A Wyoming goodbye, again

I took this photograph in January, just days after moving back to Wyoming from California. 

It’s the view out the window above my desk in WyoFile’s Laramie office. After four years living in California, the visage this day, with snow on the roofs and sidewalks and the sun fading prettily behind the mountains, was a nice welcome home. 

The photograph contains within its frame much of what I love most about Wyoming — the quiet and the community. The rooftops and footprints remind me that beneath Laramie’s complications and contradictions lies the bedrock of a village mentality. It’s a place, like so many towns in Wyoming, where people have gathered together in the middle of an empty, often harsh landscape to build lives together.

Saying goodbye to Wyoming is a hard thing. When I left in the winter of 2021, I had spent five years at WyoFile, the start of my journalism career. I’d lived in Lander, Gillette, Cheyenne and Laramie and filed stories from most towns in the state, as well as a few from a mobile hotspot on a roadside. Leaving on Interstate 80, my heart tugged me backward. Driving west felt like post-holing through deep snow, with a hard-blowing Wyoming headwind to boot. 

One would have to be crazy to say goodbye to Wyoming twice. Alas, I am crazy, or at least restless, so come next week, I’ll be doing just that. In late October, I took a job at the Sacramento Bee covering California’s Legislature. It has been wonderful living in Wyoming again and working with the expanded and ever-more talented team at WyoFile, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about one of the most-watched statehouses in the country. 

So soon enough, I’ll be packing my belongings and battling those headwinds and heartstrings back down Interstate 80, headed west on the highway I drove east on just a year ago. Who knows, maybe the local U-Haul dealer still has the trailer I rode in with. 

My stay this time around was far too short, but at least I packed in a lot of Wyoming. I wore out the tires on my truck chasing stories into Riverton, Rock Springs, Torrington and points in between. I watched the falling sun turn the walls of the Wind River Canyon pink after catching a hard-fighting rainbow trout — and losing more than a few. I bit my skis into untracked powder as I swooped through the silent forests of the Snowy Mountain Range. I clutched my suit jacket tighter around my body and cursed politicians, politics and the very idea of “the news” as I walked through the biting morning wind to the statehouse in Cheyenne. And I swung open the red metal door of a Laramie dive bar, stepping out of the winter night and into the cheer of a room full of people I am fond of. 

So, I hate to leave you again. And who’s to say I won’t ask you to take me back again. But for now it’s goodbye again, Wyoming. There is, quite certainly, no other place like you.