Lay of the _______

Our 1500 mile approach to the diorama site was the frame around it. It’s edges followed the grid of the 1785 Land Ordinance, a landscape gradient that started in the deciduous suburbs of Chicago that divided into checks, townships, sections and quarter sections by the roads and county lines. It took us into the high altitude desert of the west. By the time we arrived in Southern Wyoming we learned the lay of the land was not geological. It had little to do with the grasses that grow there. The soil-composition really wasn’t that important, nor were the exact locations of the nesting sites of the greater sage grouse. While each grouse was a pin in a map, what was truly pinned was human ambition. We gained access to the landscape through the people who were shaped by it. By knowing them, we also knew the soil, grasses, and most importantly, wind. It was a landscape that was starkly human and an expedition that started out naturalistic quickly turned journalistic as we neared the site.

After crossing the cornfields of lower Wisconsin and the Badlands of South Dakota we stopped at a gas station off Route 130 on the edge of Saratoga, Wyoming. As we stepped through the dark aluminum framed door of the Conoco country store, we learned that there had been a fire at the lumber mill. We learned that the son of the lady at the register was okay. He had to run in late last night to help save the mill so he could work the next day. We learned his day was ending as we were beginning ours. We saw a rotating rack of maps. I pulled off a Bureau of Land Management map off a stainless steel rack that rotated drunkenly next to the cashier. The maps are published by the Bureau to distinguish public and private so as you are out on an ATV hunting pronghorn you don’t commit the faux pas of crossing into someone else’s land. In Saratoga the gas station is the grocery, fueling station and welcome center. While there is a ranger's station in Rawlins, it wasn’t worth driving another forty five minutes to get the BLM maps at list price. The local gas stations bought them to mark them up from four to eight dollars.

The Bureau of Land Management was created in 1946 to manage the nameless public lands of the American land-system. Escaping a clear definition of ownership, they were treated as an open commons throughout the first half of American history. Covering eleven states and comprised of 400 Million acres they are the largest allotment of federally owned land. With most their holdings in the West, BLM lands form a sagebrush shadow to the Rocky Mountains that stretches nearly to the Mississippi river. While, owned by the federal government, unlike a National Park, they lack a clear purpose. Arid and alkaline, they had originally been passed over by the first rounds of homesteading and unwanted their use was fractured. They initially weren’t beautiful enough to be preserved. They were too inaccessible and culturally invisible for recreation. They were productive, but maybe too much so, leaving them at risk of depletion. As a public landscape shared between the American people it was not exactly clear what we were sharing. Cattle, recreation, preservation, mineral extraction and energy development, were all competing for the same land.

It was ten years after the Grazing Service was created in 1936 that President Harry S. Truman merged the Grazing Service with the General Land Office to form the BLM in an attempt to streamline the management of public lands. Despite this attempt the early BLM lacked a clear vision for the American Public Land System and disaffected, ranchers claimed them as their own. Ambiguity of ownership exacerbated the differences between the BLM and its rancher clientele. The 400 million acres that the BLM was initially tasked with managing was an intermingled patchwork of federal, state and private lands with no clear edge between them. Ranchers leased land from the federal government at extremely subsidized rates and entangled them with privately owned tracts forming ad-hoc hybrids of public and private creating a not so public public commons. Often, access to public lands required right-of-way permits to cross through private lands and ranchers were not willing to grant them. When the government attempted to resolve the messy land-use patterns they threatened to let ranchers’ leases expire and shut down access to adjacent public properties. Ranchers felt their sovereignty was violated.

The conflict between the federal government and private landowners was stoked further in 1976, the American Bicentennial, when the federal government officially closed the frontier. Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) formally ending the homesteading in the continental United States. It signaled to ranchers the end of their individual autonomy. The BLM administered a doctrine of rational surveying and land planning practices based in peer-reviewed scientific study which replaced the generational knowledge passed down by ranchers. Through an encompassing national view, the federal government sought a cohesive strategy to manage national land-use. It moved away from a decentralized system that responded to western user’s input and deployed a centralized planning system rooted in science and academia. This alienated western landowners and the FLPMA act led to revolt. In the late 1970s and early 1980s western landowners staged the Sagebrush Rebellion a political movement in which Western states and landowners resisted the government’s efforts to regulate public land. Western landowners pushed an agenda of federal land disposal and called for the federal government to release its land holdings to state, local and private ownership.

Forced to solidify its stance, the Sagebrush Rebellion was a point of maturation for the BLM. It was an agency that lived in two worlds, in the offices and the conference rooms in Washington and regional field offices and the other in the natural world. The split was emblematic of the virtual reality of governing and how inarticulate policy was in describing the natural world that it is attempting to regulate.

The idea that the rancher could be regulated was a paradox. The rancher was endemic within the sagebrush ecosystem and the BLM could have chosen to regulate the rancher as a species along side of the mule deer and elk but instead the BLM divorced the rancher from the land. The separation was an attempt to create a more inclusive definition of human habitation in the American West.

The FLPMA was only the apex of this process, the framework had been in place leading up to the rebellion. In the 1960s the BLM systematized the natural world through an inventory of the American Public. The inventory allowed the BLM to analyze and allocate lands for specific and diverse uses, without the inventory, the federal approach to land management was conducted scatter shot. They hoped that an honest portrait of land use would show a habitat that is capable of holding multiple user groups. Recreation and conservation were elevated to equal importance as production. The biologist, the thru-hiker and the birdwatchers were introduced as active specimen into the American wilds.

Land classification shaped a national vision for how public lands should be used and gave a sense of clarity to its constituents. The inventory and the FLPMA took American lands out of their adolescence and reigned them in for the production of the American public. For Merica and I, members of this public, the map that I picked off of the rack in the Conoco was deceptively simple, land was subdivided into the grid of the Land Ordinance of 1785 and then color coded by ownership. Yellow was federal land, light blue was state and unmarked was private land.

Startlingly, the map depicted Southern Wyoming as a checkerboard of ownership with one mile by one mile sections alternating between public and private. The entire map, not just a segment, was a quilt of land-use. Its strict grid was carefree of the topographic features that lay under and in it we felt the humanness of the map. I could not resolve the dissonance between the wide open spaces that we had just driven through and the constrained plots that the map delineated.

The checkerboard was a remnant of the Union Pacific's bid to build a transcontinental railroad as part of the Pacific Railways Acts of 1862 and 1864 which granted 174 million acres of public land for a railway and telegraph line that would connect coast to coast. The construction of the railway was steeped in controversy as congressmen colluded with financiers of the railway and received kickbacks on the approval of the line. The undertaking of constructing a transcontinental railroad was an effort of nation building at continental scale and it preyed on the ambiguity between public and private to muster the brute financial and political force needed to succeed. The land was granted in a 40 mile swath within which the Union Pacific could chose an ideal line and the remainder of the land was to be sold in order to fund the project. Unlike the arable East, no one bought the lands in the arid West. The deal agreed upon between the federal government and the Union Pacific was that fifty percent of the land granted to the railway would be returned on completion of the line. When it was returned every other section was given back. The Union Pacific checkerboard blurred a public land system that was already out of focus.

The land holds a lasting imprint of the human ambition that fueled the project in the form of a rigid geometric checkerboard. There are many ways to give back fifty percent of something and it remains questionable why it was given back piecemeal instead of discrete and purposeful chunks. Whether the inbreeding of public and private lands was purposefully sinister, it remains a fuck you to the American Public forever embroiling their land in a confusing cocktail of whose-is-whose that is equally unfair to people who wish to enjoy the beauty of the land as it is the people who wish to produce from it. It is an ambiguous land-use condition that could only be a result of human motivation.

Today, Wyoming has adopted the attitude of making public land private. With notoriously harsh trespassing laws, it's illegal to travel corner to corner between sections of public land which share one point of contact but no common edge. To travel from one section of public land to another the sections need to share a contiguous border or public right-of-way, such as a river or a public road, connecting it. While water in a river or stream is public, it’s bed and shore are not. Anchors need to float or stay in the boat when floating private land. Due to the transcontinental railroad checkerboard very few sections share a contiguous border and ownership defaults to private. Over 750,000 acres of public land in Wyoming and 4 million acres nationwide are publicly inaccessible due to this out-of-date land-use pattern. There have been recent congressional attempts to clarify access to public lands for the American public in the last decade to open lands primarily for recreational use of hunters and fishers so that they can secure permits and access land that is currently checkered or otherwise inaccessible. Nothing has gotten through and the lands remain hostage to landowners who are unwilling to allow passage through their property.

The site of the diorama is made of this cocktail. As we approached the site we entered on a public road and as we got deeper into the Sage Creek Basin we could feel the landscape lining up to the image that we remembered from the diorama back in New York. At the moment that it felt as if each individual landform is just setting into place we were interrupted by a gate. The fence was relatively invisible: thin spindly barbed wire that visually dissolved into the pale yellow grasses and soil. The gate on the other hand was made of dark green bent tubing. It looked new and had presence. In the hush of an empty landscape, it gently told us that we were not going any further unless we planned to slip into the ambiguous legal territory of checkerboard land-use. We checked the lock. It was locked. We look back at my rental car, a dark blue Volkswagen Passat that was as alien out here as we were. It barely had the turning radius or ground clearance to reverse course but it nudged over the ruts as I pulled it off-road. The feeling of defeat at the gate was the same feeling I had a few weeks before when I had called the Overland Trail and Cattle Company, the company listed on the sign of the bent tube gate. The first question I asked when I called the cattle company was so endearingly naive of Wyoming land culture. I was on the roof of my building at work, the only place I can get some privacy.

I was dialing the number as I was running up the fire stair. He answered as soon as I opened the door to the roof. His hello was muffled by the sound of the cooling tower outside. I wasn’t sure if he had said anything or not. I ran further to the edge of the Manhattan rooftop with the skyline of midtown unfolding around me, the Empire State building at my right and the Hudson River on my left. I found a spot where the updraft was calm enough that I could hear.

“Hi. Is this the Overland Trail and Cattle Company?” I asked.

“Yes.” He answered as if he already had said so.

“Can I camp on your property?” In retrospect, what a stupid question, but breathless, from the run upstairs and across the roof, half of my oxygen was being directed to my lungs rather than my brain.

“No.”

He answered simply. Of course, I thought. In the moment of my desperation my mind caught up with my mouth and I realized that people just don’t let people on the their property in the rest of the country. I thought that if I explained my earnestness he might understand:

“I am from New York and I am doing a project on the dioramas from the American Museum of Natural History and it means everything to me to get on your property. Is it possible if we hike in for the day?”

“No.”

Why should I expect him to know what a diorama is, or why it’s important enough to travel halfway across the country to hike unaccompanied on his land.

“Thanks”

I resigned and hung up.

The lay of the land completely closed down. I wasn’t going to get on it. Asking to camp on private property wasn't the subtlest lead in. Three weeks later the gate did the same thing. I felt my purpose siphoning out of me. My mood changed and the compulsion of adventure I had felt for the last three days as we drove from Chicago, through Minnesota and South Dakota ended 1500 miles later at that gate. I turned somber and monosyllabic. So when Merica encouraged me to jump the gate in an effort to maintain our momentum, I refused. She replied that I was risk-averse, she was right. I was having the same reaction that I had a year earlier when she floated the idea of moving in together. The anticipation of discovery which had fueled the trip was lost, flustered, I froze. But back in the present, In Wyoming, I told her in as few of words as possible that I wouldn’t cross the fence and just wanted to go back into town. I was emotionally depleted and needed time to recover.

Only later would I learn how restrictive Wyoming’s trespassing laws are. They have the specific focus of keeping people from collecting data on private land. In 2016 the state passed a bill that heightened trespassing laws in Wyoming for people who conduct scientific research on property without the explicit consent of the property owner. The law came from a case where 15 ranchers were accused of violating the Clean Water Act when it was found that streams running in their land contained 200 times the acceptable legal limit of e-coli, a pollutant caused by cattle grazing too close to water sources. Ranchers fought the lawsuit claiming activists had illegally crossed onto to private land in order to sample the water they needed to make their claim. The law was passed in order to buttress the case of the ranchers making it illegal for a person to collect data on any “open space” without the consent of the owner of that space. The law, broad in its language, specifically identified photography as a form of data collection it explicitly outlawed. When Merica tried to get me to jump the gate so that we could find Perry Wilson’s view and document it, neither of us knew that it could have been a felony punishable by a year in prison. I like to think that my cowardice saved us, but Wyoming is a huge place and indiscretions are hard to track. Our argument was emotionally casual and wasn’t tuned into the full weight that land politics carry in the West. Back in Saratoga we checked into the Wolf Hotel where we tried to recollect our conversations with Jay, an educator at the American Museum of Natural History, who initially helped us plan our trip. He had been there once before, before the land was fenced off and we retraced his routes on the maps we had talked over with him a few weeks earlier, alternative approaches we found were just as inaccessible. Our hotel room was dipped in a curd of finely crafted pastiche that was comfortable to the body but uncomfortable for the mind. We resigned for the night and pulled the lace duvet over ourselves and slipped into sleep.

The next day we sought a savior at a local a gear shop owned by a fishing guide named Hack. Hack shuttles, clients down to river access points, lets them float then picks them up a few hours later further downstream. The diorama site abuts the North Platte and I thought that he may personally know the owner of the land we were trying to access. We got there as he was opening and it was his busiest time of day as groups were preparing to take advantage of a long day. The room was carpeted in beige and the walls were covered in pegboard that held extensive collections of baits and tackles. Bins of fly building supplies sat in the center which consisted of an assortment of feathers of an incredible range of colors that would make a millinery jealous. A small door out the back opened directly out to the banks of the North Platte, a collection of canoes and trolling boats sitting at its side. There are 6000 miles of fishable trout stream in Carbon County and the gruff Mike “Hack” Patterson was your source and shuttle to them. Hack immediately shut down when we mentioned the property. It was clear he wanted to have no part with what we were asking from him. He was equally congenial and resistant to our attempts to get more information about why he was so steadfast about not helping us. You could read the unspoken politics on his face, so we left. There are certain values that you don’t question in Wyoming, especially when you are an outsider. Land rights were clearly one of them.

There is a currency to imaging landscape that makes the places they represent public regardless of the legal ownership of the land. By documenting the Sage Creek Basin in a diorama James Perry Wilson inserted the image of the place into our collective visual memory. When we set out we didn’t think that what we were doing was subversive, we shed a layer of innocence as our data collection quest wandered further into ambiguous territory. A thin firewall of ownership restricted our access to the land that would allow us to validate James Perry Wilson landscape. Without access to the site our only option was to trust that Perry Wilson wasn’t fucking with us. After Hack excused us, I now had no expectation of getting onto the site and was starting to wonder what we would do with the remainder of our trip. Fortunately there was one other sportsman's guide in Saratoga.

The shop was emptied. It hadn’t appeared to be open for a few years, but there was a number we took down. He was out of town but answered. He apologized for not being there in person and he immediately knew who could help us. He told us of Dick Perue, a retired typesetter who had spent most of his career as the owner of the local paper the Saratoga Sun. His house was marked by an used and abused printing press that sat in the corner of his lawn on Walnut and South River street. Dick’s ruby brown Oldsmobile was in the driveway and we saw that the screen door was open. Dick was walking back from the hot spring in a towel and sandals, it was a block away from his house. The naturally occurring geothermal spring maintains a temperature between 108 to 119 degrees and was considered neutral territory during disputes between the town’s settlers and Native Americans. In the spirit of its history as a shared land, a green-zone, it remains open twenty four hours everyday of the week and is free to use. It is the social center of Saratoga and when you are visiting you are immediately inserted into local culture as you soak. When we visited the spring the gas station attendant we saw a few days earlier was ending her day at the hot spring,

Dick begins his day there. We gave him time to get dressed then walked up to the his one-story prairie style home and rang the doorbell. He talked with us through his screen door until he was comfortable enough inviting us inside. We walked through the living room where his wife, Marty, was watching tv and ended up in a study, a converted screened porch, that was ringed with filing cabinets and layered with stacks of file folders and sepia toned images. On his retirement he acquired a collection of historic photos of the area and sold them as reproductions that hang in local hotels, chambers of commerce, and restaurants forming the pastiche we slept in the night before. Dick uncovered a round table in the center of the room and asked us to sit. As we told him the story of the diorama, we showed him photos of James Perry Wilson on site and images of the diorama back home in New York. Dick led us through his photos in search of any hint of it. There was an image of a Scribner’s stagecoach carrying mail along the Overland Trail. An image of the ladies from the Hi-hat Literary Club, taken in the early 1900s that showed women travelling across a fifteen foot snow drift on cross-country skis in full dress and high hat. Images of the Wulf Hotel, the hotel we were staying at. He got us close, he had an image of a man in the 1920s fishing for trout in the North Platte River near Sheep Rock. Paging through picture after of picture we appreciated his persistence, but we weren’t looking for an image of the place, we were looking for the place itself. After explaining to Dick our need to get to the site he immediately knew who to call but didn’t have the number. Almost anyone in the town of Saratoga could have helped us, including Hack. A purchase of 312,000 acres of land isn’t easy to hide from the residents of the small town next door.

The land was owned by Phil Anschutz, the state’s second largest land owner. Perue knew the area well. It’s near Emigrant’s Rock, an area of historical value where homesteaders traveling the Overland Trail engraved their names as they crossed the North Platte River. On several occasions Perue had organized groups of amateur historians to view the engravings. He showed us pictures of these trips as well. Anschutz had originally bought the 312,000 acre cattle ranch for 9 million dollars with the hope of reselling it for 50. He had no buyers and was on the verge of considering his investment a bust when one of his vice presidents recommended he consider wind energy. Carbon County falls into the Southern Wyoming Corridor, a wind corridor created by a 90 mile gap in the Rocky Mountains that funnels air across the high plains. The site was considered to have exceptional winds with an annual average that falls between class four and class six winds with winds in the winter that often reach sustained class seven winds. There are only seven classes. These were some of the best winds in a non-mountainous region in the Northwest. Often called the Saudi Arabia of wind, Anschutz is planning the Chokecherry Sierra Madre Wind Project, the largest wind farm in North America here. It was considered a critical component of the Obama Administration’s clean energy plan and at one thousands turbines the farm would be the second largest in the world. Along with the turbines come access roads, a five thousand man work force, and transmissions lines to get power to homes in California.

The development would cause an influx of temporary laborers drastically altering the charm that Dick Perue made a business preserving. Dick broke the story for us but that was as far as he could take us. We purchased a collection of his photos and after he inscribed: “To: Merica + Mike, Enjoy the history! Dick Perue”, he recommended we talk to his former employees at the Saratoga Sun. He thought that they might have the contact information for the public relations officer of the Power Company of Wyoming. On our way out, we left through his garage where continued his search for the fabled image of our diorama site. Instead he came up with reams of unused fliers for the annual cowboy poetry round up. He suggested next time we planned to come this way we plan around the event. We thanked him, got in our car, and drove the four blocks to the offices of the Saratoga Sun. There were only four desks and only one was occupied by a writer, to his left was a portable crib. The new father patiently listened to us recite our practiced story of our journey to the site. While he was interested, he had no specifics and recommended that we either return later when his co-worked who had been working on the story of the wind farm returned or stop by the chamber of commerce another four blocks away. He graciously thanked us for stopping in and we continued. Becky at the chamber of commerce swiftly distributed the information we needed: the number of Kara Hachette the director of public relations for the Power Company of Wyoming.

The Power Company of Wyoming's relationship with the people of Saratoga had experienced setbacks throughout the development of the site. People we met during our stay in Saratoga openly ostracized Anshutz buying out a small town. There was a fear that the wind project would disenfranchising the town of its identity. They gave the example of the neighboring town of Sinclair which is home to the Sinclair oil refinery. Finding a room near Sinclair is nearly impossible due to temporary Sinclair Oil laborers who use the hotels and motels as temporary lodgings as their three to six month work assignments fade and surge. Back in Saratoga the advent of a similar type of industry had people on edge that the pastiche would be lost. We called Kara and got her machine, it felt unlikely that she would return our call and still feeling resigned that we wouldn’t complete our trip we explored the main street of Saratoga wanting to stay within its bubble of cell phone reception. Unexpectedly she called. She needed to relay our request to the ranch manager to get his approval. Again, we waited for her to return our call and she swiftly she called back and we were granted chaperoned access to the site the following day. We sent Kara the documents we had on the location of the site so that she could coordinate our visit with the ranch manager and she gave us a time and place to meet him. We again pulled our laced duvet over ourselves and this time I couldn’t sleep from anticipation. The following day we approached the road that and ended at a gate and turned right instead of left following a sign for the Overland Trail and Cattle Co. After waiting thirty minutes in the crushed limestone parking lot we heard an all terrain vehicle drive up behind a fence. It was a woman. We were expecting a man named Henry, but we knew that his wife may join us. She sat on the stairs to a manufactured trailer that housed the offices for the Overland Cattle Company.

“Henry is late she said. He’s going to be another 15 or 20 minutes.”

She was warm.

When we talked to Kara she said that Henry’s wife was an amature photographer and asked us if it was okay if she come along. She took us into a warm wood clapboard office with a drop acoustic tile ceiling and very little view outside. Henry was unloading a load of game birds that they stock the ranch with for guided hunts and she apologized for his tardiness. It was a small room with a large desk that filled it, leaving barely enough room for chairs. There was a box full of maps in the back left corner and a few maps hung on the walls. It was casual and contrasted so much with our office in New York. From the office it was a twenty minute drive to the site, by the time Henry met us there it was half past three. The sun was beginning to drop and we all knew that the light was going soon. After quick introductions we made our way to the site following the same route we had taken two days before. We crossed Route 130 and approached the wind weathered ridge of Sheep Rock where we tested our cameras and exposure two days before. Henry described it as the most beautiful place on the route to the ranch property. As we crossed the ridge the view opened up to a panorama of the basin, the foreground was composed of the yellows of the windswept grasses, the kelly green of the North Platte in the mid-ground from which the red of Coalbanks Bluff peeled off to the right and the ochres of foothills of the Sierra Madre filled out the background of the frame. The road descended into the basin following the curve of the Coalbanks to the right.

Kara barred us from interviewing our escorts, but the line between interview and conversation was ambiguous. We slowly learned the history of the site, we learned that the canals that were used to supply the farm were built in the 1930s are the same which Henry uses today. They run ten miles away to Elk mountain, left of frame in the diorama, to supply the hay fields with the melt from the winter snowpack. Henry grew up three hours from me in Ohio. He appeared to be is his mid forties but he was wind weathered into his fifties. He and I shared a brevity in our conversation, that was about the only common ground we found in our Ohio roots. He looked coarse to the touch and communicated through his presence as much as he did through his words. His stoicism, a dangerous cliche of a cowboy, led Jane to pick up the reins of conversation with Henry supporting. They had been in Wyoming for the last ten years so we assumed that they understood the beauty of the place where they lived. Like any of us, the beauty escaped them because it became so routine. While we were half thanking them and half apologizing for wasting their time they made it clear that this was as much for themselves as it was for us. Their affection for one another showed itself as she described unspoken conversations between the two of them about the decision to finally buy ten-ply tires, and the absence of running boards that would have made up for the jacked-up suspension. I never expected such sweetness from her description of a truck.

Following the bend around the escarpment the image of the site emerged. By now finding the site felt like an ancillary prize. The image of the place no longer captured our interest but rather it was affixed to the story of the future development that would happen here. The Bison Pronghorn diorama was one of the few dioramas which was sited on private land. Most are in protected places, National Parks, National Forests, National Monuments, and state lands. By chance, the Bison Pronghorn diorama was in a territory woven of both public and private land. Because of that ambiguity the Bison Pronghorn site was in the process of a fundamental change. So as the diorama came into view behind us and as we are straining to view out the back window of the truck to to align the landscape to photographs of James Perry Wilson’s background painting so we could instruct Henry how far to continue, we were just beginning to realize the significance of this place. If the diorama was a case study in how we value beauty of the natural environment, then that beauty now had an environmental assessment, a record of decision, a viewshed analysis, and a comprehensive environmental impact study. There was also a jury to appraise its beauty, the Bureau of Land Management.

We approached the point where two days before the Volkswagen Passat had to turn around. The barbed wire that aborted our trip so quickly led us to the same gate which I didn’t risk entering. This time the gate was closed but not locked. This time the voice that had so adamantly denied us access when I first called from the roof in New York was sitting next to us describing how a center pivot irrigation system works.

Henry opened the gate and we drove through. - - -

Diorama Diary is a project to get comfortable with the idea of moving Upstate. It was created by Mike Robitz as he looks for land and the complimentary utilities needed to be comfortable within it. If you have suggestions on places/services for him to get comfortable, email him: here.