DEIRDRE STOELZLE GRAVES

Wyoming: The last, best place

It's been a while.

It's been so long, in fact, that the repeated, Hunter Thompson-esque postponement of this column to my life-support system of an editor have gone from sort of cute to you're sort of about to be fired.

I shall recap.

So, summer vacation.

East Hampton is a hole. Rhode Island is a dream. Boston's divine; Marblehead, wonderful; New York City, amazing, as usual, and as sweaty as any summer of my younger days. People on the East Coast rock - they're hip, they're accommodating, they're laid back in the energized, dizzying sort of way that makes me feel OK about being crazy.

Venturing out of Wyoming and, in fact, off the remote ranch where I live is always exciting. But the most fun is had planning the trip. Any pleasure is immediately erased with the reminders that life as you know it - independence from pretty much anything and anyone, self-reliance - does not exist in civilization. (Here I give a nod to my old colleague Hugh Jackson, who considered Wyoming more civilized than any progressive city.)

Things cost three times as much as they do in Wyoming. The movement of three times as many people - or 30 times - is difficult to get used to. Things smell, the air is thick, the trains leave without you, it's two hours later than it is back home.

Back home, life is hard, and maybe harder because it's lonely. The weather is mostly inhospitable. When it's hot it's scorching, when it's cold, it's a bitter, blue cold. It takes 40 minutes to get to town, so we don't get to town often. Every year, someone important in the community will die and we will hold tight to our grief, and be grateful for our connection. Every year, it seems, we lose another great ranch horse. Every year, we dance in the street outside the Invasion Bar.

Our microcosmic heaping of hardship is lived in addition to what we share with the rest of the world. Global warming. Disease. The great fisherman Paul Gorman dropping dead on a boat off Chincoteague. Eight Belles. Fighting insurance companies.

Wyoming is the last, best place. But you have to be rich on so many levels - enough education to keep learning, enough friends to stay connected, enough energy to keep moving, enough humor to anesthetize the sadness.

This all sounds morose, you're probably thinking. You think I'm just bummed because we're heading into winter. You'd be right.

I'm working on a game plan for getting through the next eight months that is not based on the axiom Life's a Bitch and Then You Die.

Winter is, after all, just a season. But in Wyoming, that season is indistinguishable, temperature-wise, from the other seasons. If you live on a ranch and the prospect of a long winter bums you out, you get a sun lamp and stay the course. This is a busy eight months. You've got hunting season, then gathering cows, then calving cows, then selecting your 4-H animals (and all the while buying, hauling and feeding a steady supply of hay).

If you don't live on a ranch, learn to ski.

And if you're like me, living on a ranch but mostly desk-bound, you plan your next trip.

Deirdre Stoelzle Graves is the author of "Branded: The Making of a Wyoming Cowgirl." Write to her at dstoelzle@yahoo.com.