Public land — land of the free — defines Wyoming

I wasn’t born in Wyoming, but, as the old saying goes, “I got here as soon as I could.” For me, that was August of 1960 when my parents packed up the kids and headed west from St. Louis, a station-wagon version of Lewis and Clark. On our way home from the Pacific, we bent south, like William Clark, and found ourselves along his fork of the Yellowstone River in the Sunlight Basin. I was not quite 10 years old, and the North Absarokas were an obsidian-tipped arrow straight into my soul.

Up until that week, my idea of freedom was a hundred acres of timber along a creek that cut its way down a steep valley through the bluffs of the Mississippi, dove into a culvert under a four-lane highway, and found its way down the rip-rapped bank to join the Father of Waters. It was a marvelous place for a bunch of suburban kids — oak, hickory and wild cherry on the uplands, giant sycamore and soft maple along the creek, whose dappled waters trickled over limestone outcrops and lingered in gravel-bottomed pools — but it was a tiny spark of wildness in a landscape that had been thoroughly settled. Even the kids knew that.

If we left the creek and climbed up toward the ridges on either side, we ran into the back fences of suburban yards, carefully mowed and festooned with “No Trespassing” signs. Now and then, an irate householder would catch a glimpse of us in the woods and yell — we disappeared into the shadows like smoke.

So the water and timber and wildflowers and snowfields and peaks of the Shoshone National Forest were like a revelation of God to me. The family came back again and again over the next several years, and I was loosed with a flyrod, four Muddler Minnows and a smashed peanut butter sandwich to follow the creek as far as curiosity and gumption would take me.

After college, I settled down in the Midwest to start a family, but every summer, I was back for as long as the company could spare me, with a wife and two apple-cheeked little girls in tow, to taste the freedom we had somehow lost back east.

Then, I had a chance to come to Wyoming full time. The offer was exhilarating, but I thought it over before I accepted, not because of what the job entailed, but because of how I felt about the West. They say familiarity breeds contempt, or at least boredom, and I wondered whether the sage and mountains might lose some of their shine for me if they were always at the back door. I decided to take the chance.

That was 1983. In the years since, I’ve rambled around most of the state, from Devil’s Tower to the Bear River Divide, Jenny Lake to Vedauwoo. I’ve hunted, fished, canoed, hiked, photographed, picnicked and contemplated my navel, and I’m pleased — and relieved — to report that the big sky has never lost its shine for me. In fact, the love affair has deepened over time as I’ve come to appreciate the subtle charms of the sage as much as the flower-strewn meadows above timberline. It wasn’t until I moved to Wyoming that I experienced September and October here, arguably the best months of the year, not only in the West but anywhere.

All of this is set against the backdrop of public land. I own 34 of the BLM’s 1:100,000-scale maps covering Wyoming, 32 of the USGS quads, and an assortment of national park and forest maps on the side, all of them dog-eared and stained from days spent crammed into backpacks. I’m proud to say I’ve worn out two compasses, something that never could have happened behind the Midwest’s fences.

Wyoming is many things to many people. The boosters tout its minerals; the politicians brag on the rugged independence of its people. But, let me tell you: public land is what defines Wyoming. It’s why I came; it’s why I stay. I think I share that sentiment with many other residents.

You hang a “No Trespassing” sign on Wyoming, and it will be no different than Illinois, with a lot less rain and much longer winters. If all I have left is the view of the Tetons from a crowded parking lot and locked gates off every highway, I can think of better places to spend my time.

Back in the 1930s, America’s poet laureate, Archibald MacLeish, looked at the state of the nation and asked a penetrating question:

We wonder whether the great American dream

Was the singing of locusts out of the grass to the west and the

West is behind us now:

The west wind’s away from us

We wonder if the liberty is done:

The dreaming is finished

Or if there’s something different men can dream

Or if there’s something different men can mean by 

Liberty . . .

Or if there’s liberty a man can mean that’s

Men: not land

We wonder

We don’t know

We’re asking

I wonder whether there’s liberty a man can mean that’s men, not land. Here in Wyoming, I think there’s little doubt. Public land means my freedom.

Don’t you sell an inch of it.