Dear HCN,
Jeffery Smith’s plaintive
essay, “Sensory Deprivation on the High Plains’ (HCN, 7/7/97),
reflects what Patrick Jobes has called the “deconstructing” of
Western communities. In his decade-long study of demographic trends
in the Gallatin Valley of Montana, Jobes found that newcomers had,
on average, moved four times in the past decade. “Newcomers have a
poor track record of remaining part of a community,” he says. “They
are likely to be ignorant of facts and attuned to superficial
symbols.”
Like Smith’s looking for Appalachian
hillbillies in the middle of the high plains.
For
the same reasons as Smith, I moved to Wyoming in 1980 with the
intention of establishing a home rooted in a place which was
completely different than what I had grown up with. When I came to
Rawlins in 1980, there were only three houses for rent. The
cheapest was $500 a month. Having spent the better part of my life
in the coal mining country of southern Illinois, I had never paid
more than $100 a month for a house. When we drove into town to
interview for a job with the county planning department, my wife,
seven months pregnant, cried. The oil rigs and muddy streets were a
shock. I had a pounding headache from the elevation and the wind
was sucking up a dirty October snowfall.
Yet
somehow, after a few days in the community and a side trip to the
Sierra Madre Mountains, where we saw our first mule deer, and
experienced the smell of wet cottonwood leaves and sagebrush
carried through town on a river of clean wind, we knew we had to
give it a try. Eighteen years later, I have a new wife and five
kids ready for college. Three of them were born in Wyoming and I
intend to live here for the rest of my
life.
Wallace Stegner wrote: “Somehow, against
probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been
growing on Western ranches, and in Western towns and even in
Western cities. It is the product not of boomers but of stickers,
not those who pillage and run but those who settle and love the
life they have made and the place they have made it in.”
Rawlins, which is no Aspen or Jackson Hole,
taught me a lot about how to be a “sticker” in the West. As the
boom tailed out in 1983 and the exodus started out of the state,
those of us left adapted and learned to survive. Sure, it was
stressful – it cost me my first wife and my first home, but we
stuck it out. We began the search, which continues today, for
strategies to stabilize and protect the fabric of rural life in the
state.
In 1987, when my employment ended in
Rawlins, I had several job offers back in the Midwest, but I
couldn’t bring myself to return to the humid, crowded places.
Instead, we moved to Gillette. After a frustrated weekend of
searching for a place to rent, my second wife, Jayne, cried. We
finally found a house and within three years had saved the down
payment to buy a house.
Those first years in
Gillette showed me that people here were not that much different
than what I found in Rawlins. They were hardworking types, mainly
from the upper Midwest. As we raised our family and the economy
gradually came back, we began to realize how lucky we were. My wife
and I never went unemployed and even our children could work and
earn as much as they wanted.
What we found was a
community which is committed to taking care of itself. Dozens of
clubs and social organizations flourish.
In 1995,
the year Smith came to Gillette, the city completed its 20th annual
citizens’ survey. It showed that 93.6 percent of those answering
would recommend Gillette as a place to live. It also showed that
the average tenure of respondents was 19.2 years in Campbell
County.
Sure, there are those that sit back in
their “caves’ on Rockpile Avenue, but the stickers don’t. They
(and, proudly now, we) have built a community that is new and
prospering. It is developing depth; but that takes time. And it
takes effort from the “stickers,” not those who cut and run,
endlessly searching for the place that fits their wavering
ideals.
Today the Powder River Basin is the
largest coal-producing area in the United States. It took a “Boom
and Bust” to get us to this point, but we are now developing a
manageable industrial base. This isn’t Appalachia with black-faced
miners lying down in front of the “scab” coal trucks and going home
to squalling babies in tarpaper shacks. It’s about people earning a
decent living, providing for a highly regulated and environmentally
sound mining process to meet the nation’s growing energy needs.
Somebody has to provide the power for all those personal
computers.
What the stickers have learned is that
your community is what you make it.
One final
thought on omens. The real omen in Jeffery Smith’s essay is that he
has no understanding of the “geography of place.” The Mustang Motel
is located under an overpass, but is nearly a mile from I-90. The
name of the housing development is “Antelope Valley,” not “Antelope
Hills,” and the Thunder Basin National Grasslands are not all
leased to coal companies. There are thousands of acres open to the
public within a 45-minute drive of Gillette. You just have to be
able to read a map and know where you
are.
David
Spencer
Gillette,
Wyoming
The writer is a planner in Gillette, Wyoming.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A High Plains rejoinder.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
