in and emptied out loudly in a variety of languages and I believe if they got the room next to mine I just would have cried. The sun was gone now, thick clouds taking over, temperature dropping quickly in response, the party was over. I went back inside and start reading Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories. I’d been in this motel room for just over 24 hours and the room looked decidedly like mine. A mess.
I woke up the next morning feeling a little better but the weather remained lousy. Still, I had to take my chances and hit the road. The road I hit was WYO 130, the Snowy Range Scenic Byway, rising from the 7100’ elevation of Laramie to 10,847‘ in the Snowy Range. Most of the ascent was through heavy forest beneath thick clouds. I stopped at the Snowy Ranger station, but the attendant was on the phone and showed no interest in talking to me. It was downright cold, no weather to camp in when you’re sick. I almost doubled back to Laramie but decided to see what I could see further along the scenic drive.
The road opened into high meadow just as a sun break revealed a wall of snow-streaked silvery mountains, glowing against a backdrop of dark stormy skies. It was like a vision, as beautiful a stretch of roadside scenery as I’d seen my entire trip. I was desperate to immerse myself but my breathing was so belabored I could only manage walking a couple hundred feet from the parking lot to a small lake.
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I would have to get well before I could enjoy any of this. So I continued driving down the other side of the mountains where it was suddenly sunny and warm along the North Platte River, flowing out of northern Colorado on its long journey to South Dakota and the Missouri River. The volunteers in the Bush Creek Visitor Center were far more friendly, providing more insight and information than I had any energy for.
I stopped in Saratoga but Saratoga was successfully marketing hot springs and the only motel with any vacancies was charging $65/night. That was too much for me, though the winning young lady dropped the price $5.00 and almost persuaded me to stay. I entertained the idea that this might have been personal but of course she had only one room left and if I took it she could just put up the No Vacancy sign and call it a day.
I pushed north on WY 130 toward Interstate 80, through nice open ranch country. My guidebook told me to keep an eye out for pronghorn and I did, but I didn’t see any. I did see an oddly intermittent fence running along the fields and dimly wondered how it could do much of what fences are supposed to do with those huge gaps in it. I later learned that these were snow fences, constructed to keep the snow from drifting up and closing down the highway.
The main show, though, was the sky. The weather coming in from the west was simply dire: nearly pitch-black at midday, punctuated by occasional flashes of lightning. The back lit grass took on a golden glow, the seemingly useless livestock fence adding an interesting visual foreground to the beautiful oncoming storm. It was one of those scenes I deeply regret not photographing, but this time I had a good excuse. I think if I went out in that weather in the condition I was in, I might have never made it back to the car.
I had a copy of the Roadside Geology of Wyoming sitting on my front seat, and I would later read an interesting paragraph it has on the precise area I was now driving:
"Don't be fooled by gentle summer. This highway is a battleground during the winter! Interstate 80 between Laramie and Rawlins, more than any other road in Wyoming, can be a fierce challenge to the winter traveler, and is often closed. Winds whip snow from the mountains and drive it horizontally across the landscape with the force of a hurricane."
Gentle summer? This was the middle of August, and I headed west on Interstate 80 toward Rawlins smack into a preposterous hailstorm. Visibility was reduced to a couple of car lengths and the only intelligent thing to do was to pull over, but road construction had reduced the road to one lane each way with no shoulder so I had no choice but drive, very tensely, 30 MPH down the Interstate.
Sinclair had no motels though it did have an enormous oil refinery glowing ominously in the stormy sky. I ended up going all the way to Rawlins, by which time I was ready to die. I grabbed a $45 room and went straight to bed, having effectively driven the scenic way from Laramie to Rawlins to save $4. Later I sat up and watched a baseball game, Mets vs. Giants. A Met got beaned and was taken off in an ambulance.
That evening the cold settled in my chest and ushered in the coughing phase. After a fitful night I had no idea what to do next, other than to get out of that motel. I drove back to Saratoga, but it was still too expensive. Suddenly I remembered reading something about cabins to rent in Riverside a few miles further down the road, so I gave that a try and found one that was damn near perfect for $43. No TV, no baseball game, but much better than a motel. I slept and I coughed - cold tablets doing who knows what - and read on the front porch. Our Savage by Matt Pavelich, about an enormous Serb who moves to Wyoming.
Monday morning was beautiful and I was desperate to be up in the mountains hiking, but there was just no way. I would have to stay in the cabin to rest one more day. Reading outside, the shade was too cool and the sun was too bright, so I found some dappled middle ground. Across the street the Mangy Moose Saloon and the Bear Trap Cafe/Bar were doing light weekday business. Afternoon clouds started to build and I would have given anything for a crackerjack thunderstorm, but I wasn’t going to get one. By the end of the day I was feeling pretty beat. Still, I wanted to have myself back on my feet the next day so I could hike the day after that.
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