Wyoming History in the First Person: What Happened Afterward

In late August, 1959, I locked the ranger station for the last time and headed Spud down the Death Canyon Trail. Sandy plodded behind, his panniers almost empty. My best summer ever was winding down.

But twelve months of high adventure were just beginning.

In September I celebrated my twenty-second birthday at the University of Bristol in England. I was there, supposedly, as a graduate student. And I did attend lecturers and tutorials. Some anyway.

I also played basketball for the university. We reached the national semi-finals undefeated, then were blown off the court by the University of Manchester. They had three Americans on their team.

Mostly, during my twenty-second year, I was a hitchhiker.

A friend studying at Stratford-upon-Avon had a small flat with a comfortable easy chair. Sleeping in it, I could attend five plays at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in a single weekend.

I watched from the back of course, in the standing room section. Students bought the cheapest tickets as a matter of principle.

A Friday departure and a Monday return would allow a full weekend in London, a city that tempted a young man with many attractions, highbrow and low.

Christmas was celebrated playing poker (30 franc limit, about 10 cents) with other wanderers in a grimy youth hostel in Menton, near Nice on the French Riviera.

The New Year was rung in at a community dance in a small alpine village in Austria. On the SS United States going over I had met a returning Austrian grad student who invited me to visit his family.

The night of Easter, in a country pub in Ireland, I proved that I sang even worse drunk than sober. After too many pints of Guinness I tried to deliver a creditable rendition of Johnny Cash's "Ghost Riders in the Sky" and failed utterly. An elderly Irish gentleman kindly patted me on the shoulder and said, "God bless you, boy."

A group of us (me wearing boots) had hiked to the pub from the youth hostel. On the way back an Australian girl acknowledged my brag about being a Wyoming cowboy must be true. She said I walked like my feet hurt.

Loaned a rowboat a few days later, I spent a morning exploring the overgrown ruins of a medieval monastery found by chance on an island midstream in the River Shannon. The inscriptions on the grave stones especially were intriguing.

On my way to Belfast I caught a ride with a couple from Northern Ireland. As we drove the casual conversation gradually turned into a subtle interrogation. The husband eventually acknowledged he was an off duty policeman. The fighting known as the Border Campaign had been going on for five years. Footloose young Americans were suspect because of the support the IRA received from friends in the U.S.

In July I spent three days, by chance, in a small village in Denmark. After I returned to Wyoming my maternal grandmother told me the story of her family's emigration at the turn of the century. They had come from that village.

In August I sailed home on the Queen Mary and disappeared into academia for a dozen years, then left university teaching to start a corporate training and development business. Those three decades as an academic, then an entrepreneur, provided their own kinds of excitement; but little happened worth recounting today.

Horses reentered my life about the time my university career ended, as did deer and coyotes, moose now and then, even the occasional bear.

We raised our four offspring on a small ranch tucked away in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. The ranch, though accessible only by four-wheel-drive during the winter, was within commuting distance of Calgary.

LIFE ON THE RANCH

The ranch

Gloria with one of her many litters.

We needed a to build a three quarter mile access
road up and over the ridge, plus have a way to
plow it in the winter. So I bought a used bulldozer.

Belle and Juanita, mothers and grandmothers of champions.

Daughters

The kids raised 4-H steers. We milked a couple of cows, kept a sociable and fertile sow named Gloria, and started raising llamas at an especially fortuitous time.

We lost Gloria one cold winter night when I was in New York on a business trip. She gave birth to 21 babies and died. By the time I got home our family and others had divided up the surviving piglets and were bottle feeding them.

When I was in my early 50s Barbara and I cashed in our assets, bought an old-fashioned, fifty-foot steel ketch named Maruba, and sailed away to the tropics.

THE GOOD SHIP MARUBA

Maruba at anchor in Costa Rica.

Anchored off a Kuna village in the San Blas Islands,
Caribbean side of Panama.

Maruba displayed her Pacific Northwest heritage.

Maruba, a 50-foot, 36-ton steel ketch. Some mariners said she was a ship, not a boat.

Maruba at the Curacao shipyard to get her bottom cleaned

After several years we abandoned the seafaring life and settled on a wild shore of a small Caribbean island, where we've lived for two decades now.

LIFE ON BONAIRE

House, from the cove

Aztec, our Fila Brasiliero (Brazilian Mastiff) at ten weeks, with grandchildren Logan, Janna, and Tanner

Three years later.

Looking north across the cove.

A manta ray passes by.

Barbara, hiking the hill behind the house.

Today is the first anniversary, plus one month, of the two stories that opened Wyoming History in the First Person. Twenty-four more stories followed. This story ends the blog.

Have my memories been as accurate as they seemed when recounting them? Perhaps not always. Who can be sure?

As to veracity . . . the story of my life may be weighted with improbabilities; but it has been honestly told. The story is also consistent with my genes.

My mother's motto was: When life goes to hell, move somewhere else. The version I inherited seemed to be: When life has gone well, try something new.

From my father I likely inherited my manifest susceptibility to opportunities. However, I didn't roll crooked dice or deal from a marked deck.

Wyoming History in the First Person has now come to an end. It will remain permanently available on the Net.

Don M. Ricks, wyomingfirstperson.net

Now, about the sequel being planned . . .

Wyoming History in the First Person has told coming of age stories. It recounted events in the life of a young man growing up in Wyoming.

The new blog, The Big Kid from Wyoming Takes on the World, will deliver being of age stories. It will look back upon the experiences of a grown man who, trusting his Wyoming heritage, moved away and encountered the larger world. The posts will be short and about ideas as much as events.

I'd be pleased to have your company on this new adventure too.

If you're on the mailing list, you'll be notified. Soon.