Laramie
Laramie has a strangely polished urban feel. A Wyoming town surrounded on all sides by nearly endless grassland, it feels more like a sleek New England coastal town minus the coast. Down the main street well manicured boutiques and restaurants draw gentle crowds of townsfolk and tourists inside. There is an event of some sort in the town that brought out several well built lemonade stands with professional signage. On various street corners, vertical troughs grow fresh herbs and food, possibly for free for the community.
My father had joined me for the weekend drive, hoping to finally see Idaho for the first time in his life. We walked through the town together silently mulling over this town’s strangeness. We had a casual conversation and tour of an Order of Elks lodge. The young woman guiding us said she was club manager, her sister was Exalted Leader. The first female Exalted Leader in the lodge’s history. Her picture hung on the wall at the bottom of a stairwell of black-and-white men.
The restaurant we had lunch in boasted farm to table ingredients and interesting combinations of flavors. A local grocery store sold “de-stressing collagen powder for kids.” We walked into a second story local bookstore with a selection of books that could have sat on the front tables in the Strand in Manhattan. “How is this liberal town in conservative Wyoming?” we asked aloud.
Behind the bookstore counter Judy Hibberd rang up a customer. She warmed up into a conversation initially about how she found her way back to Laramie to be with her greatgrandkids. She had a cadence to her speech that I recognized. Like the women who live in my apartment building in Greenwich Village, the ones who have lived there for 30+ years and will probably live there after I leave. I asked her about respect and dignity to start.
She stewed for a moment on dignity. When I offered another angle, what has to be taken for a person to lose dignity, she was more puzzled. Instead she answered the original question, what gives a person dignity.
Judy seemed to be roughing out a shape of values that were connected to a community but emphatically not bound by it. Rather the community she seemed to imagine was one that opened its arms to other different groups. I proposed a unifying value to her, that the only intolerance she accepts is intolerance of the intolerant. She agreed smilingly. I asked her then about what makes a life good. Without skipping a beat she announced,
It felt strange asking my final question about what she wants or is missing in life. The sense I got from this 86 year old woman was total contentment. I asked anyway. No sense in assuming the answer.
She paused a moment looking like she was pondering a story.
I don’t often hear political ideologies crop up in these discussions. But my nagging question on this town’s liberalism turned out not far from the mark. I hadn’t heard a more clear representative of the liberal worldview anywhere yet. To find it here in Wyoming was a peculiar surprise. If Laramie is filled with people like Judy, then I suppose my question is answered.