Kim Barker, a journalist who is best known for her book on Afghanistan, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, is coming out with a podcast on a 1985 unsolved murder in Laramie. Moreover, Barker was apparently a high school student at the time.
And she doesn't like the city of her alma mater at all. Of it, in the promotions for this podcast, she's stated:
"I've always remembered it as a mean town. Uncommonly mean. A place of jagged edges and cold people. Where the wind blew so hard it actually whipped pebbles at you."
Wow.
And there's more:
I don't like crime books, but oddly I do like some crime/mystery podcasts. I'm not sure why the difference, and as I'm a Wyomingite and a former resident of Laramie, I'll listen to the podcast.
But frankly, I’m already jaded, and it's due to statements like this:
It was an emblem of her time in Laramie, a town that stood out as the meanest place she’d ever lived in.
Really, you've been to Afghanistan, and Laramie is the meanest place you've lived in?
Hmmm. . . . This is, shall we say, uncommonly crappy. And frankly, this discredits this writer.
I've lived in Laramie twice.
All together, I guess, I've lived in Casper, Laramie, and Lawton (Ft. Sill) Oklahoma. I've been to nearly every town and city in Wyoming, and I've ranged as far as Port Arthur, Texas to Central Alaska, Seoul, South Korea to Montreal.
The author may recall it that way, but if she does, it says more about her life at the time than Laramie.
And indeed, I suspect that's it.
If you listen to the trailer, you hear a string. . . dare I say it, of teenage girl complaints, preserved for decades, probably because she exited the state soon after high school, like so many Wyomingites do. I can't verify that, as her biography is hard to find. Her biography on her website starts with her being a reporter, as if she was born into the South East Asian news bureau she first worked for. A little digging brings up a source from Central Asia, which her reporting is associated with, and it notes that its very difficult to find information on her. It does say, however, that she grew up in Billings, Montana and grew up with her father. Nothing seems to be known about her mother. She's a graduate of Norwestern University, which supports that she probably graduated from high school in Laramie and then took off, never to look back. How long did she live there is an open question, and what brought her father there is another. Having said all of that, teenage girls being relocated isn't something they're generally keen on, and Billings is a bigger city than Laramie. I have yet to meet anyone who didn't like Billings.
Now, I didn't go to high school in Laramie, but I was in Laramie at the time that Barker was, and these events occurred. 1985 is apparently the critical date, and I was at UW at the time. I very vaguely recall this event occurring, and didn't at first. I vaguely recall one of the things about Laramie that Barker mentions in her introduction, which was the male athlete branding. What I recall is that there was a local scandal regarding that, and it certainly wasn't approved by anyone.
A lot of her miscellaneous complaints, however, are really petty and any high school anywhere in the United States, save perhaps for private ones, might be able to have similar stories said about it. Boys being sent out to fight if they engaged in fighting within the school wasn't that uncommon in the 80s. I don't recall it happening at my high school, outside of the C Club Fights, but I do recall it from junior high, in the 1970s, and experienced it myself. I don't regard it as an act of barbarism, although I woudln't approve of it. As noted, I recall this branding story, which was a scandal and not approved of, but today an equally appalling thing goes on all over the United States with the tattooing of children for various reasons, including minors, in spite of its illegality. Certainly college sports teams feature this frequently, and I'd wager many high school athletes experience a similar example of tribalism.
What's really upsetting, however, is the assertion that Laramie was, and is, "mean".
When I went to Laramie in 1983 for the first time, I didn't look forward to it. I found the town alien at first and strange. I probably would have found any place I went to under those circumstances to be like that. I was from Central Wyoming and had lived there my entire life, save for a short stint at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. But by the time I graduated in 1986, I had acclimated to it and there were parts of living in Albany County I really liked. I was back down there a year later, this time not dreading it, and as a graduate student I was pretty comfortable in the town.
I also wasn't a teenager being dislocated from the place I grew up in.
In my last couple of years of undergraduate studies, and in all of my graduate years, I was pretty comfortable with the city. I knew the places and things there, and had friends there. In the summers, and I spent a couple there, it was a really nice place in particular to live.
And let's be honest. Just as the land of high school angst might seem awful, the land you are in when you are young usually isn't.
If I had any complaints, at that time, it was about housing and prices. Housing was always a crisis for a student, and a lot of the places I lived were not very nice. Some were pretty bad. And prices locally were really high, it seemed to us. Local merchants complained about students shopping in Ft. Collins, but we did that as it was cheaper than shopping in Laramie.
The weather in Laramie is another thing. It's 7,000 feet high, in the Rockies, and therefore it can be cold and snowy. The highway closes a lot. In the early 1980s, it was really cold and snowy, with temperatures down below 0 quite regular. Interestingly, by the late 1980s this was less the case. And it does have wind, but ten everyplace from El Paso to the Arctic Circle is pretty windy. Wyoming weather can be a trial for some people, particularly those who are not from here.
Which gets, I guess, to this. A Colorado colleague notes that you have to be tougher just to live in the state. You do. Being from here makes you that way. As the line in the film Wind River puts it, in an exchange between the characters:
Jane Banner: Shouldn't we wait for back up?
Ben: This isn't the land of waiting for back up. This is the land of you're on your own.
And that can be true. If you aren't at least somewhat self-reliant, this may not be the place for you.
The further you get away from Laramie, the more this can be true. Laramie is the most "liberal" city in regular Wyoming, surpassed in that regard only by Jackson. Albany County nearly always sends at least one Democrat to the legislature. If there's left wing social legislation pending, there's a good chance it comes out of Albany County. Albany County is the only county in the state, outside of Teton, where all the things that drive the social right nuts are openly exhibited, due to the University of Wyoming. In real terms, about 1/3d of the city's population are students at any one time, and a lot of those who are not students are employed by the University of Wyoming.
When I graduated from law school, I noted that a lot of students who passed through the College of Law stayed there if they could. That says something about the town. Several good friends of mine over the years who are lawyers stayed there, including ones that had come there from other Wyoming locations. Even a few of my non law school friends worked and lived there for a time, although none of them do any longer.
And in the years since I lived there the influence of Ft. Collins has come in, with downtown establishments mimicking those that are fifty miles to the south. I've known people who retired and left the town, but I also have known people who retired to it.
It's not mean.
But the whole world is mean to some teenagers, with their limited experience and exaggerated sensibilities. Some people keep that perception for the rest of their lives.
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