Ten miles southeast of Shoshoni, Wyo., on US Route 20, the prairie really opens up. Gone are the geothermal deities of Yellowstone, the dribble-sandcastle mountains of the Absarokas, the red layered buttes of Thermopolis.
And as the vast semi-arid grasslands opened up to usher us into their endless nothingness, I turned to my two traveling companions, exhausted from a morning of digging diplodocus vertebrae out of a dry summer hillside, and said, “Look, kids. It’s home.”
Not theirs. They grew up in a Boston suburb. Wyoming is my home. Was my home. I grew up in Laramie, a few hundred highway miles south of where we were. The daily afternoon rainstorm was blowing in. My 16-year-old daughter, in the front passenger seat, took a photo. My 17-year-old son rolled down a window in the back; he had already learned how good those western storms smell. Sage and earth.
Iron-rich soil around Thermopolis, Wyo., gives the low hills and buttes a red hue.Chloe Bruce
We had been planning this trip, driving from Bozeman to Phoenix in seven days, for some time. Our stops were loosely organized around themes of dinosaurs and visiting colleges that have undergrad geology programs my daughter might be interested in. I wanted my children to experience the shocking beauty of the American West. And I wondered if my beloved old stomping grounds would feel welcoming to us: My son is visibly, obviously, spectacularly queer
We had flown into Bozeman, home of the Museum of the Rockies, which has an exceptional collection of dinosaurs, including an age-progression array of triceratops skulls. Then we made our way through Yellowstone to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, which has a rare kosmoceratops skull in the back room that is held together by a professional application of duct tape. The center has a program that pairs families with paleontologists for a day of careful digging in a fossil-rich site on a privately owned ranch. We adored our personal paleontologist, Ali.
Ali told us that many of the young people going into paleontology are women; my daughter dreams of being one of them. Ali also said there are a very large number of LGBTQ people in the field. Earlier in Thermopolis (pop. 2,700) I saw a pride flag on a bakery window with a sign on the door that read “no bigots allowed.” I wondered if the person just outside of town with the homemade “immigrants not welcome” sign on his fence was a patron or not. If not, that’s unfortunate for the sign-maker — the pastries were outstanding.
The author and her daughter at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, Wyo.Chloe Bruce
My daughter had studied “The Laramie Project” in English the previous semester. The play, by Moisés Kaufman, is about the fallout in Laramie over the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, in 1998. I was invited to speak to my daughter’s class about Laramie. As preparation, I finally read the script. I had been avoiding it for so long, a mix of anger and shame preventing me. I couldn’t separate my own identity from the reputation, deserved or not, of my hometown.
I told the class then that the arc of history favors acceptance and change. The Laramie of my youth, the Wyoming of my youth, the United States of my youth, aredifferent now, in so many ways to celebrate. The 1980s version of myself could not have imagined the love and unqualified acceptance I feel for my kids and their spectrum of awesome queer friends. I could not have imagined the number of pride flags we saw hanging in downtown Laramie businesses when we finally rolled into town.
The prairies outside Laramie have also changed since I was last there, grown forests of wind turbines towering above the oil derricks. Time moves on in some ways. In others, it does not: Outside the University of Wyoming Geological Museum still stands a life-size T-Rex statue with a mouth full of pine cones. Throwing a pine cone into its mouth has been a pastime since well before my own childhood. My daughter did what I never could, landing one on her second try.
A couple of days later, we were at an evening rodeo in Snowmass, Colo. It was cold — Rocky Mountain summer cold — and the rodeo had been delayed due to a thunderstorm. We were cold and our butts were wet and we were deliriously happy to be there, under those arena lights, the smell of cow crap wafting through the thin air. My grandpa was a team roper out of Fort Morgan. I was explaining to the kids why the cows wear horn hats (so the rope doesn’t hurt them) when the event finally started for real and the rodeo flag bearer came shooting out of the gate on a gorgeous palomino horse, her blond hair flowing behind her and a large American flag fully extended into the night, the flagpole fastened tight in her right stirrup.
Maxine Harris, carrying the flag at the Snowmass Rodeo in Colorado on Aug. 21, has been the flag bearer there since 2013.Chloe Bruce
The national anthem started. The sold-out crowd stood up as one to sing. I put my hand over my heart and started to sing, too, but burst into tears instead, standing there just sobbing with pride at that beautiful flag streaming around the arena, the sound of the horse hooves in the soft dirt somehow audible even over the joyous singing around me. My son noticed and poked my daughter. They pointed at me and laughed, laughed as I cried through the entire anthem, laughed as I cried through the prayer for the safety of human and animal athletes alike. I was overwhelmed with love for this country, for the mountains and the prairies and the coasts, for the cities and the one-road towns and the vast array of people in them, for the pride flags and the American flags, for the luck and the privilege it is to call the United States my home. The American flag should never be a symbol of one party, of one ideology, of one vision of America. It belongs to everyone.
Days later we returned to Boston, luggage heavy with fossil-laden slabs from a 150-million-year-old Wyoming inland sea bed and the implications of all that has happened since. Next to our pride flag, I am installing a second flagpole, for the American flag. I should have been flying it all along.
Heather Hopp-Bruce is director of visual strategy for Globe Opinion. She can be reached at [email protected].
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Publish date : 2024-10-04 17:11:00
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