Holdsworth - Big Wonderful: Notes From Wyoming

Big Wonderful

notes from wyoming

kevin holdsworth

2006 by the University Press of Colorado

Published by the University Press of Colorado
5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C
Boulder, Colorado 80303

All rights reserved
Printed in Canada

The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of
the Association of American University Presses.

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Holdsworth, Kevin.
Big wonderful : notes from Wyoming / Kevin Holdsworth.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-87081-846-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-87081-846-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. WyomingDescription and travel. 2. Outdoor lifeWyoming. 3. MountaineeringWyoming. 4. Holdsworth, KevinTravelWyoming. 5. WyomingHistory, Local. 6. Holdsworth, KevinHomes and hauntsWyoming. 7. Authors, AmericanWyomingBiography. 8. WyomingPoetry. 9. WyomingBiography. I. Title.
F765.H65 2006
917.87034dc22

2006028465

Design by Daniel Pratt

15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of my father,
Keith Jay Holdsworth,
19252004.

. Wallace Stegner, At Home in the Fields of the Lord, in The Sound of Mountain Water (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 164.

. Ibid., 165.

. LeRoy Hafen and Ann Hafen, Handcarts to Zion (Glendale, CA: A. H. Clark, 1960), 2949.

. Ibid., 4648.

. Stegner, The Gathering of Zion (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 238.

. Hafen and Hafen, Handcarts to Zion, 40.

. Hafen and Hafen, Handcarts to Zion; Stegner, The Gathering of Zion.

. Ibid.

. Ibid.

. Hafen and Hafen, Handcarts to Zion.

(accessed October 17, 2005).

. H.R. 2754: Public Law 108-137, described as Alternative A in Environmental Assessment No. WY-050-EA4-14.

(accessed October 12, 2005).

(accessed October 17, 2005).

. Brodie Farquhar, LDS Faces Leasing Hurdle, Casper Star Tribune, May 17, 2003.

. Andy Howell, managing editor, Ogden [UT] Standard Examiner, personal interview, April 19, 2006.

. Farquhar, LDS Faces Leasing Hurdle.

(accessed October 17, 2005).

. See www.lds.org.

. Hafen and Hafen, Handcarts to Zion.

. Ibid., 193.

. Ibid., 114116.

. Ibid., 230231.

. Ibid., 227229.

. Barbara Dobos, Re: Solid Facts, e-mail to the author, October 12, 2005.

. Ibid.

. Quoted in Christopher Smith, Tragic Handcart Account Evolved over the Years, Salt Lake Tribune, June 30, 2002.

. Stegner, The Gathering of Zion, 238.

. Quoted in ibid.

(accessed October 17, 2005).

. Dobos and Wischmann, Alliance for Historic Wyoming.

Thanks to Ken Brewer, Bobbie Stearman, Tom Lyon, Sherwin Howard, Brad Roghaar, Susan Fishburne, Rick Moody, Brian Bedard, Eileen Sullivan, Todd Moffet, Tina Eliopolis, Jerry White, Sean McCandless, David Weisberg, Dave Rickers, Darrell Mensel, Richard Boyer, Levi Peterson, Robert Hodgson van Wagoner, Monika Rose, Maury Grimm, Susan Bono, Sharon Dolan, Annie Proulx, Robert Roripaugh, Mark Spragg, Jon Billman, Samuel Western, Annette Chaudet, Christian Aggeler, Paul Kyed, Lesley Wischmann, Barbara Dobos, Darrin Pratt, Laura Furney, Daniel Pratt, Ann Wendland, Henry Holdsworth (no relation), and especially Sandy Crooms.

I could not have written this without the patience and love of my wife, Jennifer Sorensen. Also, grateful acknowledgment and thanks to all those concerned with the following periodicals for printing earlier versions of the work contained herein: Creative Non-fiction, Denver University Law Review, Hard Ground 200002, High Plains Register, Junction, Manzanita, Mountain Gazette, Owen Wister Review, Petroglyph, Red Rock Review, South Dakota Review, Sports Guide, Tiny Lights, and Weber Studies.

Big Wonderful

The first movie western, The Great Train Robbery, was filmed in New Jersey, or upstate New York, depending on whom you believe. The Homer of western writers, Owen Wister, was a Philadelphia lawyer. Zane Grey, the king of the formula western, was a dentist from Ohio. Louis LAmour, inheritor of the Grey legacy, wrote about the wild wild west from the City of Angels and had such powerful concentration that he boasted he could compose on a median in the middle of the Santa Monica Freeway. Mary Austin, who wrote so beguilingly of the great dry lands experience, spent much of her creative life in New York City, as did other western writers, Willa Cather and May Swenson. Jackson Pollock, the celebrated urbanite drip, fling, splash, and swirl painter, was born in Cody, Wyoming.

These facts might seem discordant if not downright contradictory. They may be, but the ability to keep two opposites in mind helps us to negotiate this arid vale of tears. Its not enough to circle it as yin and yang or simply pin it on a star sign. It is instead what keeps us wranglingto acknowledge both sides of Prudence. It may also have something to do with the way past and present coexist in our minds. It may be the way sound shifts in passing. Where we are is also where we have been. We have to escape in order to return.

It is for these reasons, perhaps, that Edward Abbey wrote parts of his classic, Desert Solitaire, in Hoboken, New Jersey, and that he penned the Introduction while seated at Nelsons Marine Bar, just a few staggers from the towns greasy waterfront. Abbey defends individualism and anarchy just across the river from the Colossus, corporate and cultural Yosemite. Desert Solitaire treats of the wide-open and ever-twisting canyon country, the big American empty, and it was partially written in a mile-square, sea-level town with a notoriously corrupt government, a town which on rainy days smelled like coffee, owing to the Maxwell House plant that is no more. Good to the last drop it may have been, but a place farther from Arches is hard to imagine.

I must now confess that when I was living in Hoboken, on native-son Mr. Francis Albert Sinatras very street, Monroe Streetneither a peaceful, nor a sylvan, nor indeed a particularly wholesome streetthat I began to write a western. I did it my way. It proved to be a western that got away from me, but a western it was meant to be.

I felt homesick, true. I was way out of my element. Just how I ended up in Hoboken, New Jersey, is of little importance. Because I did not know exactly who I was and was homesick, I tried my hand at that imported homegrown species of genre fiction.

Because I had grown up in Salt Lake City, Utah and felt embarrassed about it, I felt I needed some Wanderjahren to make up for it. Few places, surely, would be less provincial than the Big Apple. Obviously in that belief I was nave. Its impossible to imagine a more insular, self-absorbed, and indeed more provincial place than Manhattan Island, love it though I did. Thirteen miles in length