Wyoming expects nothing from me

Wyoming offers free lessons in the art of expecting nothing and receiving almost everything once you have learned the art of expecting nothing. It’s an overwhelmingly large state considering the small number of people in it, with an overwhelmingly vast number of open spaces in which people have chosen not to live, finding life difficult if not impossible, either too mountainous and with too much snow, or too barren and without enough water, and yet going ahead and living in these places anyway.

I’d never before lived in a place where I thought so many times that everything is against me—everything—and then thought the very next day, or even before the very next day, that I’d never before lived in a place where everything seems just right, where I felt more at home with the thought that everything is the way it has to be, that it could be no other way, and that I would be doing myself a favor by expecting nothing or, if expecting something, to realize that everything is against me and surrendering to that expectation.

What’s against me in Wyoming? Only just about everything. Wind so strong it will rip a car door left open from its hinges. Cold so cold it’s hot. Water freezing in the pipes. A live rattlesnake in the garage. The hot water heater that’s too often un-lightable. The old pickup truck with bald tires and wires under the hood the mice like to gnaw on. The locksmith who shows up at the cabin door wearing a ‘Trump in 2020 hat’. Bad pepper jack cheese that tastes the same as good pepper jack cheese. Snow in April…

I first came to Wyoming to live a while in winter 2003, and still can’t forget sitting in the little studio building at the bottom of the property, looking out at Ptarmigan Mountain (12,024 ft) and thinking, “I am really empty.”  It seems the mountain overwhelmed me; there was 6,000 ft of steep unwalkable granite to climb, from the studio where I was to the top of Ptarmigan, before I’d get anywhere or really see anything, and then, once there, what would I do, what would I say, being so empty? I listened—nothing. I watched—near nothing. I closed my eyes— nothing looking back at me—and when I opened my eyes I saw the same nothing I’d seen when my eyes were closed.

This special sort of emptiness is unique to Wyoming, and Wyoming has only become emptier and emptier in the last 20 years I’ve been coming here. I’ve even come to accept the emptiness as the kind of gift I’d been looking for all my life, during which almost everything has been against me for my own good.