Susan Kime - Luxury Travel Journalist - Blog - The Smiling Stegosaurus: Shell, Wyoming

Tuesday

Aug142007

The Smiling Stegosaurus: Shell, Wyoming

Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 11:26AM

I had never been to middle eastern Wyoming. I had no reason to go, as the real action is in the western part - Yellowstone Park, Jackson Hole, all those places where you could see and sense the Tetons -- a vast range of jagged tipped mountains resembling the Olympic range, the Cascades and even, yes, the Himalayas. But mid-east Wyoming? Not really.

My friends all laughed about my traveling to Shell, Wyoming - about an hour outside of Cody. I am more of the London/Paris/Urban jungle type. But this story and this place - the Hideout Club, outside of Shell, Wyoming, intrigued me. It was a place, I had heard, where many Europeans travel, where they can experience the dream of the American West in a pure form. A combination cattle and dude ranch, it was a place where you could ride horses all day, pack into the Big Horn mountains to further Hideout lodges and camps, and spend the night after having a great meal, prepped by their Cordon-Bleu trained chef. You could work the cattle ranch, shoot skeet, take a canoe down the Shell Creek or the Big Horn River, and live the dream of the American West.

The dream was real, and the reality had, when I was there, a very European flavor. There were indeed more Europeans than Americans, and even one famous Austrian Princess who came there with her children. The experience was fascinating, the guests even more so. And the landscape even more so.

The landscape has a desert barrenness, and this range of the Big Horns has a non-Teton soft-roundedness. The altitude is also soft: about 5000 feet above sea level; so there are cottonwood, some aspen, some pine, but no great stands of anything. The dazzling, almost artificial greenness of the vast farmlands is due to irrigation, not natural rainfall. Alfalfa is the major crop. Driving along the ancient road - a true Blue Highway - there are old apple trees and huge Elderberry bushes, augustly laden with umbels of black, round berries, along the side of the road. It is a truly gentle landscape - no tourists, no crushed Coke cans or rotting Pampers along the side of the road, just old apples, wire fences, stands of evangelical corn raising their gifts to the sky, and bright green alfalfa.

Of all the guests there, there are only two who are not horse people. Me, and a gentleman named Fred. He is there with his wife, Geanette, a horsewoman. They have taken their son and grandchildren to The Hideout Club as the granddaughters love to ride. In fact, all of Fred's family love to ride, except Fred. He and I have an aversion to horses, as we both feel they are odd, whiskered, oat-eating, ill-smelling beasts needing serious dental work. We have both been thrown, also, and never really got over it. So Fred stays on the porch and I get the sense of the guests' experience, which will be the substance of the article for my magazine.

And yet, with all the goings-on, I feel, on a more profound level, that I do not know what I am doing there. The feeling of separateness, of a stranger in a strange land, permeates my being, and makes me somewhat grouchy. Well, really grouchy. But when I see Fred, he looks even grouchier. The first thing he says to me, after I meet him and his family the evening before was, "My ##@cell phone doesn't work here. What am I going to do?" And he smiled a kind of wistful, yet accepting smile, a counterpoint to his gruff words.

After two days of viewing the facilities, and getting the sense of everyone having a great tine except me - and Fred - I ask if we could go to the Fossil ruins that were in and around the Hideout Club.

A few hours later we --- Fred and his more of his family - are in a van, with our guides: Cliff and Rowena, a husband and wife team impassioned about fossils, the Jurassic period, Dinosaur tracks and bones. They are also a married couple who are always interrupting each other. I tuned them out very early. The first few hours are spent walking along tidal areas where we are actually seeing dinosaur footprints. The Smithsonian and Harvard have multiple digs around there. Cliff explains that it had only been about a million years that Wyoming - indeed all of the West, had been above water. Where we stand was at one time Dinosaur knee-deep tidal pools. They also say there are 2million year oyster beds nearby, with many fossilized, open oyster shells, leading me to believe that Dinosaurs had the intelligence to be able to crack them open without an Oyster knife! … and eat them. I underestimated the wit of these ugly beasts for a long time!

On those ancient tidal beds, the weather is hot and dry, and the sand blows in our hair and gets in our teeth. I begin to think about so much else in that area that is yet to be discovered. I look to the hills, multicolored, rounded strata, knowing the past is all around us, blowing. "The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.." Bob Dylan once wrote, to which I add, "so is the past."

When we finish with the tidal basin, Cliff and Rowena drive us, across the highway, down an old road, to a working farm. On that private land, he says, is an exceptional archaeological dig where they found two intact Stegosaurus skeletons, between 200 and 250 million years old. We drive through the fields, on a dirt road for many miles, up into the mountains, into the ancient, millennial past. The van stops and we climb a steep hill - then, down into a nameless, dessicated valley. At the bottom, is the dig. I had seen an archaeological dig in Mexico before, but the findings, all Mayan structures, were so contemporary in contrast. This one is a dig where only a few dedicated, dusty people work with brushes and small, delicate chisels. What they have found thus far is a skull of another Stegosaurus, then down about 20 feet away are the remains of his or her vertebra-laden tail. The lead archaeologist, Bob Simon tells us about the ancient creature. I walk down into the crevasse and touch the skull. Nobody minds.

I see and feel the vague outlines of this archaeological reality, but standing away from it, it looks very much, also, like a rock we clear away on some construction site. But it is what it was: once a living thing - and now, an ambivalence of my contemporary imagination, -- I see the mouth curled slightly in a smile. I also see the ancient reality, the old stone, 250 million years in the making. The ideal and the real, past and present, equally parsed.

When I ask Bob if he thinks there are any more ancient creatures embedded in the hills, he said, "Are you kidding? Every night I hear the hills laughing at me!"

"I lift mine eyes unto the hills, from when cometh my help" says a line in the Bible. There is some truth to that, as my eyes fix on these soft hills, and I am aware of the help they provide. How small we all seem, and what is it now that were are worried about today? Maybe that's was what that creature was smiling about. He ( or she) could hear the laughing hills, and we cannot as yet.

Fred and I walk down the hill together. He has a ruddy complexion, and his glistening silver hair is damp with understandable sweat. I tell him my knees hurt from all this walking up and down. And then he says, out of the blue, "I have cancerous melanoma and have been given four or five months to live." I look at him, and he smiles that accepting smile again, then, tilts his head. I tell him how sorry I am, he then says he recently refused more radiation, as he wants to live out his days without being in radiation caused excruciation. We both look at the hills, and they look back, in blessed silence. The others come down quickly thereafter. I begin thinking that the confluence of past and present, the vague shape of the 200 million year old Stegosaurus smile, must have affected him too, lightening, paradoxically, the profound burden of a darkening life.

I understand, now, what the heft of ancient bone and skeletal outline do to those who are in the field. They probably cannot look at a rock without asking, "What's hidden inside?" They look at multi-colored mountains and hear the laughter. As we drive back, I view the hills with a new archaeological reverence, understanding that Fred's confession came a perfect time.

Susan Kime |

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