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Heather Heidi Walsowski-Smith’s daughter, Cambria, is researching a school project on pioneer migration into Jackson Hole. Her task is to interview old-timers who came here in the 1970s and 1980s, to see how they arrived and why they stayed. She caught up with me with my hose down a mole hole, trying to flush the buggers from my lawn.
“Are you an old-timer?” Cambria asked.
A plaintive squeak came from nearby, but no rodent bodies floated to the surface. “I’m more a middle aged-timer,” I said. “You have to go back two generations of home birth to qualify as a true old-timer.”
“Why did you move to Jackson?”
“It was semi-unplanned.”
“All my interviewees say that. I haven’t met a single person who chose to spend their lives in the valley. They come temporary, but stay permanent.”
“You want my story or not?”
Cambria pulled out her phone and opened a tape recorder app. Cambria’s life is composed of apps. A mole broke free over on the driveway side of the yard. It scampered for the neighbor’s lawn and I wished it well. I think that’s where they migrated from in the first place. He puts out poison and they head for me.
The entire article can be read in the Winter 2012 issue of Jackson Hole Magazine.
