Location, Location, Location

Over the past two years I have blogged several times about one of my all-time favorite western humorists, Bill Nye. Nye started a newspaper in Laramie, Wyoming, a paper with possibly the most unusual name for a paper in America, The Laramie Boomerang. (Named after his mule that no matter how many time he sold it or gave it away it kept coming back).

Am I going to get around to something here? Well, yes. Nye was a humorist who reveled in poking fun at himself and Wyoming. Living in Wyoming the weather is at best unpredictable, went to bed last night as it started to snow, yep, snow in May. Still snowing when I got up this morning and been snowing on and off most of the day.

On June 10, 1880, Bill Nye wrote in his book, Forty Liars and Other Lies, about the weather. “It has snowed a good deal during the week and it is discouraging to the planters of cotton and tobacco very much. I am positive that a much smaller area of both these staples will be planted in Wyoming this year than ever before. Unless the yield this fall of moss agates and prickly pears should be unusually large the agricultural export will be very far below preceding years, and there may be actual suffering.”

I feel about like that today looking out at my garden covered in snow and dreaming of sometime actually planting on a warm sunshiny day. Nye, later in the article went on to say, “Again the early frosts make close connections with the late spring blizzards, so that there is only time for a hurried lunch between.”

Warm weather and summer will come, I am just not sure when. So why would an old gardener like me live in a tough to grow state like Wyoming? Well, as real-estate agents are happy to point out, “its location, location, location. And location, to me, is all about the view.

Elk last evening in Sybille Canyon

 

Our little town from Powell Mountain five miles away

The garden, on the other hand, will need to wait, at least a few more days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wyoming Wind and a Plug Hat

Wyoming Wind and a Plug Hat

Bill Nye, my all-time favorite western humorist, like the rest of us who live in Wyoming often made a few unpleasant comments about the Wyoming wind. February seems to always be the bleak month in the Cowboy state. Cold and wind dominate.

 Nye entitled one of the short stories in his book, Forty Liars and Other Lies, “The Plug Hat in Wyoming,” and you guessed it, the wind is the antagonist.

Here is what he had to say –

“In the first place, the climate of Wyoming is not congenial to the plug hat. You may wear one at 1 o’clock with impunity, if you can dodge the vigilance committee, and at three minutes past1 a little cat’s paw of wind will come sighing down from the Snowy Range, that make the cellars and drive-wells tremble, and the hat looks like a frightened picket fence.”

He also plays with the idea of the hat maybe being too much of a dudes head topper to be worn in the rough and tumble 1870s – 80s Wyoming. “In former years they used to hang a man who wore a plug hat west of the Missouri but after a while they found that it was a more cruel and horrible punishment to let him wear it and chase it over the foothills when the frolicsome breeze caught it up and toyed with it, and landed it against the broad brow of Laramie Peak.

He does mention that the hats can be found as long as you are willing to travel fifteen or twenty miles, “as the crow flies,” to find it.

 

In the end he explains the hat of the day, the western style of hat. “Time may overcome at last the public disfavor, but until the Rocky Mountain wind is lulled to repose, so that a plug hat will not have to be tied on with a wrought iron stair-rod, the soft hat will be the prevailing style of roof.”

Bill Nye lived all too short a life (1850-1896) and unfortunately his very popular newspaper column was only partially saved over the years. Reading him today, more than a hundred years later he is still funny, no wonder he traveled the lecture circuit with Mark Twain. 

 

The photo is my solution to dealing with the nasty February winds.