Chapter 1 #2
"You're standing up for a breakfast speech."
"I am."
Zachary put both hands over his face and giggled into them.
"Wyoming," Joe said. "Beautiful state. God's own country. Nine people per square mile, which sounds like heaven until you understand what it actually means."
"Which is what," said Bill, who was clearly enjoying himself enormously.
"It means nobody's coming. Ever. For anything. You break a leg in February outside Kaycee and you are having a private experience with the universe."
"That's the point of it," Imogen said.
"That's the theory of it. Here's the practice. Wyoming's got wind. Not breeze. Wind. Sixty mile an hour sustained for four days in a row, and it will take the roof off a barn and the heat out of a house and the will to live out of a grown man. You cannot garden in it.
You cannot keep a greenhouse in it. Your solar panels become sails."
"You can build a windbreak."
"With what? There's no timber. That's the second thing. Half that state is sagebrush and you can't heat a house with sagebrush, and if the propane trucks stop running, and they have now stopped running, then you are burning your furniture by January."
Bill Tandy made a noise of grudging agreement.
"Third thing," Joe said, holding up fingers.
"Water. Wyoming water law is a knife fight with paperwork. Half the creeks are spoken for by somebody in Nebraska who filed a claim in 1904 and whose great grandson will absolutely litigate you into the ground over it. And the ground water in the basins is deep. Three hundred feet,
four hundred feet deep. Which is fine when you've got a submersible pump and a grid to run it on."
He let that sit.
"And we don't have a grid to run it on."
Hazel said, "Okay, what about Montana."
"Montana," Joe said, "is a gorgeous lie."
"Dad."
"The western half is the most beautiful place on this continent and I would like to be buried there. The Bitterroot, the Flathead. Water everywhere. Timber everywhere. Elk everywhere."
"So why not."
"Because the growing season in the Bitterroot is about ninety days if the frost is polite, and it is frequently not polite. Because the good valleys got discovered in 2020 and the price per acre went insane, and the people who bought them were not farmers,
they were people who wanted to look at a mountain out of a window the size of a car. Which means when this happened, and this has happened, those valleys are now full of very nice people with heated floors and no idea how to render a hog."
"That's a little mean," Imogen said.
"It's not mean, it's a population problem. Every hungry person in a valley is a variable. I'm not judging them. I'm counting them."
Delores Tandy said, quietly, "What about Idaho. My sister's in Idaho."
Joe softened.
"Idaho's the closest call," he said. "Honestly. The panhandle's got water and timber and decent soil in the low country. If I'd had one more year and a little more money I might have talked myself into it."
"So what's wrong with it."
"Two things. One is the Snake River Plain, which is where most of the people and most of the farming actually are, and that is a desert that farms because of pumps. Enormous pumps. Center pivot irrigation over hundreds of thousands of acres, all of it running on electricity.
When the power went out last night, the most productive agricultural land in that state went back to being sagebrush in about two weeks."
Bill whistled low.
"And the second thing," Joe said.
"Say it," Imogen said. "You've been dying to say it for twenty minutes."
"The second thing is that Idaho's got one road in and one road out through the mountains and the whole state is downstream of Spokane and downstream of Portland if people start moving, and they will start moving."
He put both hands on the table.
"Now. Utah."
"Here it comes," said Hazel.
"Utah," Joe said, "is the single most quietly correct decision I have ever made in my entire life, and I am including marrying your mother."
"You are not including that," Imogen said.
"I am not including that. Correction noted."
"Thank you."
"Utah," Joe said, "has the Wasatch Range, which is a snowpack machine. That is what it is. That mountain catches storms coming off the lake and squeezes them and stacks up five hundred inches of snow a winter on the high country, and that snow does not run off in one week in April. It releases.
All summer. Which means the creeks run when the creeks in half of Montana are down to a trickle and the creeks in Wyoming are a memory."
He pointed out the window.
"Our creek ran in August. In the worst August in nine years, our creek ran, and our spring came out of that hill at three gallons a minute in the middle of a drought, and it will do it again this year, and it will do it with nobody's permission and no pump and no wire."
"Okay," Hazel said. "That's actually a good point."
"Thank you. Second. Elevation stacking. We are at sixty two hundred feet on this bench, which is high enough to be cold and low enough to grow food, and I can walk from this porch to alpine timber in forty minutes and down to a river bottom in an hour.
That is three completely different food environments inside of one morning's walk. Elk up high, deer in the middle, fish and cattail and willow down low."
"You've never caught a fish in your life," Imogen said.
"I caught a fish in June."
"You caught a fish in June with Bill standing behind you telling you which hand to use."
"That's still catching a fish."
Bill Tandy laughed so hard he had to put his coffee down.