The Wild Wild West

Last week a good friend of mine mailed me two books: a Frommer’s guide book for Montana and Wyoming and book entitled “Last Empty Spaces.” The Frommer’s guide sits on my desk at work as if I were planning to write a detailed analysis or craft a power point presentation about it. I brought it to work in hopes of reading a few pages over lunch because more often than not, I’m in planning mode for places wild and west. Cursed by my personal manifest destiny, I suppose.

So far, I’m only on page 13 where I learned that there are only 530,000 residents of Wyoming, making it the least populated state in the union. To put things in perspective, there are roughly 450,000 residents in the city of Virginia Beach.

While work responsibilities have prevented me from exploring its 419 fact-filled pages in great detail and consequently sharing more interesting tidbits with you (like there are 12 cows to every person in Montana), it is refreshing to have the book close at hand.

On the cover is a color photo of Mt. Reynolds in Glacier National Park, complete with requisite glacier as a parade of Q-tip-looking Beargrass fills the foreground. (By the way, Google Beargrass if you don’t know what it is.) The book is clearly out of place on my desk among the scattered piles of illegible sticky notes, life-sucking excel spreadsheets, and jargon-filled reports. I kind of like it that way. It’s a reminder that there are a lot of things out there that I still want to explore and experience. (As if I needed to be reminded.)

Chances are it will sit on my desk until I block off some time and book a flight to Missoula, Jackson, Billings or Bozeman. Until then, I will peek at it occasionally and discover things like Jackson Hole is not a town but the valley in which the town of Jackson sits. Back in the day, valleys were called holes. I could go on.

Or, I could just go.