Crazy House, Wapiti, Wyoming

You can't do justice to someone else's dream.

Other than to say that the volume of a dream may be measured by the resistance to it.

Think of the child Icarus so happy to fly, then in his happiness coming too close the sun and falling.

Lee Smith, architect and engineer, 'an artist' in the words of a local, had a dream: to build a house by hand at the exact mid-point of the Wapiti Valley. He began the project on 1973.

Whether it's the exact middle of the valley is neither here nor there. What is here is the 'home' Smith designed and built by hand, often with tools he made himself.

A home known in the valley as the 'crazy house' or the 'Pagoda' house, or the 'Smith Mansion' ot a half dozen other made up names.

Fact is, you can't miss it if you're driving from Cody to the east gate of Yellowstone Park-- a road very well traveled in the summer when the park's open--and seeing it you're very likely to give it your own name and wonder what the hell it's doing there.

What's known is this:
--It's pretty much made of the wood
Smith cut from timber on Rattlesnake
Mountain
--It's 75 ft. high
--A handmade system of ropes and
pulleys provided construction
conveyance and were designed to work
as dumb-waiters once the house was
occupied

Walking around the house now, you can see bits of the plumbing Smith planned to install; tools lie scattered in the bunchgrass and the wood rails--handcarved from the old gymnasium floor Smith bought from Meeteetsee High School--are neatly stacked, probably right where he left them.

Smith, his wife and two young children, lived in the house as he was building it, sans running water or electricity. Rumor is that his wife complained, the complaints becoming louder and louder approaching wintertime, and that he bought a trailer, installing it on the flats below the house, for the family. Apparently at some point she gave up on the whole deal (understandable) and moved back to town.

In April 1992 Smith fell to his death from the very top of his mansion on a wind-blown spring day.

The crazy house just sits there, getting crazier by the day. Gloriously forlorn, obvious and mysterious, a dream that keeps dreaming.