Day 71 – 9/12 – Cokeville, WY to Montpelier, ID – 36 miles

I walked angry today.

My planned route would have led me into the mountains to the west, climbing back up a few hundred feet and hopefully scoring a view of Bear Lake in the process. From there, I would have turned north, eventually dropping back into the valley with US-30 for the final push. It required some backtracking early on, so I spent the first 45 minutes looping back to the southwest in order to reach the first dirt track that would lead me into the hills. And, sure enough, there was a private property sign on that road.

Well, by this point, folks in Wyoming have thoroughly conditioned me into taking a “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” approach in these cases, so I shrugged and walked on. Five minutes later, I saw a car coming towards me from deeper in the property. A middle-aged woman pulled up, rolled down the window, and stared at me. I feigned ignorance, then switched over to the charm offensive. She was impervious and humorless. I acknowledged my error and turned back around. In one fell swoop, I lost 1.5 hours of walking time and, after a quick survey of the gps, realized that I would be stuck on the highway for nearly the whole day.

This is the risk of creating route plans with gps tracks. It’s easy to tell that a road, track, or footpath exists, but it’s impossible to know if it’s private property. (There’s a certain irony, I suppose, in a white man’s progress on the Oregon Trail being thwarted by private property. Somewhat similar conflicts didn’t stop us in the first place!) And obviously, they have a right to keep their property private. I can appreciate that. It didn’t stop me, though, from spending the bulk of the day raging at the discourtesy, marching forward with anger and determination, and a pace I don’t typically hold with the heavy pack.

A single event–or even worse, a pair of events–can indelibly shape a reputation. The entirety of my write-up about Cokeville yesterday focused on its greatest tragedy, the Cokeville Elementary School hostage crisis. Today’s run-in with the human Stop sign only compounded a particular narrative that was already coalescing in my mind, about how a tragedy might fester and settle into a sustained bitterness.

Cataclysmic as that event was, though, it’s only one story from a town’s long history. On my walk out of Cokeville, I learned another. In 1922, Ethel Stoner was voted mayor, in an election that made national news. She wasn’t the first woman mayor in America–that happened in Kansas in 1887–but the combination of Stoner’s ascent alongside two other women to city council made Cokeville noteworthy. If I scratched the surface, instead of latching onto the goriest headline, what more would I find?

A few miles outside of Cokeville, a sheriff’s deputy was parked on the shoulder. When he saw me coming, he popped out of his vehicle, noting that he had seen me covering a lot of ground that morning. I told him about the larger journey and the morning’s struggles. He sympathized, but was also enthusiastic about the trip, and wanted to supply me with snacks and first aid supplies for the walk ahead. I paused to think back on my host at The Hideout in Cokeville, and how he was similarly friendly, inviting me to snag extra snacks from the breakfast spread for the road. Of course, in my mindset at the time, none of that found a handhold. I was raging.

It was a cold, cloudy morning, like the first vestiges of winter had cut the line ahead of autumn. So in some ways, that cascading heat in my face was a virtue, fending off the just-over-freezing temperatures as livestock-laden trucks whipped past me on the highway. As I settled in, I realized that, while I wasn’t following the mountains, I definitely was more loyally in line with the Oregon Trail, following the wagon route through this narrow valley sliced through the looming hills to the east and west by the Thomas Fork.

My head was filled with stories of pioneers on the Oregon Trail confronting dramatic setbacks. In Bagley’s South Pass book, I had just read about the Astor scouting trip having their horses stolen by Arapaho Indians (and then, adding insult to injury, getting mooned by the Arapahos before they sped away with the horses). The scouts were forced to make the entirety of the remaining journey–through the winter–on foot. The great scout Jedediah Smith was attacked by a grizzly bear, which “laid his skull bear to the crown.” I’ve mentioned the many graves I’ve passed along the way–the hazards of cholera and dysentery and wagon wheels and Cheney-esque firearm aim. Families routinely had their wagons break down, forcing them to make some terribly difficult choices about what to abandon and how they might carry on.

There were two additional reminders of these challenges on this walk. I crossed the Thomas Fork, following a modern bridge, but the pioneers didn’t have the luxury. Instead, a private bridge was built here in 1950, with the owner charging emigrants $1 to cross. Many couldn’t afford it. Imagine that–being halted from your desired course by private property! Then came Big Hill, an intimidating impediment that required a full-day’s delicate maneuvering to overcome. Some wagons didn’t survive the treacherous descent.

A voice in my head was saying: all of that seems a fair bit worse than being forced to return to the highway after a lost hour. Another voice in my head told that voice to stuff it.

My body was pretty well abused by the self-inflicted pace, but the upside of all of that is that I still managed to reach Montpelier before 5pm, even as my calves started cramping as I crossed the town border. A giant M adorns the hill overlooking town–it even lights up at night. I detoured through the supermarket on my way in, and the young dude checking me out couldn’t hold back, launching immediately into “And what are you up to?” He was almost ecstatic, talking about how this is exactly the kind of challenge he wants to tackle someday. As I left, the bitter voice in my head smugly asserted that I’m not in Cokeville anymore. And that smaller, beaten-down voice whispered that there were really good people in Cokeville, too.

Montpelier is famous for being the site of one of Butch Cassidy’s bank robberies, in 1896. Indeed, it’s the only town where the bank building still survives, having been converted into a museum. It was the first bank in all of Idaho, opened in 1891. One local blamed the heist on numerology: “The 13th was the cause of it all. He noted it was the 13th day of the month; it occurred after the 13th deposit had been made that day at a sum of $13.00 and occurred at 13 minutes after the hour of 3:00 p.m.”

It occurred to me that Montpelier, in time, had managed to turn a notably negative experience into a lasting positive, something that brings people to town, generates a little tourism revenue, and adds some color to the local history. That’s not a panacea; it’s not like Cokeville could or should pull exactly the same maneuver with the school hostage crisis. But it’s a reminder–we do have some agency over how we respond to setbacks. At some point, we choose to hold onto the negative, to cherish our victimhood.

I still would have loved to see that view of Bear Lake, though.