Family lore has it that my mother joined the Patterson household when they lassoed her out of the Greybull River as a baby, floating by on a cow patty during the flood of ’63. However she came into the world, my mother would grow up in a three-bedroom trailer on a farm in rural Wyoming. The youngest of seven, she was always at the bottom of the dogpile and the last to get a bath. Taking after her own mother—quick to stitch a wound or slaughter a chicken—she’s kept my family scrappy. Her home in Montana is a chaotic scene: grandkids are tackled until they say uncle; art supplies dug out of Home Depot’s dumpsters fill the rooms; and sons and daughters of all ages pour concrete foundations and cobble together spaceships out of cardboard, depending on what construction project has taken ahold of the family.
I make pilgrimages from Brooklyn to Wyoming and Montana every year, taking photos of the wildness, familial and otherwise, before either disappear. I’m not alone in my quest to preserve the beauty of the place. My sister sings the songs our mother sang us as she drives her kid through the car wash. Toddlers learn how to draw floor plans for houses the way our dad taught us and the way his dad taught him. My uncle Stacy used to mine coal, but now he wakes up every morning before dawn to capture the sunrise over the desolate plains of Wyoming on his phone—unremarkable to most but a landscape straight from heaven, if you ask him.
On a May afternoon in 2021, Stacy sent me a text:
Hello kid how r yuh, hope ur well
Hate to tell U
Granny took her last plane
yesterday into the wild blue
yonder
Luv yah
Sixty-odd descendants gathered for my grandmother’s memorial in Douglas, where she spent nearly all of her eighty-six years. Stacy showed us all a cell phone video of two lightning storms meeting above town, taken the night she passed. “It’s Grandma and Grandpa reuniting in heaven,” he said. A new generation of babies ran around barefoot, scowling at having to wear their church dresses and likely wishing they were roping horses or riding dirt bikes instead—carrying on the family way.
