You know you live in the mountains when your alarm clock is a snowplow.

Every winter morning between 5 and 5:30 I am awakened by the sound of metal scraping on icy roads. Then like a snooze alarm 10 minutes later the sound returns as the plow makes its way the other direction on the road, after turning around at road’s end a mile from our house.

I live a quarter mile off the main road, but in our little slice of mountain valley the sound vibrates.  Sounds that in the city you wouldn’t hear if they were happening next door are exasperated here by the resonance of the valley and silence surrounding it.  I swear sound here travels further and faster than the ‘L’ train in Chicago. You can hear the kids playing touch football a half mile away. If a neighbor has an outdoor party they tell everyone to drop in for a cold one, since we are going to hear every word said anyway.

But, unlike when I lived in the city, where the next door neighbors could be heard arguing with their teenager over lost driving privileges…not once here have I heard anyone arguing.  We may be a goofy bunch of remote, high mountain dwellers, but we are a ridiculously happy bunch.  Could be the party pub in my neighbor’s garage creating our euphoric lifestyles, or maybe we’re all crazy and heavily medicated. Either way, even the early wake-up call of the snowplow makes us all happy.

Without it, we’d never get to work or play on time.  The two miles downhill from home, affectionately called The Luge Run would pitch more of us in the ditch without the sand the plow flings on its merry way. We’d never by able to tow trailers loaded with snow machines to the forest without neatly plowed roads. The snow banks created by daily plowing are like gutter rails in bowling alleys for little kids, allowing our trucks to bounce off them and continue on our way. Talk at the party pub after work always drifts to who spent time in a ditch, and who else bounced off snow banks, and how many times in one trip.

Directions to our houses are given by the trees, corners or ditches named after you from either sliding into the them, or as in my case scraping the guardrail all the way down “Lyn’s hill.” George holds the party pub record for most times in one season getting stuck in your own driveway. (After achieving this “award” every year for several years, he hired the awesome guy who plows our little valley’s private roads to also plow our driveway.  He now hasn’t been stuck in our drive since the 2013 slide-into-the-woodpile event.)

In Wyoming, plow drivers are revered as godlike if they are good ones. For a couple years we threatened to dump our driver in a snow bank, as he would plow the ditch, not the road. If you didn’t know exactly where the road was, you would happily drive along his plowed path and drop right into the ditch. In Wyoming the government doesn’t believe in snow poles to mark County roads to assist the driver unless said road is lived on by someone famous or very rich. Basically, our plow drivers are plowing using The Force.

I’m also pretty sure one year the driver spent his afternoons at the bar instead of making a second pass plowing slush off the road. I don’t really blame him, as without snow poles to find his way in the morning darkness, I’m sure he shit his pants a few times because of sheer fear.

It’s a thankless job at best. At worst, one where people daily call your boss to complain if they don’t like “your work.” I can’t imagine working with that kind of stress.  Which may be why every year we have a new driver on our plow route. Actually, I think we have a new driver every year, because after the heart-stopping fear of being the first on this road every morning for five to six months, I’d move to a beach, where the only white stuff I see would be the sand.

So to all you snow plow drivers out there who wake me at 5 a.m. I say thank you, and stop by anytime for a beer. I love you guys!

What Were They Thinking?

“Did you see that dilapidated old house on the hill?” I asked George while we were out for a drive one afternoon.

“I am not buying a fixer upper for you honey.”

“The only thing that would fix this one is gasoline and a match.” I watched the old house disappear in the mirror as we continued on our outing.  It was probably built in the late 1800s by a homesteader. But I was puzzled by the location.  It was situated on the top of a hill, with no stream for water in sight, and definitely no protection from the Wyoming winds Mother Nature loves to kick-up in winter. I thought about the journey this family made to come west. Did they travel all the way from the east coast, or maybe from St. Louis? Either way their journey was long, arduous and probably filled with days of diarrhea since early travelers had a habit of camping on the riverbank where they also ate, drank, peed, and then pooped their panties from dysentery.

Let’s imagine they began their wagon journey in St. Louis and traveled over a 1000 miles before stopping on the hill and the husband saying, “Look honey, we’re home.” I don’t get it. You travel all that way and that inaccessible hill with no water, and no protection from weather or marauders spoke to you? Sure, I know streams change course and dry-up, but geologically it was obvious this hill never had water flowing around it.  Maybe there was a hidden spring at one time. Good grief, I hope so. Otherwise, I’d be inclined to say the dude who built there was high on locoweed.

These homesteads literally in the middle of nowhere are a constant source of bemusement to me.  Or as George says, it’s just one more load of craziness rattling around in my brain.

“If you were an early homesteader would you have built there?” I asked George.

“Nope. I would build next door to the bar.”

“I mean, if you were here before towns and bars where would you build?”

“Are you crazy? I wouldn’t be here before bars.” George was being obtuse, but I get what he meant.  We may be considered modern day pioneers…which means we live more than 30 minutes from the nearest grocery store, have no idea what 4G cell service is, can travel by snow machine and horseback easier than cars, and could survive without ANY modern amenities if need be. But, we’re still grateful some “real” pioneer did all the hard work 150 years ago.

It’s easy to understand why many of these homesteads quickly fell to ruin, however it saddens me to find others that are equally as abandoned but with no reason they should be. Good location, viable water, land for grazing and growing. So why did people abandon it, and no one else ever move in? I’ve lost many nights sleep puzzling through what happened to the original owner and why the home fell to ruin instead of new people moving in. 

Did all the original family in the house die from Cholera, out of fear it was then considered uninhabitable? Did a minister own it and also ran a brothel at the house?  (There’s another awesome story, as some of the biggest and best houses in the west were brothels.) Maybe every night a ghost grizzly visited the homestead terrorizing everyone, and when little Tommy disappeared all the locals said it was the ghost grizzly who stole him away. Or the government bought up the land because it had oil and gas under it and they are still secretly mining it from hidden underground cities for their own nefarious purposes.

Or maybe I need to just learn to enjoy an afternoon drive for what it is.