In a victory for health
activists, non-smokers are increasingly able to enter workplaces,
restaurants, bars and outdoor patios without breathing secondhand
cigarette smoke. Smoking bans of various levels of restrictiveness
are being enacted all around the country, and even my state of
Wyoming, historically resistant to knee-jerk social change, has
seen a few communities unplug their Smoke Eater ashtrays.
Yet I can’t help thinking that a statewide ban on smoking in
Wyoming is not only unrealistic but unwise.
For the last
three years, I’ve spent lots of time hanging out in the smokiest
places I can find. I’ve been on a systematic tour of Wyoming bars
because I’m writing a book about them — though that’s another
story. The bars I visit are in tiny towns, in the remote outback of
Wyoming’s high plains or lonely deserts. They are the sort of
places where everyone knows everyone, where people drop in day or
night for a beer, cup of coffee, six-pack to go, bite to eat, or to
find out whether Earl and Betty have finished calving. Bars are
where people go for human company in vast Wyoming. And yes, lots of
people in them smoke.
For the record, I don’t smoke. I
don’t mind occasionally smelling like eau
d’ashtray for the cause of writing a book. But am I glad
that my town of Laramie enacted a smoking ban in all public places
— bars, too — as of April 2005.
One typically
smoky Wyoming saloon I visited for my bar tour is Dad’s Bar in
Thayne, Wyo., population 341. That’s in the Star Valley of western
Wyoming, just south of Jackson Hole. Sitting around Dad’s one
afternoon, I told my companions about the new non-smoking ordinance
in Laramie. It got them so mad the bar rattled with the
coughing-clatter of a half-dozen hacking smokers.
“Nobody
will ever come in here and tell us we can’t smoke in our own bar,”
they wheezed. They could understand a smoking ban enacted by folks
in Colorado or by the pointy-headed intellectuals and health nuts
in Laramie — who should move to Boulder with the other
granola-eating tree -huggers — but in Wyoming? No way.
The folks in tiny Thayne can probably be confident in
their defiance for years to come. A grassroots effort needs some
grass, and in Wyoming, bans of anything are unpopular. Nonetheless,
the smoking-ban effort continues in larger Wyoming towns. Cheyenne,
the state’s capital, became the second community to pass a smoking
ordinance as restrictive as Laramie’s. That happened just this
summer, but Cheyenne officials wisely decided to wait until their
major tourist event, Frontier Days, came and went before putting
the law into effect.
Further, in a move that conjures
visions of the Attica Prison Riots, the Wyoming Department of
Corrections made all Wyoming prisons tobacco-free as of July 1 this
year. Instead of smokes or chew, prisoners get stress balls,
patches, lozenges and other devices designed to wean them from one
of the few pleasures available in prison. I picture prisoners
bartering nicotine gum in exchange for other goods, and somehow the
image doesn’t have the same scared-straight flavor. Maybe that’s
the idea. Meantime, at the Wyoming Honor Farm, a minimum-security
prison in Riverton, escapes escalated after the ban. Men simply
wandered off, only to be caught a few hours later without having
made much of an effort to bug out. One has to wonder if they can’t
claim temporary insanity: They weren’t trying to hitch to
California; they were desperate for a cig.
The folks who
run Dad’s Bar and others around Wyoming wouldn’t appreciate being
turned into criminals because their customers have a smoke or two
with their drinks. After all, these bars are their hangouts, their
second homes. I hate to think of the folks at Dad’s shivering
outside on the snowy sidewalk, sheltering under the racing sleigh
suspended above the door, puffing on cigarettes between drinks.
They might as well stay home, smoking and drinking alone.
There will be a lot of clean-lunged people in Wyoming bars if
smoking is ever banned statewide. Except there won’t be anybody
gathering in hometown bars to visit about the weather or ask about
Earl and Betty’s calves. The social network will get severed in the
name of health. If a smoker hacks in a bar but there’s nobody there
to hear, is the solution worse than the problem?
Julianne Couch is a contributor to Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado (hcn.org). She is a writer in Laramie,
Wyoming.
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