ATLANTIC CITY, WYO.— In 1972, while camping alone in the Wind River Mountains, the young naturalist John Mionczynski, is convinced that he encountered the creature known as Sasquatch, or “Bigfoot.” Over the decades since, he’s searched for further evidence of a large primate inhabiting the forests of western North America.

In the minds of many, this placed him in that scientific netherworld populated by believers in crop circles, alien invaders and Bermuda triangles. But to cast him off as a paranormal nut would be unfair to one of Wyoming’s most interesting characters who in other spheres has made significant contributions to contemporary understanding of the Wyoming wilderness.

John Mionczynski enjoys a cup of coffee in the cabin he built in the 70's. (Photo by Brad Christensen - click to enlarge)

Mionczynski is self-taught, sometimes eccentric, above all insightful. Pat Hnilicka, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who once worked with him on big horn sheep projects, describes him as a “top-notch” scientist.

“He’s a throwback to old naturalists from many years ago like the Muries,” said Hnilicka, referencing the early 20th-century family who pioneered conservation science based on meticulous field observations of Alaskan caribou, Wyoming elk and other wildlife populations. The Muries pushed for protection of what later became the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and Grand Teton National Park.

Mionczynski, well-known and well-loved in Lander and Atlantic City, is and has been a pianist and concertina player, motorcyclist, goat packer, researcher of big horn sheep and grizzly bears, desert guide, wilderness survivor and medicinal plants expert. After exploring it for decades, he knows more about the northern Red Desert than perhaps anyone else.

“He’s extremely meticulous and takes great notes. Years later he can look back on notes and draw things out of them,” says Hnilicka.

Mac Blewer, a graduate student in cultural geography at the University of Wyoming, compares Mionczynski to the subject of Blewer’s master’s thesis — Butch Cassidy, the infamous outlaw whom Blewer describes as magnanimous, ever-supportive of his friends while remaining fiercely independent. Like Cassidy, Mionczynski has “a foot planted in this century and in the past as well. His resourcefulness is very rare in this day and age. It’s a pioneer trait. He can talk about anything from mountain man history to the mechanics of the Ford 250 sitting outside.”

John Mionczynski with Serendipity, his custom-built motorcycle pieced together out of parts from four different BMW models from the 1950's. (Photo by Brad Christensen - click to enlarge)

When I met with him recently at his home near Atlantic City, Mionczynski, 64, unfolded two camp chairs in the shade of an aspen grove next to his BMW motorcycle so he could change the oil and repair the broken headlight while we talked. Over thirty years ago, he pieced this motorcycle together out of parts from four different BMWs — a 1951, ’52, ’53 and ’55 — none of which ran. The resulting motorcycle is named Serendipity.

“Whenever I went on a trip with it, it would have some kind of mechanical breakdown and stop me in a place where I had a really significant positive experience, so it had to have that name,” Mionczynski explains.

The motorcycle is small and black, with curving handlebars. It has a sidecar for carrying camping gear or the occasional passenger and gets 50 miles to the gallon, good for the 30-mile trip to Lander, Wyo., where the nearest groceries and gas can be found. His friends have written songs about the motorcycle. Recently, members of a BMW motorcycle backcountry tour group staying at the Miner’s Delight Inn in nearby Atlantic City, Wyo., were impressed when Mionczynski rolled up on Serendipity for his job playing piano. He took the leader of the group, Jim Hyde, for a ride in his sidecar. Hyde hired him to guide future motorcycle tours through the Red Desert for his company RawHyde Adventures.

As we talked, his first Red Desert BMW tour was a week away and the bike needed several repairs including new tires and a new seat spring before it would be ready to go 140 miles over rough roads, so he set to work.

Mionczynski has a hundred projects going at all times, usually involving building or fixing things or figuring out how they work. He lives close to the wild landscape of South Pass and the Red Desert at the southern end of the Wind River Mountains. He barely sets foot inside during the summer, cooking and sleeping on the porches of his cabin, and often spending weeks at a time alone in the mountains or desert. But as soon as he comes home several visitors drop by every day. He’s social, too, frequenting the Mercantile and Miner’s Delight Inn in Atlantic City. He’s never been married; “Not yet,” he says. “But I’m still young.”

From the Atlantic Ocean to Atlantic City

Mionczynski was born in 1947 on the east end of Long Island, New York, a place he describes as woodsy and wild. “You could go out the back door and be in the woods all day and walk to the ocean,” he describes.

From an early age he was interested in science and natural history. His grandfather gave him an entomology book and he memorized the Latin names of all the insects in the book after just one read-through. As a young boy, he had an accident that crushed his elbow. Doctors thought he might not be able to use his left arm again. His mother gave him a small accordion, to help him exercise the elbow. Not only did the squeezebox heal his arm — though it’s still a bit crooked — but it gave rise to a lifelong love of music that’s comforted him and charmed listeners ever since.

Mionczynski went to Southampton College on Long Island where he considered majoring in music, but decided to pursue his love of chemistry instead. However, the higher-level chemistry classes were all calculus, which he didn’t like. He had a minor in marine biology, so switched that to a major and graduated in 1969.

In the meantime, he continued to explore the eastern woods. He was interested in surviving off the land, eating wild plants and figuring out tricks to purify water. Once he got comfortable living this way in the forests around his home he ventured westward to landscapes like the Mojave Desert. In his twenties, in search of a wilder, less-inhabited and more challenging place to live off the land, he pulled out a map of the U.S. and put his finger on the Red Desert of southern Wyoming.

The red line depicts the boundary of Wyoming's Red Desert, spanning some 9,320 square miles. The high-altitude desert is made up of mostly public lands. (courtesy of Biodiversity Conservation Alliance - click to enlarge)

“I like to be alone and that was the greatest place on the planet to be alone at that time,” he explains. The Red Desert spans southern Wyoming from the tip of the Wind Rivers to the Colorado border and from the Green River to the Platte River. It includes high-elevation sagebrush steppe, sand dunes, badlands, and the Great Divide Basin, a harsh, sparse landscape.

Having worked as an apprentice in his brother’s mechanic shop in New York, he carried tools to fix his 1962 Willys Jeep, but when it broke down so badly he could not repair it, he made his way to the nearest town — Atlantic City, population “about 57″ — and found a job playing piano at the Mercantile. He’s lived in that small mining hamlet ever since.

Life at South Pass

The piano job paid him enough to buy another Jeep, this one a ’48, and supported his work prospecting for gold and jade in the desert. Eventually, he bought a few acres of land on the ridge south of town in a spot he liked to hike and camp on hunting trips. He planned to build a house there even though his neighbors warned him he wouldn’t be able to drive to it all winter. He could have built on land closer to town, but preferred the exercise he gets hiking through the snow to his place November through April, which he still does.

In 1973 he had just poured the concrete foundation for his house when a friend who worked at the U.S. Steel mine a few miles away called to tell him they were going to flood a draw that was full of big, straight pines. Mionczynski didn’t have a trailer to haul the timber, so he spent the next two days driving the Jeep three miles over, cutting trees, tying them to the Jeep and dragging them to his home site. He salvaged windows from the dump. The highway department let him take lumber from old snow fences they were tearing down, as long as he cleaned up all the rebar and wire. He used that wood for the floor, loft and roof of the cabin. He found an old wood stove in the dump, too, and refurbished it. In the end, the entire house cost $72. He’s lived there ever since.

John Mionczynski discusses the healing properties of comfrey in his greenhouse. Among the swaths of fruits and vegetables grown there are his strawberries. He picks a bowl for breakfast every day. (Photo by Brad Christensen - click to enlarge)

Shortly after building his house, Mionczynski added a greenhouse to his property. Inside the greenhouse grows comfrey used to treat burns, plus green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, garlic, onions, grapes and strawberries. The strawberries came from a hermit friend of Mionczynski’s named Teddy Hurst who lived on the Sweetwater River in the ‘70s. Hurst was a vegetarian and grew all his own food at 9,000 feet, something Mionczynski admired. Hurst crossed sweet wild strawberries with larger domestic ones, according to Mionczynski. These greenhouse plants — the several-decades-old descendants of Hurst’s — are productive enough that several months of the year he picks a bowl of strawberries every morning.

Mionczynski teaches a daylong field course on wild edible and medicinal plants for Central Wyoming College and occasionally speaks on the subject at the University of Wyoming. Marian Doane, a range technician for the Bureau of Land Management, took the Central Wyoming College course a few times and said, “Sitting around a campfire is best thing to do with John. He’s always bringing over some plant, chewing on a root, making tea. He’s constantly teaching you.”

Mionczynski first got attention in Fremont County playing accordion and piano in an old-time band called the Buffalo Chips. Terry Wehrman, who owned the Atlantic City Mercantile in the early 70s, says as many as 200 people would show up for dances, too many to fit inside the building. Before the Buffalo Chips, people only listened to country rock or country western music, but the band’s Polish bluegrass was a big hit in the area.

Doane, a Lander native, remembers going to the Mercantile in Atlantic City as a teenager to listen. Too young to be allowed into the bar, she’d dance on the porch outside. “You can dance all night, he’s so much fun,” she says. “He’s got a great love for his music.”

Mionczynski built compartments inside of his accordion to carry a first aid kit and some food. He doesn’t like anything to go to waste — even the space inside an instrument — and he appreciates tools that have multiple uses. For example, he devised a system for packing goats into the mountains. The goats provide both transportation of equipment and fresh milk. He’d make yogurt by mixing goat milk and yogurt culture in a jar and wrapping it in a sleeping bag for warmth. He added wild berries for flavor.

In 1982 he started a company called Wind River Pack Goats not only to transport equipment for his backcountry wildlife research but also to haul food and gear for other expeditions such as National Outdoor Leadership School courses. He also rented out pack goats for recreational wilderness trips. In 1992, a Lander publisher printed his book The Pack Goat, which portrays his admiration and respect for the animals and earned him the nickname “the father of goat packing.” For a while he built and sold goat packsaddles. In the late 90s he sold the company to Charlie Wilson of Lander, who still leads pack trips and rents goats in Wyoming and Utah.

John Mionczynski rides Serendipity, his custom-built BMW motorcycle, along his driveway outside of Atlantic City, Wyoming. (Photo by Brad Christensen - click to enlarge)

Mionczynski no longer raises goats, but they — along with the motorcycle — are still a defining part of how people know him.

“He’s got a leather helmet, and when you see him coming across the desert on his motorcycle it’s just hilarious,” says Doane, who as an adult led Red Desert tours with Mionczynski. “When he used to raise goats, he’d carry a goat around in the sidecar. The leather helmet and a goat in sidecar — that’s a sight you ought to see. That shows his whole personality. He’s a real character.”

Scientific research

Mionczynski’s curiosity, work ethic and knack for retaining information have served him in his work as a professional wildlife biologist as well. In the early 70s he was hired by the U.S. Forest Service to track radio-collared bighorn sheep. They needed someone who had knowledge of natural history and who could spend time alone in the mountains traveling over difficult terrain without the help of trails. Mionczynski was just this person, and as he relates in his goat packing book, he was very excited about that work.

“These sheep had been fitted with radio collars, and my link to them if they decided to migrate was my receiver,” he wrote. “No one had ever done radio-telemetry studies on bighorn sheep before, so most of what I was doing was experimental.”

He’s continued to follow the plight of the bighorns ever since. In the ’90s when the sheep started to die from mysterious causes, he helped determine part of the cause was air pollution creating acid rain that leached selenium from the soil preventing plants from taking it up, which meant the sheep had selenium deficiency in their diets. In 2007 and 2008, he co-authored three scientific papers on selenium uptake by plants and its presence in the diet of alpine wildlife including sheep and pikas. The U.S. Forest Service acknowledged the importance of his work with an award that hangs on the wall of the loft in his cabin.

In the mid-1970s he also participated in the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, live-trapping grizzlies to affix radio collars to them and then tracking them around Yellowstone.

Mionczynski addresses most issues in his life as an experiment. When packrats mowed down his vegetable garden, he live-trapped a dozen of them and marked each with a spot of paint. Then he released them at increasing distances from his house to see how far he’d have to take one before it wouldn’t return. Released in the next draw, a rat returned to his garden by the end of the day. When he released one a mile away, it came back within a couple days. Two miles away: it showed up three or four days later. He found he had to take a packrat six miles from his place to keep it from returning.

The North American ape

Mionczynski keeps several plaster casts of footprints in one of his storage sheds. They were collected over nearly four decades from around western North America. The largest is about 18 inches long and 8 inches across and looks human, except for the size. Another is smaller, but still enormous, showing splayed toes in great detail. Still another shows where toes slipped in the mud as the heel was lifted.

There is also a huge, if faint, handprint collected from mud underwater in a pond where an animal apparently rested on one hand as it reached out to grasp an aquatic plant with the other. This, he says, matches the silhouette he saw framed in moonlight on the roof of his tent one night many years ago in the Wind River Mountains.

He was camping alone when he awoke to a large hand pressing on the top of his 6-foot-high tent. At first he thought it was a bear, but could distinguish fingers, not a clawed paw. The creature collapsed the tent and fell across Mionczynski’s legs. He scrambled out of the tent as the animal disappeared into the forest nearby. Mionczynski started a fire and stayed awake next to it through the night. He said he could hear the animal breathing and moving nearby for two and a half hours. For 45 minutes it threw pinecones at him, he said, as if it wanted him to leave.

He reported the incident to the Game and Fish Department. Several others also reported sightings in the Wind Rivers that summer, 1972. People were going to the Game and Fish asking for information about the sightings in hopes of finding the creature and shooting it. At first the agency suspected someone in a monkey suit was in danger of getting shot and wanted more information, Mionczynski says, but as things simmered down they dropped the investigation.

For a couple of decades, Mionczynski guarded his interest in the creature he’d encountered that night, even as he continued to look for evidence of its existence. Once, while working for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, he took a hair and skin sample to the agency’s lab in Laramie for analysis. A superior yelled at him, threatening to have him fired if his name were ever publicly associated with “this Bigfoot thing.”

John Mionczynski plays the piano in the Atlantic City Mercantile. Mionczynski first got attention in Fremont County playing accordion and piano with the Buffalo Chips, a band that played with a Polish bluegrass style. (Photo by Brad Christensen - click to zoom)

Mionczynski says his experience with the research has ranged from, “exciting in a very positive way like you know you’re onto some, as-yet untouched science, to the other extreme of dealing with ridicule and job threats.”

In the late 1990s he met Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, a primatologist at Idaho State University who specializes in the evolution of bipedalism and had accrued a collection of casts of apparent Bigfoot tracks. The two teamed up and applied for funding to travel around North America interviewing people who’d reported seeing Sasquatches and collecting data and evidence about the sightings. They rated each sighting based on its credibility, and mapped only the most credible cases, which, by their determination, added up to hundreds.

In 2010, National Geographic television did a special on Bigfoot and interviewed Mionczynski. Over the last four years, Mionczynski has worked on this full time, traveling in the summers to assess habitat and potential foods for the creature, set camera traps and try to snare DNA. He reads and writes papers for Wildlife Society and hosts scientific meetings at his cabin during the winters.

Hnilicka, the USFWS biologist, is skeptical about the existence of Bigfoot. But, he says, “At least someone credible like John is trying to do the science and look into it. He’s putting his reputation on the line. I’d give him credit for that.”

In the last couple of years Mionczynski has been diagnosed with emphysema. He can trace his lung problem to a number of things in his past, but he also thinks it has something to do with recent increases in ozone levels in his area. The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality operates a ground-level ozone monitor near Mionczynski’s house, and he’s found he can predict the ozone levels within ten parts per billion based on how he is feeling — if it’s above 55 ppb he feels terrible and every month or two it gets so bad he has to go on oxygen.

“Then I lose a day’s work and I have to be tied to those tubes,” he says.

In the face of his deteriorating health, Mionczynski’s long-range plan is to leave his cabin in Atlantic City and move to a lower elevation that doesn’t have the ground-level ozone problem. That he believes pollution is driving him away from the blank space on the map, one of the most untrammeled and wildest parts of the country, carries a certain irony. Though if he makes that exodus, it will likely be on the wheels of Serendipity.

— Emilene Ostlind grew up in Big Horn. She earned her degree in creative nonfiction writing and environment and natural resources at the University of Wyoming.

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JACKSON — As his latest novel, “Lydia,” was being shipped to bookstores this spring, Tim Sandlin sent a mysterious crate to the sales staff at Sourcebooks in Illinois.

“It contained liquor bottles — many bottles — of Koltiska,” a spirit made in Sheridan, said Todd Stocke, Sandlin’s editor and vice president of Sourcebooks. “Tim wrote in a note: One of my writer friends said that if you want the sales department to get worked up about a book, you have to bribe them with liquor.”

The antic won’t surprise fans of Sandlin’s novels, which are steeped in humor, occupied by eccentric characters, and follow absurd plots twists. The Jackson Hole writer, who has penned nine novels, 11 screenplays, and a book of humorous essays capitalizes on comedy, even as he probes somber topics like alcoholism, suicide, and aging. He’s been compared to Tom Robbins (“Still Life with Woodpecker,” “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”) and Carl Hiaasen (“Tourist Season,” “Strip Tease”).

Click to read an excerpt from Tim Sandlin's latest book, "Lydia."

Sandlin’s plots tend toward the outlandish. In “Honey Don’t” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003), which might be his zaniest work, a wannabe gangster accidentally kills the president, after catching him with his girlfriend, and hides the body in the freezer of a gay Washington Redskins football player. In “Rowdy in Paris” (Riverhead Books, 2007), a Wyoming bull-riding champion chases two French women to Paris after they steal his championship belt buckle following a one-night tryst.

“When you think American master of absurdist humor with acute observations about contemporary society, characters to fall in love with, and lines you’ll be quoting to your friend, the first name to spring to mind should be ‘Tim’ (Sandlin), not ‘Tom’ (Robbins),” said Sarah Bird, Austin, Texas, novelist and a friend of Sandlin’s.

Some critics fault Sandlin for traipsing too far into the absurd.

“Sandlin doesn’t specialize in subtlety,” Mike Peed wrote in an April New York Times book review of Lydia, which is about a woman, recently released from jail for mailing the President’s dog a poison chew-toy. “In large part, he relates his story via megaphone, with loud plot turns and louder wisecracks.”

But, Peed added: “Although the novel masquerades as jeremiad, it’s ultimately uplifting, adroitly chronicling the ways we seek to transcend our fears.”

‘A little clinical’

In person, Sandlin, 60, is almost as colorful and droll as his characters.

Jackson, Wyo., author Tim Sandlin in his home office. (Bradly J. Boner/WyoFile — click to enlarge)

I meet him at Pearl Street Bagels, the small downtown coffee shop popular with locals in Jackson. Sandlin has written parts of his novels here and acknowledges the staff in “Honey Don’t.” (“I thank the owners, Les and Maggie Gibson, for their tolerance, and to the employees who think they are the model for ‘Honey,’ I lied.”)

Sandlin is easy to spot. His distinctive white curly hair falls to his shoulders. He wears large-lens glasses, and dresses Jackson Hole casual — jeans, hiking shoes, a Simms sports top. At rest, his face bears a slight scowl, as if skepticism is its natural expression.

Some coffee drinkers glance sideways at him as we sit down at a small table to talk, probably recognizing the local celebrity. His books are on display in the window of Valley Bookstore, an independent Jackson bookseller. He has lived and worked in Jackson for more than three decades.

It’s hard not to laugh while talking with Sandlin. He peppers the conversation with quips and funny confessions.

When describing how he immerses himself in his “fictional world” — he placed gifts for characters in a novel he was working on under his Christmas tree one solitary holiday — he said: “I spent a lot of time alone, in my 20s, 30s, with just my characters, and it got a little clinical at times. They were a lot more real than what was real.”

“You go to a restaurant, you figure out what your characters would order before you know what you want. Maurey [a character in four Sandlin novels] kept a journal for a long time before ‘Sorrow Floats.’ I never could keep a journal myself, but my characters could.”

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Sandlin knew at an early age he wanted to write. At age 9, he published a poem about a tree in a children’s magazine.

Sandlin jokes that while he wrote almost every day after that, it took him 28 years to publish again. “Sex and Sunsets” (Henry Holt & Co.) — about a dishwasher in Jackson who falls madly in love with a young bride on her wedding day (to someone else) — was published in 1987 when Sandlin was 37.

Sandlin grew up in the flatlands of southern Oklahoma in Duncan, and still retains a southern twang.

He began spending summers as a teenager with his family in Jackson Hole when his father Hoyt, a school teacher, took a summer job as a surveyor for Grand Teton National Park.

“We lived in a trailer in the Park,” he recalls. “Every Thursday, we drove to the library in Jackson. We could check out four books. I read four books each week.”

Sandlin got his B.A. from the University of Oklahoma, where he studied “professional writing.”

“There were no creative writing classes. One day the professor had us write a mock article for Boy’s Life, next week for Redbook, et cetera.”

Elk skinner, dishwasher

He promptly moved to Jackson in the early 1970s to write novels. Making ends meet, however, was tough in the tourist town. Sandlin became a master of entry-level jobs. He rattles off an astounding array of the many jobs he held before publishing: elk skinner, dishwasher, gardener for the Rockefeller family, pizza restaurant manager, Chinese restaurant cook, ice cream truck driver, trail surveyor.

“When one of the jobs started looking like a career, I would quit,” he said. “I would write most of the day, work a job, and then go to the Cowboy Bar and dance. Do it again.”

All the while, he sent out query letters to publishers.

“I would send out 100 query letters, get 60 or 70 rejections and the rest wouldn’t even answer. And I’d write another book.”

He never faltered. “If you’re a writer, you just write. I was drinking a lot, so I didn’t think about it. I didn’t think, ‘Am I wasting my time? What am I doing?’ I just did it.”

Times were tight enough that Sandlin lived for years during the summer months in a tent and later a homemade teepee on national forest land. He relied on food stamps. He keeps his food stamps card in a nightstand drawer to remind himself of leaner times.

“I always figured I’d either be a writer or a dishwasher,” said Sandlin. Today, he lives in a house in Jackson and keeps two cabins in the Gros Ventre Wilderness for getaways.

In the mid 1980s — “tired of the whole dishwashing thing, living outdoors, bad relationships” — Sandlin mixed things up by going to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro to get a masters of fine arts in writing.

“I was leaving a relationship,” he said. “I thought it would be a good idea. I was kind of isolated up here.”

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He doesn’t think he picked up much on the writing craft in Greensboro, though he names a poetry class by Fred Chappell as an exception. Yet he said that being treated as a writer and having undisturbed time to write were critical.

He wrote three novels there, including “Sex and Sunsets” and “Western Swing” (Henry Holt, 1988). “Western Swing” revolves around a middle-aged writer who is slowly going mad, waiting to hear from God about the loss of his young son. The third book was never published.

Sandlin returned to Wyoming, and success followed. “Sex and Sunsets” was picked up by Flip Brophy, a literary agent with Sterling Lord, and sold to Henry Holt.

“I love every book,” said Brophy, who remains Sandlin’s agent today.

A city girl, Brophy recounts a memorable stay in Sandlin’s cabin in the Gros Ventre Wilderness. The rustic cabin has no running water.

“Camping for me is a Holiday Inn,” she said. “I expected to go out to the outhouse, see a black bear, and then no one would see me ever again.”

Brophy said she believes in Sandlin’s work because of the “quirky characters, sense of humor, and great story telling.”

Fictional ‘GroVont, Wyo.’

Sandlin is best known for his “GroVont trilogy” — although with “Lydia,” the linked novels now number four. Sandlin calls them his “four-book trilogy.”

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The novels are set in fictional GroVont, Wyo., a small town outside Jackson in the shadow of the Tetons. Besides “Lydia,” the novels include “Skipped Parts” (Henry Holt, 1991) “Sorrow Floats” (H.H., 1992), and “Social Blunders” (H.H., 1995), each set in 10-year intervals, starting in 1963.

They feature the Callahan family: Sam, who is 13 in “Skipped Parts,” and his dysfunctional mother, Lydia (who says she conceives Sam after a gang rape), as well as a cast of supporting characters, including Maurey, also 13 in the first book. Maurey becomes the narrator and central character, struggling with depression and alcoholism, in “Sorrow Floats.”

The books are at times hilarious, like when Sandlin nails the personality tic of a character, “who looks like Khrushchev in overalls.”

The man spit, ‘Don’t talk down to me, son. My granddad homesteaded this valley, and if it wasn’t for him you wouldn’t be living here so free and easy.’

Yet, without being maudlin, Sandlin hits deep notes. When Sam Callahan touches his newborn daughter for the first time, he describes:

She was as soft as a bubble gum bubble and, I imagined, as delicate. I had created this. The whole deal was so neat I started hyperventilating and had to stand up.

The books have a dedicated following. Todd Stocke, Sandlin’s editor at Sourcebooks was a fan before he gained Sandlin as an author-client with the book Lydia. He actually created a Yahoo e-mail account: samcallahan@yahoo.com.

“A little weird, a little fan boy,” he admits.

Other fans include actress Drew Barrymore, who phoned Sandlin after reading his books and struck up a friendship. The rock band Sonic Youth penned lyrics inspired by his prose.

Sandlin and his wife unlisted their phone number when a few too many ardent fans called late at night.

“While Tim was out of town, early into our relationship, a girl called at 2 a.m., very drunk, demanding to talk to him and accusing him of being an alien,” said Carol Chesney, Sandlin’s wife.

Hollywood calls

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Eventually, Hollywood got wind of Sandlin’s talents. Both “Skipped Parts” and “Sorrow Floats” have been made into movies. “Skipped Parts” (Trimark Pictures, 2001) stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mischa Barton, with Drew Barrymore in cameos. “Sorrow Floats” was made for cable TV (Showtime, 1998) and renamed “Floating Away.” It stars Rosanna Arquette and Paul Hogan. Sandlin wrote the screenplays for both films and sat in on both sets.

He enjoyed the experience but describes it as surreal. “There were some 150 people who had jobs because of something that I’d daydreamed. That was the neat part. Seeing all these people working — some of them made good money — and it was because one night when I couldn’t sleep I was just daydreaming about these characters.”

Why Sandlin’s novels have never broken into the mainstream perplexes his supporters.

“I don’t know why they’re not best sellers,” said Brophy, his agent.

Sandlin has garnered awards, including having his work named to the New York Times‘ most notable books list, and high-profile reviews, but he hasn’t broken through to best-seller status.

“The reviews don’t necessarily move the needle in terms of sales,” said Stocke.

For some readers, Sandlin’s material, which includes no-holds-bar sex scenes (between two experimenting 13-year-olds in “Skipped Parts,” between free-loving senior citizens in “Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty”), is a turn-off. On the book-review site Goodreads.com for example, among 95 reviewers, many gush over Sandlin, but others say they’re done with him. “Sandlin is a genius,” posted Autumn about “Skipped Parts,” while Eric Thomasma concluded, “This wasn’t a story worth telling, no matter how well told.”

There’s not a lot of middle ground.

Art imitating life

Sandlin said his problems have always been fodder for his novels.

“The first five books are all about my problems,” he said. “The fact that I got five books out of me, shows you what a mess I was.”

When he “ran out of problems,” Sandlin jokes on his Web site, he turned to writing screenplays for Hollywood. In addition to his own books, he was hired— and paid well — to write nine more scripts. (None are out yet.)

“Money for screenplays is at least ten times more money than you get for a novel, but ten times less work,” said Sandlin. “And the [Screen Writers Guild] insurance was good.”

“Hollywood loved Tim,” said Bird, who was writing screenplays at the same time. “The young Masters of the Universe were endlessly enchanted by his utter genuineness, his utter lack of interest in remaking himself to please them.”

“Tim was my rock during the time we were both doing our Hollywood tours,” she said. “I always aspired to being as unfazed as he was and still cherish the advice he gave me about dealing with the operators I encountered out there. ‘Just treat them like beautiful children in a petting zoo.’ Brilliant.”

But Sandlin eventually grew weary of writing for movies.

“It’s not a real satisfying way to write,” he said, referring to being hired to flesh out a preconceived movie idea. One of the unmade films is “Stacked,” about a man who accepts a $100,000 bet to get breast implants.

Sandlin returned to writing novels about 10 years ago with “Honey Don’t.”

Greeter at Chapel of the Transfiguration

On his Web site, Sandlin proclaims: “I wrote five novels about my problems and then I ran out of problems so I wrote movies because you don’t have to have problems to write movies. After a few years of that I developed all new problems so I went back to novels and that’s where I am now.”

Author Tim Sandlin at his home in Jackson, Wyo. (Photo by Bradly J. Boner/WyoFile — click to enlarge)

In truth, his life seems problem-free these days. He has been married to Chesney, 56, an accountant, for 13 years. (All of his books, since 1990, when he met his wife in the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, include dedications to her.) He and Chesney are “regulars” who volunteer as greeters at the Chapel of the Transfiguration, a log chapel near Moose. The couple adopted a daughter Leila, now 10, from China.

“Tim is a wonderful father,” said Carol. “He loves to play board games with her and loves his Daddy days.”

Around his neck, Sandlin wears a circular Jade pendant on a red thread, which he purchased in China when adopting Leila. He has worn it every day since, “like a wedding ring for a child.”

He also has a “career” — the horror — outside of his writing. He is a founder and director of the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, now in its 19th year, which draws speakers and writers from across the country to a weekend in June in Jackson. Sandlin raises money, schedules guest authors, and runs the event.

“Once a year I get to talk about what I’m interested in,” he said. “I wrote for 20 years before I met anyone who had any common interests. I didn’t downhill ski. I didn’t sell real estate.”

Sandlin only drinks an occasional glass of wine these days.

So where will he find new material for his darkly comic novels?

Sandlin assures he is working on a new novel. It is not, however, “Death Before Decaf,” a book he has fabricated in press interviews.

“I always talk about it as the next book when I’m getting interviewed, but it’s really not. It’s about a guy who’s discovered a poison. If you mix decaf coffee with skim milk, you could kill people. Each time I get interviewed I add a detail or two.”

He pauses, “I may actually write that book.”

Fans need not worry: Tim Sandlin’s wry humor is intact.

CLICK HERE to read an excerpt from Tim Sandlin’s screenplay, “Stacked.”

REPUBLISH THIS STORY: For details on how you can republish this story or other WyoFile content for free, click here.

Previously in the WyoFile Writer’s Series: UW Professor Brad Watson nominated for fiction award

Susan Gray Gose is a freelance writer who lives in Lander with her husband Ben and two children, Lily and Gage. She has been managing editor of the Lander Journal, a correspondent for People magazine, an assistant editor for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and a reporter for The News & Observer (N.C.) She also writes fiction.

As Wyoming’s college rodeo coaches converge on the National High School Finals in Gillette this week, they will be recruiting top student athletes who waver between going to college and turning pro right out of high school.

The most ambitious competitors will want to ride on the college and Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association circuits at the same time. And many of those may follow some of Wyoming’s top young cowboys to Texas, where the pro rodeo season is longer and richer than in the Northern Rockies.

Kaleb Asay, of Powell, seen at age 17 in a file photo, won the saddle bronc riding championship at the 2006 National High School Finals Rodeo in Springfield, Ill. (Ruffin Prevost/WyoFile - click to enlarge)

“I do hear kids say they want to go to Texas and pro rodeo,” said Dan Mortensen, a world champion saddle-bronc rider and the interim head rodeo coach at Northwest College in Powell. “I know it’s really tempting to head off to the pros. The ones who are winning in college are probably good enough to win pro rodeos, too.”

Case in point: JR Vezain of Cowley, who won last month’s College National Finals Rodeo bareback competition. With $29,000 in winnings, he is a top contender for rookie of the year on the PRCA circuit.

“I never wanted to go to college,” said Vezain, the 2009 national high school bareback champion, as he stripped several yards of tape from his forearms after riding last month for Vernon College at the CNFR in Casper.

“I just wanted this,” said Vezain, 19, waving at the arena and the crowd. “I didn’t want to sit in a classroom. I wanted to rodeo.”

But the 2010 valedictorian of Rocky Mountain High School turned his back on Wyoming colleges and accepted a full scholarship to Vernon.

“I went to college in Texas because I heard it was easy to pro rodeo from there,” said Vezain. He might not have gone to Vernon if Tyler Willis, a bull rider from Wheatland, and Kaleb Asay, a saddle bronc rider from Powell, weren’t already enrolled at the school near Wichita Falls.

“I didn’t commit to going there until March of my senior year,” he said. “It was easier to decide because Tyler and Kaleb were already there. They told me it was a good place to go.”

Like Vezain, Asay won state and national rodeo titles in high school and dreamed of going pro. Unlike Vezain, he spurned college and headed out on the PRCA tour as soon as he turned 18.

“I wanted to be rookie of the year [on the PRCA] and be young when I won it,” said Asay, who is now 22. “I didn’t want to wait to win it when I’m the age I am now.”

After winning the saddle-bronc competition at the National High School Finals Rodeo in 2006 and the International Finals Youth Rodeo in Shawnee, Okla. in 2007, Asay set out to test himself against the best.

He won more than $23,000 in his first year on the PRCA circuit and finished first among saddle-bronc rookies in 2008. He cinched up his rookie-of-the-year buckle when he was 19.

A bull rider hangs on during the 2009 Xtreme Bulls event in Cody. (Rob Koelling photo - click to enlarge)

Asay says he might never have gone to college if he hadn’t suffered a serious injury and fallen in with a friend who was riding and studying at the same time.

He cracked two vertebrae in his lower back during his rookie season in the PRCA but kept riding through the pain. The next year he hurt his back again when he was bucked off a horse after the whistle in Odessa, Texas.

“I was having a tough time coming back from my broken back,” Asay remembers. “So I was working on a ranch in Colorado for a friend of mine. He talked to me about going to Vernon.”

The friend was Jace Hildreth, a fellow saddle bronc rider who had spent a year at Vernon already. As the two rodeo riders roped and doctored cows on the Hildreth ranch outside of Gunnison, they talked about rodeo and school.

“I had tried to recruit Kaleb right out of high school,” said Bobby Scott, the Vernon rodeo coach. “He got back in touch with me, but Jace was the one who recruited him. In the end, it was one of my students who convinced Kaleb to come to Vernon.”

Asay won the saddle bronc title at the CNFR as a freshman in 2010 and graduated from Vernon this spring.

Wyoming coaches recognize that they will lose some top competitors, like Asay, to the southern schools.

“It’s a bit of a disadvantage to be here,” said Rick Smith, the head rodeo coach at Central Wyoming College in Riverton. “We are not in the proximity of a major airport. If those guys are able to make money in the pros, they want to be able to fly to the rodeos.”

A pro competitors tries his luck in Cody at the 2009 Xtreme Bulls event. (Rob Koelling photo - click to enlarge)

Even so, Smith has recruited some of the best riders in Wyoming, including Seth Glause, a saddle bronc and bull rider from Rock Springs, who won Wyoming State titles in 2005 and 2006.

It helped that Smith was himself a saddle bronc rider who competed in the NFR and had known Tom Glause, Seth’s father, for 30 years.

“Wyoming has a lot of talented kids, especially in rough stock events,” said Smith. “Seth had friends at Riverton. If you can get one kid to come, you can often convince others to come to your program.”

Glause transferred to Oklahoma Panhandle State University, in Goodwell, for his junior year. He won $92,000 in 2008 to qualify for the NFR.

“I used my time in Riverton to learn and get better,” Glause said at the Xtreme Bulls competition in Cody on June 30. “The coach let me pro rodeo at Panhandle. Craig [Latham, the Panhandle State coach] let me choose the college rodeos I wanted to go to.”

Smith was happy to see Glause leave Wyoming and ride for his old friend, Latham, the Panhandle coach. “If Seth goes to Oklahoma, then we don’t have to compete against him in our region,” Smith said. “I try to send all of my best kids out of the region after they graduate.”

Great rodeo talents have come to Wyoming for college, often to learn from a particular coach or pursue a specific field of study. Shane Proctor attended Northwest College from 2002 to 2004, where he competed in timed and rough stock events.

In an interview just minutes before his winning ride in the Xtreme Bulls competition in Cody, Proctor said he went to Northwest because Gavin Gleich, a former NFR bull rider, was assisting head coach Del Nose.

Matt Wznick of the Northwest College rodeo team competes in a preliminary round of team roping during the 2007 Trapper Stampede Rodeo in Cody. (Ruffin Prevost/WyoFile - click to enlarge)

“I also liked Northwest because they had a great wrestling program and I wanted to learn to coach wrestling,” Proctor said.

Proctor later went on to star on the Professional Bull Riders Circuit, where he is ranked 15th, and on the PRCA, where he was first on the bull-riding prize money list at press time.

Proctor competed in many pro rodeos as a student in Wyoming. “We couldn’t fly out of Cody because it was too expensive for poor college students, so we would go to Billings or drive to Denver,” he said. “You had to be really dedicated, but you could still make it to a lot of rodeos.”

Mortensen, who attended Northwest as a student, sees more in college rodeo than the chance to go pro.

“It’s possible to make it to the NFR as a student,” he said “I did it. I tell students that I did it and they can, too. But I also got a college degree from Montana State.”

The package he presents to students includes an indoor arena and practice on the same bucking stock used in the Cody Nite Rodeo. But, he says, the best part of the deal is the opportunity to get a quality education.

“You rodeo your whole career knowing that it could be over in an instant,” he said. “The kids who are coming here for rodeo need to get their degrees.”

Smith, the Central Wyoming coach, agrees. “It’s the total package that matters. I’ve been to the NFR, so I have some credibility with the kids and I know something that I can teach them. But the school matters, too, the education. So does the arena, and the scholarship. In the end it comes down to what you can offer them.”

For some students, the opportunity to stay at home is as important as the chance to compete in pro rodeos.

Bull fighters work to protect a fallen rider during the 2009 Xtreme Bulls competition in Cody. (Rob Koelling photo - click to enlarge)

“It’s about half and half,” said Tyler Willis, a two-event state champion from Wheatland. He went to Vernon on the advice of a friend from northern Colorado, against whom he’d competed all his life. He became the PRCA bull-riding rookie of the year in 2009. “They’re recruiting a lot of Wyoming people, but some go to a Wyoming school no matter what.”

Eric Gewecke, a roper and saddle bronc rider from Gillette, went to Sheridan College to room with his best friend, Tyler Jacobs, a calf roper. After two years there he took a year off rodeo, attended Gillette College and worked to save money.

“I saved my eligibility so that I would have something to offer a 4-year coach,” he said. In the fall, he’ll rodeo for the University of Wyoming.

“A lot of guys go to Texas and do well down there,” he said. “I’m hauling horses, so Texas is too far. I’m only gone four and a half hours. I can still go to Rapid City and the Denver Stock Show. I can come home to hunt in the fall. And all winter I’m going to practice roping in that heated indoor arena.”

In the end, the reasons to leave Wyoming and the reasons to stay can be very similar.  And coaches don’t always have the last word. Talented riders follow their friends.

Gewecke stayed in Wyoming to room with a friend. Kaleb Asay went to Texas with a new pal he met on a ranch. Tyler Willis followed a boyhood friend to Vernon. Willis introduced his coach, Bobby Scott, to JR Vezain.

“Rodeo cowboys want to have fun,” Asay said. “You go where your pals are. You spend so much time and work so hard, you don’t want to rodeo with people you don’t know.”

Ron Feemster is Visiting Professor of Journalism at the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media in Bangalore, India, and previously taught journalism at Northwest College in Powell. He has reported for The New York Times, Associated Press, Newsday, NPR and others.

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At the height of his scientific career, Jeffrey Lockwood walked away to teach in the humanities and write.

“The flame had gone out, in terms of science,” said the entomologist. “I really felt like I was turning a crank.”

For 15 years, Lockwood was a star in the University of Wyoming’s Department of Plant, Soil and Insect Sciences (renamed in the mid-1990s the Department of Renewable Resources). He conducted groundbreaking research on grasshoppers, insecticides and biological controls. He developed 10 courses, raised over $1.3 million in grants, and received tenure at 33. He solved a 100-year-old science mystery: why the Rocky Mountain locust, which plagued American settlers in the 1800s, disappeared in the early 1900s.

“He really established himself in the field,” said Scott Schell, a research scientist in the Department of Renewable Resources, who studied grasshoppers under Lockwood. “He was high up in Orthopterists’ [those who study grasshoppers, crickets and the like] Society, traveled around the world. He was widely respected in his field — all at a relatively young age.”

But in 2000, Lockwood gave it up to pursue a vague dream of writing.

In 2002, Jeffrey Lockwood won the Pushcart Prize, which honors the best work from small presses, for an essay in his collection Grasshopper Dreaming: Reflections on Killing and Loving. (Ted Brummond - click to enlarge)

Today, at 51, Lockwood has published a small shelf of books, is a revered professor in UW’s Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts program, and teaches in UW’s philosophy department.

What might have been a suicidal career move has panned out.

Lockwood’s book “Locust: the Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier” (Basic Books, 2004) has received high praise, including from Pulitzer Prize-winning Wyoming author Annie Proulx, who called it: “Gripping… fascinating… An entomological thriller.” In 2002, Lockwood was awarded the Pushcart Prize, which honors the best work from small presses, for an essay on grasshoppers in his collection “Grasshopper Dreaming: Reflections on Killing and Loving” (Skinner House, 2002). The following year, he won the John Burroughs Medal, for outstanding writing in natural history, for a piece about locusts in Orion magazine.

“I’ve come to discover,” said Lockwood, “the things we regret are the things we don’t try. You almost never regret the things you try but fail.”

Burnout and change

Over cups of coffee in Ross Hall Café on UW’s campus, Lockwood, who is tall and lanky with a warm personality, talked about his burnout as an academic scientist.

Jeffrey Lockwood hunts for grasshoppers in the field. (Spencer Schell - click to enlarge)

“When you’re really successful in the sciences and academia, what they really want you to do is be in your office writing grants,” he said. “You turn into a sort of laboratory manager or a program manager. You spend less and less time in the field because, look, a day in the field doesn’t generate any overhead dollars.

“So the whole reason of getting into science, if you get really good at it — and I think it’s true in a whole lot of fields — is lost. You get removed from the thing that was really your passion.”

Lockwood also felt a burgeoning desire to write. He had published extensively in academic journals and textbooks, with nearly 100 academic papers to his name and more than a dozen book chapters. But he wanted to write for a popular audience. Schell recalls Lockwood taking far more care than anyone else in the department when critiquing scientific papers. He cared about style, and marked up pages with notes about grammar.

In 2000, Lockwood took a sabbatical.

“I’m going over in my head, ‘What do I want to do?’” Lockwood recalled. “God, I want to do something in writing. But I don’t know anyone in writing. I don’t know any writing programs. Writing ‘retreat’? I don’t even know the word.”

As he was ruminating over what to do with his sabbatical year, he walked into his department’s office. On a secretary’s desk was a brochure for the Wildbranch Writing Workshop.

Wildbranch is a well-regarded nature-writing workshop founded by Annie Proulx at tiny (125 students) Sterling College in Vermont.

“I don’t think there are accidents,” said Lockwood, a member of Laramie’s Unitarian church, where he has served on the board. “Or there are accidents, but you’re ready to see.”

Lockwood wrote “out of the blue” to Wildbranch.

Organizers accepted him into the workshop, set him up in a temporary teaching post at Sterling, and provided housing for him, his wife Nan, and their two then-elementary school-aged children, Ethan and Erin

The year in Vermont changed Lockwood’s life. He set a goal: Write 10 essays, for a popular audience. Submit them to magazines and publishers. Don’t stop until you’ve accumulated 100 rejections.

“That was my rule,” he said.

The rejection-slips hardly mounted up. At Sterling, Lockwood met an editor for Orion, a popular science magazine that sponsors the Wildbranch Workshop. His essay on grasshoppers and insecticides was accepted for publication. He also met the publisher for Skinner House Books, a small press affiliated with the Unitarian Church, based in Boston. They published his first collection of essays, “Grasshopper Dreaming: Reflections on Killing and Loving,” in 2002.

“A scientist friend from India who was Hindu stayed with me for six months,” said Lockwood. “He had this expression that’s stuck with me: ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will come.’”

Orthoptera Star

Lockwood was hired by UW in 1986 to teach entomology and conduct research on one of the state’s major pest-management issues: grasshoppers. Lockwood had just received his PhD in entomology from Louisiana State University, where he had studied the southern green stink bug (Nezara viridula). Despite a lack of expertise on Acrididae, the grasshopper, Lockwood plunged in, quickly establishing himself in the field.

Jeffrey Lockwood formerly studied grasshoppers, locusts and other insects, but now teaches creative writing and philosophy at the University of Wyoming. (Ted Brummond - click to enlarge)

He spent hours in scratchy grass on Wyoming rangeland, studying clacking grasshoppers — counting them, testing various insecticides and biological controls, figuring out ways to reduce hoppers’ numbers and ease the burden for ranchers, while not wreaking havoc with his poisons. Lockwood developed a form of strip-spraying insecticides for rangeland grasshoppers — in which chemicals are sprayed in discreet strips rather than indiscriminately applied — that dramatically reduced the amount of chemicals required, saved the federal and state governments money ($13 million last year), and lessened the environmental impact.

Lockwood traveled to Australia, China, Kazakhstan and elsewhere with his work. He was elected executive director of the Orthopterists’ Society.

He also became intrigued by a leading mystery among grasshopper researchers: what happened to the Rocky Mountain locust? Locusts are species related to grasshoppers. In the late 1800s, the Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus) — North America’s only locust species — was an infamous menace to American settlers on the Midwestern prairie. Their swarms were so dense, farmers recorded seeing sun-blackening clouds descend and strip their fields in hours. Guinness World Records lists the Rocky Mountain locust as the largest swarm ever recorded: an estimated 198,000 square miles (greater than the size of California), consisting of some 12.5 trillion insects. (It was Lockwood who submitted the necessary documentation for the Guinness publication).

But in the early 1900s, the Rocky Mountain locust disappeared. The last known living specimen was collected in Canada in 1902; its carcass is now pinned in a museum display.

What happened? Locusts continue to thrive elsewhere in the world, including the desert locust in North Africa and the Middle East.

“If you’re in the grasshopper field, eventually you run into that mystery,” said Lockwood. “It was sort of laying out there, unresolved.”

Jeffrey Lockwood searches Grasshopper Glacier for remains of the Rocky Mountain locust (L. DeBrey - click to enlarge)

Lockwood raised grant money to travel with a small team into the Wind River Mountains to hack away at the glaciers in search of frozen locust carcasses, in case their DNA held answers.

“I did a lot of work in the prairies. Wow, grasshopper glaciers? [The research] was somewhat motivated by curiosity and this unsolved mystery. It was fairly motivated by a sense of adventure and the chance to go to weird places with interesting treasures, fossil-hunting.  This wasn’t quite Bigfoot, but there was still this element of excitement.”

Lockwood’s breakthrough came not high up on the mountains or even in a research lab, but driving in a “peeling, rattle-trap” Chevy truck on a Wyoming highway with colleague Larry DeBrey. They were talking to keep themselves awake as much as to pass the time. The conversation meandered to their joint obsession: the extinct locust. DeBrey had joined Lockwood on all his glacier hunts.

What if, Lockwood pondered off-handedly, the locust disappeared not while in its outbreak mode, spread across the Midwestern prairie, but while wintering in relatively small clusters along the river valleys in the Rockies? He happened on this idea as their conversation touched upon the monarch butterfly. The monarch winters in a relatively small, forested area in Mexico and southern California. The butterfly’s vulnerability during dormancy has raised alarms among environmentalists who warn that a few wayward loggers could wipe out the entire population in a single winter.

Lockwood and DeBrey decided to poke around the theory when they returned to UW, looking into what early settlers did around the river valleys. “Sometimes a revelation comes with a flash of heavenly light and a booming voice — and sometimes it is jotted in a sun-bleached spiral notebook,” Lockwood wrote in Locust, his book about his sleuth work on the locust.

The theory bore out. Lockwood and DeBrey discovered evidence of massive change along the mountain river valleys of the Rockies at the turn of the 19^th century. Farmers took up residence on the fertile ground, plowing fields, flooding the ground, changing the vegetation. They were answering the call for food from miners heading into the mountains for treasure. Enough change took place in a short period, Lockwood discovered, to utterly wipe out the wintering locusts —without man even realizing it.

In Locust, Lockwood writes elegantly and menacingly about this startling conclusion — and what it said about man’s footprint on earth.

“The Rocky Mountain locust was inadvertently driven to extinction. The most spectacular ‘success’ in the history of economic entomology — the only complete elimination of an agriculture pest species — was the result of unplanned, uncoordinated, and unintentional human activity. The agriculturalists who arrived in the river valleys of the West managed to drive their most severe competitor to extinction in a matter of a few years, leaving North America the only inhabited continent without a locust species.”

“When,” he ponders, “can we no longer appeal to being big, dumb, clumsy beasts bulling our way through yet another display of fine, living porcelain in nature’s china shop?”

Writing about bugs

Lockwood’s book Locust, perhaps his finest literary success to date, combines his in-depth knowledge of insects and his story-telling talent. He probes deep into the history of late-19^th century settlers, the political climate, the history of entomologists, and the habits of the pesky locust. The book reads like an insect geek’s “thriller,” as Proulx said.

It’s not an easy book to follow up, since Lockwood gave up his science post and may never again apply his research skills in the same way. He spent 10 years (off and on) studying the locust.

But he did come up with a fascinating new book: Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War (Oxford University Press, 2008). Exhaustively researched — in the library, not the laboratory — Lockwood writes about how often, and in how many ways, insects have been used in war, from beehives and scorpions hurled at enemies in antiquity to today’s threat of biological terrorism. He also explores the dark history around claims from foreign countries like North Korea and Cuba that the U.S. dropped plague-bearing insects on their populations.

The book has received some glowing reviews, but one critic, writing in The Times of London, said, “As history, his work seems unsatisfactory. I am amazed by the willingness of Oxford, a university publisher, to lend its imprimatur to a book devoid of rigour, and notably carelessly written. A chapter heading such as All’s Lousy on the Eastern Front is scarcely an incentive to take its content seriously.”

Lockwood’s next book, slated to be completed next year, is about “entomophobia,” or the fear of bugs. It will cover everything from bed bugs to psychological disorders when people believe insects are creeping all over their bodies. The book is tentatively titled: The Infested Mind.

Between the big books, Lockwood has written dozens of essays, collected in three books, all put out by Skinner House: Grasshopper Dreaming;, Prairie Soul: Finding Grace in the Earth Beneath My Feet (2004); and A Guest of the World: Meditations.

Lockwood writes with grace and humor in several essays about his days as an entomologist at UW who had fallen in love with his subject (“[grasshoppers] are rather endearing when you give them a chance… beautiful animals”) yet was tasked with killing them by the millions with insecticides (“I am an assassin… This year I will direct the killing of no fewer than 200 million grasshoppers.”)

“Each summer after a spray,” he writes in his Pushcart-winning essay To Be Honest, in Prairie Soul, “I walk the prairie to see the gruesome results of a control program so that I never forget what I have made possible…. This is a time when I experience the fullness of the prairie, when I seek what lies at the core of my intentions as a scientist, and when I release the guilt and shame. The thought-words are different each time, but the question I ask myself persists: Why do I continue to develop the means of killing these creatures?”

Like father, like son — sort of

Lockwood grew up in the deserts of New Mexico. His older brother and he spent countless unfettered hours exploring the harsh, arid mesa behind their home, capturing lizards, putting them in jars and selling them to local pet stores.

A 1902 sketch from the University of Minnesota labels grasshoppers as among "insects notably injurious" at the time. (click to enlarge)

His father was a physicist who worked on the nuclear bomb program at Sandia National Labs and at Nevada test sites. Later, Lockwood compared his own work on insecticides and grasshoppers to his father’s work.

“In the final analysis, maybe he made a mistake in working with nuclear weapons, and perhaps I am wrong to be working with pesticides,” he writes in Like Father, Like Son, in Grasshopper Dreaming. “Our critics would perhaps legitimately claim that he perpetuated a potentially deadly strategy that has not yet been fully vindicated and that I sustain a lethal strategy that is ultimately doomed.”

He postulates that each Lockwood strived to do the least amount of harm (reducing the number of nuclear warheads, reducing the amount of insecticides used) in their loathsome fields. “I don’t know if doing less evil is the same as doing good, but it’s better than doing nothing.”

His father died two years ago in a car accident, while driving home from a graduation ceremony for a granddaughter who had received a degree in physics. The Lockwood family is chock full of scientists. Lockwood’s older brother, his partner in lizard hunts, is a chemist; his younger brother has a PhD in ecology; and his sister is a former pediatric nurse, now a photographer.

The idea of becoming a writer was heretical in the household.

“The idea was that writing was an appropriate thing to do as an avocation, but no young man should seriously take up writing as a vocation,” said Lockwood. “Boys do science.”

No more. Lockwood’s only concrete scientific responsibilities today are serving on graduate review committees for science students. (He’s on about a dozen now.)

His days are filled with writing and a small teaching load. He taught one course, Natural Resource Ethics, for the philosophy department this spring. In the fall, he will lead one graduate workshop on non-fiction writing.

The new routine has given Lockwood the time to follow another dream: writing fiction. He just completed a crime noir novel set in 1970s San Francisco. The sleuth? An exterminator who uses insect clues to track down the villain. His name is also a nod to Lockwood’s locust work: C.V. Riley, the same name as the leading entomologist who battled the locust menace in the late 1800s.

CLICK HERE to read an excerpt from Dose Unto Others, Lockwood’s crime novel.

“It’s my first venture into fiction,” said Lockwood. “And my first venture into fiction was like going to Sterling College, right? I don’t know if this is going to work. This could just flop. But on the other hand, I’d regret not having tried it.”

So far, he hasn’t found an agent for Dose Unto Others. “A couple nibbles, but nobody has really latched onto it.”

Lockwood and his wife Nan, a social worker, are empty-nesters, with their son Ethan a rising sophomore at California State Polytechnic University and their daughter Erin a new graduate from American University. Lockwood has been happy in Laramie with roots set in the community. He and his wife attend church most Sundays, are avid gardeners, and enjoy hiking and cross-country skiing nearby trails. But without kids in school, the possibility of a move away to a different campus is not out of the question.

“We certainly have roots here. We’re happy here. But I think it’s crazy to close doors.”

Susan Gray Gose is a freelance writer who lives in Lander with her husband Ben and two children, Lily and Gage. She has been managing editor of the Lander Journal, a correspondent for People magazine, an assistant editor for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and a reporter for The News & Observer (N.C.) She also writes fiction.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was modified on June 14 to correct references to Sandia National Labs and the southern green stink bug (Nezara viridula).

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Dose Unto Others

Excerpt from the unpublished manuscript, Dose Unto Others, by Jeffrey Lockwood

Sergio pressed me for more about why I was interested in the body, wanting to know if it had to do with my time on the force. I was reluctant but he’d become a friend of sorts. A fellow something-American working his ass off because he took duty and dignity seriously. He loved and lived deeply, with niceties. Sergio had told me all about his family, his beautiful but volatile wife, his plans to one day turn DiMaggio Pest Services over to his son if only the little shit would acquire a sense of responsibility, and his dreams of opening a café in the heart of the San Pedro neighborhood. So I figured it wouldn’t hurt to reveal a bit more about myself, keeping the ugliest parts for some other day. Or never. If he really wanted to know, he could check out the Chronicle headlines from the summer of ’69.

“By the time I quit the force, I’d made detective. I was the department expert on postmortem insects. You know, like using flies and beetles to figure out how, where and when a victim bought it. I didn’t crack many cases this way, but we got some important leads.”

“Like what?” Sergio was stuffing a triangle of club sandwich into his mouth. For a guy hoping to open a restaurant, he sure didn’t seem to be picky about what he ate. I kept the butterfly-and-mafioso story for Tommy, but there were plenty of others.

“I remember the time a suspect’s alibi collapsed when the maggots that were feasting on the victim’s brains were three days behind those setting up house in his mouth and nose. Turns out his business partner poisoned him at his house in the middle of the week and stuffed the body into his car trunk for a couple of days, where the flies found easy pickings. Then he hauled the corpse up to their office on the weekend when nobody was around. That was the hard part. The easy part was propping him in a chair, putting his hand around a .38 and blowing out the guy’s brains. The staged suicide might’ve worked, but a few enterprising flies found their way into the office through an open window. So, when I looked at the mess on Monday morning, the ages of the maggots on the splattered brains didn’t match those who’d set up house in his face.”

“A badass cop armed with a butterfly net. If your buddies only knew.”

“That’s a damn good story,” Sergio nodded approvingly. “But I thought the universities had experts who picked up a few bucks with that sort of stuff.”

“They do. But the cops and the faculty at UC Berkeley don’t play nicely. Hell, even the entomologists over there were peaceniks. For the most part the professors hated cops, and we didn’t have a whole lot of interest in asking for their help. So I learned everything I could about maggots.”

“Ok, but why you?” He was working his way through the soggy fries, although with less enthusiasm than he’d had for the sandwich. At least the man had some sense of taste.

“It’s kind of convoluted.”

“A badass cop armed with a butterfly net. If your buddies only knew.” Sergio chuckled and punctuated his cleverness by shifting the toothpick to the other side of his mouth.

“They did. Sort of. In my rookie year, my partner came by my house and saw the display cases with insects. He ragged on me and told the other guys. At first they made fun of the ‘bug guy’ but over time they brought me all sorts of interesting specimens in pickle jars and pill bottles wanting to know about them. Mostly it was great.”

“Mostly?” His eyebrow arched, as if he was a reporter catching a politician hedging on a campaign promise. I indulged him.

“Well, there was the sergeant who brought in what he thought was a tick that he’d found in his son’s beard. The kid had been out the night before at a prayer meeting. It was one of those churches where the teens sing hymns around a campfire while some youth minister strums a guitar. The old man was a holy roller and figured that his son must’ve picked it up walking through the beach grass. A good theory, except.”

“Except what?” Sergio leaned forward, momentarily stopping the excavation of lunch from his gums.

“It was a crab louse looking for a new home. He didn’t pick it up going down to the beach. The kid picked it up going down on some girl. Pubic hair, beard—any port in a storm when you’re a louse.”

Sergio gave a belly laugh, leaned back in his chair, and resumed scraping his teeth. “Did you tell the sergeant?”

“Nah. Once the kid moved onto real sex, I figured he’d pick up a ripping case of the crabs or something worse and learn his lesson.”

“So that’s why you’re interested in seeing the body this afternoon. An ex-cop checking out a corpse for old times’ sake?” Sergio started working the toothpick around his upper molars, like he was trying to flush a rat from a drainpipe with a broomstick.

“You know, even the maggots down here dress in leisure suits.”

“Yep. I still like trying to make sense of the insects at crime scenes. My old buddies call me to help out sometimes, off the record. So I like to keep up, learn new stuff. And I’d like to see which of my little friends answer the dinner bell LA.”

“You know, even the maggots down here dress in leisure suits.” Like me, Sergio was not a slave to fashion and had little love for popular culture. He dropped the toothpick into his shirt pocket, either having succeeded or given up on the molar project.

“Sounds great. I could use a rhinestone-studded blow fly in my collection.” I was tempted to tell him that I had stopped to check out a road killed rabbit outside of San Luis Obispo on the way down and nabbed a gorgeous burying beetle. I doubt he would’ve been as disgusted as I was with his tableside hygiene.

My gut was getting used to the reek. It’s funny how you can adapt to the environment. People can get used to most anything, which explains a lot about ghettos, dictators, and factories. The room, like the rest of the hotel, was overly air-conditioned and the coolness made the place more bearable. I wasn’t enjoying the odor, but at least it faded into the background. And this allowed me to concentrate on the flies.

A dozen or so metallic-green flies were buzzing around in circles, evidently frustrated by having the object of their devotion zipped into a plastic bag and hauled off. The blow flies were looking to lay their eggs on a corpse that could smell but couldn’t find. From what I’ve seen, they favor bullet holes and knife wounds. A shotgun blast is a virtual nursery. But they’ll settle for most any orifice, including the openings that nature provides. I remember the naked corpse of a hooker that washed up on Hunter’s Point. Somebody had smothered her by tying a plastic bag over her head, and the flies had played the hand they’d been dealt. After working that crime scene I wasn’t interested in sex for a month. Which was fine, given my luck with women at the time.

There was also a cluster of flesh flies, grayish insects with black stripes. They too were hoping to find a home for their little maggots. Several were resting on the landscape painting over the bed, making it look like a mountain valley that had been invaded by giant flies. I thought the insects improved the unimaginative original. When I was on the force, I called these ‘sergeant flies’ which pleased the guys on the beat to no end. I told them that three stripes meant you’re dealing with a sergeant, so the same holds for flies. If only the two-legged sergeants could find bodies as quickly as their six-legged counterparts. The insects hone in on the first whiff of death, before we can detect the faintest odor. I’ve seen ‘em coming in for a landing ten minutes after a victim’s last gasp, especially on a hot day. And LA started delivering its renowned heat yesterday afternoon, once the rain quit.

© 2011 Jeffrey Lockwood, republished with permission. This copyright notice must be included in any republication of this excerpt from Dose Unto Others.

Return to Insect Intellect: The Literary Turn of UW Entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood

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As a teenager, University of Wyoming creative-writing professor Brad Watson tested his talents in Hollywood. He wound up as a garbage man.

Thirty-five years later, he has left the garbage bins of Tinseltown behind and can count himself among America’s literary elite. For his 2010 short story collection, “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives,” Watson was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Considered one of the most prestigious American literary honors, the peer-reviewed award is named for William Faulkner, and includes a $15,000 award.

Reached by phone during the university’s spring break, Watson (who has the gravelly voice of a road-weary country singer) said the nomination was “wonderful news.”

“To be a literary writer and receive this kind of recognition, you can’t aim for better,” he said.

Click image to read an excerpt from "Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives."

He learned March 15 that he’d lost to writer Deborah Eisenberg, author of “The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.” He wasn’t surprised, and had expected either Eisenberg or Jennifer Egan, author of “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” to win.

The other nominees were Jaimy Gordon, author of “Lord of Misrule,” and Eric Puchner, who wrote “Model Home.” All five will be feted in Washington D.C. May 7; runners-up receive $5,000 each.

Watson, 55, who turned to writing after his failed year in Hollywood, is not new to literary prizes. His first collection of short stories, “Last Days of the Dog-Men,” won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His second work, the novel “The Heaven of Mercury,” received the Southern Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award in Fiction.

“Aliens” also was just picked as the winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters fiction award.

“I have to say everything has been big,” said Watson, who was vacationing in Walla Walla, Wash., part of a road-trip.  “Each book has been awarded something. It’s been lovely.”

Watson’s road to writing has been long and filled with the kind of hardship that proves good literary fodder. Raised in Mississippi, he married after his junior year in high school and had a son soon after.

So, he and his young family moved to Hollywood.

“My dad thought that since I’d screwed up my future, I should go for broke,” Watson said, with a laugh. He had acted in school plays and local theater, but Hollywood studios went on strike just after Watson arrived in 1973. So he did odd jobs, including trash-collecting.

University of Wyoming professor Brad Watson was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. (Photo courtesy University of Wyoming — click to enlarge)

Watson returned with his family to Mississippi — humbled. His parents talked him into enrolling at Meridian Junior College. To his surprise, he scored high on an English test and landed in honors English.

“It was a complete surprise. I hadn’t thought it was something in the realm of possibility,” he said.

Watson, whose fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and been reviewed well by The New York Times Book Review, was not much of a reader growing up.

“I read eclectically,” he said. “I didn’t read seriously. We didn’t have a lot of books in the house. I read trash. I read by accident. I read ‘The Exorcist’ in Hollywood and some old detective novels between jobs.”

That changed. In the honors English class, Watson read his first Faulkner story, his first Flannery O’Connor, his first Robert Penn Warren. He went on to get a bachelor’s degree in English from Mississippi State University in 1978, followed by a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Alabama.

His marriage did not make it. Watson married again and had a second son (now 17, his first is 38) but that marriage also didn’t last. He’s now in a relationship with a colleague in UW’s English Department.

Watson’s students in UW’s creative writing program are impressed with his literary success — in their own way. “In their own words, they’d say they are ‘psyched,’” said Watson.

Will they listen more? “I doubt that,” he laughed.

In Walla Walla, Watson was grading papers but also making time for fiction. He has two novels, one possible short story and one short-story-morphing-into-a-novel in the works.

Author Brad Watson enjoys hiking, biking and other outdoor activities in Wyoming. (Photo courtesy UW/Nell Hanley — click to enlarge)

“I always have more projects going than I ought to,” he said. “I wish I was like some of my colleagues or even my students who can remain focused on one thing and see it through. Whenever I’ve tried to do it, I can’t. It’s a character flaw.”

He doesn’t call himself a slow writer but “an infrequent finisher.” His personal standards are exacting. About a novel in the works (inspired by Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Good Country People”), Watson said: “There’s some good.” He pauses. “Uneven is what I’d say. I’m playing around with it. … But, I don’t know, this may not amount to anything.”

“I tell my students, ‘You have to be somewhat thick skinned to improve,’” he said.

Watson came to Laramie to teach in 2005 after a search for jobs in the Southwest didn’t pan out.

He visited in January.

“I knew nothing about Wyoming. I thought, ‘Oh, God.’ It was a little desolate. But they took me to Vedauwoo and Centennial into the Snowies. I thought, ‘My God, I’ve never seen anything like that.’”

An avid hiker, biker and snowshoer, Watson appreciates Wyoming’s austere beauty and lack of congestion. “I’ve had a lot of ‘I can’t believe where I live’ moments,” he said.

The PEN/Faulkner nomination comes with a big dose of publicity, and some worry Watson could be wooed to a bigger-name institution. He has taught as visiting faculty at Harvard University, the University of West Florida and the University of California-Irvine.

“I’m pretty happy,” he said. “There’s not another place I’d really want to go.”

“They’d have to offer a damn good deal.”

Susan Gray Gose is a freelance writer who lives in Lander with her husband Ben and two children, Lily and Gage. She has been managing editor of the Lander Journal, a correspondent for People magazine, an assistant editor for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and a reporter for The News & Observer (N.C.) She also writes fiction.

By Laton McCartney

New York, NY __The just-released movie “Did You Hear about the Morgans?” is supposed to be set in Wyoming.  The ever-hopeful Wyoming Film Office, the bureau that tries to attract lucrative Hollywood projects to the state, desperately wanted it.

The film’s director Marc Lawrence even spent some time in Meeteetse where he hung out with Tim Kellogg, the Cowboy Chocolatier, scouting for material.

“I got specific information and insight that was utilized in the script. The people were terrific, welcoming and very generous with their time,” Lawrence told the film office.

In a December 17 release, the state tourism department described Meeteetse as the “perfect model”   for the film. But as with other movies supposedly set in Wyoming (see “Brokeback Mountain,” set in Wyoming but filmed in Canada),  the movie was shot somewhere else— in this case, New Mexico.

In fact, almost all the movies set in Wyoming over the past few decades or so have been filmed elsewhere. For instance, “Taking Chance,” the 2009 HBO film about  United States Marine Corps Lance Corporal Chance Phelps’s body being returned from Iraq to Dubois for burial was shot in Montana. “Red Rock West,” a 1993 neo-noir thriller, which supposedly takes place in Red Rock, Wyoming, was filmed in Montana and Arizona. At least Steven Spielberg used the real Devil’s Tower in his 1977 classic “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Given its vast range of spectacular scenery, why is Wyoming missing out? A big reason is money, or lack thereof.  Wyoming offers moviemakers peanuts in tax incentives ($900,000 a year) compared to a state like New Mexico ($80-million in 2009). The result: Ten films were produced in New Mexico this year and another four are wrapping. The benefits to the New Mexican economy are enormous. In 2007 movie production in New Mexico generated $257 million for the state.

The lack of film production in the Cowboy state may not be all bad, given the hackneyed collection of clodhopper clichés and hinterland humor contained in “Did You Hear About the Morgans?”—a comedy in which Wyoming serves mainly as a metaphor for backwardness.

In the movie, which opened nation-wide on Dec. 18, Meryl Fisher, the owner of a high-end Manhattan real estate boutique, has to make a life-or-death decision. After she and her soon-to- be ex-husband Paul witness the murder of an international arms dealer, Meryl is told by a federal marshal that the pair need to go into a witness protection program pronto and leave behind Meryl’s beloved New York. If they insist on remaining in the city, it’s a near certainty they’ll be killed in a matter days or even hours.

In other words, Meryl’s choice – and she’s the reluctant one — is imminent death or exile to “the middle of nowhere,” — in this instance the fictional town of Ray, Wyoming.  For Meryl this is a tough decision. “I’m thinking,” she tells the marshal after the mandatory comedic pause.

Played by Sarah Jessica Parker of “Sex and the City” fame, Meryl is the quintessential Manhattanite, a highly successful, neurotic, always-on-the- go over- achiever who sells seven and eight- figure condos in the most fashionable neighborhoods, and jabbers away like a woodpecker on speed.  Not that she’s entirely consumed by raking in the enormous commissions to support her expensive life style. This is a woman who raises funds for breast cancer in her spare time and desperately wants to adopt a child. Unfortunately, her marriage has gone sour. The problem: Her husband. Paul, who heads up a law firm, had a one night fling during a trip to the West Coast.

As portrayed by Hugh Grant, Paul is a likeable, slightly bumbling, long on charm, short on practical sense Englishman, a true romantic at heart. He desperately wants to win Meryl back, but she simply can’t trust him after what happened in California.  Hey, can you blame her? He lavishes her with outrageously expensive gifts and convinces her to find room in her busy schedule for one last dinner at which he pleas for reconciliation.

It’s a no-go, sadly. Still, Paul walks Meryl in the rain to her after-dinner meeting with a client. That’s the arms dealer. Who else can afford to buy a Manhattan apartment these days? The moment the Gordons arrive, the arms dealer tumbles out his second story window with a knife in his back. Meryl and Paul look up and get a clear view of the killer standing in the open window.  The killer looks down and gets a clear look at Paul and Meryl, whereupon he fires several shots, and they jump into a cab, thereby disproving one Manhattan myth—you can’t ever get a taxi in New York when you need one.

The next thing you know the Morgans are being whisked off on a government jet to Ray, Wyoming, or rather the closest airport in Cody. The Cody airport terminal (not to be too much of a stickler, but it’s the Yellowstone Regional Airport, Cody) as depicted in the film is approximately the size of Bull’s Conoco in Dubois. Of course the one security guard in the facility has nodded off, this being a sleepy town.  Where’s the local marshal who is supposed look after them during their stay in the witness protection program? The Morgons grow increasingly nervous, especially after Paul reads a poster in the airport about what to do in case of a grizzly bear attack. A half dozen grizzly jokes follow, several of them involving Paul being sprayed in the face with bear spray.

Fortunately, the local marshal, Clay Wheeler, (Sam Elliot) arrives on the scene before long. An imposing figure with a handlebar mustache and a husky voice, Clay embodies Hollywood’s idea of a fearless, clear-eyed, straight- shooting western lawman. Clearly, the Morgans are in good hands. Still, as soon as they climb into Clay’s pickup truck, Meryl starts complaining.

Thinking perhaps she was being sent off by the Feds to Paris or Palm Beach instead of Ray, Wyoming, she brought all the wrong clothes – chic, expensive gowns, shoes, and the like. Not to worry. Clay takes them to the local Bargain Barn. Much to Clay’s amazement, Meryl says she’s never been to a Bargain Barn – read Wal-Mart. How could that be?  Meryl explains impatiently that there are no Bargain Barns in Manhattan. She’s never shops outside Manhattan. In fact, her universe is bounded by the Hudson and East rivers.

Despite themselves, she and Paul are amazed at Bargain Barn’s incredibly low prices. A sweater for $7!  No, wait, the store is offering two sweaters for $7. Meryl picks up an entirely new Ray, Wyoming appropriate  wardrobe while Paul slips off to acquire enough bear spray to repel half the grizzlies in Yellowstone.

In the parking lot we meet Clay’s wife, deputy Marshal Emma (Mary Steenburgen), a no-nonsense gal who buys high powered hunting rifles the way Meryl acquires designer shoes. The writer-director Marc Lawrence and Steenburger could have gone all Sarah Palin on us here, but Emma comes across as a likeable, believable character rather than a caricature.

She asks if Meryl hunts. “Only for bargains,” the New Yorker responds, adding that she’s a member of PETA. Emma says she’s a member of PETA as well — People who Eat Tasty Animals. Of course, Meryl turns out to be a vegan, which in Wyoming means your menu choices are slim and none.

The last third of the film plays out on the Wheeler ranch and in the blink-once- and- you’ve- missed- it town of Ray. Ray is described as the friendliest small town in America or words to that effect. Here we’re introduced to just about every small town western stereotype Hollywood can come up with. There’s the local doctor who looks like he’s still in high school,  who tends to Paul every time he Paul gets sprayed in the face with the bear repellent. Meryl takes a shine to the young doc and helps him sell his mother’s house by suggesting Mom take the aging, dilapidated arm chair that’s parked in the front lawn to the junk yard. A paint job wouldn’t hurt either.

The doctor’s pretty, bubble-headed receptionist makes lame jokes and tells Meryl and Paul  she needs three jobs to survive in Wyoming. She has that right.  Besides her work in the medical office, she’s a trick rider and the assistant fire department chief, which entails hosing down the fire engine in short shorts.

Then, we have Earl (Wilford Brimley), the curmudgeonly owner of the only café in town. Earl doesn’t like Democrats – Ray has 13 of them – and he especially doesn’t like New Yorkers who ask him not to smoke in his own café. Perhaps the Morgans should go back to where they came from, Earl suggests.

Earl has hopes his grand daughter,  whom he is raising, will eventually win “American Idol.” No question, the little gal can really belt out “Redneck Woman.” She’s not crazy about Democrats either. Still, she and everyone else in town, even gramps, rally around the Morgans in their hour of need. These are good, generous folks tolerant of even self-absorbed, neurotic New Yorkers.

At the ranch, Meryl throws a conniption fit when she thinks about all she’s missing being stuck out in the boondocks – New York bagels, Shakespeare in the Park, Lincoln Center, the Sunday Times. She and Paul argue so much that the Wheelers began to miss their last federally sponsored house guest, a mafia hit man nicknamed “The Butcher.”  To end the squabbling Clay and Emma take the Morgans out riding and shooting at tin cans. Meryl turns out to be a pretty good shot, but for the life of him, Paul can’t split a cord of wood with an axe.

Having gazed up  at the profusion of stars in the Wyoming sky one night – nothing like that in Central Park- Paul and Meryl begin trying to put their marriage back together with a little help from the Wheelers. When Paul asks Emma how she and Clay made up after a fight, she suggests Paul ask his wife on a date. This kind of works.

When Meryl approaches Clay and asks him a similar question, he’s in the barn milking one of the Wheelers’ three milk cows, the only livestock on the place. (Note to Hollywood: Ranchers generally don’t keep milk cows. You’re confusing them with farmers who wear overalls, grow sugar beets and, yes, milk old Bessie).

Meryl confesses to Clay that she had a little overnight dalliance herself when she and Paul were separated. Clay asks her to help with the milking. OK, but should she tell Paul about the affair. Clay tells her to “be gentle with the teats.” Viola! Meryl reads this as some kind of cryptic cowboy zen message, meaning she should tell Paul, but gently. This turns out not to be a good idea at all.

I, of course, can’t divulge the ending except to say it involves a horse shoe, the return of the killer, a rodeo, Paul and Meryl in a four-legged bull suit, and more pepper spray. This film runs 1 hour and 40 minutes.

WyoFile contributor and author Laton McCartney splits time between homes in New York City and Dubois. His most recent book is Teapot Dome: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country (Random House 2008).

Lander — If you’ve ever had an idea for a movie (oh, don’t pretend you haven’t, my friend, whether you’re a novelist, a latte sipper, or a pipe-welder), and you see the wide open spaces of Wyoming as the perfect backdrop for your ‘Lonesome Chukar’ screenplay, then you have probably heard of FIFI. If not, well, have I got a deal for you …

FIFI is not the agent in New York who’s going to get you six figures for your screenplay, nor the family dog in “Brokeback Mountain” – FIFI is the Film Industry Financial Incentive that’s supposed to convince Tom Hanks or Keira Knightly to drag the private trailer and twenty trucks of film equipment to, say, Wright, Wyoming, to film that romantic costume epic about Genghis Khan’s secret romance with Richard the Lionhearted.

(Okay, I don’t know if there is such an epic in the works, but the high prairie and unmarred horizons around Wright would be a good stand-in for the Steppes of Asia, and there’d be fewer terrorists in the tall grass. And in the great deal-making swamp of Hollywood there are, believe me, a gazillion treatments sliming around for everything from the siege of Stalingrad to your grandmother’s mah jong game.)

Wyoming is one of several states trying to sell themselves as props and scenery in the name of economic development. A year ago, the legislature took some of the drippings from its bubbling budget stewpot, and put $1 million in a special fund to entice moviemakers here. If a production were willing to drop $500,000 in the Cowboy State, mention us in the credits, and maybe flash a “Chugwater Chili” label during the action, why, the filmmakers it could get as much as 15% of its costs back from the state.

If this were Brad Pitt’s latest movie, that $1 million would barely cover the nanny costs, but never mind. So far, unless you go back to “Shane” or “Close Encounters” or the Oscar-overlooked “Starship Troopers,” Wyoming hasn’t attracted much more than truck commercials – none of which have reached the half-million mark in local expense.

So, I’m sending out the word to the pipe-welders and latte-wielders to shake the dust off that 100-page masterpiece and get it in play. One million dollars is just sitting there in FIFI’s kibble bowl. Beat Tom Hanks to it (his proposal is a so-far-unproduced movie called “Boone’s Lick”, based on a novel by the oppressively-omnipresent Larry McMurtry). More realistically, beat the guys who make “Ram Tough” commercials to it.

You also might have to beat the legislature to it – because they may be having second thoughts about the program, after a recent article in the New York Times. The article suggests there’s growing skepticism that film incentives really help the states that offer them. (They obviously work for production companies – who wouldn’t want to get 10 % of that caviar catering paid by taxpayers?) The villain in the NY Times piece is a movie called “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, a $167 million blockbuster that got a $27 million infusion from the state of Louisiana, a state with a loosey-goosey incentive program whose film commissioner was recently convicted of taking bribes from filmmakers.

Even bribes – and these are incentives, please – may be enough to turn Wyoming into Wyowood. Years ago, the independent film maker John Sayles came to Wyoming (lured by his old college friend, Wyoming writer and editor Tom Rea) to look for locations where he could shoot a movie based on the fine book Yellow Raft in Blue Water. We took him up to a string of beautiful lakes just south of Dubois in the Wind River Range, which certainly looked right for the story about an abused girl on an Indian reservation. But movie productions – even smaller operations like Sayles’ – are less about camera angles and action than they are about food, weather, and comfortable beds. And while the donut shop in Dubois can handle a tough, hungry, early morning crowd during hunting season, I’m not sure they can do foie gras for 100. So it was not selected.

"Shane", the most well-known Wyoming movie

Really, Wyoming doesn’t offer much to filmmakers except scenery. We don’t have a large army of videographers or editors or actors. Even when we have a story – like the death of a young Dubois man in Iraq – the production of “Taking Chance” went instead to Montana because the help’s better there, and there’s more of them.

Which brings us to the most serious question – does a movie production infuse the state’s economy in a useful way? If we lack the technical skills, they’ll have to import shooters and gaffers and Best Boy’s (you’ve seen it in the credits – what is that?) and we can only hope each one of them will buy a stuffed jackalope before they leave. Massive one-shot catering jobs require big outlays and equipment, but only for a few weeks. Is anyone going to make that investment locally? And then be stuck with it when it’s back to donuts for pronghorn hunters? Is the environmental and social disruption of trucks, cables, and spoiled movie stars such a great benefit? Does anybody get a permanent job out of this?

“It was never meant to be a way to develop long-term jobs,” says Colin Stricklin, who has a presumably long-term job at the Wyoming Film Commission. He spoke just a little slowly, the way people often speak to me when explaining economics. “It’s a sort of ‘super-tourism’ – not infrastructure, but more of a black bag of money.”

Why black? But what am I doing? Good grief, I’m on a Film Commission subcommittee that reads scripts. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you! (Or at least pets your furry head – there’s no money involved.)

And in fact, someday I may resign from that subcommittee and get that old treatment out of the closet. (Well, I’ll get one of them out.) My screenplay could be shot entirely in Wyoming. It’s about a pipe-welder who joins the Army just before the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. A big action film with Bruce Willis as the crusty old colonel, and Keira Knightley as the gorgeous-but-lethal lieutenant trying to command the respect of her men while forced to wear a burqa in combat. What draws the crucial 12-16 year old males to the theaters is, of course, things blowing up in the desert – oil refineries, little towns, that sort of thing. And what locale could provide a better stand-in than Wyoming? We could use Jeffrey City, a town where frankly not much has been going on since the last boom and bust, and … and blow it up!

Now that’s economic development.

Lander Talk: Have Chair, Will Sell

Lander – I called Habitat for Humanity the other day about an old house in Riverton which was being offered virtually free to anyone who would move it. After 15 years of swearing I was about to start building a cabin in the country, maybe I could sneak this old building onto my land under cover of night.

The landowner needed it out of the way so he could expand his business. Erin Shirley, of Habitat, didn’t want to see the house torn down – it was a beat up but stylish 1930s bungalow with a porch and a hipped roof. But months of advertising around Riverton had gotten little response, and the wrecking ball was about to swing.

Then she sent an email to “Lander-Talk”, an internet list-serve that originated in Riverton’s neighbor-town about 25 miles to the west. (A list-serve is essentially an internet mailing list – you send something to it, and it gets distributed to a group with common interests that has signed on to receive emails.) That’s what prompted me to call Habitat about the house. So, apparently, and suddenly, did a lot of other folks.

“Now I’ve got a bunch of people to call back,” Erin said when I got through on her busy phone. “It’s unbelievable. I wish Riverton had something like the Lander list.”

And what an eclectic list it is. Last week, there were notices about planning a community garden on an empty city lot (right behind my house!); a request for encyclopedias to send to Tanzania; a gun rack needing a new owner (like a free old house, something I was looking for – but it was pine, not my type); open mike night at the Folklore Café; a dog socialization class (a fix for my daughter’s crazy puppy); locally grown spinach for sale; and a woman from Washington state looking for some new friends to sail with her on a 26-foot boat down to Mexico (tempting…this list can get you in trouble).

Like the internet itself, Lander-Talk seemed simply to have materialized from galaxy dust. But in fact it began at the National Outdoor Leadership School, which had gotten on the email bandwagon early – way back in 1992 – by setting up lists for communication among employees at its various branches. When messages on those lists began straying outside the realm of work – someone needing a house-sitter, or selling a climbing rope – NOLS started Lander Talk. In 2001, they decided to open it up to the community. Now there are 466 subscribers, and growing.

It doesn’t provide NOLS any big benefit – they don’t promote their school on it – but it doesn’t cost much either. A little bandwidth, and about 30 minutes of manager Bill Hastings’ time per week. The list is unmoderated, which means that no one edits or censors what goes out on it. So far, no problems with that.

But Lander-Talk is something more than an electronic bulletin board – it’s a town having a new form of conversation with itself, a conversation which may be more revealing of a community in flux than any stories written up in a conventional newspaper or broadcast on local radio. And it’s part of a larger, international story, too: about an economic earthquake that has shaken an industry – well, my industry, the media – to its roots. With astonishing rapidity, staples of our nation’s political, informational and cultural life – that newspaper with your morning coffee, the evening television news with your martini – are as passé as a Lincoln Continental.

Of all the “old” media, newspapers seem to be the least adaptable to the internet age, though they are frantically repackaging their newsgathering staples onto websites, decorated with video and animation. Yet they seem doomed by the thing some of us love best of all – that heft of wood pulp that lands on your doorstep every morning. Newsprint is inky-dirty and expensive, especially when the competition needs only some cheap and inexhaustible bandwidth. Circulation is dropping, display ads are diminishing at about 10 percent annually nationally, and classified ads – the place you might once have looked for a cheap old house in Riverton – are dropping fastest of all. Standard & Poor’s keeps chopping the credit ratings of newspapers’ parent companies. The Economist predicts that over the next few decades half the newspapers in what it calls “the rich world” will fold. Every week the ranks of reporters are depleted by “buy-outs”, often accompanied by tearstained eulogies for the newsroom (these are writers, after all).

Television must reinvent itself, too, if it’s to survive. A television station used to be as valuable as a liquor license, and popular network programs were so pervasive that Ed Sullivan had more sway in defining national character than Dwight Eisenhower. But the television screen has been shattered by cable and satellite into a thousand shards of niche channels – and soon cable and satellite will give way to the internet, as you and I create our own TV series in our backyards and run them on YouTube. As ratings decline, network news staffs wither.

There is reason to be concerned about the decline in trained reporters’ ranks – particularly the loss of investigative reporting – but it’s also fascinating to watch the evolution of the instant informational smorgasbord that is the internet. And despite extraordinary exceptions like Google, E-Bay, and Craig’s List, the money-making class hasn’t figured out how to harness it yet.

Craig’s List is essentially a bottomless, borderless classified ad section, and it gets a large share of blame for newspapers’ troubles. Though it’s now international in scope, its genius is its local focus – a simple formula that helps visitors find the goods, services, events, or friends on the streets where they live.

That’s what Lander Talk does, too. But it is much more than a classified section, for a number of reasons: first, almost unconsciously, it reveals and builds an alternative social network, linking people who want to paint, or do yoga, or watch a movie, with like-minded neighbors they may never have met; second, it crosses the boundaries of social cliques that in many towns separate the oldtimers from the newcomers, the sushi eaters from the steak chompers, the feline-fancier from the canine-cozy; third, it reveals, and maybe enhances, a new community emerging, with worldviews that might have remained under wraps in most Wyoming towns, interests that would never fit in a newspaper display ad, like barter without cash, or flat-out giveaways, or a community garden idea that happens simply because…well, because, wouldn’t it be nice?

Yes…but not to everyone. As Karl Sutton – also the Lander-Talk fresh spinach salesman – and other community garden promoters discovered, there are still plenty of old school folks who don’t buy into some of the ideas emerging on Lander’s alternative internet universe. Some of them live right next door to the proposed garden (which is plotted on land owned by the city), and they’re used to running their dogs and riding their four-wheelers there.

Lander Community GardenPhoto: Kevin Bergstrom

My dogs are out there doing some fertilizing too, but nevertheless, I see the garden as a welcome addition, a “local food” effort to be more self-sustaining and inclusive. And I like that it has composted in the enjoyable, communal babble of Lander-Talk. But as Edmund Burke would have posted on the list-serve: “Every prudent act is founded on compromise and barter.” So we’ll grill each other over backyard grills, and raise our voices at city council meetings – the “new” community will get to know the “old,” and progress will be made in the stuttering, push-pull way of small towns.

In time, I think, the town that seems to be taking shape in Lander-Talk will infect the rest of us, and we’ll change without knowing exactly where the spinach came from.

It’s quite different from the evolution that Sam Western described in his piece about Sheridan, a town which he and others link to Lander as among “Wyoming’s more pleasant places.” The Sheridan transformation he described – from an energy and ag economy to an arts-centered community – is driven from the top by leaders with money and education.

Lander’s transformation – if that’s what it is – comes from the bottom, or, at least, from the happy, unharbored chaos you find in Lander-Talk. The genesis of that list, NOLS’ Don Webber pointed out, simply happened, without a master plan to guide it. It has a life of its own now, and Don opens the posts, like me, with expectant curiosity. There are always surprises, but he sums it up with a note of wonder in his voice: “It seems there’s a new feeling in town, a new approach to life and community in Lander.”

And Karl Sutton’s spinach, if you were hoping to get some, sold out the first day it was offered.
Get Lander-Talk! Lander-Talk@lists.nols.edu