Wide Open, What Wyoming Still Is

Drive almost anywhere in Wyoming for more than an hour and you will encounter the essential fact of the place: it does not fill up. The sky is large. The distances between towns are real distances, not the kind that can be covered in fifteen minutes on an interstate.

A rancher here might drive ninety minutes to a grocery store. A child in a rural county might ride a school bus for two hours each way. The state has roughly six hundred thousand people spread across ninety-seven thousand, eight hundred and fourteen square miles, a density of about six people per square mile.

In comparison, New Jersey has more than eleven hundred people per square mile. This emptiness is not accidental or temporary. The geography does not support dense settlement in most of the state.

Water is scarce, the growing season is short, the winters are severe, and the soils outside the river valleys are not particularly suited to agriculture. The economy has always been extractive: cattle, sheep, coal, oil, natural gas, trona, uranium. When commodity prices fall, Wyoming bleeds people.

When prices rise, it fills back up with workers and machinery and returns to its permanent condition of being somewhere between a place and a prospect. What it has in abundance, what no extraction has diminished, is landscape. The sky over the high plains on a clear night holds more stars than most Americans have seen in their lifetimes.

The wind is almost always present, a steady pressure from the west that shapes the trees along the fencelines into leaning shapes that point east, like compass needles. The mountains at the horizon are not decoration. They are where the weather comes from.

Wyoming is a place that reminds you, without making a speech about it, that the country is larger than the places you have been before.