As Western as Wyoming Pie

In the introduction to her book on the modern West, called “The Solace of Open Spaces,” Gretel Ehrlich compares Wyoming to a pie shell, calling all the space the filler. My Wyoming pie may have the same rectangular crust, but what's in the middle is much more than just endless space. Mine is full of every inch of downtown, all-consuming fall sports, and cinnamon apples. I appreciate the accuracy with which Ehrlich initially presents the idea of Wyoming, but the state I know isn't only surface deep. She depicts the Wyoming outsiders see, or at least hear about. It’s all gruff cowboys who don’t have time for proper English and are unwilling to let go of legacies they’ve never lived. Don’t get me wrong, I know people who “telegraph thoughts by the way they tilt their heads and listen,” (4) or who can be found “lean[ing] against a fence with a fat wedge of Copenhagen beneath their lower lip,” (4). I go to school with so many of the “type” that she describes, but none of them are just silent people who hold on to someone else’s distant past. Maybe that’s a trait we’ll grow into, or maybe Ehrlich unknowingly captured a dying generation. Either way, my Wyoming is full of extra linguistic fluff, and not a lot of shyness. As far as I see it, all the classic cowboy coyness was bred out long ago, and replaced with overboiling confidence. All that empty space that Ehrlich so aptly describes is still around, and it can still make a body feel special, but empty space eventually gets filled with all the little things that are going on within and around it. My Wyoming is the result of the most vivid and tightly packed eighteen years of my life, so there’s no surprise that it is so much more than a Western Pie with a Solace and Solitude filling.