Facing Loneliness in a Wyoming Ghost Town

The little prince asks the snake, “Where are the people? It’s a little lonely in the desert.” To which the snake responds, “It is lonely when you’re among people, too.”

This is Why-oming, a column by Jenny Tinghui Zhang that explores life as a woman of color in Wyoming, one of the whitest and loneliest places in the United States.

Jeffrey City, Wyoming, lies just off Highway 287, where the town’s plaque proudly announces itself, “The Biggest Bust of Them All.” On an uncharacteristically warm September day, three classmates and I drove two and a half hours north from Laramie and into the heart of Wyoming. We were writers living and studying our craft in Wyoming, looking for something worth writing about. Jeffrey City seemed like a good option: It was a ghost town in a place that already felt like a ghost state.

Once a uranium mining boomtown in the seventies, Jeffrey City boasted over 800 mine workers and a population of about 4,000 at one point. The 28.5 square mile area enjoyed all the luxuries of fast money and boomtown optimism—complete with three bars, churches, two banks, three gas stations, a bowling alley, a movie theater, a roller-skating rink, its own newspaper, and a high school with an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

But, as with all booms, there was a bust. In the late 1970s, the uranium market collapsed and the local mine was forced to close. In the three years following, Jeffrey City’s population decreased to less than one thousand people. By 1986, ninety-five percent of its residents had left town.

Today, Jeffrey City is a census-designated place and better known as a ghost town, although about forty-two people still call it home. The only businesses still in operation are the Green Mountain Motel, the Split Rock Bar & Cafe, the First Baptist Church, and a pottery shop called Monk King Bird Pottery just across the highway.

My classmates and I explored the town in silence, afraid of disturbing the heavy emptiness just by being there. The place had all the usual characteristics of a ghost town. Empty cars and trailers littered the overgrown, yellow landscape; a school bus filled with doomsday-prepper gear sat in the middle of a field. Discolored apartments lined what were once streets, their windows boarded up and spray-painted. The abandoned buildings, what-could-have-beens, looked like they had been ripped apart, their wooden planks and insulation foam exposed and rotten. Whether by man or by nature, we couldn’t be sure.

The elementary school, hardly different from a dollhouse with its miniature furniture, still had chalk on the board. We peered into the dusty windows of the middle school, where home economics textbooks lay open to a chapter on melting butter. We passed a deserted fire station, a gym shaped like a prefab aircraft hangar, and an old mechanic shop with letters spelling out “www.youtube.com/theshepherdschapel” against the corrugated metal wall.

Then, there were the more disquieting things. We found a gigantic one-room church sitting three feet off the ground on wooden stilts and concrete blocks, its middle sinking into the earth like a years-old mattress. If you looked in the fields of what were once yards and playgrounds, you could just make out orphaned four-step concrete stairs. They peppered the landscape, leading to nowhere and waiting for buildings that would never come to be.

Standing in the middle of this once thriving town, all I could think about was how the wind could just run through a place, caterwauling across plains and rivers and through empty hallways, the things left behind. This was the kind of isolation that made you feel like something was wrong. Even as we stood there, the four of us in a group together, I felt a sinking sense of loneliness, like I was standing at the end of the world.

A kid’s tricycle. A phonebook open to the letter D. It was eerie to see things as they were. Once upon a time, a hand put down the book and the book was never picked back up again. When did a child last cross the monkey bars? What was the last thing bought at the liquor store? Where did the fire trucks go? Jeffrey City lost everything in three years. Looking at the caracasses of a civilization, I couldn’t help but shudder at how quickly we could abandon entire lives.

Life goes on around Jeffrey City at 55 mph, but it isn’t entirely devoid of human life just yet. Aside from tourists and roadtrippers who stop to inspect this town in the middle of nowhere, Jeffrey City is still considered home by a few.

For example, we met two hunters from Texas who bought a house specifically for hunting trips. We met a man who emerged from one of the derelict apartment buildings, looking like he hadn’t seen the sun in days. (To his credit, how could he? All of his windows were boarded up.) The last people we met were the owners of Monk King Bird Pottery, the rickety pottery shop across the highway with “OPEN” signs adorning the building walls and RVs strewn across the yard.

“I’m known around here as The Mad Potter,” the owner, Byron, told us. He certainly fit the “mad” part—his straw-colored hair was blown back so that it crowned his head, like an Einstein of the West. Also inside was his buddy Chuck, an older man sitting on a rumpled armchair. He had long grey hair and breathing tubes.

The shop was crowded with Byron’s pottery, which he called Red Canyon Ware. It was a take on agateware, which comes from mixing two different clay bodies of different colors, producing a marbled effect. Each piece of pottery had trippy designs of black, brown, and rusted red melting down the sides. This, Byron told us, was done with three different colors of clay on the wheel. He’d then carve into the pottery to reveal the tri-colored patterns. It was imperfect and wavy and droopy all at once, as if something out of an acid dream.

Other pottery looked like they had been victims of a controlled explosion. Byron called them his “shot pots.” For those, he would take a freshly-thrown pot of still-wet clay and shoot a hole through it with a .22 caliber bullet. He then patched it from the inside, giving way to a pot that looked like it had been shot through.

It was strangely reflective of life in this lonely place, I thought, inspecting the pottery. Everything had the look of melting, like something that was once right, then slowly, over time, became wrong.

The shop had two small rooms, one of which was occupied by Byron’s materials and wheels. The walls were covered with scribbles like phone numbers, “NO DAPL,” and copies of the same painting: a bunch of naked people running towards the viewer, their faces ghoulish, their bodies hollow and bony.

“Those are Chuck’s paintings,” Byron said. Chuck told us that the vision came to him in a dream, and it was the only thing he had been able to paint since. “It’s what the apocalypse will look like when it comes.”

“It’s what the apocalypse will look like when it comes.”

Byron, full name Byron Seeley, had been making pottery since 1984. He was born in Lander, Wyoming, and studied pottery in Austin, Texas, and Taos, New Mexico, before coming back to Wyoming and buying this store—a gas station at the time—for $5,000. Back then, it had no ceilings. But it was a space, and it could be his space, so he bought the entire thing in one go. That was almost a decade ago. Now, it was his own little piece of land and home and solitude out here in Jeffrey City.

We asked him what it was like living here. It was hard to believe that anyone could sustain themselves in a town with so few resources, especially in the middle of the brutal Wyoming landscape, where it snowed nine months out of the year.

“It’s lonely,” he said, then he smiled. “You get depressed, but that’s just part of the deal.”

“Props to you,” I said, taking in the empty liquor bottles and mismatched armchairs. “I don’t think I could do it.”

We drove away from Jeffrey City more quiet than we were when we arrived. We were thinking about the abandoned church, the man who lived in a dark, falling-apart apartment, and about The Mad Potter.

Most people spend their whole lives trying to escape loneliness, whether it’s around other people, in a place, or in a relationship. There’s a scene in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince that encapsulates this. The little prince, who finds himself in the desert, asks the snake, “Where are the people? It’s a little lonely in the desert.” To which the snake responds, “It is lonely when you’re among people, too.”

When we do encounter loneliness, we deal with it in different ways. Some of us turn to friends and family for solace, others to vices. And when you live in the least populated state, one that suffers from below-zero temperatures and oft-closed roads, loneliness is a default, one you try to fight tooth and nail against.

Except for Byron. He chose to be lonely, to face it head-on. He picked out the most isolated place in the most isolated state, and he still had a smile on his face when he said that word: Lonely. Like he had made his peace with it, and there was nothing else he’d rather be.

Back in Laramie, we returned to our routines as the winter came early in October. I drank scalding tea throughout the day to warm my blood. I stayed inside, kept the curtains closed, and covered every inch of my body to protect myself from the cold. If I went out for classes, I disappeared into my hat and scarf and coat, my nose the only piece that remained exposed. When I breathed, the hairs in my nostrils straightened, almost as if the extreme cold woke them and set them right.

I wrote through the winter. No amount of hot soup or socks or blankets could make my toes any less cold. I saw fewer people, spoke less. There were days when I went to bed, realizing that I hadn’t said a word out loud the entire day.

Then, in the middle of a Laramie December, the wind ratcheted up to 60 mph and pressed against my windows. I was reminded of Byron in Jeffrey City, where this kind of wind could pick his shop up and move it. He chose to remain lonely and persevere in the face of this wind, this cold, this uncertainty, devoting his life to his art and sacrificing just about everything else. It wasn’t, I realized as I looked around my apartment (which had become something of a personal cave), all that different from being a writer.

We call it a lonely business, this writing thing. When I write, I feel like I’m screaming into a void most of the time, convincing and unconvincing myself that what I have to say is meaningful and good. On top of that, it can be difficult to talk to non-writers about writing—especially when you’re in the middle of it. It’s not something you can emerge from at the end of the day and chat with your non-writing friends about.

“Oh, I just can’t figure this one character out. I’m worried I’m coming across as too sentimental. The ending just won’t stick. Anyway, how was your day?”

Some of us are lucky enough to be in school for writing, where all of our peers are writers and understand the toil. Others have found writers in their community, forming writing groups and support networks locally and digitally.

Still, no matter the state of a writer’s friendships, the act of writing demands isolation for many of us. So much of writing is being in your head, pacing to and fro, deleting, undoing, deleting again. It is muttering to yourself, chewing your fingernails, laying in bed at night thinking about one sentence you can’t get right. It is waking up before everyone else or staying up long after they have gone to sleep—just so you can write. For an art whose end product seeks to connect deeply with its readers, the act of writing is ironically lonesome.

For an art whose end product seeks to connect deeply with its readers, the act of writing is ironically lonesome.

It’s a plight any artist faces. This feeling of having so much inside of you that you might explode at any moment, but having very few people you can trust to talk about that explosion with. Find a reader you trust, writers are told. Someone who can give you good, honest feedback, someone who can sit down with five pages, or fifty, and give your manuscript the kind of attention it needs.

Byron had Chuck. Sometimes, he even had customers who fired shots at what would eventually become their own shot pots. This was their live collaboration, their trust. Not everyone can be so lucky.

From where I am in Wyoming, the loneliness of being a writer is compounded by a true physical and emotional separation from my home. I left Austin, Texas, almost two years ago to study writing here, and in that time, my good friends have started new jobs or promotions, gotten engaged, or scattered across the country. Their lives are moving on, while mine is starting over.

I chose to follow my dreams. The price I have to pay for doing so is loneliness, just as Byron chose to live in extreme isolation for his art. I remembered looking around at his studio filled with empty bottles, how I said “I don’t think I could do it.” Was I—or anyone else who chases the unexpected and fantastical—so different from him after all?

I tried reaching out to Byron a few weeks ago, but he didn’t have an email. Just a phone number that rang and rang every time I called. That’s when I remembered the whiteboard propped up inside his shop, one to notify guests if he wasn’t there:

call me on CB radio

push to talk

let go to listen

We with great expectations and our own boom town optimisms will always be lonely creatures. Jeffrey City started with immense optimism and remains barely intact, held together by curious tourists and a few residents who refuse to let the town go down. But it is still there—in the Split Rock Cafe serving hungry travelers, in the one student and teacher they bus in during the school year, in a mad potter making pottery because his life demanded it so.

Jeffrey City is the truest reflection of an artist’s interior life, the rise and fall and eventual, hopeful resurrection, the stubborn determination to continue, the slight delusion that propels us forward.

“Let go to listen.”

The people in Jeffrey City had done just that. There was the wind, yes, and the creak of rusty signposts. But there was also the contentment of quietude, the beauty in uncomplication.

And when night came and cars stopped rushing past on the highway, there was a simple truth: that when you choose lonely, maybe you aren’t so lonely after all.