Cold

I’d forgotten how cold Wyoming can be, cold to everything I touch. And I’m writing when it’s not yet winter, knowing everything is going to become progressively colder and colder. There are no words for the Wyoming kind of cold, a kind of coldness that could explain why people in Wyoming who’ve lived here for a while say so little, why they so often speak monosyllabically, as in ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘yep’ or ‘nope’, saying as little as possible or saying nothing at all.

My father-in-law was born and raised on a ranch in northwest Wyoming. He was a beautiful man, as beautiful as a man can be, though he didn’t say much most of the time. He’d been a shepherd as a young man, alone in the mountains living in a sheep wagon for months at a time. Silence shaped him. When I met his daughter who is now my wife I thought he didn’t like me much because he had so little to say to me. I had to try very hard to get him talking, never really succeeding the way I wanted to succeed, thinking for some reason that the more words he might say to me the more I might come to believe he liked me and would approve of my interest in his daughter. 

When I first came to Wyoming, early 1970s, a person driving an oncoming car would raise two fingers from his right hand on the steering wheel to acknowledge a passerby. I almost never see this now, only once in a while and only the further I get outside of town, out in the lonely beautiful country of backroads and unpaved rural lanes. I don’t know what this change means, I’d like to think I know but I don’t. I know it means something and that I was very fortunate to have the experience of one person acknowledging another while both were going in opposite directions.