Wyoming isn't empty . . . it's full

THE VAST PANORAMA of Wyoming stretched out below me as I took a commercial flight over our state one day a few years ago. I was flying on a commercial flight that went from Riverton to Denver and Denver to Rapid City over open country.

It is always makes a unique impression to look down and see so much space. Wyoming has such vastness. Critics might call it empty spaces. We locals prefer to call it open spaces.

A recent tourism survey indicated that our vast amounts of open spaces is one of the biggest attractions to people coming here from more populated places. There are even documented cases of tourism buses full of Japanese pulling of the road in between Gillette and Buffalo to take photos of "nothing."

So much space with seemingly nothing in it is immensely impressive the Oriental visitor who lives in such crowded conditions. There are also documented cases of those people suffering "reverse claustrophobia" where they actually got ill from the strange feeling of being in a place so open.

THERE was a national best-selling book a few years ago titled The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich that discussed our vastness. Some of her comments pulled from the 12 stories in the book include the following:

• The geographic vastness and the social isolation here make emotional evolution seem impossible.
• In all this open space, values crystallize quickly. People are strong on scruples but tenderhearted about quirky behavior.
  
  
• If anything is endemic to Wyoming, it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily, leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially shaped the state, wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage.
  
  
• The emptiness of the West was for others a geography of possibility.
  
  
• The solitude in which westerners live makes them quiet. They telegraph thoughts and feelings by the way they tilt their heads and listen; pulling their Stetsons into a steep dive over their eyes, or pigeon-toeing one boot over the other, they lean against a fence with a fast wedge of Copenhagen beneath their lower lips and take in the whole scene. These detached looks of quiet amusement are sometimes cynical but they can also come from a dry-eyed humility as lucid as the air is clear.
  
  
• Sagebrush covers 58,000 square miles of Wyoming . . . despite the desolate look, there's a coziness to living in this state. There are so few people . . . that ranchers who buy and sell cattle know each other statewide.
  
  
• To live and work in this kind of open country, with its hundred-mile views, is to lose the distinction between background and foreground. When I asked an older ranch hand to describe Wyoming's openness, he said, "it's all a bunch of nothing -- wind and rattlesnakes -- and so much of it, you can't tell where you're going or where you've been and it doesn't make much difference." Ms. Ehrlich's comments were beautifully written and I'd strongly recommend people buy her book.

FROM MY VANTAGE POINT in that airplane, Wyoming didn't look empty. It looked like a kaleidoscope of colors, as river-formed valleys, mountains and hills jutted and swirled along. Patches of snow would indicate how fast or how recently the wind had been blowing across the desert.

Wyoming isn't empty. It's full. It is just a matter of knowing what you are looking at . . . and looking for.

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Authorized by William C. Sniffin
Contributions or gifts to Bill Sniffin for Governor 2002 are not tax-deductible.
Bill Sniffin for Governor - P.O. Box 900 ­ Lander, WY 82520 (307) 332-3111, ext. 17