ROCK SPRINGS, Wyo.—The late-afternoon thunderstorm barreled down the chalky face of White Mountain and rolled east into the Red Desert, where it would dissipate and disappear in the expanse of the Great Divide Basin’s sagebrush steppe.
In the blow’s wake returned the sun and the wind—the flag-snapping, bush-bending winds of Wyoming that scrape the land clear of snow in winter and can blow litter along I-80 from Utah 400 miles across the state to Nebraska.
What’s happening in Washington, DC, on the cable news networks, in affairs elsewhere, is figuratively a million miles away from southwest Wyoming’s Sweetwater County, but the people here know which way the wind is blowing….