Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.
I made a point to have 'mini-adventures' on the road. In Tucson, that meant swinging by a massive airplane graveyard. A quick detour through the Grand Tetons was a Wyoming highlight. We stopped for cheese in Wisconsin and barbecue in South Carolina.
Everywhere I travel around my home state of Wyoming - but also around the country - I continue to hear, 'How can Washington make us buy something we don't want to buy, a product? They can't tell us to buy breakfast cereal or something else - how can they do that?'
I grew up on the west side of Detroit - 6 mile and Wyoming - so I was really in the 'hood. And I would go to school at Detroit Waldorf, and that was not the 'hood. Growing up in Detroit was good. I had a good perspective, a well-rounded one, and not being one-sided.
I don't know if it's just my age or the climate or the high altitude or some of those old-cowboy values rubbing off on me, but I've grown slightly mellower living in Wyoming. I think if you ride into the West on a high horse, you pretty soon end up in a pile of manure.
Australia exports millions of tons of coal each year to Asian markets. These same countries are interested in Wyoming coal. I look forward to visiting and seeing a vibrant coal port to better understand the benefits and challenges associated with this method of export.
Wyoming, home to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons, is also the country's largest coal producer and one of its largest gas drillers. Two-thirds of the state's gas-drilling rigs are on public lands in the increasingly industrialized Greater Green River Basin.
I found while driving in Wyoming that wearing a stetson and driving a beat-up pickup meant you could go as fast as you like, while the police picked up Californian winnebagos that went one mph over 55. After all, they wanted to bring money into the state, not merely circulate it.
In the 1880s, a weedy Easterner named Owen Wister had something like a nervous breakdown. Wyoming, with its wide-open spaces and healthy pursuits, was prescribed as a cure. Wister was immediately smitten by the taciturn cowboys and the rules imposed upon them by the cattle barons.
I, for one - despite being a pretty solid climate hawk, I am extremely sympathetic to West Virginia and its coal-country needs. I lived there for a year. I've seen it. And the same for Wyoming, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. They all have parts of their state where that really matters.
If anything is endemic to Wyoming it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily, leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates, and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially shaped the state, wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage.
I worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange back when they used to write tickets. And I was just a runner. So a guy would write a ticket and I would run it, and it was endless. That was a hard job. And I dug tungsten... for a coal company in Wyoming one summer, and that was pretty miserable.
The end of coal in Appalachia doesn't mean that America is running out of coal (there's plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation - the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia.
We started out making a film [ The Fourth Phase] about the incredible snow we get at home in Wyoming, the journey soon macroed out into this epic 16,000 mile trip around the North Pacific, taking us to locations in Japan, Alaska, the Kamchatka Peninsula in far-eastern Russia, and back to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Who were the biggest acts in the world in 1987? Guns N' Roses and Metallica. I shamelessly pandered to surfers and skateboarders, and in pictures from then, you'll see Slash and those guys wearing N.W.A stuff. If they thought it was cool, people in Kansas and Wyoming would buy it. That's how we broached the subject.
I was sitting here without a shirt on, absentmindedly scratching my back with a pen for about five minutes and I just looked in the mirror and saw that I had drawn a nice mural on my back. It looks kind of like a map of Wyoming, with all the rivers and mountain ranges, or maybe a portrait of Bob Marley. Yes. Tablature
I remember a humorous episode from Bill Clinton's presidency in which his advisers prevailed upon him, one summer before his re-election campaign, to spend his vacation in Montana and Wyoming instead of the usual Martha's Vineyard. The theory was that he'd benefit from hanging out someplace a little more down to earth.
Wyoming is a special place: Where our farmers and ranchers rise before dawn and work until night to feed our nation. Where our coal miners and oil field workers produce the energy that powers America's homes and businesses, and where our families are guided by faith, know the value of hard work, and deeply love our land.
As people, right now, we're so over-stimulated in this world that I don't know what I'd do in Wyoming. I really don't know what I'd do. I would probably have a heart attack because I'd be so lonely, and I'd actually have to listen to myself think. That's a terrifying prospect for myself, and I'm sure many other people as well.
I remember as a little girl going down to the beet fields in the Dakotas and in Nebraska and Wyoming as migrant workers when I was very, very small, like, I was, like, 5 years old, I believe. And I remember going out there, you know, traveling to these states and living in these little tarpaper shacks that they had in Wyoming.
I think people's perception is that when you're famous, you want people to love you. That's a big part of why people become famous, because they don't just want love, they want it on a grand scale. But once you realize - and it's not a big trick to really figure it out - that it's just completely artificial, an external pumping of the ego that's never going to really help you, then it's an easy thing to step out of it. That's probably why Harrison Ford lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
