The cowboy, and the outlaw with whom he is generally associated, assumes a large part in the American consciousness. Though the period of the ‘Wild West’ was relatively short (from about 1865-95) it has nevertheless formed certain fixed iconic images in the mindset of the USA. The cowboy and the outlaw symbolise that anti-industrial romanticisation often attributed to people living outside, and to some extent against, the encroaching power of the modern state and capitalist economy. Somewhat paradoxically the state – represented by the lawman, and to a lesser extent the cavalry – stand for those who make things safe for women, kids and cherry pie, by going out and – quite simply, killing the bad guys. In High Noon the reluctant sheriff is forced to finally see that the only way to deal with outlaws, is to gun them down. (Even his more reluctant, pacifist, wife comes to this viewpoint, by shooting one of the baddies in the back.)
This resolution of social problems not by trying to understand and tackle them, but by going out with a gun and mowing down their social consequences, runs through the Western, the US detective novel, and the US war movie. It does not take a great stretch of the imagination to see US foreign policy as motivated by a similar mind-set, vide Bush Jnr.’s ‘Dead or Alive’ response to the 9/11 Twin Towers attack. Obama did more for his popularity than any healthcare legislation he implemented by assassinating Bin Laden in the best Western movie tradition (it was even filmed) to the joy of millions of Americans who failed to share the rest of the world’s realisation that this changed precisely nothing. The same millions of Americans believe that the right to carry arms (being your own cowboy) – which gives them a murder rate 10 times that of the UK – makes them safe against the bad guys.
Utah is not really cattle-ranching country but not because its topography and climate are any less unsuited to cattle rearing than is the rest of the US West. The dry climate and thin soil with limited grazing makes the western US the worst possible place to raise cattle. In some parts of the South-West it takes 600 acres to graze a cow, whilst in the UK it is three (hence the term ‘three acres and a cow.’). It beggars belief what you sometimes see the poor scrawny beasts grazing on, and a century-and-a-half of this – thankfully declining – practice has been the biggest cause of habitat and species loss in the whole region. The buffalo is an example: many millions of them were slaughtered in the 1870s largely to make way for cattle as well as to starve out the Indians. Utah is as unsuited to cattle as is Arizona, Nevada or Wyoming, which are prime beef-rearing areas. What was different was that the Mormons were not primarily cattle-raisers. Their tight-knit theocratic society would function best, its leaders like Brigham Young realised, be more cohesive and easily controlled by that theocracy, if it were based on crop-rearing in settled villages. The wide-open life of the cowboy (and later the miner) was one that the Mormons eschewed, feeling that in such a context social order and religious control would be more difficult to establish. And they were right.
Nevertheless, in the more arid areas, away from the densely settled Mormon farming communities based on collective irrigation systems, ranching did develop, especially in southern Utah. And this area has a good claim to be the place which gave birth to the Western novel (and subsequently to the whole genre of the Western film) with the appearance of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage in 1912 – a book which has never been out of print in 100 years and has been made into several films. As a work of literature it is pretty awful, Grey was a Writer of the Purple Prose, but it is worth reading when in this part of the world for its social attitudes. It is interesting that the first proper detective novel (Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet) is an anti-Mormon tract, and so too is the first real Western, for the target of Zane Grey’s book is not the Indians, or Cowboys, but … the Mormons. In this book the good guys are the marginal cowboy types, and the bad guys the Mormon leaders trying to steal the hero Lassiter’s intended woman for wicked polygamist purposes, as well as to get their hands on her farm.
As you drive through southern Utah you might be forgiven for thinking that you had trespassed onto a Holywood film set for a cowboy movie, with the cactus, the sagebrush, the buttes and mesas of the high plateau all around. And you have indeed so strayed, for much of this landscape doesn’t just look familiar, it is familiar having been used many times in Western movies over a long period. The south-east corner of Utah, at Monument Valley is paradigmatic in this respect, and some of the buttes and mesas must have had covered wagons rolling round them dozens of times. There is even a John Ford Point, named after the famous western movie director in Monument Valley Park. Stagecoach, How the West was Won and The Searchers were all made here. Later it was the main location for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Moab too was, in the 1950s and 60s, another favourite location for filming Westerns (later large parts of other kinds of film, such as the road-movie Thelma and Louise were also filmed around there). But Utah’s real boom ‘Western’ town was what is a now rather forgotten and slightly forlorn location in the South-West, the town of Kanab. This Mormon settlement from the 1870s was one of the remotest towns in Utah until it was discovered in the 1930s and it soon became known as ‘Little Hollywood’ from the amount of films – mainly Westerns, shot there. Fort Apache, The Lone Ranger, The Outlaw Josey Wales as well as TV series like Gunsmoke and Wagon Train were all filmed around Kanab, as well as biblical blockbusters such as The Greatest Story Ever Told, and futuristic science fiction epics like The Planet of the Apes.
I had driven up from Arizona, crossing the Colorado River (a trickle down-river from the Glen Canyon Dam which I had deliberately avoided visiting, as being too depressing an experience) at Marble Canyon and drove past the monumental Vermillion Cliffs and on into Utah after passing through the unprepossessing town of Fredonia. This, and more especially Colorado City to the west, is not Cowboy Country, but Co-Hab Country where in the strip of territory separated from the rest of Arizona by the Grand Canyon, the residual co-habiting polygamist Mormons live far from the reach of the US state, but nevertheless existing parasitically off it, with almost the entire population living on social welfare benefits. Jon Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven deals with the beliefs and practices of these people, though to my mind his attempt to amalgamate them with the larger LDS community, which disavows them, fails and the attempt to do so only fuels LDS paranoia and hypersensitivity. Sensationalism may boost sales but it doesn’t aid understanding.
There are no hotels in the Arizona Strip, to discourage outsiders and intruders. Kanab however looked a little more promising as I drove up the main street and saw Parry Lodge, neon-lit even in the bright winter desert sunshine, my hoped-for destination. For decades this had been the place where the movie stars stayed whilst in Kanab (there wasn’t much place else to stay) and where they had drunk and copulated (not much else to do in Kanab, as I was to discover) whilst off the set. I parked outside reception, a pleasant white-painted, wooden-fretted building looking a little like a modest Southern mansion, and entered, wondering if I would find a room. I needn’t have worried. I handed over my $25.
‘Take your pick,’ said the desk clerk, ‘the keys are all in the doors’
The lodge dates from 1931 when the three Parry brothers set out to convince Hollywood to film here by taking images of local locations to the film producers in California. They also set up the local infrastructure by providing transport facilities as well as building the lodge to cater for their needs. I passed the closed and covered pool, where apparently much midnight nude bathing and drinking of champagne had taken place in bygone days, and had a walk round the square of rooms; the place was really little more than a (slightly) superior motel, not one’s image of superstar accommodation. Each room was named after a star who had apparently spend some time within its walls – John Wayne, Lana Turner, Gregory Peck, Alan Ladd – and I walked down looking for one that was artistically and ideologically acceptable, bypassing the Ronald Reagan room and settling eventually for that of Sammy Davis, Jnr. I was tempted by, but resisted, the Barbara Stanwyck room. She wasn’t the most beautiful but she was to my mind the sexiest of the starlets of her era. However, prone as I am to erotic auto-suggestion, the thought of a night in a bed where there was even the slightest possibility Stanwyck might have slept would, I knew, have seriously disturbed my sleep. That scene in Double Indemnity where she comes downstairs, the bracelet on her ankle … but I digress.
In the middle of the enclosing lines of hotel rooms stood an old barn. That’s what it was called, the Old Barn, whether the motel had been built round it, or whether they had built it afterwards and called it the Old Barn (they do that kind of thing) I didn’t know. But I knew that occasionally they showed old Cowboy movies here, and I was hoping, since naked champagne-crazed starlets appeared thin on the ground, and the pool was closed anyway, that there might be something on show that evening to kill the time. I was in luck, in summer films were shown every day, but in winter only on Saturdays – and that was today. After snatching a bite to eat I headed for the Old Barn.
The film that night – I have forgotten its name – was one of those 1950s’ B movies, produced at a time of supreme American self-confidence and lack of self-questioning. It fascinated me by its sheer awfulness – and from within the unusual surroundings I and about a dozen others watched it. It was about the US Cavalry, who were uniformly brave and handsome fellows, fighting the Apaches who were cruel semi-savages, and who appeared additionally to have an uncontrolled lust for white women. There were some Mexicans in it and they were lazy and untrustworthy – though their women were redeemed by the adoration shown by them towards the white men. A couple of blacks were also cast, as trustworthy but stupid servants. The 1960s, if for nothing else, were valuable in challenging all these American assumptions and value projections, and saw the emergence of a new genre of Western, undermining some of the myths underpinning productions like the one I saw in the Old Barn. Films like One Eyed Jacks, Brando’s only directorial role, Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, and others. The next day I made a pilgrimage to a spot somewhat west of Kanab, to pay homage to one of my favourites of these new wave of Western films.
The town – or ghost town – of Grafton lies just outside Zion National Park, towards which it looks. It was set up by the Mormons in an area where they thought they could produce cotton, as part of their early efforts at self-sufficiency. Attempts to live here in an area unsuitable either for farming or ranching were tough; the town was abandoned, re-occupied, then finally abandoned again by the 1920s. Unless things go on fire or are swept away by floods here, they survive, and Grafton today has several buildings still standing, including the old school-cum-church and several farmhouses. This place featured in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when the latter has his tryst with Katharine Ross at one of the duo’s hideouts before the modern world finally caught up with them and forced their flight to South America. Grafton features mostly in the bicycle scene, where Butch kidnaps Ross on the new mechanical, industrial toy that symbolises the anachronism of his outlaw life.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, made in 1969, and starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, was filmed mostly in Utah, around Grafton and in Snow Canyon and in Zion, which is appropriate as the Wild Bunch which they led operated in and out of southern Utah. There are almost as many haunts associated with the gang as there are caves in Scotland where Bonnie Prince Charlie is supposed to have slept. They operated at the very end of the outlaw period, in the 1890s, and as far as outlaws went they were not really a bad bunch at all, killing as few as possible and actually occasionally remembering that as well as robbing the rich, they were supposed to help the poor. Butch in particular hated violence, which some say was due to his Mormon upbringing (not really dealt with in the film), and is reputed never to have killed anyone or even carried a weapon (though other gang members had and did). It was almost a clappy-happy-hippy cowboy film, a welcome antidote to, for example, Clint Eastwood’s slightly later western productions, which consisted of little more than the celebration of psychopathic killing. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was to leave Utah a legacy in the Sundance Institute and Sundance Festival, set up by Robert Redford in 1981 as a crucible for independent film.
Back in Kanab I went looking for an eatery. I had survived most of the previous two days on biscuits and coffee. It clearly wasn’t high tourist season in the town, and most places were closed, but I found one – at five o’clock – that had an hour of its opening time left. It was a basic café serving burgers and various pies. I was to find again that this kind of fare was usually a fairly safe bet in an otherwise gastronomic hazard zone. At six o’clock they were closing the joint. It was New Year’s Eve, and I innocently asked the waitress if the event was celebrated locally in any way. She looked at me with a puzzled and slightly worried look, then said, ‘No, folks hereabouts just go to church and then to their beds’, then added, ‘But I think they might do some kinda thing in Salt Lake, or so I’ve heard.’
Salt Lake was a long way to go to bring in the bells, so I wended my way back to Parry Lodge for an early night, hopefully to dream of Barbara Stanwyck as my first-foot. That was when I thought, that for Hogmanay entertainment, I should have stayed in Williams, Arizona – where I had just been before Kanab.
Williams was once a Highway 66 transit town, and it trades on this as well as being a southern gateway to the Grand Canyon. There are a couple of soda-fountain-style cafés that are as phoney as Mom’s in Salina is real, but the visitors possibly don’t know or care. A tourist steam train leaves the town daily for the canyon, with a staged cowboy shootout preceeding it. It had been my last stop in Arizona before heading northwards to Utah, and I wasn’t initially too enamoured with the place. However, I left it with a great regret, and one day I might get back to rectify this. In my hotel there were various brochures which I picked up and was leafing through as I had my milkshake and burger in Cruisers Café 66. One handbill especially caught my eye. It was promoting Williams Cowboy Church, which was to have a service on New Year’s Eve, (that very night only two days later when I was Aimless in Kanab). ‘Start the New Year with your foot in the strirrup’, it advised. ‘Settle your debts with God’. I would have had to wait two days to attend it, but I was sorely tempted when I read on.
As well as offering a Cowboy Preacher, who was to ride into town especially for the occasion, the event would host Gospel Music in addition to Cowboy Hymns and Poetry. For those seeking to come to the Lord and assure themselves a place in the Great Bunkhouse in the Sky, there would be – horse-trough baptisms! Evenings can be cold even in Arizona at this time of year, and for anyone hesitant about meeting their saviour via immersion in chilly water there was the option of Hot-Water Baptisms for $10. This concession to softies probably tipped the balance against my waiting in Williams for two days for assured salvation. It went against the Presbyterian grain of my upbringing. The Lord could not be mocked. He would know the cold-water true believer from the warm-water fake. This was not the True Church. But it might have been more fun than New Year’s Eve in Kanab.
There are cowboys (and some very cute cowgirls) everywhere in Arizona. It is a state where you are allowed to carry a gun visibly, so many of them are armed with holsters and six guns. But they don’t drive cattle, they drive huge, gas-guzzling, macho pick-ups, and the clothes they wear are expensive designer items. Everywhere there are Cowboy Outfitters where leather goods are sold to the pretend cowboys of Arizona and their gals. If they do ride horses, it is for recreational purposes, back on their country acres. At least that’s how it was in the places I visited, doubtless in the sticks of the back country you can find real cowboys in Arizona.
Arizona of course features heavily in the Western movie canon, with none more famous than Gunfight at the OK Corral, set in Tombstone. The most famous shoot-out in history took place here in in 1881 when Wyatt Earp, his brother and Doc Holliday summarily executed three members of the Clanton gang in as many minutes, an event for which Earp was later put on trial. Americans can take virtual reality to a pitch of perfection no one else can, maybe because their distinction between fantasy and reality is finer. Though it is pure hokum, there is no way you should miss a visit to this Arizona town, ‘too tough to die’ – and living very well on tourism. From a scratch in the sand Tombstone had become a rip-roaring silver-mining town of 10,000 people by the same year as the gunfight with 100 saloons, most of which were brothels. This included the Bird Cage Theatre, where Shakespeare was not performed, but where prostitutes strutted their stuff in cages suspended from the roof.
In Tombstone you can be in your own movie, watch re-enactments of the gunfight, dress up as a cowboy, take a ride in a stagecoach and do all those things that Americans do well and with gusto. I limited myself to watching the goings-on from the safe vantage point of the OK Café, where I treated myself to a coffee and buffalo burger, before taking a stroll around town whilst others followed the cowboys to the promised shoot-out. By 1900 all the silver mines had closed and the population plummeted, but Tombstone survived as an administrative centre for the county. In 1917 the mine owners in neighbouring Bisbee summoned the obedient Sheriff Wheeler from nearby Tombstone to deal with a strike in the copper mines by the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). Wheeler deported over 1000 men and dumped them in the desert without food or water, breaking the strike.
But there are still cowboys – who handle actual cows – in the West. To find them you have however to go, not south from Utah into Arizona, but north from Utah into Wyoming. The Wyoming state emblem shows a cowboy on a horse and the slogan attached is ‘Forever West’. I was to realise that this was reality, not virtual reality, on the occasion when I headed north from Utah towards the Tetons and the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. Of course I had read Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain and seen the film (to near the end when I left, knowing what was coming). But that was set back in the 1950s, and anyway, they were shepherds, not cowboys, I recalled. Even when I was told by a friend in Salt Lake City, ‘Take care up there. A guy was lynched for being gay in Laramie last year.’ – I did not baulk. There must, I thought, have been some mistake in the reporting of that event. And anyway, I’m not gay, that’s obvious, I confidently told myself.
The way north lay through Idaho, and I half expected to be driving past the houses of maniacs with tanks in their front gardens, armed to the teeth and waiting for Armageddon – or for the devil in the guise of the US taxman. But those types are apparently further up north, in the Panhandle area, down south there appeared to be nothing but docile potato farmers and fruit growers, predominantly Mormons as I saw to my relief. I was headed for the Tetons, partly to do some walking, and partly as it was the location of the filming of one of my favourite westerns, Shane. Shane is a man who wants to put his violent past behind him, but events force him to realise that, as the classic all-American avenger and distributor of justice, he can only do it one way – by picking up the gun again, and killing the evildoers, before riding off into the sunset. The scenery in this film, a vista across a wide plain with the Tetons behind, I just could not believe existed. It must be a magnificient stage-set of some kind, I had thought on watching the movie. And as I drove northwards, seeing the Tetons from their unflattering, western, Idaho side, I was coming to think this was the case. From Driggs, the range looked a bit like the Cairgorms from Aviemore.
Leaving Driggs the road through the Teton Pass at over 8000ft takes you to Jackson, Wyoming. But Jackson is as much Wyoming as Acapulco is Mexico. It is a mega-rich resort, where the billionaires are pushing out the millionaires, and is serviced by thousands of workers who migrate from Idaho over the border each day. It has that Swiss Alpine look that is favoured in US mountain resorts, and I passed through it, not tempted to look around, and on into the Tetons National Park. There are some iconic unforgettable moments in your life, and driving into the park, towards Mt Moran and the Grand Teton, was one of them, it was pure Shane. With the exception of the Caucasus I had not seen mountains so dramatic and so beautiful at the same time. Ever. But I was soon to realise that this was not Shane country, not an area where typical western-style isolated homesteads had been established, to be threatened by the wicked cattle barons. Driving through the park I saw a sign pointing to Mormon Row, and followed it to a parking lot where there was an abandoned village. Like Johah trying to escape from the Lord and failing, it seemed like there was no way I could get beyond the reach of the Saints. Had my rationalism been of less stern stuff, I might have thought, is there a message for me from Someone in all of this?
Half-a-dozen families had been sent to colonise Mormon Row in 1889, and they had built a school, a church, a post office and the houses and barns which had subsequently become the icons of the Teton National Park, shown in every postcard and calendar image, against the mountain backdrop. These buildings, though now empty, poignantly remained as did the clogged-up channels of their irrigation systems and the rusting remains of agricultural machinery. The community struggled in the harsh terrain, and those remaining were evicted in the 1930s by the park authorities, intent on restoring a pristine environment, and then filling that up with log cabins, lodges and visitor centres. The same happened in Appalachia where the hill-billies were expelled, their abandoned illicit distilling locations becoming Visitor Attractions, and in Yosemite where the native Americans were kicked out, and then, washed and sanitised, returned to people a virtual reality ‘Native Village’ for tourist amusement. Maybe one day we will see people back in Mormon Row pretending to be LDS settlers.
There are no easy peaks in the Tetons, and the time when I might have challenged their summits to a duel are long past, but I was here to spend a couple of days walking in their innards, to pay homage to them. My first day’s target was Lake Solitude, and it was necessary to take a boat across Jenny Lake, and then hike up Cascade Creek. The boat was full of enthusiastic Americans – and a Bulgarian. It could have been that I was missing European cultural references, or it could have been that she was young and pretty, but we got into conversation. She seemed awed at my day’s walking target, but declined my offer to be her guide and take her along. She was a mechanical engineer who had left Bulgaria, whose economy was still in chaos 20 years after the so-called collapse of Communism, and had come to the States to work. Maybe I overdid the economic/social analysis bit and lost her interest (this tends to happen to me with women, I have noticed) but anyway she went with the rest of the Merkans, about a quarter-of-a-mile to Inspiration Point, to be ‘inspired’, then waited for the next boat back. I headed up the canyon.
It was September and the canyon was in the full bloom of autumn, with raspberries, huckleberries and whortleberries hanging on the bushes. The lower canyon was deeply wooded and on emerging into thinner forest the full impact of the Cathedral Group of mountains – The Grand Teton, Mount Owen, and Mount Teewinot – was felt, their sides hung with small snowfields and glaciers. Halfway up the trail there was a fine waterfall and an unoccupied ranger station and then a steep climb of about 2000 ft to Lake Solitude. My guidebook assured me there would be no solitude there but lots of people, though in fact I was the only person who had come this far. Mindful that the last boat was at six o’clock, I began racing back down the track. This is not a good idea in these parts, as there are bears around, but it wasn’t a bear I met when crashing through the forest. It was a very large bull moose which looked at me in what I construed to be a displeased fashion. Moose actually kill many more people than bears do, attacking trampling and goring them, so I froze and waited to see what he would do. With a look that seemed one of utter contempt, he ambled off into the forest.
I made the boat with time to spare, and then had to find somewhere to stay for the night. As accommodation inside the park consists of camping and RV units, that was out (no RV, no tent), and I thought Jackson would be beyond my budget so I consulted the map and headed south-east towards a place called Dubois, almost veering off the road as I drove when images of the Tetons appeared in my mirrors. There were surprisingly few if any signs of tourism along this road; maybe the visitors didn’t come in this way, I thought? Finally I found a petrol station and shop with cabins attached, and pulled in for the night. Once again in America I found myself in the position, which I have failed to satisfactorily explain, of being the only person in a place. I nearly turned back out when they guy said, ‘Its $60 for a night, provide your own bedding. Breakfast extra.’
I had a sleeping bag borrowed from Mikel, I had my packet of biscuits as the place offered no evening food (and that provided in the morning was inedible) but it was worth it, for what must be the best view of the Tetons from anywhere; I sat and marvelled until the bugs drove me inside as night fell.
Next day it was back down to the park and leaving Lupine Meadows I decided to head for Amphitheatre Lake and as far past that point as I could get. The track went up through the forest on some quite punishing zig-zags, and this time there were a few other people on the trail. As the path rose we passed fine waterfalls with occasional views of the summits, including that of the Grand Teton at 13,770 ft. Eventually I reached Surprise Lake and a little beyond it Amphitheatre Lake at 9700ft. The trail ended here and so did most people’s hike. (Americans don’t generally like going off-trail). But there was a scree slope to a higher saddle where I thought I might get a better view, so I scrambled up and then a little onto the nose of Disappointment Peak to about 10,000 ft. This was a disappointment, as the Grand Teton remained hidden behind its bulk.
Back at the saddle I met a father and son who were having lunch and I joined them; the older man recommended the Pinnacle beside Surprise Lake for the best view of the Grand, and I subsequently took his advice, which was good, on my way back. Though very eroded, with a wee tricky bit, the ascent repaid the effort. Before I departed to do that, he asked, as they do Whereyafrom? ‘Scotland?’ he noted, ‘Not very popular with a lotta folks over here these days.’
‘No, but we are very popular in Libya,’ I retorted. Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber had just been released on humanitarian grounds from a Scottish jail. He asked me if I thought Megrahi was really at death’s door, the reason given for his release.
‘I don’t know, but that’s not the point. The point is, he didn’t do it, as everybody in the UK knows. Even some of the relatives of the victims have been campaigning for his release. He was freed to avoid a judicial inquiry into the case, which would have shown he was innocent.’
My new-found friend listened, and commented, ‘Well, we haven’t heard anything about that in the US.’
Well, with Fox News, they wouldn’t, would they? I suggested he try googling some internet websites on Lockerbie to get more information, and he said he would. Maybe he did.
By the time I got down to Surprise Lake from the Pinnacle I was the last man on the mountain, all the others having already descended, though I thought I could hear their footsteps crashing in the woods ahead. Just below Surprise Lake I got a real surprise. First a small black bear trundled through the woods and across the path about 20 yards in front of me. I knew what was coming by the noise. Momma Bear followed on closely behind Baby Bear. I quickly looked behind me, hoping that someone, anyone, was still at the Lake so I could shout for help if needed. When I turned back, mother and cub were gone. Should I run? Should I walk slowly? Should I be quiet? Should I make a lot of noise? I had read what to do in these situations, but had forgotten. I trod carefully and slowly for a while – and then, ran like hell as they say here. But this encounter was nothing to what was to come.
I had decided that two nights in my cabin – despite the view – was excessive at that price, so I started heading back south, where there appeared to be plenty of places marked on the map that I might stay. I also wanted to visit the Wind River Range, which had been recommended by a friend. A Cinderella of mountains lying in the shadow of the Tetons, they were a much wilder area, but, I was assured, equally worth visiting. Once you leave Jackson you enter, almost all the way to the Utah border, very arid country. But it is not arid and dramatic and colourful like Utah, it is just arid. It presents itself to the eye as resembling huge mounds of dull-coloured chemical waste, which have been baked into solidity by the sun. If the tourists come this way they don’t stop in any of the towns before the Tetons, I would imagine. Many of them looked like one-horse towns whose horse had long died. I was headed for Pinedale, which seemed the biggest and therefore would be most likely to have accommodation for a couple of nights’ exploration of the Winds. In Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads, Richard Grant says, ‘I liked Pinedale, a small no-nonsense Wyoming town.’ He went there when it was hosting its annual Mountain Man Rendezvous, and the population (1181, and falling I was later thankful to find out) was swamped many times by the pretend week-end trappers. I suggest Grant tries the town another time.
Pinedale didn’t look like a gastro-hub or a place with a cluster of boutique hotels as I drove into town, but I thought it would do. I drove around for a while, and then, down a set of dusty back streets with clapboard houses and wrecked cars, I found a motel. It was midday, and no one was around. I rang the bell and eventually a – I have to say – rather slatternly and very fat woman appeared.
‘Youwanna room? Sixty dollars a night, in advance. Idennification?’
I handed over a passport which visibly said on the front United Kingdom, in English. She flicked through it and noted my place of residence.
‘Glasgow? That’s in Germany, aint it?’ adding, ‘That room on the corner. Lock your door. Don’t answer it at night.’
In Pinedale possessing a British passport, living in Glasgow and talking in English apparently meant you were German.
I had most of the day left and decided to go and have a look at the Wind River Mountains. A road went up into the hills from Pinedale, past Fremont Lake where the country started to improve in visual quality and to a trailhead amongst the pines. I hiked from there about six miles to an overlook point, and looked down into the great bowl of the Wind Rivers Wilderness, lakes dotted in the forest beneath the granite peaks, chief of which was Gannet Peak in the distance. This was, as they say, awesome – serious wilderness country and seriously beautiful. But it wasn’t day-trip country so, hoping that one day I might be back I returned to Pinedale, having a plan for an adventure the next day in the southern part of the Winds range that looked like I could do it in a day.
When I returned to the motel I had company. They had presumably been out working during the day, and they looked like migrant workers, Mexicans, or Hispanics anyway, possibly cattlemen, possibly labourers. They had a collection of beat-up trucks parked at the motel. They were already making their meal, an open air barbecue, and hitting the crates of beer that they had bought to wash it down. The courtyard had been converted to an open air gambling school, where some threw dice in the dirt and others played cards whilst waiting for their meal. I am sure they clocked me but there was not the slightest sign of recognition given, nor was one invited from me by any body language on their part. It would have been good if I had shared a meal in the open air with happy cattlemen, singing Spanish love songs and playing their guitars … a story to tell, bringing colour to my travelogue. But I have another tale instead.
I walked back to the main street and started looking for somewhere to eat. There appeared not to be a lot of choice so I stopped a passing local and asked where I could find a suitable place.
‘Cattleman’s Grill, the best in town. You won’t go wrong there,’ he advised me. I crossed the street and entered, and immediately I was in my own movie again. Only, it was Brokeback Mountain. Maybe it was the jacket – friends in Utah later sagely said that was the problem. I have a light tweed jacket that has been much admired at home, and even praised in sartorially conscious Italy when I have worn it there. It is made of tweed material of a subdued orange colour, and possibly nothing like this had been seen in the Cattleman’s Grill before. The joint was dimly lit, smokey (no cigarette ban in Marlboro Country) and noisy – until I entered, and felt that every eye was on me in a brief silence, until they all turned away again as one. I moved further into the restaurant looking for a waitress; one emerged from the kitchen at the back, saw me, registered my presence, and disappeared back into the kitchen. I sat down, heads occasionally turning in my direction, and waited. No one came to serve me. This must have been how blacks felt in the 1960s when they sat at Southern café counters. And I knew what happened next in that scenario.
The people in the restaurant I had time to observe – and I trust I did so casually and discreetly. They were like something out of a Depression-era movie; the men and the woman dressed in jeans and shirts that appeared to have been long unwashed, kids beside them with hair uncombed staring at me – unlike their parents, one of two of whom I noticed were beginning to chuckle at my discomfiture as the waitress continued to ignore me. It was my move, and I’ve seen the cowboy movies – if I headed back out the door there would probably be a bullet coming my way. So, I got up, marched through into the kitchen, confronted the waitress, and politely but firmly, asked for service – and a beer. The beer came silently, as did the menu sullenly with none of the usual ‘I’m Lucinda. I’ll be your server tonight. Let me know if I can help you in any way’ stuff. I ordered and something came. Maybe they made it especially for me, but it was the most inedible lump of fat sugar salt and some kind of carbohydrate that I have ever eaten, or, not eaten. I drank my beer, nibbled at the edges of the gastronomic creation, ordered a box for it (which I filled and carried out) and walked out like John Wayne, my head held high. I chucked my meal into the first bin I could find.
I was slightly relieved to get back to the motel without being pursued by a lynch mob. Extensive deconstruction of this episode later with friends back in Utah produced their interpretive slant on it. I was clearly:
a) an intellectual/ environmentalist
b) a homosexual (because of the pastel jacket)
c) had engaged in a deliberate provocation by going in there and
d) was quite lucky not to have been challenged by a drunken, or even sober, cowboy (they explained to me that is what the guys in dirty clothes were).
Back at the motel I though my anxieties had probably been exaggerated, but the next day, in a place called Boulder, came the confirmation that they had not been. However, first I had to put up with the tail-end of the Hispanics’ party. I would like to say there were gunshots that night, but instead there was just shouting (no music) and the occasional crashing noise which I hoped was taking place far from my car. I locked the windows, pushed the wardrobe in front of the door, and got out the bear spray I had brought for the Wind Rivers – but having found out there were greater terrors in Pinedale than Bruin, I had it at the ready.
In times of stress we reach for the familiar. There was a phone in the hotel room, I thought I would call home, hear a reassuring voice. Phones are complicated things and I spent a while working out that local calls were free, but others had to be put through the operator service, for which, conveniently, there was a number and so I dialled it. I will leave out my own contribution to the conversation for brevity’s sake.
‘Good evening, sir? Which number? Is that an out of state number, and which state? An international call? I can’t do that, sir, I have not provided that facility before, and I am not aware of how to do so. No-one has previously asked for that service.’
I had a sudden pang of horror. Pinedale was disconnected from the outside world, whatever happened here would go unnoticed, like in a time warp where people simply disappeared. This is little exaggeration. In these nowhere US towns the only sources of information are local radio stations, many of them of a religious, fundamentalist persuasion, and local newspapers which provide comment on stump and parish pump issues. There is a serious lack of interest in the world outside. That’s why they think Glasgow is in Germany. (Or Scotland is in Russia).
In the morning, though having paid for two nights, I jumped in my car at six o’clock and bade farewell to Pinedale. Fortified only by my remaining supply of biscuits, I headed for the Big Sandy trailhead. A friend of mine had recommended a trail from there into the Cirque of Towers in the southern Wind Rivers, a place he raved about as being equal to the Tetons. I didn’t get to the Cirque of Towers. I didn’t even get to Big Sandy trailhead. I did, though, get to Boulder. This was the first place after Pinedale, and I stopped to buy petrol at a filling station and see if I could get some supplies. It was now 7am and I managed to acquire a couple of bottles of coke, some chocolate and biscuits to help me on my way. I had a problem, my road map showed two dirt roads into Big Sandy; which was the one I should take? I asked the gas station attendant.
‘Dunno,’ she offered, and jerking a humb over her shoulder, ‘ask the guys back there.’
I went ‘back there’. Remember, it is only 7am. Through the fog of cigarette smoke I saw the group of maybe half-a-dozen guys sitting round a table. They were drinking from bottles, many others of which stood empty on the table. An early start I thought – or maybe they’d been at it all night. My instinct to turn on my heels was overcome and I pulled off another John Wayne moment, marching to the table.
‘Mornin’ guys’ I tried breezily in my best local accent. (I should mention the tweed jacket was safely out of sight in the boot of the car by now). ‘I want to get to the Big Sandy Trailhead, which is the best way?’
Silence. It was as If I had not spoken, was not even there. No one even looked at me. The request for directions to the trailhead, I was informed later, had revealed me as an outdoors type, hated by the cattle-ranching fraternity for their goddam hippy environmentalism. Friends subsequently told me my next move was a greater provocation than the red rag of the jacket was in the Cattleman’s Grill, and that I was probably at that point in some serious danger of being assaulted. I laid my map out on their bottle-cluttered, cigarette-strewn table, pointed to the two roads going into Big Sandy, and asked, pointing to each in turn, with an attempt to put steel into my voice,
‘Which road should I take?’
One guy turned his head towards me slowly, looked at me like I was a cockroach and, wordlessly, stubbed his thumb on the most southerly of the two roads. I walked out, I admit, my throat dry. And I had fallen into a trap.
The more northerly road was partly paved and went through scattered farms to the turn off for the trailhead. (I know, for I came back that way). The southerly route was a dirt track that led to an electricity power sub-station, and then had no further directions when fissuring out in a maze of other dirt tracks. In addition tracked vehicles had rutted this road, and I could only judder along at a gass-guzzling shuddering snail’s pace. I spent a long time driving around those dirt roads until I finally emerged at a farm, and saw a guy driving a trailer with bales of hay. He had no idea of where the Big Sandy trailhead was, but at least he knew where he was, and from that information and my map I could work out that I still had about 30 miles to go. I was furious. I saw those guys having a good laugh back in Boulder at their sorting out of that smart-ass, out-of-town, pinko-liberal, commie-pervert fella, and had fantasy visions of myself walking into the back room, and blowing them all to bits with a magnum. Then I thought, maybe I’d been in Wyoming too long – and I headed for Utah.
I drove non-stop through the ‘badlands’ of south-western Wyoming, an area that appeared to me to be even more unscenic than that around Pinedale – or maybe it was just my negative mood influencing my aesthetic appreciation – past Kemmerer and across the state line into Utah – and stopped. They couldn’t get me now. I looked back at the Forever West Cowboy sign announcing Wyoming, and then forward at the glorious image of Delicate Arch on the Utah one, and thought – I’m safe, I am back with the Mormons. They may have their flaws, but I don’t think they would lynch a man for the colour of his jacket.