I slowed to look at the abandoned buildings in the late afternoon sun, vertical structures attempting to join the horizontal landscape. There were only six—a few were wood frame and a few were stone, a couple had storefronts, and only one was worthy of a second story. The old grayed walkway was twisted, and the wood was pulled from its substructure, but the rough-cut two-by-eights were still there, waiting for the ringing sound of silent boots.
There was a union hall and a tipple at the end of the street, with an assortment of roofless shacks that had been built along the stone cliffs that rose at the end of the abandoned town; the weedy graveyard was on the far side. Seventeen markers had been placed where there were no bodies. The disaster had happened when the unfortunate miners had hit a gas pocket, and the resulting explosion had shaken the ground all the way back to Powder Junction almost twenty miles distant.
None of the bodies were recovered, and I always felt strange driving by the lonely little spot of abandoned civilization.
There weren’t many ghost towns left in the state; most had been packed away and carted off to amusement parks and tourist destinations along I-80. I guess it would be for the good of the county if we got rid of the fire hazard, but it would be sad to see the place go. One of the buildings had already partially burned when some kids had come up from Casper, had drunk too much beer chased with too many shots, and had decided to see how quickly hundred-year-old buildings would burn. We were lucky in that it was winter, and the snow had isolated the damage to one collapsed wall, one DUI, and three minors in possession.
I doubted many tourists came up 190 to the gravel Bailey Mountain Road, and those that did probably mistook what they saw for the real Hole in the Wall of Butch-Cassidy-and-the-Sundance-Kid fame. Through a side canyon, the road leaves the river and the formation of stunning red sandstone with a passage just large enough to allow the entry of a single wagon. A handful of men at this location could hold off an army of sheriffs, but they’d never had to, the Wild Bunch’s reputation doing their fighting for them.
Fiction writers would have you believe that this spectacular location was the Hole in the Wall of western fame; it was in reality a cinematic fabrication at best and an uninformed lie at worst. The actual Hole in the Wall was a good thirty miles south and barely noticeable as a slight break in the cliffs, allowing just enough slope for a man on horseback to pass. It had been described by my father to me as the least memorable historic spot in Wyoming.
It was now private land on the Willow Creek Ranch, and the Ferg had been pestering me for years about getting him on the place to do a little fishing at the rustler’s settlement, where Buffalo Creek tumbled out of the canyon and into a perfect triangular pasture. The dozen or so log cabins that Butch, Sundance, and the Wild Bunch had used were all gone, the last having been hauled over to Cody and the Buffalo Bill Museum.
I continued on my way and drove past the Bailey public school, which was a one-room schoolhouse, a last bastion of public education with, at last count, two students. It troubled me to think about the school closing, the cabins disassembled, and the ghost towns being flattened; it reminded me that the majority of my life had passed. I had started my education in a school very much like the one here and had spent my childhood in a town a lot like Bailey would have been if there had not been the mining disaster.
I thought about Cady as I drove; about Michael, who was due to arrive imminently; about Vic; then about the upcoming election in November and the debate on Friday.
I tried to stop thinking and propped my hat over the big eyelet hook that was anchored on the dash. We had a lot of DUIs in Powder Junction, and I guess Double Tough had improvised this way to secure drunken drivers to the vehicle.
The road was rough—it obviously hadn’t been graded since early spring—and the ruts and bumps kept me from getting the twenty-five-year-old unit above thirty. The clouds of dust obscured my view to the rear as I took a right and continued up through the lodgepole pines and scattered cottonwoods that grew along the draws. It was as if life had chosen to run away and hide in the ragged crevices of the harsh country and forgotten to come back out.
I trailed along a small ravine where swallows cartwheeled in the thermals of the russet cliffs, and glanced over the edge to where the creek still carried the snowmelt of the Bighorn Mountains. It looked like pretty good fishing on the Dunnigan place, but I’d also noted the NO HUNTING signs, and figured that the fish, like everything else, were something the brothers didn’t give away.
