Heartland's Eternal Beat

Hunt Along Tango-11, And You Might Bag The Sweep of History

TANGO-11, Wyo.

There's no here here.

To the thousands who daily hustle their cars and trucks up I-25 toward Casper from Cheyenne, this stretch of high desert nothingness, about five miles beyond Wheatland, looks as anonymous as a landscape invented by Samuel Beckett.

From that sleek road, little can be seen: a haze of steam, perhaps; the crust of the finger canyons that mark the extent of a river valley; and miles of rolling hill, munched almost barren by cattle.

But Tango-11 bears investigating, because in its confines one can see a rare confluence of the pillars of civilization -- or its discontents. That's quite a claim, I know, for a chunk of rural Wyoming a million miles from Times Square, but I've trekked its trails and meadows and haltingly scaled its cliffs three times now, and I'm always amazed by what's here, if only you look hard.

Tango-11 is a square mile or so of heartland bisected by the Laramie River, and where the river has meandered, it has declared paradise, a fertile swath of green very like other river valleys where man's long climb began.

The greensward is a mile wide, trending more or less westward to the small Wyoming city that gives the trickling stream its name. Down here, close to the water, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better descriptor than "Edenic."

Surely man's first collective memories of a mythic garden were formulated in such a place. Meadow and tree cooperate harmoniously a thousand yards each side of the trickle, and a western wind sets every green thing aquiver with the pulse of life. The willows and cottonwoods whisper in that turbulence, the deep grass undulates like the surface of the Pacific while overhead, the sky manufactures huge marble structures that turn out to be only clouds; they look like Michelangelo's stairway to heaven -- gleamy, creamy, epic. It's just damned beautiful.

But I didn't come to gaze and issue purple prose. I came to hunt.

With a good friend and a good guide, I have three times passed days in the Laramie River Valley, waiting for Father Deer to arrive and feed me. Sometimes he shows and sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he wanders close enough and sometimes he doesn't. It depends on skill, stamina, patience and good marksmanship, all of which I lack, which means it really depends on luck. If the animal chooses to mosey close, you are successful. If not, as has happened, you go home empty-handed. That's why they call it hunting and not killing.

But, sitting there in the cold before the dawn, watching the rocks gradually emerge from blur to shape as the sun caught them, I thought: This is how it began. Men, alone, with some kind of weapon, waiting for some kind of animal in the chilly dark. Okay, so Ooglock went back to a cave with his flint-headed spear and I went back to the Wheatland Econo Lodge, threw my 7mm-08 on the other bed, and collapsed on my bed to make the pain of a 4:30 rising go away. If he doesn't score, his kids die, his wife dies, his tribe dies, his race dies; if I don't score, my kids laugh. Fool and money, soon parted, that sort of thing.

But somehow for a million years in lush river valleys like this one, Ooglock kept his family fed, enough so there'd be another tiny, desperate generation. That's where it began, our topless towers of modern Ilium: with the hunters.