![]() Inside, I found myself - half shyly, half proudly - dropping my r’s, saying “ real good,” instead of “ really good,” peppering my speech with “y’all.” I wasn’t trying to pass, exactly, just pass unnoticed in a town where one might overhear one man say to another: “Well, your cousin is my cousin’s cousin, but we’re not cousins.” In the fridge behind the bar, packs of cigarettes were for sale. The interior was dim and smoky, populated by gruff men sporting hats and overalls and mustaches, and by one child, maybe 6 or 7 years old, who kept trying to climb on his seated father’s back. I had wondered, before entering, why Vicki’s was a saloon and not a bar once inside, I quickly understood. We toured the fort, which had also attracted a group of rowdy Italian tourists, before repairing to Vicki’s Saloon, where Noah joined us for an early dinner: third-pound burgers - Vicki was out of quarter-pounders. The second was staffed by a rough-looking woman whose accent, we agreed, seemed vaguely British - an odd coincidence, or evidence of Fort Laramie’s unsuspected cosmopolitan appeal. ![]() (The disdain for Colorado, in Wyoming, is strong and statewide.) I bought a sunhat, the better to shield the few parts of my body left visible by the muumuu. She said she’d lived in Boulder, Colorado, for 40 years, which seemed suspect, though her assessment of Boulder’s residents - “snobs!” - did not. The first trading post - named, what else, Calamity Jane’s - was run by a woman with the strongest French accent I’d ever heard outside of a multiplex. My first full day in Fort Laramie, Natalie and I went into town: the old fort, two trading posts, a saloon, a restaurant (closed), a gas station (abandoned), and a building that looked like it used to be a motel. Instead, watching my friend’s husband rub her feet, I thought how lucky they were - not just to have each other, but to have, for miles around, no one else. ![]() “You’ll think we’re so old and boring,” Natalie had joked on my first night in town, as we chatted in the living room beneath the massive taxidermied head of an elk Noah had shot when he was 12. Natalie had not been happy in New York in Wyoming, standing on the porch in a yellow sundress as I drove up to her ranch house, she was radiant. Visiting the Strongs - Noah, tall and broad and impressively bearded for a man still in his early 20s, had an impossibly apt last name - promised both the pleasure of seeing a friend and the pain of comparing her life to my own. But while I, frustrated and overworked, had burrowed deeper into my unhappiness, she, faced with a similar situation, had left: for Wyoming and a job on a ranch, where she’d met a cowboy and married him. ![]() After her internship, she’d worked in magazines I’d gotten a job at a publishing house. Natalie and I are similar, on paper: unassuming backgrounds, Ivy League educations, literary aspirations. I was in Fort Laramie to visit friends: the cowboy, Noah, and his wife, Natalie, whom I had met in New York when we were both interns at the same literary magazine. Fort Laramie is not a place one arrives in by accident, and the few people who do plan trips there are mostly retirees in RVs touring America’s historical forts. It was early, not yet seven, but my host, an honest-to-goodness cowboy - he manages and lives on a cattle ranch - had already brewed coffee. ![]() I dressed in a long floral muumuu (a city girl’s idea of prairie garb) and headed downstairs. “I think - hope - this trip will curb me of some of that.” “Wanting to be wanted - accepted,” I wrote in my journal, diagnosing the personality flaw for which this journey was to be the cure. My task, between coasts, as I drove across deserts and mountains and prairies and cornfields, was deceptively simple: to be alone with myself. Fort Laramie was my sixth stop on a solo cross-country road trip that would eventually return me to New York: to a job I had tried unsuccessfully to quit to a life I didn’t yet know how to leave. I had driven to Wyoming -Fort Laramie, Wyoming, population 231 - from Colorado, and to Colorado from New Mexico and to New Mexico from Texas and to Texas from Arizona and to Arizona from California. The bear’s head, still attached, pointed away from my bed, toward the lofted room’s back window, through which could be seen a wide, flat expanse, dotted with the occasional scruffy tree: the dusty plains of Wyoming. The morning I turned 27, I woke up in a room with a bearskin rug. ![]()
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