The Ladybug’s grandparents (and my mom and dad-in-law), Papa and Nana Shoo, recently bought a ranch on some two-thousand-plus acres of land in Wyoming. Last week they headed out to Wyoming, Papa Shoo to survey the property and get a feel for the lay of the land, and Nana Shoo was there to drink wine and read John Grisham novels in peace and quiet. As this serendipitously coincided with my Spring Break, the Ladybug and I (and eventually the Queen B) met up with them. Here are some stories, some of which are apocryphal (or at least, wildly inaccurate), from the middle of nowhere.
Wednesday
It takes a long time to get to the Shoo Ranch from the Komplexify abode. The ranch itself is outside the city of Lusk, a burp on the map whose only claim to fame* is that it’s “The Gateway to the Black Hills” … which is sad, since the Black Hills are actually where I live… which are two hours away from Lusk… in a completely different state. The ranch itself is another fifteen miles outside of Lusk itself, but owing to the rugged topography of the land and the apparent unfamiliarity of Wyomingites with the concepts of “asphalt” or “road paving,” it takes another forty minutes to get there.
* That’s not altogether true. Lusk also has a pink, two-ton granite monument honoring a prostitute. Seriously.
The point is that this is a long trip for a two-year-old. While she fortuitously fell asleep for the first half hour of the trip, the Ladybug spent the remainder of the trip whining variations of the phrases
(a) Wah! Where is Nana’s house?
(b) Wah! I wanna be at Nana’ house!
(c) Wah! Why aren’t I at Nana’s house yet?
(d) Wah! When will I be at Nana’s house?
After the first hour of this cyclic litany I decided to pop in the Mama Mia! soundtrack in the hopes that pantomiming “Honey Honey” and “The Winner Takes it All” would shut her up a bit, but unfortunately the CD mis-loaded and got jammed in the player, effectively disabling it. Consequently, the remaining hour was spent listening the to Ladybug not only repeat (a)–(d) above, but also adding the occasional
(d) Wah! I want Mama Mia!
(e) Wah! You broke my Mama Mia!
which, if nothing else, at least provided some variety.
It didn’t help that the previous Tuesday it had snowed, so the entire trip through the plains simply consisted of driving through a seemingly endless stretch of flat white expanse, as if we were nothing more than a microscopic bug on a massive sheet of paper. Eventually, after 150 minutes of travel, of which I spent 120 listening to the Ladybug complain (and 110 of those seriously considering simply mailing her to her grandparents’ ranch than then moving to the Yukon), we arrived at the ranch’s homestead, to which the Ladybug shouted in glee:
Yay! We’re at Nana’s house! Let’s go!
It turns out the ranch’s homestead actually consists of a pair of living quarters: a quaint, natural wood cabin that acts as the guest house, and the main house. A long, single-story building of weathered wood, the front of the main house sports a lengthy patio, several large windows, and pair of hitching posts, and a decidedly “old-timey” western facade along the roof-line, while the bulk of the interior house is dug into the side of a hill, which not only efficiently insulates the house, but also gives it the impression a Western saloon in the process of being eaten by a mountain. Assessing the scene, the Ladybug commented:
Ooo! I like your house, Nana. Let’s go in it!
Inside, the house consists of a large main room, a kitchen with an ornate bar, a dining room, and a long hallway leading to a smattering of smaller bedrooms and bathrooms. The Ladybug run in and out of each room, quickly surveying them before invariably passing positive judgment*:
Ooo! I like this room, Nana. I want to stay here.
* Well, almost, at least. The Ladybug was in particular fascinated by the pair of swinging saloon doors separating the kitchen from the dining room, and spent much of the few minutes in the main house running back and forth between them and watching them swing wildly back and forth behind here. However, owing to an unfortunate combination of the door’s spring-loaded hinges being somewhat tightly wound and the Ladybug’s being somewhat scatter-brained, the little girl found herself (in rapid succession) both momentarily distracted and then significantly concussed, after which she gave the doors a healthily wide berth.
Eventually, the Ladybug discovered the fireplace in the main room: an iron wood-burning stove, black with gilded flourishes. The Ladybug walked up to it, stared at it appreciatively, and finally announced:
Ooo. I like your TV, Nana. You wanna watch Mama Mia with me?
To which my mother informed her that it was not a television, but rather a fireplace to keep us warm at night. She then before helpfully added “We don’t have a TV here,” to which the Ladybug responded
Oh. Daddy, can we go home now?
Thursday
While it was subfreezing the day before, Thursday was, if not warm exactly, at least sunny and bright. The Shoo Ranch was still covered by an inch or so of snow, and the rather barrenness of the surroundings and the oppressive temperatures drive home just how unsettlingly remote the Ranch was. As we drove in Wednesday, I realized that the number of bars on my cellphone was inversely proportional to the distance from the ranch, and when we finally arrived, all my phone said was No service, so I shut it off. On Thursday morning when I awoke, I powered it back up, during which my phone spent a few minutes searching for a network before displaying Where the hell am I? and crawling off to a corner to cry.
In fact, Papa Shoo spent much of Thursday on his 4-wheeler driving all over the property, ostensibly to chart out the farthest corners of his land, but mostly to see if he could find any bars at all on his cellphone to check in and see if his business in California hadn’t collapsed in his absence.
Of course, Papa Shoo also constitution of battleship, and hence found the icy weather perfect for such explorations. However, the constitution of any of the rest of the family is to be likened more to, say, a dingy, whence Nana Shoo and the Ladybug and I spent the day alternating between exploring the area within walking distance outside the house until we froze, and then sitting around the fireplace until slightly insane with cabin fever.
The Ladybug in particular found that Nana had squirreled away a portable DVD player, and she staved off her cabin-induced psychoses by watching snippets of Mama Mia throughout the day, continuously changing her costumes to be (among things) Tinker Bell,
Cinderella,
and a duck.
In hindsight, maybe the Ladybug didn’t weather cabin fever that well after all.
Friday
The temperatures on Friday climbed into the fifties, finally melting off the remaining snow. This gave the Ladybug and I (and the Queen B, who was finally able to join us once the school week was over) our first real glimpse of the Shoo Ranch, and we spent much of the day taking short hikes through the appealing hills with Nana Shoo or 4-wheeler rides through the suicidal ones with Papa Shoo. The property is a broad stretch of hilly grassland and rocky forest whose previous owner leased it to cattle ranchers and hunting parties. As such, it’s mostly beautiful and undeveloped except for the occasional dilapidated windmill, listing feed structure, or vacant field filled with the remnants of giant tires, like a elephant grave yard, only for monster trucks.
Equally as beautiful as the daytime scenery, of course, is the Wyoming nighttime sky. Since the state is so sparsely populated, there is utterly no light pollution, and so the sky above the Shoo ranch is a scattering of impossibly many bright pin-pricks of light against the celestial watercolor of the Milky Way.
But the moon… the moon was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was a full moon that hung low over the horizon, appearing massive against the backdrop of trees and rocky outcrops. But that wasn’t the amazing thing. Due to some unknown atmospheric condition, the moon was neither white nor round! Instead, it glowed a sort of neon pink, and its perimeter, rather than being continuously round, appeared instead to several angular corners, so that the moon looked less a luminous white circle than hot pink octagon, as if some celestial raver had placed a day-glo stop sign in the sky.
Amazed, I stood with the Queen B and the Ladybug that night, transfixed by the moon. A moment later, the Ladybug noticed it to.
“Dad!” said the Ladybug breathlessly, clutching my hand tightly with one hand and pointing a finger at the rosy moon with her other. “Look at the moon.”
“I see it.”
“Somebody broke it.”
Saturday
Having spent most of the previous days exploring the nooks and crannies of his property on his 4-wheeler, Papa Shoo offered to give us an abbreviated tour in his truck. He then drove us across the breadth of the ranch land, taking us up a hillside that offered a 180 degree panorama of the plains below; to a castle-like rocky outcropping jutting from the top of a snowy hill, like a miniature Devil’s monument; to a breezy hillside under the shadow of a still-pumping windmill; across the source of the Plum Creek; and (ever so briefly) past a dead cow.
I bring up the cow, since if you were to ask the Ladybug about what she saw on the trip, that would be the only thing she’d mention. In fact, based on the Ladybug’s subsequent conversations over the rest of the day, you would have thought the only thing we did on Saturday was hike to the bovine corpse and stare at it. Sample conversations for the rest of the day would take the form:
Me: Did you have fun with Papa Shoo?
Ladybug: Oh. My. Gosh. Did you see that dead cow? I saw that dead cow. It was kind of spooky. It was yellow, but its face was white. Actually, it didn’t have a face… I was a skeleton face. Aaah!
or
Queen B: Would you like a drink, Ladybug?
Ladybug: I saw a dead cow today. It didn’t go “Moo,” because it was dead. It didn’t go “Moo” but I went “Aah!” because it had a skeleton face.
or
Nana Shoo: Do you want to watch Mama Mia.
Ladybug: I saw a dead cow today. It was dead. And it had holes in it. The cow was broken. I saw the dead cow. Did you see the dead cow?
and so on.
The Queen B and Nana Shoo were a little worried that all this fixation on expired livestock might permanently damage the Ladybug mentally. (Considering she’s a pixie-dressing one-woman traveling-vaudeville-act for Mama Mia, I think such concerns are being addressed a tad too late.) To get her mind off of it, Nana and Papa Shoo set aside Saturday afternoon to shower the little girl with birthday presents, the most exciting of which was a Disney Princess bicycle.
To only thing that could make it better would be a color-coordinated bike helmet and knee-pads, and fortunately, Nana and Papa Shoo had those too:
And thus the rest of the night was spent trying to master the bicycle, a task of unimaginable complications whose detailing I shall defer to the Ladybug’s official birthday post. Suffice it to say, however, the combined intoxicating excitement of a new bicycle and aggravating difficulty of trying to ride it were sufficient to keep the Ladybug’s mind (and hence, the Queen B’s and the Nana Shoo’s) off of dead cows for the rest of the day.
Sunday
Since everyone at the Shoo Ranch needed to be at work on Monday, I realized early on that Sunday would be the day everyone would pack up and head for home. However, since Papa and Nana Shoo needed to get back to California — a trip whose duration, even taking into account Papa Shoo’s radar detector and homicidally proprietary view of the road, would be at least sixteen hours — I didn’t realize we’d be up at 4:30 in the morning to start packing up.
For me, this was simply unpleasant; for the Queen B, who views sleeping in on Sundays as roughly equivalent to the Fourth Commandment, this was heretical; for the Ladybug, who has been taught to stay asleep until she see sunlight, this was simply inconceivable. As a consequence, the little girl mostly sat on a chair and dozed in and out of perplexed sleep while the rest of the adults packed up suitcases, loaded vehicles, turned off water and electricity, and finally exchanged hugs and kisses and goodbyes. Eventually, we loaded the Ladybug into her car seat, whereupon she promptly fell back asleep, and the Queen B and I headed north to South Dakota, while Papa and Nana Shoo turned around and headed south. We made our way back across the winding dirt road that connects the Shoo Ranch to Route 18, at which point the Queen B pulled over to take one final picture of the technicolor spendor of a Wyoming morning:
The stopping of the car was enough to rouse the Ladybug from slumber. She squinted at the sun, and surveyed her surroundings. Then she sat up, looked me straight in the eye and said:
“Dad. I saw a dead cow yesterday.”
