Comedy Blog – Understanding Wyoming

I’m currently on vacation in Wyoming.  We’ve been visiting Grand Teton National Park for the last few days and today we are traveling to Yellowstone.

If you are going to use this information to rob my house, please be aware that we have a house sitter, a burglar alarm, four attack cats, and a house full of shit you probably don’t want anyway.

Since we’ve arrived in Wyoming, we’ve found there are some things that are a little different out here in one of only two states that lacked the creativity to shape their state like something other than a rectangle.

The first thing I’ve noticed is that FOX News isn’t just a news station.  It is the only TV news station there is.  I looked up MSNBC on my hotel room directory it was listed.  When I tried to punch in the numbers, however, the remote just laughed at me.

I don’t think everyone in Wyoming is a conservative.  I just think everyone in Wyoming assumes that everyone else in Wyoming is a conservative.

Another concept that is different is the definition of “back yard.”

I have a back yard and it is quite small.  Even when I’m using “back yard” to reference something close to my house, like say Cub Foods, I’m talking about someplace that is less than a mile from my home.

We ran into a family from Idaho having a picnic yesterday.  They told us that the Grand Tetons were “in their back yard.”

The Grand Tetons are in a completely different state!

I live kind of close to Wisconsin but the 45 minute drive that gets me from my house to Hudson is not even close to back yard territory.  That’s “I’d better have a really fucking good reason to go there” territory!

Idaho and the Grand Tetons are a lot further apart than my house and Wisconsin.  Unless you want to climb over the mountains.

That is a while different scale of “back yard.”

I think that different concept of size is a challenge for folks like us.  Let me give you another example.

We wanted to go on a hike in the park because we are firm believers that you can’t fully enjoy a national park from the turnouts along the road.  Because there were a lot of trails closed due to snow, we checked with a Ranger before deciding where we would hike.

The ranger suggested a trail to Taggert lake.  She told us there was “some snow” on the trail but it was well packed by hikers and shouldn’t present too much of a problem.

We’re from Minnesota and we’re used to snow.  “Some snow” seems like it shouldn’t be more than a couple of feet.

When she said “some snow,” however, what she meant was “this region gets an average of 400 inches of snow every winter and it takes a long time to melt.  Therefore, any depth of snow less than 100 inches can realistically be considered ‘some snow.'”

Had we been able to speak the language of those native to Wyoming, we would have understood that we were not currently equipped to manage a three-mile hike across mounds of snow that sometimes exceeded eight feet in depth.  Nor would we have assumed that our “simple” hike would have taken an hour or so.

The thing is, Wyoming is fucking huge and everything in Wyoming is a long way away from everything else in Wyoming.  If someone tells you that you are going to need to drive for “some time,” they mean you’d better have a full tank of gas because it is 200 miles to the next gas station.

If someone asks you if you’d like “some steak,” they are offering you an entire cow and if you say “yes,” they are going to slaughter one for you.

And if someone tells you there is “some snow,” it means there is enough snow to swallow up your family and preserve them until some future date when a new generation’s Pauley Shore will be looking to make the next remake of Encino Man.

I just need to remember that everything is bigger here and I think I’ll be able to get along.

I’ve given up on news, though.  I asked the clerk at the desk how I could get CNN and he just told me they had “some trouble” getting reception on that channel.