Fear and loathing on the Oregon Trail Peter B. Steiger 04/03/97 Actually, the Oregon Trail lies a little to the north of Cheyenne, in Fort Laramie, Wyoming, but we felt like hardy explorers for the last two years as we planned our move to the great, untamed northwest. The plan developed this way: We read one too many articles in the paper about small children getting snatched out of their front yards in broad daylight; we got sick of roasting in 115 degree summers; my lovely and talented wife Sylvia decided that the lucrative new trend in nursing was to become a nurse practitioner. This last takes some explanation. A nurse practitioner is some weird hybrid between a nurse and a doctor that gives her many of the duties and privileges of a general practitioner, but without the years and years of residency and so forth. So the idea we developed was to head for somewhere low on medical resources and set up shop with a shiny new Family Nurse Practitioner license. Thus was born the vague idea that to achieve our various long-term goals, we would need to move someplace cold and rural. I did some demographic research on the internet (see, hardy pioneers just like Lewis and Clark!) and determined that just about everything bounded by Oregon, Minnesota, Canada, and Oklahoma met these criteria and had low enough children- snatched-from-their-front-yard statistics to suit us. Meanwhile, Sylvia did research of her own and determined that the University of Wyoming had one of the better FNP programs in our geographic region of choice. I did some more searching on the internet and decided that good old U of Wyo was one of the better- wired schools in terms of on-line classes, well-designed web pages, and all the other things which define an obviously superior university. _That Square State_ I should mention the geographic phenomenon I encountered during the planning stage of the process. Once we agreed on Wyoming as The Promised Land, I began talking to friends and relatives excitedly about the prospect of getting away from the smog, carjackings, traffic jams, and other Dallas delights. On the average, 50% of the people I told about this would come back minutes or days later and say something along the lines of "When are you moving to Montana?" Some of them were particularly hard cases - I would correct them time after time, only to hear them asking about Montana again later. Apparently, to many Texans, everything north of Colorado is Montana. I told one friend about this and he didn't believe me; soon that evening we were talking to a nice lady from my college town and I mentioned our plans just before the curtain rose for the show we were watching. The first performance ended and as if on cue, she turned to me and said "Why did you decide to move to Montana?" _Saddle 'em up_ Fast forward two years to March 1997. Sylvia has completed her bachelor's (bachelorette's?) program in nursing; we've got an IRS refund on the way to fund our exodus; we've already sent in notice to our landlord that we're leaving; we've shut down our newspaper and internet services as of the end of the month. Apart from the fact that we're only days away from moving and still haven't seen that IRS check, all is well. But finally the check arrives and plans go into high gear. The best part is that all the packing will take place while I'm at the office, so I don't have to lift a finger to help. Nevertheless, I stayed up until some obscene hour like three in the morning to pack my computer and desk Thursday night, even if it means being more of a zombie than usual the next day at the office. March 28th arrives, the big day. I'm so excited I could plotz, if I had any idea what that means. The plan is for the movers to load up the truck in the morning with all the furniture and things we boxed up earlier in the week, then Sylvia will finish off the house, pick me up at the office, and we'll head straight out of town from there. With that in mind, it was only a little disappointing to come home and find that there was still more work to be done - and I no longer had the excuse of needing to work while Sylvia does it. I'm still confident we can finish up by midnight and get out first thing Saturday morning, so I plunge in and start boxing things up. By Saturday noon, it was clear we were not likely to finish anything of the kind before Sunday. We boxed, labeled, and carried things out to the truck until our arms and legs were numb, then we boxed, labeled, and carried some more. We spent Easter Sunday still boxing, labeling, and carrying, by now so resigned to getting hopelessly behind schedule that we didn't even think about it any more. An observation here: You know you have too much stuff when you have a few boxes labeled "kitchen", a few labeled "clothes", a few labeled "books", and 106 labeled "miscellaneous". On Monday another scary development threatened our plans: We were running out of room in the 24 foot monstrosity designed to carry up to 8 rooms full of miscellany. Finally we started getting serious about weeding out our belongings. I gritted my teeth and threw away perfectly good computer equipment - a smoke-charred power supply from a 1982 Tandy computer, an apparently nonfunctional 20-meg hard drive the size of New Jersey, and an Apple ][ joystick adapter. Sylvia would glance hastily at everything she encountered in the packing process and evaluate instantly: "This stupid portrait has been serving its purpose for 175 years in my family; it's long since outlived its usefulness. Pitch it. The Hope Diamond... too bulky. Pitch it. The kids... too bulky. Wait, they can push the car if it gets stuck. OK, keep them." By Monday night we had managed about 3 hours of sleep out of the last 72. Sylvia lifted one last box towards the truck and lapsed into an unconscious stupor in mid-pack, so her dad forcibly dragged her back to his house for a night's sleep on a real bed. I followed soon after when I heard footsteps in the living room. I could just imagine the expression on our would-be burglars' faces when they saw what they had broken into: "Man, nothing here but empty boxes! What kind of cruel joke is this?" With Tuesday came an ultimatum: Sylvia's dad would drive our van at least as far as Denver, but we had to have it ready to leave by 11:30. So from daybreak until his arrival we threw everything remaining - which was the entire contents of the kitchen - into the van and the Ford that it would be towing. We no longer bothered with packing, labeling, or even wrapping securely. What few square inches remained of cargo space got stuffed with individual cans and bottles as we could find room. As Sylvia's dad pulled away promptly at noon, I ran behind, squeezing in a few last items before he turned the corner and disappeared with our entire houseful of belongings for the next two days. With only our family car left for space, we had to make some final, hard decisions. We had to pack for several days' worth of life on the road, so most of the car was stuffed with clothes and food, including a full-sized refrigerator wedged into the back seat (this had the added benefit of preventing the kids from hitting each other while they fought). I had to tear down my life support system, which comes in the form of a case of Diet Coke, and stuff individual cans into spaces between the seats, into the exhaust pipe, etc. We were actually quite proud of how efficiently we had packed the car, until we realized we had forgotten to pack the kids. So I moved some of my cans and stuffed the kids between seat cushions, we handed over our keys to the landlord, and we waved a tearful final good-bye to the house, which was now obscured by the 24-foot mountain of discarded furniture and other trash we left behind - including about half of the famous $200 waterbed. That waterbed has bugged me since the first time we had to pay movers extra to lug it for us: It has a headboard that's some nine feet wide, six feet tall, solid mahogany. I didn't mind sleeping on the waterbed, but moving it was getting to be a real pain. On top of that, some parts buried deep in the frame had broken loose, leaving this immense mahogany tombstone teetering precariously over our heads for the last several months. So Sylvia reluctantly agreed to include the waterbed on our moving sale list, asking $200 for a bed she had paid about $17 million for originally. The problem was, normal people had better sense than to try to move that thing. Prospective buyers would come in to look at this great bargain, scream "Good lord, look at the size of that thing!" and flee in terror. Finally, in desperation, we marked it down to ZERO dollars and begged people to take the blasted thing, and still we couldn't get rid of it. A friend at work took pity on us, had her husband come over, and when he saw it he shrieked "Good lord, look at the size of that thing!" and fled in terror. He hasn't been seen since, and my friend is quite angry with us. Anyway, we had the movers load the Towering Headboard of Death onto the truck and started loading the rest of it during our three days of nonstop packing, only to decide at the last minute that the frame was so far gone there was no point in taking it. So we ended up moving with a waterbed mattress, headboard, and side rails with no frame. _Oklahoma, you're OK_ Back to the main action. At 3 PM Tuesday, April 1st, we left Dallas for the last time and started on our great adventure, only 4 days late. I found out soon enough why Sylvia went through all that trouble to squeeze every possible Diet Coke into the car: She intended to keep me awake and driving nonstop to Wyoming. We made good time getting to Oklahoma City, and I tried not to think about the 15 more hours ahead of us as we tried to find an old high school teacher friend for dinner. Eventually I was found myself trying to cram 10 years of news into a dinnertime conversation with my friend while Sylvia and the kids looked on, their eyes glazed over from absolute boredom. What we didn't know was that was the last time we would leave the car for the next 12 hours. _Journey into oblivion_ Kansas was a blur, largely because the entire state flew by us between midnight and 4AM. From the little I did see, however, I'm fairly certain it wouldn't have been very different during the day - it's just one huge, homogenous rectangle of grass, like that one house on the block where they never cut the grass so the lawn stands out from the rest of the yards as a verdant, square protest against the homeowner's association. We did, however, have some excitement around 4:30 AM shortly after we entered Colorado. In our nightlong plunge through Kansas, we had both failed to notice how low the gas tank was until we found ourselves at a rest stop with about 1/8th of a tank left. Sylvia wanted to park in front of the one and only gas station and wait until they opened... at 5? 6? 7:00? She had good reason to want to stay where we knew there was gas: According to our AAA road map, the next small town (9 miles away) didn't have gas and the town beyond that (15 more miles) didn't say one way or the other. I couldn't stand to blow three hours just sitting there, though. To make matters worse, the kids were wide awake and bored (as I was) and it was sleeting outside. That's when I realized our fatal mistake regarding the winter coats. We knew we'd probably need them along the trip, so we got one of those big wardrobe packing boxes - essentially a giant cardboard closet - in which to hang our winter coats, gloves, etc. We planned to put this on the back of the van when we thought we'd be driving it ourselves and we could just get them out as needed. Since Sylvia's dad had generously offered to drive the van for us, it was somewhere in another state, carrying our coats farther away from us with every second. We had only thin jackets to wear on our bathroom stops, and the further north we traveled the more inadequate those jackets became. So with Sylvia snoring beside me in the passenger seat and the kids facing from one to three hours of forced silence, I decided to take the chance that we had enough gas to make it to a town that had an open gas station. I put the car in gear and headed slowly (to conserve gas) west in search of fuel, praying nonstop the entire way. The first town, true to AAA's prediction, was no help at all; it was just a couple of shacks glued together. The needle no longer dipped closer to E - it was already well past that mark and couldn't register any less gas than we already had. Finally I saw lights ahead and that most beloved blue- and-white road sign of salvation: "GAS FOOD LODGING". We puttered into the gas station and I pumped 17 and a half gallons into that 15 gallon fuel tank. _Happy Birthday - now blow out the twinkie and make a wish_ Irene celebrated her birthday in the car. We had promised her snow for her birthday, so when we saw snow on the road we broke into song. Passing cars probably wondered why people in party hats were throwing confetti in the car, but we were having too much fun playing "Pin The Coke Can Pop-Top On The Roadmap" to notice. _Oh, give me a home..._ I should mention our first buffalo sighting, because it occurred right about here between Denver and Cheyenne. Through the increasing snow, I saw the most amazing sight: A lone buffalo standing bravely atop a snow-covered hill overlooking I-25. I thought my eyes were deceiving me: Aren't buffalo almost extinct or something? But as we got closer, there was no mistaking those enormous, muscular shoulders. I got out the camera, as I had done periodically along the way, and started firing off picture after picture through the snow-smeared window. We finally got close enough for a really great view - and that's when I realized the beast hadn't moved an inch since I first spied it, and it was about as deep as your average billboard - which is to say an inch or two. It was a two-dimensional model stuck on top of that mountain to advertise Lord only knows what, and I fell for it (although I like to think that I wouldn't have been so gullible if the visibility had been better). _Snow Job_ All that snow should have been our first clue that the drive ahead would get rough, but we missed the point completely. Snow in April! We were too excited to realize the impact this would have on the rest of the drive. Sure enough, our approach to Cheyenne was an adventure of sliding, creeping along at a few miles an hour, and blinding flurries. The radio reported roads closed all over the state - except the road we needed to take. I think the announcer specifically said, "But the Steigers might as well keep driving, because it's only going to get worse from here on." Sylvia would have just stopped in Cheyenne to wait it out, but she couldn't even see Cheyenne as we drove through, much less any turnoffs, so she just stayed on course until she could find a safe place to stop or turn around. Our first view of the promised land was in the form of gigantic gobs of snow pelting against our windshield for the last 60 miles of our 1,000-mile trip. That safe place didn't come until we had gone through the Laramie mountains, a smallish (by Wyoming standards) range that appeared to be made of dirt and charcoal under all that snow. We crept along in single file through what seemed like an eternity of construction, bogged-down 18-wheelers, and more snow until we finally broke through on the other side and found ourselves at our destination - soaking wet, freezing, half-blind from the snow, but home at last in Laramie, home of the University of Wyoming. What a shame we couldn't see anything around us. I got a great kick out of telling store and motel clerks that we just moved up from Dallas to get away from the horrible weather. I topped it off by assuming a hurt expression and griping "None of the brochures said anything about this!" A few people were apologetic, explaining that just a few days before the weather had been great. Most, however, gave me a look that clearly said "What are you, some kind of idiot? What did you EXPECT, coming up to the mountains before winter is completely over?" Later I changed my answer to "We left Dallas to get away from the cowboy lifestyle". The look I receive in response to that statement could freeze nitrogen. _Our adventures as a homeless family_ We remembered newspaper ads we had seen months before advertising rental houses for mere pennies - in our idealized world, it seemed like everyone was offering 8, 10 bedrooms with thousands of acres for practically nothing. In the cold light of reality, living out of an expensive motel room on Ramen noodles, the story was quite different. 3 bedrooms for $900. 4 bedrooms for $1080. 2 bedrooms for $675. We reluctantly explored the least expensive options, including an apartment across the street from the main university campus. This apartment had everything the average college student could hope for: No (apparent) restrictions on smoking, lots of loud neighbors, cramped spaces, no laundry connections, and no parking. By Thursday I was running out of vacation time, and we still didn't have a place to live, much less minor details like phones, water, or electricity. Out of desperation we got a new newspaper, hoping against hope that in the middle of the week someone had decided to rent a huge, cheap house that hadn't been available the previous day. We started scanning the ads, and there I found a huge, cheap house that hadn't been available the previous day - how could you say no to 5 bedrooms for $600? With grave doubts, we called to find out what's the catch. Among other catches, the house was not in town with the university - it was an hour away in Cheyenne. We had to go through Cheyenne anyway to get our moving van from Denver, where Sylvia's dad had left it at a Ryder lot when the storm got too bad to drive through. _The next best thing to a log cabin_ We finally found the house in question, and quickly learned why it comes so cheap: It's not in Cheyenne, it's in the middle of a guest ranch several miles outside town - the source of my faux buffalo from several days (and paragraphs) ago. There's only 1.5 bathrooms for the whole family, it's at the bottom of a hill with an unpaved road, and because it's on a guest ranch, busloads of tourists wander by occasionally and gawk at everything in sight, although there is a small private yard with a low fence around the place. We thought about all these drawbacks, and thought about that tiny 3-bedroom apartment with loud students all around, and signed the lease immediately. We drove to Denver and picked up the van, then parked it directly at the front door, called some movers, and met the locals. _Smile when you say that, pardner_ Bear in mind this house is located on a working buffalo ranch. Now, I've lived in Texas for 28 years and I don't believe I've ever met a real cowboy. Here at the buffalo ranch, there are real cowboys. I have never, ever before seen people wearing chaps that were not part of a costume. The foreman, Doug, lives in an apartment attached to the side of our house and every night I can hear him listening not to citified "country/western" music but to genuine cowboy music (through an Internet search I eventually identified his favorite group as the Sons of San Joaquin, a trio that makes their career covering old Sons of the Pioneers hits). Doug has an immense handlebar mustache and wishes he worked on a "real" ranch, with longer hours and harder work, and takes pride in his custom-made saddle which cost more than any car I've ever owned. Doug is either a character actor putting on performance art 24 hours a day, or he's a genuine cowboy. The man's dedication to his work amazes and embarrasses me, for reasons that will become clear later. _And here our troubles began_ Now, during our two days as a homeless family, the weather had actually cleared up quite a bit. We were driving around bright, sunny areas and exclaiming "It's hard to believe just yesterday this whole area was blanketed with snow!" As it turned out, we had been granted a reprieve from the storms just long enough to find a house and drive the van to it. Almost immediately as I was unloading some of the smaller boxes, a light rain started to fall which, as temperatures plummeted, soon turned to hail and then snow. If the movers had arrived on time, they would have been done and out of there before things got bad, but as it happened they were running late on a previous job and didn't show up until the snow was pelting down full force. There was a gap of about 6 feet from the back of the van, down the ramp, and onto our front porch; the ramp itself was slick with ice and it was getting hard to see. I'm not sure what the moving company boss told these two guys. We had told him we had a freezer, a refrigerator, and a player piano to move and that we knew from experience these would require four guys with heavy-duty equipment. He sent two guys with one of those flat square four-wheel carts, sort of a very wide skateboard. But they weren't fazed by our warnings of the huge task ahead of them, and despite the fact that the trip down the ramp violated about 106 safety restrictions, they plunged enthusiastically into the fray. They wanted to use our two-wheel dolly for the refrigerator, but this is not a furniture dolly by any means - it's literally a family heirloom, coming from Sylvia's mother, and I'm surprised it was able to handle 50 lbs. of boxes without collapsing. Sylvia kept them away from our dolly, so these two seemingly skinny guys just picked up the whole refrigerator and carried it down the ramp and into the house. We had to get pictures of these guys lugging a refrigerator through a snowstorm because we're sure nobody will ever believe this. _Hey guys, piano means "softly"_ Eventually our sturdy heroes had transferred all 7,000 boxes (6,412 of which are marked "miscellaneous") to the house and all that remained was that piano. I can't describe to you how HUGE that thing is. By piano standards, it's not much, but when you're trying to move it, it's the size and weight of three Newt Gingriches. It took all four of us to balance it on that little skateboard of a dolly they had, and we inched as slowly as you can pushing 800 pounds down an icy ramp. There are two front doors on our house: The first leads into a little covered porch, I guess so visitors can shake the snow off their boots while they ring the doorbell. The four of us managed to hoist the piano up off the end of the ramp over the doorstep into the first door. Some nineteen hours later, we got it through the inner door… and that's when it got difficult. The house twists and turns in some awkward places, and the corner from the front door to the living room is one of them. Right inside the front door is a zig-zag about 18 inches per zig, and it quickly became clear that the only way we could get that piano around each of the sharp turns would be if it were an accordion instead. The guys were about to give up when I remembered there was a back door. I ran around to check and saw that the path from the back door through what we designated as our "play area" and into the living room was relatively clear, apart from those 1600 miscellaneous boxes, so while the other three wrestled the piano back out the front door I set out to clear the way. Mostly this meant shoveling the walk. I thought it was quite a joke to have a snow shovel on the truck ready to move in to our new house - who would need a snow shovel in April! - but you should have seen me slogging through that mess, shoveling like a pro (the last time I saw snow deep enough to shovel, I was five years old and didn't have to worry about the stupid shovel). When I had the way cleared, we discovered another important fact: The concrete used to pave the front walk was 90% sand. That little four-wheel dolly, the piano, and the two movers quickly sunk into the walkway while I watched in horror. Then I remembered the waterbed we should have thrown away days ago - sturdy plywood platforms designed to support hundreds of pounds of water and two enormous couch potatoes. I ran and got the platforms and laid them end-to-end from the flimsy front walk to the more solid patio behind the house. The plan worked beautifully except for one thing: We ran out of plywood before we ran out of flimsy front walk. So as they rolled the piano off one platform, I had to run behind, yank out the most recently vacated platform, and run up ahead to put it down for the next few feet. By this time I'm sure we had half the population of Cheyenne, which is to say all two dozen of them, watching us recreate popular scenes from Laurel & Hardy movies. The rest of the journey with the piano was as uneventful as the first half was spectacular. Our intrepid heroes had plenty of room to move the piano around corners and through the back door into the family room. The paused at the threshold of their original goal, the living room, while we played cruel games with them: "You know, now that we have it safely in the family room, maybe we should just leave it here." "Well, there's really no other obstacle to keep us from taking it the rest of the way to the living room." "Hey, didn't you say at one time you wanted it upstairs?" This last was offered by yours truly, and I still have the black eye to remind me of the fine line between jest and stupidity. We finally settled for leaving the piano right where it was, stuck halfway between the family room and the living room, on the grounds that we'd better quit while we were ahead. The piano being the last item to unload, it was time to pay our heroes off. We didn't have the traditional sack of gold to throw them, but they didn't have the traditional stallions on which to ride off into the sunset either, so we settled for cash. The actual bill was something embarrassingly small, maybe $2.50 for their four hours, but we made up for it by giving them all our remaining cash, some jewelry, my spare VISA card, and half my remaining Diet Coke supply as a tip. We couldn't express enough admiration for the work, and in the end they beat a hasty retreat because we couldn't stop being so effusive ("Come on back tomorrow for dinner! Give us your address so we can mail our next ten paychecks to you! If you ever need a liver donor, just give us a call!") _Getting there isn't even 1/16th of the fun_ As it happened, we had to return the moving van that night or face extra charges for going beyond our contract. The blizzard had reduced to only semi-blinding and the snow drifts were down to a couple of feet, so we figured we'd chance it. Sylvia groped her way to the truck while I loaded the kids into the car to follow, and while we warmed our hands around the gentle glow of the car heater we waited for Sylvia to appear with the truck. And waited. And waited. We couldn't tell if we couldn't see her because she wasn't moving or because the blizzard was so bad. It turned out to be a combination of the two: Sylvia gave up trying to get the van out of the parking lot when she couldn't see the difference between the truck and the road. All the way back to the house she was berating herself and me for our folly: "What were we thinking? Why didn't you tell me there would be this much snow? First thing tomorrow, we're moving back to Dallas, or maybe Tahiti!" By Saturday, we were painfully aware of the extra $17,042.94 that we'd be charged each day the truck was late, so we took another stab at returning it. This time there was no fresh snowfall and we could clearly see for several feet ahead of us, so after I spent a jolly three hours scraping snow and ice of the windshields of the car and the truck, we fired up the engines and took off. Did I mention our house is at the bottom of a hill at the ranch? Did you know that hillsides get covered deeper in snow than any other part of the earth's surface? Sylvia made it halfway up the hill before the truck started whuffing "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can... who am I kidding? Of course I can't." With that it dug its stubborn little wheels into the ground and refused to budge in either direction. We groped our way back to Ye Olde Tradin' Post to explain our problem, and our landlord / ranch manager valiantly offered to get the truck out of the snow for us. His ranch hands fired him a look that could petrify Jell-O, but it was lost on him, and off they went. Doug, the singing cowboy, was the leader of this mission, and he quickly managed to back the truck out of its prison down to the bottom of the hill to give it a good running start. Alas, he failed to take into account the gusts of wind which, in Wyoming, go from zero to 250 miles per hour or knots per furlong or however you measure wind, at a moment's notice. One of those gusts, the approximate size and strength of New Jersey, pounded into the side of the van just as he got to the bottom of the hill, and promptly slid him into a drift of snow nearly as tall as the truck itself. Meanwhile, oblivious to this turn of events, I wandered by to see if I could help. This in itself was a laughable idea, partly because as a professional couch potato I have the endurance to stand in place for maybe 16 seconds before I get winded and partly because I was so heavily bundled up against the cold I was virtually immobile. But Doug explained the plan: One of his able assistants would get the "bobcat", some multi-purpose combination forklift, snowplow, bulldozer, and tractor, and use it to pull the truck out of the snowdrift. Meanwhile, another able assistant was drag racing up and down the hill in his Maverick to pack down the snow. The rest of the able assistants, and Doug, would get snow shovels and start digging. At last, something I could help with! I ran back to the house and got that snow shovel I knew I wouldn't need until next winter, and dug right in (ha ha). By the time the Bobcat arrived, we had the wheels more or less free of snow, so they hooked up some chains and started pulling. No luck, so one of Doug's crew went around back with his truck and started pushing from behind while the Bobcat pulled from the front. That did the trick, and the truck roared free. At this point, several things happened: The maverick that was packing down the snow on the hill got stuck on the hill, the truck that was pushing the van got blown by the same gust into the same towering snowdrift, and Doug nearly broke his leg stepping into a cattle guard that was completely covered by snow. As the idiot city slicker who didn't have the sense to stay in out of the snow and the sole cause of all this turmoil, I did my best to stay both inconspicuous and useful. I decided the best way to accomplish that would be to gather up the snow shovels and make sure they didn't get buried in the snow, too. The Bobcat pulled the truck out easily enough and went off to pull out the Maverick, so I threw the shovels into the back of the truck and rode along to the next scene of the crime. We went up the other, less snowy hill, and around to the top of the one the Maverick was stuck on. Imagine my further embarrassment and terror when I saw that the Bobcat itself was stuck. If that powerful tank couldn't get free, we were all doomed! But I didn't have time to worry about that, because while the Bobcat was getting stuck from its efforts to free the Maverick at the bottom of the hill, the pickup truck got stuck at the top of the hill. I was getting all too familiar with the drill by this time. I got out the snow shovels, and several of us started digging out the truck - again. Doug, tossing mountain-sized bales of snow over his shoulder like they were nothing, cheerfully pointed out that if I overexerted myself in that bitter wind it could kill me. That's about the time someone else asked how I liked Wyoming so far, and it was only because I was the one who caused all this trouble in the first place and I owed these guys my life that I didn't use my last breath of life to bop him a good one with the snow shovel. Fortunately, the Bobcat freed itself and pulled the truck free, and then it was relatively simple to pull the Maverick free as well. At this point, I was ready to cut our losses, but Doug had committed to getting that truck up the hill and he wasn't going to be defeated that easily. He sent the Bobcat operator off to find the snow plow attachment and suggested it might be just as easy if three guys with shovels started manually clearing the snow off the hill. I groaned and set to work - not an easy task, since Doug and his partner were flailing away with their shovels and I was afraid to step within swinging range of those weapons. While I was wheezing away at my end of the hill - I think I had managed about two shovels full in the time that the others had cleared half an acre each - Doug realized there was just too much hill even for industrious types like us, and we set out to help find the snowplow attachment for the Bobcat. This search took us to a back fence where a bunch of things vaguely resembling farm implements were buried in miles of snow. One guy asked where they had last seen the part they needed and the answer was a gesture in the general direction of those mountains of snow… so we got out the shovels and started digging again. It's almost anticlimactic to note that while we were digging, Doug came back with the keys to the moving van and said after a couple of tries he was able to get it to the top of the hill for me. Someone else decided we were wasting our time digging at random for the lost attachment, so the party broke up while I poured forth all the gratitude I could muster. Just like the moving guys, our cowboy road crew made tracks fast when it became clear I wouldn't shut up soon. By Sunday, the roads and skies had cleared enough that we were able to creep slowly down the road to return the truck - only to find that there were trucks stranded all over the state, and we were about the only ones who had made it in under our own power. The rental place was so amazed at that they didn't even bother charging us for the two extra days, being content to charge us an extra $8514.09 for returning the truck with an empty gas tank. _Home on the range_ It's been a week, and we can officially call this place home now: All our miscellaneous boxes are familiar and cozy, stacked to the ceiling in nearly every room. We finally got phone service, and one of these days we hope the Post Office will figure out what our address is so people can send us things in the mail. I've got my office set up, so I can work through the day watching the snowplow drive by (I guess they finally found that missing part). As long as the heater and the Diet Coke hold out, I'm ready to brave this wilderness just like Lewis and Clark.