Exploring a double-narrative of Cody, WY

When the summer sets on a tourist destination like Cody, WY – where a good portion of Yellowstone National Park’s 3.1 million annual visitors either enter or leave the park by way of Cody’s “East Gate” – town springs to life; residents like myself become both observers and the ones being observed. Amongst the crowds at our nightly Gunfighters Show or the Cody Nite Rodeo (yes, every night too), it’s not uncommon to hear foreign accents or languages spoken. We put on a good show for the tourists – the restaurants add new specials to the menu, the downtown shops open up after a long winter, the parking lot at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center becomes crowded with tour buses, we celebrate the Fourth of July for the entire week, we host festivals for music lovers, river lovers, bike lovers, and beer lovers.

The Cody Gunfighters perform nightly all summer long in front of the historic Irma Hotel, at the corner of 12th Street and Sheridan. (photo by Eric Silk)

The town’s founder, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody (yes, of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show fame), would certainly be proud of the way we continue his legacy of showmanship, performing the “Wild West” for our visitors right outside his historic Irma Hotel, sometimes performing in very wild ways (read: Man loses nose in bar fight for an idea). In the essay “DissemiNation” scholar Homi Bhabha suggests narratives, or founding myths, are often constructed through a process of arbitrarily interpreted historical events and repeated signification, or performance, until “the people” emerge as one, as a collective, homogenous and standardized. In Cody, our founding myth of “Buffalo Bill,” as well as our repeated performance of that myth and our resistance to new images of the West, leads many visitors to read Cody as a modern “cowboy” town, despite the true diversity of people who have historically lived in the Big Horn Basin or the people who have the privilege of calling this outdoor playground their home today.

Buffalo Bill’s wild west and congress of rough riders of the world. A company of wild west cowboys 1899. (courtesy photo)

What happens if we explode the narrative of Cody – if we forget about the cowboys for a minute to consider the other people, the ones who lived here long before Buffalo Bill was killing buffalos, the ones who inspired Buffalo Bill’s story of the West. Bhabha suggests when we look for the stories of the people at the borderland of history, language, race, and gender, we can discover a “strange cultural survival.”

Sitting Bull and William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. (courtesy photo)

The Plains Indians once roamed Cody and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem freely; the near extinction of buffalo following white settlement in the region eroded their traditional way of life while the creation of reservations like Crow Indian Reservation in Montana and Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming erased their historic ties to the land I now get to call home. And yet, the culture of the Plains Indian people has adapted and changed and ultimately, survived. In conjunction with the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the Plains Indian people return to Cody annually for a two-day powwow and competitive dance competition. Various Plains Indian tribes are represented at the powwow, as are various ceremonial, social, and warrior dance traditions.

Each year, my friends and I love to attend this celebration – the food, the colors, the music, and the movement are inspiring. The rhythmic beat and voice of the drum circles and the steady bounce of the dancers’ feet keeps pace as the day inches on and the sun grows hotter. But inevitably, we grow cognizant of our position in the crowd and we find it hard to keep watching, to ignore the uncomfortable sense of the continued relationship of colonization: as writer David Spurr aptly notes in the introduction to his book The Rhetoric of Empire, “the relations of colonizer to colonized have neither remained the same nor have they disappeared.” We ask ourselves, are we right to be here? Is it right to watch?

The answer is not easily found. But what I continually return to is that this event in particular can be seen as an example of the Plains Indian people creating and displaying their own narrative. The curator of the museum belongs to this vibrant culture, as do many of its advisory board members. On their website, Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow, a tribal historian and board member, refers to the museum as “a living, breathing place where more than just Indian objects are on display.” The dancers of the powwow breathe life into the museum – moving it beyond walls and objects – evidencing the resilience of the Plains Indian people and showcasing their contemporary experience.

By including this nascent, but largely ignored, history of the Plains Indian people in the larger narrative of Cody, we can attempt to move beyond a colonial discourse that erases the “other” from our founding myth. As researcher Sheena lyengar suggested in her TED Talk, “Instead of replacing one story with another, we can learn from and revel in the many versions that exist and the many that have yet to be written.”

Getting lost in Montana

In high school, I loved my geography class, but had a terrible time with the actual “geography” bit. The part where we learned about other places and cultures was endlessly fascinating; the part where I was supposed to look at a map and understand it or remember where things go on the map was a nightmare. Soon the class ended, and it didn’t seem like a matter of much consequence.

Billboard on the way in to town. (photos by Heidi Hansen)

Flash forward seven years: I’m working as a reporting and photography intern in Malta, MT for the Phillips County News and I have no clue how to get out to the bird refuge for my interview with the new biologist. Pulled over on US Highway 2, which runs adjacent to the railroad track known by locals as “the Hi-Line” because it inches across the northern half of the state, I try to remember which side of the track is supposed to signify north and south. Locals tell me the Hi-Line, which has stops every 30 miles, is the reason this town exists – if homesteaders didn’t get off here, they could get off at the next 30-mile mark. This history might illustrate what geographer Joni Seager states in this reading on maps: “Maps don’t just reflect ‘reality,’ they help to create it.” Legend has it, each town got its name by a Great Northern Railway official who would spin a globe and point: he picked out faraway names like Havre, Malta, Glasgow, Zurich, and Harlem and thus the vast prairie bison habitat became the agricultural communities of Havre, Malta, Glasgow, Zurich, and Harlem.

The “Hi-Line”

While the Little Rockies of Northeastern Montana aren’t too far from Malta, they are invisible along high prairie horizon. This is where Montana (the alleged “land of mountains”) gets its nickname: “Big Sky Country.” The Hi-Line is thus the only landmark in the town of less than 2,000 people and the obvious point for mapping. But it also makes directions difficult to follow here. Did they build the town to the north or the south of the railroad? Or wait, does the railroad split Malta along east and west halves? They told me if I drove south out of town I couldn’t miss the refuge, but I’m late, and wherever it is, I’ve missed it.

A flooded field in Malta visible from the Hi-Line. All sky.

Looking back, I wonder at my foolishness. When teachers asked where I would be interning for the summer, I had absent-mindedly responded: “Some placed called Malta – it’s in Montana, I guess.” I was just going – wherever the hell it was. I said I was going because I needed the writing experience; in reality, I was going because I needed to get away from Northern Utah, from the memory of a traumatic relationship, from the dreaded summer at home after three years away at school, now single, now estranged from old friends. I needed to see myself as something else, somewhere else. I couldn’t say any of this because it wasn’t very reporter-ly of me. David Spurr, in his book, The Rhetoric of Empire, characterizes the problem of “reporting” as: “the privilege of inspecting, or examining, or looking at, by its nature excludes the journalist from the human reality constituted as the object of observation.” In journalism school they spin this differently: the privilege of inspecting provides the necessary distance from a subject to avoid bias. But the weight of the task was restricting, I didn’t want to stand apart from this new place, I wanted – no, desperately needed – to be transformed by place, and wherever Malta was, would do.

Among other things, my internship became an exercise in mapping, and not just geographically along the Hi-Line. Getting my bearings required leaning into this new world. After the botched bird refuge assignment, I was asked to profile a woman named Annie Jefferson for a series on local characters. Everyone in town knew this fiercely feminine woman with Down’s syndrome. She invited me to tag along on her paper route, and she showed me a secret that echoes the famous words of Herman Melville’s Ishmael in Moby-Dick, “It is not down on any map. True places never are.” From Annie’s perspective, I saw all the “ins” of Malta, details that weren’t on any physical map: which houses had the best garage sales, where “cottontails” liked to hide, what bank had the best free treats, who would invite us in for a chat. Annie became a constant presence in my life, regularly stopping into the newspaper and inviting me out for a walk. With Annie’s help, I began making my own map of Malta, complete with the people I enjoyed talking to and my favorite places to photograph.

Annie Jefferson getting ready for her paper route.

Soon other Malta insiders showed me their own maps. Great Plains Dinosaur Museum Paleontologist Sue Frary taught me about the remarkable fossil discoveries of the Judith River Formation that made up the soil under our feet. The most complete dromaeosaurid raptor found in North America (“Julie the Raptor”) belonged to Phillips County. Sue also showed me the “nightlife” of Malta and invited me to cut loose at the VFW Post 4067 anytime. Some locals would lament: there’s more bars than churches in Malta. One grocery store. One fast food restaurant. One movie theater. My boss had mapped the empty lots where buildings burned down and were never been rebuilt, including his own newspaper press – the printing was now outsourced to another Hi-Line town. Many of these lots had remained empty for 20-30 years as the population subtly declined from a high of 2,367 residents in 1980 to 1,997 in 2010. As long as people moved away, there wasn’t much need to rebuild what was lost.

Outsiders also wanted to show me their maps of Malta. The Denver-based nonprofit group EcoFlight took myself and a group of journalists on a bird’s eye tour of the nearby Bitter Creek Wilderness Study Area where a new land management plan was being considered and stirring controversy. Likewise, the Bozeman-based nonprofit American Prairie Reserve invited me to campout for an overnight “bioblitz” on their nearby private conservation ranch where bison had been reintroduced. The goal was to bring in scientists and interested amateurs together to inventory the biodiversity of plant and animal life on the ranch which was slowly being returned to a more natural prairie state. I stayed up late into the night with a group of giddy biology students looking for bats. They caught two. Locals were leary about what those weird conservations were doing setting up a yurt camp for more outsiders, but the experience broadened my view of what it means to co-exist, not just with each other, but with the environment.

Bird’s eye view of the Milk River heading into the Bitter Creek Wilderness Area.

Kids enjoying the discovery of a rattlesnake on the American Prairie Reserve.

These experiences with local people and organizations showed me there is more than one way to map a place – and once I connected people and animals and habitat preservation with the lines on the map, it was a lot easier to read. In this way, my journey in Malta, MT also became what writer Casey Blanton describes as “the interplay between ‘observer’ and ‘observed.’” My role as a reporter in Malta was sensitive. I wanted to bring these loving people a warm reflection of themselves while treading the line of complex conservation issues and small town agriculture-based life. At the end of three months, I emerged to head home: not totally transformed, but lighter.

 

 

Developing a travel writing persona

My mom wants me to write a book about my family’s (mis)adventures in the event known as summer vacation. Over the course of 35 years of family travel with six children, the material is pretty good: the Suburban breaks down in Palm Springs five years in a row; the discovery that your small child has led his counsins onto a cliff at the beach; that time the boat sank during a storm at Bear Lake; that other time Jake forgot to secure the boat to the trailer and it sailed down the road; the year the top of the tent camper blew away – I think the same year our dog Sissy got sprayed by a skunk several nights in a row and fellow campers donated cans of tomato sauce to the cause; and then there’s the trip to Death Valley – that speaks for itself, right? I tell Mom I’ll write it someday ….

The tent-camper, pre-destruction.

The truth is, I’m not sure what kind of story it would be – a travel book? Or would it be on par with National Lampoon’s Vacation? A kind of real-life counterpart to the Griswold’s?

In my mind, travel writing is this fantasized, yet undefinable thing. Asked to consider what my idea of travel writing is, three categories come to mind first: 1) literature I studied in school such as Hendry David Thoreau’s Walden, 2) the modern travel television series, e.g. Anthony Bordain’s “Parts Unknown,” and 3) guide books and websites. This despite my favorite books in the last year having both been travel memoirs: Laura Bell’s Claiming Ground (about the years she spent sheep herding in Wyoming) and Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (about her childhood in Africa).

The problem, I think, is that even when travel writing is discussed as a literary genre, the parameters fall apart and it becomes impossible to contain. Does Barbara Kingsolver’s fiction count as travel writing? Was John Howard Griffin “traveling” when he wrote Black Like Me? In the Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, Joan Paul Rubies states, “Travel writing, the varied body of writing that takes travel as an essential condition of its production, appears in so many forms that it is best defined in its plurality.” Rubies does however go on to contend that ethnography, or the description of people and culture – though not always present – is often an important part of travel writing. Tracking the history of the genre from commissioned travel reports to the later travel journals and memoirs, Rubies writes: “Significant changes (in travel writing) had less to do with ‘what to describe’ (ethnography) than with emphasis of interpretation and the emergence of newly dominant scientific concepts and ideological paradigms.”

Today anyone, by virtue of a place to go and an internet connection, can become a travel writer. I’ve always kept a travel journal, and in my career as a staff newspaper reporter, even written some “travel” pieces – and yet, I’m hesitant to claim the title for myself. If travel writing is “best defined in its plurality,” one question looms large in my mind: What kind of travel writer do I want to be? And what will my parameters be? Steve Clark, in his Introduction to Travel Writing and Empire, concludes that travel is inherently “one-way” because “Europeans mapped the world rather than the world mapping them.” How will I responsibly navigate such a world? How will I represent place and people without objectifying them?

This blog will be an exercise in understanding the implications of these questions through the practice of travel writing. I won’t promise to share funny family travel stories just yet, but I will promise to share my own stories of travel and how they have – or haven’t – impacted me. Anthropologist James Clifford in his book Routes suggests a metaphor for travel as comparison cultural study of “travelling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-travelling” can help us move closer to transparent writing – in other words, he says it matters to include the conditions of travel as well as the observations. My experience of where I came from, how I got there, and how I will return influence (and even create) my observations – the difference of one place exists by virtue of comparison to another place.

With this as a jumping off point, I’m reminded of Catherine Watson’s essay “Where the Roads Diverged” (included in the 2008 Best American Travel Writing series); through travel she discovers home: “By the time I got to the South Pacific … I’d been looking for home all my life—for the place I really belonged, the place where I should have been born. I felt I’d found it on Easter Island …” Unlike Watson, I’ve always felt my roots were rightly planted in the West. As a child, I explored the West from the window of parent’s minivan (often amidst fights over whose feet were touching me!). As an adult, I explore the West on my own two feet from a base camp of Cody, WY at the east gate to Yellowstone National Park. Therefore, this blog will emphasize an exploration of the character of the West and as well as the potential problems of that characterization, i.e. where does the story diverge? who is marginalized in the West?

Hiking Sheep Mountain on the North Fork on a warm day in January, 2013. (photo by Eric Silk)

“The discoveries which we make abroad are special and particular; those which we make at home are general and significant. The further off, the nearer the surface. The nearer home, the deeper.” — Henry David Thoreau