I have a thing for Wyoming, where I visited last week. If it wasn’t the location of the first hike that I ever took many years ago, it was the first hike that proved that walking long distances over reasonably strenuous terrain need not be a torturous experience. Quite the opposite. It provided an opportunity to commune with nature in a way that’s impossible if one remains planted in front of a television set, where I spent much of my childhood.
A couple of caveats regarding that inaugural trek. It occurred in Jackson Hole and I must have taken a gondola to the summit because I don’t recall it requiring spectacular exertion. In other words, it was mostly downhill. Also, it occurred in the midst of a “Teen Tour” — approximately forty fifteen-and-sixteen-year-olds traveling from New York to L.A. and back again during the summer of Woodstock and the Moon Walk. We hit every tourist hot spot and national park along the way.
What made the hike a revelation is that most of my attention to that point had been directed to the social life within the confines of our air-conditioned bus — who was dating whom, who was sneaking into whose room after curfew, and whether a crew-cut, sunken-chested adolescent geek had any chance of finding love. The unequivocal verdict was no.
My wife and I were standing on a beach in Maine approximately fifty years later when another teen tour pulled up and disgorged dozens of adolescents. One teenager turned to another and asked, “Is this the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean?” My spouse was suitably shocked but I wasn’t, at least not completely. As an alumnus of such an experience, at such an emotionally precarious age, I understood that ones’ attention, during the six weeks that my journey unfolded, was focused on my peers and being popular. The stunning scenery passing outside the bus window — the Badlands, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon — served mostly as window dressing.
“The day before yesterday we climbed a mountain that is only 1000 feet lower than Mt. Blanc,” I boasted of my achievement in a July, 1969 letter to my parents who were vacationing in Switzerland (hence the local topographical reference.) It probably also needs to be added that I was a New York City kid. The tallest structure in my viewshed, at 1,454 feet, was the Empire State Building. Grand Teton Mountain, rising dramatically from the Jackson Hole valley floor, stands at 13,775’. What that teen tour accomplished — besides me putting my foot down and no longer allowing my pathological mother to control the length of my hair when the rest of my generation was growing theirs — was to establish a life-long love for the American West.
I don’t fully understand the urge to return to the Moon — my roommate and I watched Neil Armstrong step onto its surface on the black and white TV in our Motel 6 room in Fresno — or Mars when we have even more spectacularly extra-terrestrial landscapes right here on Earth, in places such as Utah, Arizona and Wyoming. The vast spaces reorient your perspective and relationship to yourself. They instill an involuntary sense of humility. That hike through the Grand Tetons temporarily liberated me from the hot house social life of the tour bus.
I’ve been seizing such experiences ever since; I find that the further away I get from civilization the more content I am. With certain qualifications. A walk through forest or desert or along a deserted beach is all the more enticing knowing that an excellent lunch or dinner awaits at its conclusion. I can understand the allure of camping. But I’m also wedded to the notion of knowing in advance where I’m going to spend the night and that it includes a hot shower or better yet a bath and a firm mattress.
Most of those desires were met when we visited my brother and sister-in-law last week at their ranch on Wyoming’s high desert. Located near Laramie, it’s on the opposite end of the state from Jackson Hole and so underpopulated that you can see fifty miles with barely any sign of human habitation. Except for the occasional rumble of ATV tires — the preferred mode of transportation — on the distant dirt road or the buzz of hummingbirds feeding on Victoire’s Hollyhocks, the silence was shocking. The wind feels as if it has more character and personality than it does back East. There’s nothing and nobody to interrupt what it’s saying.
From Wyoming we traveled to visit friends in Santa Fe — an eight-hour drive that we broke up by spending a couple of nights along the way in Colorado. Again, what most impressed me was the harshness of the landscape en route. Vast plains of sage and desert cactus, with little to no shade, and the Rockies looming in the far distance. Few people live there for a reason. Occasional gas stations serve as oases.
Santa Fe incorporates the best of both worlds. It’s highly civilized, with a vibrant arts scene, good shopping and excellent restaurants; without forsaking its relationship to nature. In Manhattan it’s easy forget that you’re actually living on an island. Between its canyons of skyscrapers and rush of humanity it feels entirely man-made. It’s the epitome of hubris.
Denizens of the American West, on the other hand, are forced to acknowledge that they’re merely renting the landscape and that it can be reclaimed — whether through fire, floods or wind — at any time. If nothing else, those endless vistas serve to remind us of our relative insignificance.
We spent the night in New York when we returned, then took the train to Hudson the next morning and a taxi to our house. Looking out the cab window I marveled at how lush and green the landscape looked. Then I realized that was lushness was mostly in comparison to the parched environment where we’d spent the previous ten days. I don’t think I’d want to live in the western wilderness full-time. But it’s good to go back as often as possible, especially to remind yourself where you fit in the larger scheme of things.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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