Why Leave Wyoming?
I’m going to ride around the South in an old truck, sit on tailgates, and take photographs. Out-of-the-way places and the people who live there, not big cities. Talk to folks about place. A piece each month, with a few snapshots.
On the way back with my dog, I noticed near the Arkansas–Missouri line it became… Southern. I pulled into a 1950s style roadside hotel, the Rainbow Trout Lodge, at Mammoth Spring. In the damp evening air I heard crickets, sweet music I had forgotten all this in the snow and wind of Wyoming. I smelled honeysuckle, and behind the hotel a bank of kudzu led down to a river filled with trout.
I walked across the road to a barbecue joint that served sweet tea while Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” played. Their motto was “I like to get my butt rubbed,” referring to a spice rub on slow-cooked pork butts over an open pit. I noticed, however, only women wore those shirts.
Most of the rebel-flag-waving crowd don’t understand this song, which was a reply to Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” Listen carefully to the lyrics as it questions George Wallace and points to one of Alabama’s moments of truth in Birmingham in 1963, when four young girls were killed in a church bombing: “Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth.” For many of us, yes, it does.
My mother grew up next door to Wallace in Clio, Alabama. She and her sister described him as a short little boy called “Runty” who was bullied and cried a lot, wetting his pants. His parents had him learn boxing to defend himself. Of course he became a Golden Gloves boxer and later bullied folks back on a monumental scale as governor before someone shot him and put him in a wheelchair.
While waiting on a plate of ribs I sucked sweet tea like an addict on dope, listening to Skynyrd’s words, and realized just how much the South was in me. That is why I came home. Despite my love for Wyoming, I needed to leave. For months I struggled with the decision. Both parents were gravely ill, hospice had been called in, and my workday became a barrage of calls from nurses and social workers with updates.
Then the hard question came: “Don’t you think it’s time to come home?”
I asked for two weeks off without pay. A numbing silence ensued. That made the decision for me. I had known a racist white sheriff who let Black inmates out for a week to be with dying parents. This was a different culture—all about a dollar to folks like this.
My line to the mayor of a small town was, “With no respect… fuck you and the horse you rode in on.” If I had not quit, I would have been fired after I said that, so it’s probably the best explanation for my departure. Not hard to say to a man who referred to Black folks as “darkies.” It confirmed what I had known for a while: maybe it was time to move on, pursue my passions, and stop dealing with other folks’ problems.
My day job had been director of planning in Wyoming for a town and county. Not the best job, but it was doing a good thing protecting a community’ reaching culture, state benefits and it let me see the places I wanted to photograph.
Wyoming is the least populated state in the nation for good reason. My woman, while visiting—she refused to move there—remarked that Arby’s had the best coffee in town.
I’m a cowman, seven generations in my blood, so a place with a lot of cattle worked for me. I had rented a small house in a feedlot operation. Reflecting on that fact, it’s a wonder she even came to visit. A ranch hand vividly described swarms of black flies in summer that took two layers of screening on the windows to keep out.
My woman likes to garden and lounge around nude as God made her, sipping mint juleps on summer evenings. The stench of cow shit and biting black flies in hot Wyoming summers held little appeal. I had thought she could wear a beekeeping suit, but that idea didn’t fly.
Wyoming is… unusual. Author Annie Proulx wrote of a bizarre landscape and culture where the ground opened up and swallowed people. From what I observed, November to April was eroded rock outcroppings cracking in a freeze-thaw cycle, with blizzards and wicked winds that never stopped. Graves were dug with jackhammers. In some communities they just kept the dead in a freezer and had a mass burial after the spring thaw.
In most places that have hard winters there is skiing, hockey, snowmobiles, ice skating, and coffeehouses. Not there. People sat at home and stared out windows. I asked a local doctor, a fellow Auburn graduate, about winters. “Well, a lot of cabin fever and suicides. Depression is the big thing here. But there is always spring”
I realized, in the depth of that winter reviewing my photos, that almost every photograph I have ever taken was an effort to understand and define the American landscape—mostly the cultural landscape, as J.B. Jackson would define it. That’s what I write about, think about, and photograph. My year in Wyoming only sharpened that instinct.
I’ve had this idea in my head that won’t go away. Despite the notion that humans shape the land and imprint their will upon it, the land really shapes us—how we think, how we live, and the culture we construct—far more than we give it credit for. My photographs and drawings explore this hidden influence.
I think my short tenure as an investigator in law enforcement also gave me the idea to write this column. In one case I learned of an inmate held off the books in a county jail, waiting for a trial for a decade. It was hard to believe when the local newspaper had never heard of him. But when I knocked on his mother’s door and interviewed her, the story of Kharon Davis got out. It became known as one of the worst delayed trials in modern American memory.
That taught me the most interesting people are often the ones we never know about. The thinly disguised ad-monsters called “newspapers” rarely listen to the disenfranchised, the misunderstood, or the rural poor. But it is with these people that the real truth about a place is found.
Headed back to the South, I am ready to face a hidden landscape: moonshiners on remote creeks, mobile meth labs in plain sight, inmates starved into plea deals, a preacher who believes the Garden of Eden is in Edwin, Alabama, Bigfoot hunters prowling the banks of the Choctawhatchee River with night-vision gear and drones.
People say the South is a different world from the rest of America. But the real question is why.
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POSTED BY JON