Lights Out

by Ted Koppel

  15

  Where the Buffalo Roamed

  We lived for hundreds of years without electricity. We can do it again.

  — MARTIN KNAPP

  My first interview of the morning wasn’t until ten, and I’d planned on sleeping in. When the phone rang at seven, it was Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming senator and a longtime friend, whom I had asked to put me in touch with a few locals who might offer a uniquely western outlook on surviving disaster. He’d clearly been up for a while. “You had breakfast yet?”

  I lied. “I was just heading out.”

  “I’ll meet you in front of the Buffalo Bill Center at eight.”

  My interest in the Buffalo Bill Center would have been modest at any time of day. At 7:00 a.m. it was nonexistent. But the combination of shame and gratitude is a powerful motivator, and here was Simpson, just shy of his eighty-third birthday, having set me up for every interview I was doing in Cody, full of piss and vinegar and ready to take the time to walk me through this tourist-trap museum of the Wild West.

  The Buffalo Bill Center of the West, it turns out, is a gem. We paused briefly at the holographic image of Buffalo Bill Cody welcoming visitors to the museum. “That’s my older brother, Pete,” said Simpson. He wasn’t kidding. Pete Simpson, all done up in western gear, looks as close to a transparent Buffalo Bill as anyone has a right to expect. The hologram’s kid brother and I raced through the Buffalo Bill section (what a wonderful old hustler he must have been) and into the Plains Indians section. The Plains Indians, Simpson explained, agreed to be a part of this project only if they had total control over their part of the exhibit. They were fed up, he said, with being displayed through the white man’s prism.

  We zipped through the Whitney Western Art Museum, with its spectacular Remington bronzes, and lingered for a few minutes in the Cody Firearms Museum. Then Simpson had to be off for an interview—leaving me, as he no doubt intended, mulling over just a few of my misconceptions about Wyoming and the people who live there.

  The point of visiting Wyoming was precisely that it is not New York or Los Angeles. It is not only a different environment, it is a different culture. Disaster preparedness is a matter of upbringing and common prudence. The skills that empower self-sufficiency are ingrained from childhood. Guns are a frequently seen and acceptable part of daily life.

  I was about to enter a world of contradictions. By happy coincidence, I found myself in Cody at the same time as a number of Japanese Americans who had been interned at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center during World War II, just down the road from where Andrew Rose’s house now sits. The site of this camp, which housed 10,700 people of Japanese ancestry between 1942 and 1945, lies about thirteen miles northeast of Cody. There’s a memorial park there now, and members of the diminishing pool of survivors still come back every so often to remember. Among those is Norman Mineta, former mayor of San Jose, nine-term Democratic congressman from California, secretary of commerce under President Clinton, and secretary of transportation under President George W. Bush.

  Mineta and Alan Simpson have been friends since Boy Scouts, when Simpson’s Cody troop would pay occasional visits to the troop of Japanese American boys at the internment camp. On one occasion, when Mineta and Simpson shared a tent, Simpson conceived a scheme to get back at a boy who’d been hassling Norm. Heavy rain had been in the forecast, and the kid’s tent was downslope from Simpson and Mineta’s. Simpson carefully dug a shallow ditch around their tent, opening up a channel that diverted the rain directly downhill. The rains came and revenge was served, as it should be, cold. Seventy years later a couple of octogenarians chortled as they recalled the cries of outrage.

  There’s a handsome monument now where the Heart Mountain Relocation Center once stood. Erected in 1985, it declares, “May the injustices of the removal and incarceration of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, never be repeated.” It’s nice that Park County erected the monument, even nicer that the Heart Mountain High School alumni class of 1947 paid for it, but that was forty years after the end of World War II, with the stern judgment of history to motivate them. What’s more difficult to understand is that only a year or two after Pearl Harbor, the parents and mentors of a Boy Scout troop in Cody encouraged their children to befriend members of a Japanese American troop. It gives some credibility to the claims of a tradition of neighborliness and community values that one hears repeatedly in this part of the country.

  —

  The first thing you notice about Bob Model, who is in his early seventies, is his striking resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt. It is a resemblance he cultivates. A great-grandson of William Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, Model is still identified on some websites as a New York businessman, but the identity he clearly cherishes is that of a Wyoming rancher and past president of the Boone and Crockett Club—yes, that Boone (Daniel) and that Crockett (Davy). The club was founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt and to this day carries out its founder’s mission of promoting conservation and “maintaining the highest ethical standards of fair chase and sportsmanship.”

  Eastern urbanites like myself are simply unprepared for the scale of a large western ranch. Bob Model picked me up at the Simpson house, dismissing my insistence that I could find my own way, and indeed I would have missed the turnoff from the highway. The ride to the main ranch house is ten miles along a dirt path called Rattlesnake Creek Road. Model’s property, Mooncrest Ranch, encompasses 5,000 acres, surrounded by about 175,000 acres of federal forest land. From roughly June 1 through the end of the year, his horses and cattle are free to graze across that enormous expanse. To all intents and purposes, then, when Bob Model considers the natural resources at his disposal he is looking at what exists on about 180,000 acres. If campers and hunters want to pass through or even hunt on his property, Model requires only that they check in with his ranch office. There’s plenty of room to go around, and Bob Model is a great believer in western hospitality.

  Some of the ranch buildings are on gravity-fed wells, but the main house is supplied with water by electric-powered pumps. Should the power fail, and out here it often does, there are generators and hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel. Blizzards are common in this part of the country, and Rattlesnake Creek Road becomes impassable to motor vehicles. Model estimated that, based on the food they keep at the ranch, they could survive a month. Beyond that, there’s 180,000 acres of nature’s supermarket.

  “If the grid were to disappear on us overnight,” he told me over a plate of homemade brownies, “we always have the ability to hunt.” There are large herds of deer and elk. “We would be fine. We have plenty of flour on hand, so we’d be able to make bread. We have an ample supply of wood and a woodstove to cook with. Yes, it would be challenging, but this is something we think about. We don’t do practice runs, but we do think about it. Living the way [we do] and where, [we] are as prepared as one could get in this modern day.” Not only would he and his ranch hands survive a cyberattack on the electric power grid that serves Wyoming, they would barely notice it.

  I asked Model to consider the possibility of the event itself. Was there anything at all transferable from his experience and environment to urban dwellers living on the nineteenth floor of an apartment building? How would they get food, water? How would they handle hygiene? Model seemed genuinely stumped. “No answers. It scares me to death just to think about it. I don’t know how one would cope with that, other than that there needs to be local, state, county programs sponsored by the federal government. These are real issues, these are real concerns. It is overwhelming just to think about it.” Bob Model seems like a genuinely caring man and he wants to be helpful. In a testament to his deep social values, Model stresses not survival skills nor land investment but community involvement. He cites the self-reliance teachings of the Boy Scouts, as well as organizations like Wyoming’s National Outdoor Leadership School and Outward Bound.

  From th
e living room of Bob Model’s ranch these are all reasonable suggestions, but few, if any, would have an application in Manhattan or Chicago or Los Angeles. This is a region with a very small population. Emergencies are routinely addressed by the sheriff’s department, augmented by volunteer organizations. The fire department is all volunteer, as are the search-and-rescue forces. In more than one sense, Wyoming is something of a time capsule, reminiscent of, say, the 1950s, when magazines such as Look and Life and Collier’s, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Evening Post celebrated an America of values and tradition that existed, in part at least, only in our imaginations. However romanticized this vision might have been, the fact is that Wyoming does have an unusually strong culture of both self-reliance and civic cooperation.

  In 1995 a Harvard political science professor, Robert D. Putnam, wrote a journal article that he later expanded into a bestselling book. The theme of Bowling Alone was that the civic organizations that once served as such an essential part of our societal fabric were losing membership. Americans, Putnam argued, were going it alone, less inclined to participate in the civic groups that once kept communities close. That is certainly not as true in Wyoming. The website for the Wyoming Tribune Eagle listed meetings of clubs and organizations for the week of March 16, 2015, including such familiar names as the Lions (sunrise meeting at 6:30 a.m., noon Lions at, well, noon) and the Rotary Club, but also the High Plains Toastmasters, the High Noon Toastmasters, the Roadmasters Toastmasters, the Audubon Society, the Wyoming Mounted Search and Rescue Association, the Elks Lodge 660, the Masonic Order of the Eastern Star, and the Kiwanis Club. The list for that week alone ran to nine pages. Neighborliness is more than a slogan here; it is, as it has always been, an essential element of self-preservation in a challenging environment.

  The walls inside Bob Model’s ranch house bear testimony to the integral role that guns and hunting play in his life. The head of a ten-point buck hangs above a rack carrying a pair of lever-action rifles. The entry hall is a classic American montage: several pairs of western boots next to a wooden rack carrying a well-worn saddle, a lariat hanging from the saddle horn, and a couple of Smokey the Bear–style hats. A splendid American flag is draped on one wall. A couple of oil paintings of western scenes hang over a gun case tucked in a corner.

  Isolated as it is, Mooncrest Ranch is not merely self-sufficient; it could, I suggested to Model, become a magnet to those in desperate need during a time of regional crisis. What about the limits of neighborliness? What would happen, I asked, if those with fewer resources came calling? “That’s a great question, and a very complicated question,” he demurred. “Traditional western hospitality. If they were not gangsters or thugs, they would be welcome here.” It may be, given some planning and organization, that states such as Wyoming, with a very low population base, would provide sanctuary to some tens of thousands of urban refugees. Absent any such plan—and there is no evidence that it exists—the search for food and shelter is likely to become more chaotic.

  I pressed the point, giving Model a worst-case scenario. “Let’s say there’s a band of twenty or thirty armed people who have decided that this is a good headquarters, that this would be a good place to have.”

  “You know,” Model allowed, “we’ve thought about that, and I mean, we’re armed here, too. We know how to take care of ourselves. So it’s very difficult for me to speculate about what would happen. But for somebody coming and taking over the ranch, they’re going to have a fight on their hands. My cowboys and people who work here are pretty self-reliant.”

  Firearms, Model continued, are “a function of where we live.” He explained the day-to-day uses of his guns, which, in addition to hunting and protection from “large predators,” could occasionally be needed to put down an injured or ailing horse. “So we understand the very sensitive issue of firearms. We feel that we’re very responsible and we feel that they’re part of our way of life.”

  Guns are indeed part of Wyoming’s way of life. While it has the smallest population of any state in the nation, Wyoming’s rate of gun ownership is, at 62.8 percent, the highest in the country. There is general agreement on those two statistics. From that point on, however, views differ. Whereas gun control advocates routinely list Wyoming as having one of the highest rates of gun-related homicides in the country (calculated on the basis of shooting murders per 100,000 of population), statistics from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) tell a different story. For the five years 2009–2013, the CDC reported a total of 42 gun-related homicides in Wyoming, for a ratio of 1.47 gun murders per 100,000 population—the fourteenth-lowest in the nation. California, by comparison, had more than double that rate, while the District of Columbia, with the worst gun-related homicide rate, registered more than eight times as many as Wyoming. The District of Columbia has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, Wyoming some of the least restrictive. As with expert testimony, statistics are often selected and cited to suit preexisting opinions.

  At the Park County Public Library back in town, Alan Simpson had invited his old friend Stanley Wolz to join us in the cafeteria for a bite of lunch. Like Model, Wolz rejected any trendy conception of “bugging out.”

  “I am not a doomsday prepper,” Wolz told me. “I am an emergency-preparedness guy. I have done my planning in layers. The first part would be maybe three weeks where we wouldn’t have to go out of the house. Anything after that, probably, we could probably go six months. But that’s all predicated on water. If you can’t get water, you can’t clean yourself, you can’t cook, you can’t do anything. My whole thing,” he continued, “is not to have a school bus that I load with five thousand pounds of stuff and go build a hut in the forest. I think that’s silly.”

  Stan Wolz is an amiable man and, as a Mormon, is committed to sharing within his community and with those in need. He is also well armed. He has a hunting rifle with a scope, what he calls a “home defense” shotgun, and a variety of pistols. Wolz is ambivalent about when he would use one of those self-defense weapons. He is not sure whether he would shoot someone over his “bucket of beans in the basement,” as he puts it. “I just think I’d rather have a firearm and not need it than not have one and need it.” But he is, if anything, more realistic than Model about the possibility of the situation escalating: “I think that within six months, if things weren’t straightened out adequately to have something besides anarchy, somebody’s going to show up on your doorstep and kill you for your food anyway.”

  Martin Knapp, the homeland security coordinator for Park County, Wyoming, believes that other parts of the country are different. In urban and suburban areas he would be concerned that people might use their guns “to take from their neighbors. You know, ‘Hey, we’re out of food. We’ve gotta get more stuff.’ ” In Cody, Knapp described a culture in which kids go to hunter-safety class, but also in which parents educate their children in gun safety from an early age. “That’s why I’m not as concerned that these people have guns.”

  What about outsiders fleeing the cities? I asked Knapp. How would that change the dynamic? It didn’t seem to worry him: “As far as people coming in here from a couple hundred miles away, they’re going to have to get enough fuel to get here. That’s one thing. But somebody comes in here and pulls a pistol on somebody, ‘Gimme your food’ ”—the prospect was mildly amusing to Knapp—“four people in the house pull out rifles and everything else, saying, ‘I don’t think so.’ It’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight. People around here, because there are so many guns, they’ve got ways to kind of protect themselves. And a lot of them would, without thinking twice about it.”

  A place like Cody might very well be brimming with “western hospitality,” but this is a place that has never been put to the test of a large-scale influx of domestic refugees. How overburdened civic organizations would respond, to say nothing of individual citizens, is unknowable. When people in Cody consider the possibility of violent criminals, they tend to put it in the contex
t of outsiders.

  Jeff Livingstone is very much part of the fabric of the city of Cody; one of a dwindling number of ditch riders, he works to deliver irrigation water to farmers. “It’s one of the craziest jobs that you could ever stumble into,” Jeff explained. “One of the things Buffalo Bill did for Cody was he helped promote and design a Shoshone irrigation project back in 1903 or 1904.”

  In the old days, ditch riders were on horseback and rode along the dry beds of the ditches alongside the farmland. These days, Jeff drives his truck to the head gates and works the valves. “I go out every morning for about two, two and a half hours.” Folks tell him what they need: “They want three feet of water, three cubic feet per second.” The water comes from the Buffalo Bill Reservoir and flows through those same ditches. Farmers pay a flat fee for their allotment. If they use more, they pay a surcharge.

  Jeff and his partner, Pat Altringer, who is a retired nurse, aren’t fond of the term “prepper,” preferring “self-reliance,” though they say the former is “fine” in a pinch. Self-reliance is probably a more accurate term in their case, anyway. It is simply how people of limited means in Cody, Wyoming, prepare for shortages in hard times. Jeff and Pat have a 500-gallon gasoline tank and a small generator. The generator can run the electric grinder that Jeff uses to make flour. Anticipating a variety of needs for the generator, Jeff is concerned about devoting too much of its use to grinding wheat berries. He’s thinking about buying a wheat grinder that he could hook up to the old bicycle outside. He’s laid in about 150 pounds of wheat berries. He also has about 130 pounds of pinto beans and 30 to 40 pounds of black beans. He and Pat learned how to can the produce they grow; whatever they don’t eat immediately, they’ll can.