Who knows? All I can say is that the city in my dream — a cross between Springfield, Pittsburgh, New Haven, and Hartford — was not as bad as you would think. After all, as the hotel clerk in my dream told me, “The city’s local museum has the finest collection” of a rare mineral whose name I’ve forgotten. . . . Just don’t try to get on the interstate. In that case you would need a map. And since I can’t read or see very well in my dreams, that wouldn’t have helped anyway.

Okay, I’m off to drive in the snow.

Some other events are just as important but only in retrospect. These are subtle things, a turning of the tide. A high school student teaches you a bit of French in fourth grade and inspires a life-long interest in la belle langue and the nation of France. You go to camp a couple years later where you bicycle a couple hundred miles around Iowa and realize that cycling is the activity that you really love. You appropriate the family camera on a trip to Yellowstone and pick up the habit. You ride the 80 bus from Watertown to Cambridge and start to give up most of your conservative political views as you see that the working people (of which you are one) need more opportunity than they’re getting. The tragic, brutal death of a young gay man in your home state makes you rethink some of the other bullshit ideas you had.

Another thing that slowly changed me was the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building fifteen years ago yesterday.

I should note that I was in my second year at Grinnell in the spring of 1995. I loved Grinnell, but I felt like I lived in a cave. Very little news made it my way. That is, I consumed very little of it. I remember the Republican revolution of 1994 — I may have been one of the few students there who didn’t really mind it. I seem to recall there was (still) a war in the Balkans. And the farm bill was rewritten. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to know what was going in the world; I just wasn’t very connected to the media at the time.

McVeigh and Nichol’s act of terrorism really struck close to home — figuratively, of course. At the time, I still considered myself a Wyomingite. Like many people in Wyoming I felt that the federal government was a more-or-less foreign, colonial power. DC is almost 2000 miles from the Equality State, but unelected officials there ultimately control how most of the land in the mountains and plains can be used. With only three electoral votes, our Congressional delegation might have had disproportionate power relative to our population, but we felt marginalized on the national stage. It seemed like a lot of the issues that mattered to us didn’t matter to the rest of the country, and vice versa. People on the coasts and in the cities wanted to take away the guns we (truly believed) we relied on for our protection. We might not have had “Live Free or Die” on our license plates — we had a broncobuster — but we felt like we actually lived what New Hampshire was trying to claim.

I knew a guy — a sort of family friend/hanger-on — who taught me about the militia mindset. He spent a lot of time at the gun shop. (I should say one of the gun shops, for there were several.) And he would tell us what he heard and (thus) believed. He was a real life Dale Gribble. The government had designs on our guns and our liberty. For reasons I didn’t understand, the Clinton Justice Department was training a secret NATO army using black helicopters to impose the “one world government” under the auspices of the UN. The Federal Reserve was part of an ancient secret society that finally surfaced at the Bretton Woods summit in the 40s; they too were part of this enormous plot, and at the appointed time this unelected body would devalue the US dollar for their nefarious ends. Ruby Ridge and Waco and Vince Foster’s suicide were visible corroboration of the dozens of other insidious events for anyone who would just bother to connect the dots. He buried guns and ammunition in PVC pipe in the backyard so that once ATF agents came to take his “sacrificial” firearms away, he would be ready to carry on the fight. He stocked extra food and claimed to have survival skills. And he “knew people” who claimed to have shot down a helicopter that was scaring their cattle on BLM land. But the “real” militia action was always over the border in Montana, where the crazy people live.

(If it weren’t for the talk about aliens, it was almost conceivable as an alternate reality. After graduating college I watched “X-Files.” And I felt like I had heard all of the stories already. The guy I knew was a wannabe Western version Fox Mulder, uncovering the evil machinations of the Cigarette Smoking Man. After my first year working in tech support where I frequently helped people working in the defense industry on government contracts, it became crystal clear to me that the very idea of a “massive government conspiracy” crumbles because it’s just not possible to hold it all together secretly. Even people working on secret things need help completing their part of the secret.)

So when a couple of “lone wolves” put an actual plan into effect, I was stunned. I knew that some people believed the government wanted to make them slaves to its bureaucratic will. I knew that there were a lot of well-armed, slightly off-balance people out there. And I knew that there was a lot of angry — or, at the very least, agitated — rhetoric. (“Talking treason” the guy I knew liked to say.) But I didn’t think anyone would actually do this sort of thing. If I were old enough to remember the Weathermen, it wouldn’t have been so surprising.

After the bombing — which thankfully didn’t actually touch my life directly — just about anything associated with the militia point of view rapidly lost whatever bit of Revolutionary-era-throwback legitimacy I had carved out for it in my mind. These are modern times; there’s no need to “water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants,” because we are so far away from tyranny. Government wasn’t the problem; it was the bulwark against domestic terrorists. Gun legislation might not always be consistent; but it seems like a necessity. There should be no such thing as a “well-regulated militia” except as run by the states.

Above all, the tremendous amount of lost life, the needless deaths, and the premeditated brutality of the Oklahoma City bombing shows us the danger of unchecked bullshit. I don’t claim to know what was in McVeigh’s mind, though I hear he was upset about Waco and Ruby Ridge (which were unfortunate and needless in their own way). But the idea that these events herald despotism makes no more sense than the gun shop hearsay that the family friend shared with us.

Looking at American history, we see that our form of government is more durable than we let on. We have never had periods of despotism. The Republic has never fallen, although it did crack apart from within during the Civil War because of or own inconsistent ideas of “liberty.” Neither fascism nor communism — the two greatest external ideological threats to democracy — took hold. (The methods of prophylaxis — Palmer raids, strike-busting, Pinkertons, McCarthyism, widespread FBI surveillance — may even have been worse than what the forces of stability were trying to prevent.) We have survived wars and contested elections and depressions. The historical power behind the idea of America is the strongest argument against militia activity.

In fact, militias have only gotten us into trouble since they peeled us off from the British Empire. (And depending on your point of view, maybe even then too.) Shay’s Rebellion helped destroy the first post-Revolutionary confederation. Armed white civilians moving into the interior of the continent committed ethnic cleansing and spread race-based tyranny. John Brown’s raids and the Missouri troubles hastened the Civil War, while the South Carolina militia’s siege on Ft. Sumter actually started it. The Ku Klux Klan began as anti-Reconstruction civilian militia. The Gilded Age’s corporate militias killed working men and their families. The counterculture’s left-wing terrorist/nihilist militias in the 1960s and 70s helped usher in the current generation’s culture wars.

So it bothers me very much to see a contemporary resurgence in the kind of sentiment and speech that I heard in my late adolescence, the kind of words and ideas that led McVeigh and Nichols to kill 168 people fifteen years ago. I didn’t say anything about the notions I heard before Oklahoma City because I thought it was diverting, idle chatter — a jester’s story, if you will. Now that I’m starting to hear the same BS, I must say that it’s time to stop . . . before our nation’s adolescent obsession with civilian militias gets people killed again.

I was a bit nervous about today’s journey. Casper was forecast to have two inches of snow, starting right around the time this morning that we were to leave. And somehow I got us a the Casper to Denver to Chicago to Boston itinerary with tight layovers of less than an hour at each stop. But after the frustrating travel experiences we had last month on our way to and from Kansas, we had good travel karma today. We even walked out the door at baggage claim just as the Logan Express to Framingham rounded the corner. That never happens.

We very much enjoyed spending time with my mom and seeing friends in Wyoming, but it’s nice to be home. Nice to be back to sea level. To be back to my pile of reading.

While my two shelves of books will persist into the new year, my periodicals stack won’t. At the beginning of the year I set myself a goal of cleaning up the big shipping box full of various magazines and issues of the New York Times Book Review that I had amassed over the two and a half years that I was in grad school. What I haven’t finished at the end of the year goes into the recycling. “Out with the old” and all that.

Sadly, I haven’t made much progress throughout the year. But I did manage to read a bunch of magazines on the flights last Sunday and today, so maybe there’s hope after all. The Runner’s World article on 1980′s hurdling phenom Danny Harris, who destroyed his career with cocaine, and the National Geographic Adventure feature on a new hiking trail across Nepal were my favorites. The Scientific American article from last year about how the Large Hadron Collider will likely reshape physics reminded me that when I was younger I wanted to be a particle physicist. Oh well, something more to read about next year.

Kitty couldn’t care less whether we’re going on vacation or not.

Happy holidays from the Tate Mineralogical Museum.

Casper’s one and only cape buffalo.

Mmm…moose.

What’s a diorama?

The world’s smallest carnivore.

Blinky, the three legged pronghorn.

The owl says, “I will f-ing cut you!”

Like a deer in the headlights. (Hunting that way is illegal, by the way.)

Caribou!

I bond with the statues everywhere I go.

Oh, what a feeling!

Nina, let’s meet!

Nina and Rachel.

Nimmi.

Simon and Kyle.

Kyle just cannot believe that. No way!

I like the Tin Man.

Lisa wears safety orange.

The fence didn’t wear saftey orange.

Thumbs up!

How’s that “milking” going?

Prairie.

My mom.

Merry Thanksmas.

I have a little teapot, short and stout… and ready for backpacking.

Prezzies!

Holiday cheer!

I was once asked as a teenager, “What do people do here for fun?” And, to my great discredit, I answered truthfully and correctly: “They get drunk or they get out of town.”

To be fair to me, it is a great place to get drunk, I am told. You can “go sneakin’ to the Beacon” Club, which is not nearly as ghost-town chic as it used to be. Or you can go to the World Famous Wonder Bar. Just forget about bringing your horse inside and ordering something from the saddle at the bar; that’s already been done. And, of course, you can always go through the drive-thru liquor store, get a bit to share with friends (or not), head out of town, and get ginned up before shooting guns at road signs or whatever. It’s your business, and Wyoming is very much an “It’s your business” kinda place.

And, when the weather is nice, there are a large number of things to do outside of town. A half-hour southwest of town, there’s Alcova Reservoir, where we go to hike around on the rocks or go sailing or dive into the deep water from the rocks or stir up the rattlesnakes or go drinking or whatever. Nearer to town, you can put your inner-tube or raft in the North Platte River and slowly float your way back to Casper and inebriation. A bit farther down the road is Independence Rock, where “Immigrant Pioneers” wrote their names in the 19th century on the way to Oregon. Fifteen years ago it was possible to clamber all o’er it, but “they” don’t allow that any more. Across the road you can pretend you’re a different kind of pioneer, and push a handcart along the Oregon/Mormon Trails.

Just outside of town to the south is our mountain, Casper Mountain. In the summer, it’s a great place for hiking — the Rotary Park hike around Garden Creek Falls is very nice — and short mountain bike rides. In the winter there are some excellent nordic ski trails and a somewhat rocky downhill ski area, which the Locals seem to like for that midweek and busy weekend ski fix. And Casper makes a great base of operations for summer day trips to trailheads on BLM land or in the Medicine Bow National Forest. It’s also popular pastime to get into the 4×4 and just drive for hours on the dirt roads that cross the range and mountains.

If you’re lucky enough to be here in the first or second week of July, you should definitely stay in town a day or two and have a “rip-roarin’ good time” at the Central Wyoming Fair and Rodeo. You can watch barrel racing, bull riding, calf roping, and bronco busting from the grandstands with real cowboys. And you can enjoy the midway rides and food. (Casper also has the state’s best hospital. So don’t worry if you eat too many funnel cakes. You will get excellent care before, during and after your bypass surgery.) Casper’s fair and rodeo may not draw the same crowds and riders as Frontier Days in Cheyenne or the Wyoming State Fair in Douglas; but it’s probably better, because you’re in Casper and it’s in Casper and those other fairs and rodeos aren’t.

But what if you visit during one of the shoulder seasons? Say, November? Perhaps around Thanksgiving time? It’s not snowy enough to ski. It’s not warm enough to hike. There’s no fair or rodeo. Many of the backroads are impassable. You can’t go to Alcova or float the river. Basically you can’t do much without eventually involving Lunchbox, The Cadaver Sniffing Dog.

(By the way, when a Wyomingite tells you something isn’t a good idea, you should listen. We know lots of stories about people who have died or almost died doing the thing you’re contemplating. You just might be the lucky one who lives, and we’ll help you if we find you. But there are only 400,000 people in Wyoming’s 100,000 square miles, and 1/4 live in the two largest cities; so you do the math on the chances that someone other than Lunchbox will happen across your frost-bitten/sun-stroked/dehydrated/malnourished/rattlesnake-bit/drug-runner-shot/logging-truck-smashed/roughneck-mugged/drunken-cowboy-assaulted self. It’s your business, but I’m just saying. . . .)

So what can you do more-or-less year-round in Casper?

Casper started as a fort town. Wait, let’s back up. Casper started as a convenient place for covered wagon trains and Mormons with pushcarts to cross the North Platte River and head overland to South Pass and freedom Oregon. So you can get your Old West history on at Fort Caspar, which has reconstructed buildings and exhibits, and at the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center. The latter is new and quite good.

While you’re getting your “Old West” on, you should definitely stop into Lou Taubert Ranch Outfitter, the best western store anywhere. You want boots? Try on one of 10,000 pairs. You want buckles? Yup, they have those too. Need tack? Wanna rope indoors to try out your new lariat? Need chaps? Yup. Yup. And yup. You can even decorate your home in the Western style and find John Wayne lunchboxes for the little buckaroos.

The rest of downtown is fun and quirky, too. It’s compact and walkable. The shopkeepers are friendly and helpful. There aren’t chain stores downtown, but if you aren’t into interesting things, you can head out to big box stores on the eastern side of town for the same stuff you can find in whatever medium-sized town is near the town where you live. Casper does have one of the three — count em, three! — malls in Wyoming; you won’t go wanting.

Casper has three small museums that are worth a visit. Two of them — The Tate Mineralogical Museum and the Werner Wildlife Museum — are part of Casper College, the Harvard on the Hill. And downtown is the Nicolaysen Art Museum, which has several special exhibitions every year as well as a permanent collection specializing in Western regional art.

And that’s pretty much what there is to do in this modern-day Deadwood. Of course, I’ve left things out. During these energy boom times, Casper seems to have an improving restaurant and bar scene — especially near downtown and on the east-side, where you can eat at chain restaurants after shopping at chain stores. In the summer you can watch a Casper Ghosts baseball game. (We did this last year, though it was postponed due to wind.) And you might consider a short drive outside of town to the east or the northwest to see some of the oil services companies and refineries. (But you probably saw those on your way to or from Yellowstone anyway, right?) And you can drive by Natrona County High School, where Dick Cheney and I went to high school. But now we’re kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren’t we? So let’s just stop there.

I read a lot on the plane. Saveur — which is written for people with a lot of money and “refined” tastes, but I found it free at work, and it was all about cheeseburgers . . . mmm . . . cheeseburgers. And I “read” Runners World, Bicycling, New York Times, MATLAB News & Notes. It was the first time, I read the Times in a long, long time, despite the fact that it’s delivered every Sunday. I really should cancel our subscription. It feels like charity, to be honest.

My mom said Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) was on our flight. Who knew? If I had, I probably would have harassed him about his “No” vote yesterday on the healthcare bill. “I may be a so-called bleeding heart liberal; but you’re a doctor, man. You know better than to do that shit. But from what I’ve heard your patients are happier now that you’re in politics and out of the office. Etc.”

I don’t know how long we’re going to be on the Internets . . . They turn it off here at night. Honest.

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Driving back to East Glacier one day, we decided to count the different kinds of (larger) animals we saw on our trip: mule deer, prairie dogs, black bears, mountain goats, brook trout, magpies, ravens, goldfinch, pronghorn, elk, bison, pelicans, marmots, chipmunks (two kinds), squirrels (tree and ground), bunnies, hummingbirds, coyote, cows, camels, llamas, horses, osprey, golden eagles, robins, blue jays, geese, ducks, mosquitos, doggies, hawk, dragonflies, grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, bees, and hippies.

Here are photographs of some of these animals.

	Hummingbird (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Yellow-bellied marmot (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Mallard (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Yellow-bellied marmot (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Elk (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Elk (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Chipmunk (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Pronghorn antelope (Natrona County, Wyoming)
	Ravens (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Elk (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Bison (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Bison (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Bison (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Elk (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Coyote (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Deer (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Black bear (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Osprey (Glacier NP, Montana)
	Cows (Glacier NP, Montana)
	Deer (Waterton Lakes NP, Alberta)
	Black bear (Waterton Lakes NP, Alberta)
	Deer (Glacier NP, Montana)
	Grizzly bears (Blackfeet Nation, Montana)
	Bighorn sheep (Glacier NP, Montana)
	Mountain goat (Glacier NP, Montana)
	Mountain goats (Glacier NP, Montana)

Alright. Alright. But you’re only going to get a rough timeline.

	Downtown Denver
	Coors Field, Denver
	At low elevation, ca. 7,000 feet (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	On our first hike, ca. 8,500 feet (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Lunch spot (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	On our second hike, ca. 9,500 feet (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	On our second hike, ca. 10,000 feet (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	On our second hike, Lake Haiyaha (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Where’s the parking lot? (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	On Trail Ridge Road, ca. 13,000 feet (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Elk on the tundra (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Mother bear and cubs (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Arty elks (Rocky Mountain NP, Colorado)
	Carbon County, Wyoming
	Downtown Casper, Wyoming
	Learning how to use the big camera (Casper, Wyoming)
	Freeland Cemetery (Natrona County, Wyoming)
	Freeland Cemetery (Natrona County, Wyoming)
	Freeland Cemetery (Natrona County, Wyoming)
	In the Boone and Crockett lodge at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (Cody, Wyoming)
	In the Whitney museum at the BBHC (Cody, Wyoming)
	A typical prairie scene (Cody, Wyoming)
	Another typical prairie scene (Cody, Wyoming)
	Yet another typical prairie scene (Cody, Wyoming)
	Yellowstone NP, Wyoming
	Early summer flowers (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Bison amid the flowers (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Old Faithful (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Grand Prismatic Pool (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Home, Sweet Home (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	On our third hike (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	On our third hike, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	On our third hike, the upper falls (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Waiting for Old Faithful (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Old Faithful (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Old Faithful Inn (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	27ºF (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Early summer flowers (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Mammoth Hot Springs (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Dried up hot springs (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	European tourists (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	The Golden Gate (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Looking for the elusive sage moose Alces sagifora (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	On our fourth hike, the summer trip to Mordor (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	Lower falls of the Yellowstone (Yellowstone NP, Wyoming)
	The Beartooth Highway, Wyoming
	Baby cousin (Billings, Montana)
	Happy baby, Happy mom (Billings, Montana)
	In “The Montana Room” (Billings, Montana)
	The Montana Capitol (Helena, Montana)
	North of Great Falls, Montana
	On the way to Glacier NP, Montana
	Blackfeet Nation, Montana
	Snapshooting (Blackfeet Nation, Montana)
	On the way to Saint Mary (Blackfeet Nation, Montana)
	On our way to Saint Mary (Blackfeet Nation, Montana)
	The most popular view in the park (Glacier NP, Montana)
	Logan Pass (Glacier NP, Montana)
	Logan Pass (Glacier NP, Montana)
	Clearing storm, Gunsight Pass (Glacier NP, Montana)
	Gunsight Pass (Glacier NP, Montana)
	Beautiful mountain weather (Waterton Lakes NP, Alberta)
	The Prince of Wales Hotel (Waterton Lakes NP, Alberta)
	Bear grass (Waterton Lakes NP, Alberta)
	On our fifth hike, clearing snow (Glacier NP, Montana)
	On our fifth hike, Mount Oberlin (Glacier NP, Montana)
	On our fifth hike, the boardwalk (Glacier NP, Montana)
	On our fifth hike, the snowfield (Glacier NP, Montana)
	On our fifth hike, the baby mountain goat (Glacier NP, Montana)
	Merriwether Luis, the wayward conquistador (Marias Pass, Montana)
	Petting a sea star (Seattle, Washington)
	Funky coral (Seattle, Washington)
	Happy to have coffee at the Space Needle (Seattle, Washington)
	Happy in-laws (Seattle, Washington)
	Calder stabile (Seattle, Washington)
	Look who’s smart enough to wear a hat to Safeco (Seattle, Washington)
	Another great evening for a great baseball game (Seattle, Washington)
	Doing the large format thing (Mount Saint Helens National Volcanic Monument, Washington)
	Mid-summer wildflowers (Mount Saint Helens NVM, Washington)
	Mid-summer wildflowers (Mount Saint Helens NVM, Washington)
	A Zen moment at the Japanese Garden (Portland, Oregon)
	Mind like water (Portland, Oregon)
	Watching the sea lions (Portland, Oregon)
	Sea lions (Portland, Oregon)
	Crocs (Portland, Oregon)