Beasts in the Jungle

Abstract

I was halfway between Cheyenne and Laramie driving east on I-80 when I saw the sign for “Little America.” I remember Wyoming from the summer my family spent on a dude ranch near Jackson Hole when I was nine. Together with my brothers and sister, I rode slow ponies around a corral and wore out a pair of heavy-heeled, tan-colored cowboy boots I kept in my closet for years afterwards. Now, 30 years later, I thought I might buy another pair at this truck stop. But the view opening up around the curve of the exit smothered my nostalgia: faux colonial red brick buildings cluttered the wide horizon, disparaging its booted and hatted visitors as ill suited for the occasion—Paul Revere’s ride? The battle of Lexington and Concord?— the architecture revisited. Twenty-five hundred miles away and four thousand feet higher than the crooked Concord streets, surrounded by tumbleweeds rather than the unfurling fronds of Boston ferns, the iconography for “America” remained faithful to what Henry James calls in The Bostonians “the heroic age of New England life… the reading of Emerson and the frequentation of Tremont Temple.”3