Case of the Nutty Blond

Remember the hide-and-seek picture games? Such as the kind they featured in the Highlights Magazines for kids or the Where's Waldo books? Well I have one for you, my readers: in the picture above, see if you can find the beauty in the scene. What? All you see is pavement, cars pumping pounds and pounds of carbon dioxide into the air, feckless development, and a boring brown desolation beyond? You're not looking hard enough, I say.

Consider another scene: a run-down town that is getting older by the day, forgotten by the outside world as it sits in the middle of nowhere in the South West. Oh yeah, and it is full of oddball characters and rusty old cars. Can you see the beauty of this scene? Pixar did. I think that the fact that they found beauty in the eccentricity of Route 66 and characters like Mater—especially those noisy, carbon-dioxide emitting things we call cars—and told an endearing story about them is part of what made their movie Cars set a world record: my dad paid to see it three times in theatres (No one who knows this man has ever heard of this happening before).

As I ponder this topic I think of some of my dearest friends whom some people may think are not the most attractive people on the planet. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t noticed, but I really do not care. No names will be mentioned, but be they nerds, geeks, dorks, jocks, old, young, blond, brunette or red-headed, their personalities, the way they laugh or smile, and the fact that they are my friends make them the most beautiful people on the planet, regardless of whether they appear on the cover of People magazine.

Can you see the beauty in the top picture yet? It is a picture of the I-80 business loop in Rock Springs, WY, and is a sight I see almost daily now that I am back from that green, populated area known as the East Coast. I must tell you that Rock Springs is getting quite populated now with the gas and oil boom; we have gone from 17,000 people a few years ago to 47,000. Alas, most of them are dirty old men here only as long as the oil. But even with the shady characters walking the streets, our corrupt politics, my lazy and annoying co-workers at the City, and a dry heat that will soon become a dry cold, I am glad to be home. Want to know what I see? A clear sky free of smog and oxygen (we are not called the High Dessert here for nothin'), fascinating geographical layers of rock and sediment, and things that have the will and courage to live and thrive here (i.e. sagebrush, antelope, and my family, to name only a very few), and if you could look left you would see beautiful mesas and to the right is the Windriver Mountains which you can see over 100 miles away. These and other things make this land beautiful to me. Did you know that there is a trona mine only less than an hour West of Rock Springs? Do you know what trona, also called soda ash, is?!

Wyoming is not as unique as some, but it has a taste of everything. Even though Colorado has the Rocky Mountains, we have their close cousins, the Tetons. Even though Nebraska has plains and farmland, we have the grasslands in the North West corner around Gillette and farmland in and around Worland and Powell. Nevada and California can boast wind and dessert, but we have that here in the south east corner in and around Rock Springs, too. It gets colder in North Dakota, and Montana has big ranches; but we have those things here too. The only thing we do not have is a real big city as the whole state has about less than 500,000 people (that earns us half a senator in the House, but they are very nice to let us have a whole one). But which state can say they have that? Where else can you experience a place like Yellowstone Park, or Devils Tower?

You can tell me that there are other places that are 100 times lovelier than Wyoming, and we can argue until the cows come home. But the Shire was not fought for because it was lush and green; Frodo went to save the Shire because it was his home. And while your own personal Shire may be somewhere else, the land that has my heart is here.