My first encounter with WCC was in August of my eleventh year while moving my second-eldest sister to Lander for her freshman year. WCC had an administrative building—what is now the Susanka home—the Holy Rosary Classrooms, Boeseke Hall and the Church itself, and the Kellogg apartments. My family and I stayed in what was at the time a Best Western—since “The Inn at Lander” and a travel lodge—on the south side with windows facing the mountains. To this day, the smells and acoustics of those buildings—the piney, clean smell and dull carpeted acoustics of the Inn, and the thick, dusty, warm smell of the Holy Rosary Classrooms and the sound of its heavy oak doors slamming in their frames—raise for me memories of drowsy late-August afternoon sun on that square half mile or so encompassing almost everything there was of the school: a Church, a hall, some classrooms, and the streets and parks that Lander lent her. I am told that there was one student who drove up that year, saw the place, and left immediately. This essay is an attempt to describe what I believe he missed at Wyoming Catholic College.

            Consider the name—Wyoming Catholic College. Place first, creed second, occupation third. The order may or may not be arbitrary, but it suggests a priority of place: whatever else the college is, it is of or from Wyoming. If we are as atomized and individualized as our nation’s moral and political discussions would suggest—and, further, as our immersion in the greatest individualizer, the internet, daily deludes us—then the place we are of or from is an accident accruing to an autonomous will. Within this worldview, we would be tempted to view it primarily as what sets it apart as a college: its outdoor program, its seminar classroom style, the technology policy, etc. The priority of its name, I would argue, indicates this is, in a sense, misguided.

            Consider the American Midwest. I knew the Midwest—distinct from the Great Plains and the American South—as an exceptionally “middle” kind of place. The landscape has no extreme features: the lakes are small, the river bluffs are unimpressive, the river I knew, the Missouri, was wide, slow-moving, and shallow, the trees are long-lived but unremarkable depositors of leaves, the summer-home of cicadas and the winter home of grey squirrels. The most extreme thing about the region, save the tornadoes, were the spring and summer storms, feared mainly for the damage they could deal to the middle-class and whose seriousness I gaged by how hard their thunder could shake the pictures on my bedroom wall. I do not remember the warm months having much wind. There was a still, dreamy quality to my childhood neighborhood: quiet late-afternoons with oak-leave dappled sunlight broken by the hum of a lawnmower and the call of a mourning dove. This contrasted with the winter and early spring months: grey skies for what felt like six months, dormant yellow-brown grass in squalid lawns next to dirty little homes with white or grey siding and gravel driveways on lots butted up to the highways and divided from everyone else by chain link or ancient wood-slat fences at crazy angles to the ground. The streets and gutters would fill with leaves which, in their turn, filled the air with the smell of leaf-rot and mold. In the summer months, one had a pleasant, sleepy, easygoing grasp of things; in the winter, one tried desperately not to grasp but to persevere until the late spring and summer. The winter low was not very low—the winters were less harsh than those of Minnesota, Wisconsin, or anything north and east of the Rocky’s—but the summer high was not very high. This meant that there was never a point at which one’s inner insistence on comfort and ease could be silenced by necessity’s command. If you are hot, go inside. If you are bored, pull out your phone. If you are cold, go inside. If you are hungry, stop at Quiktrip—they have those taquitos you like. If life in Los Angeles, New York, or Miami is a kind of prolonged adolescence or young-adulthood, life in the Midwest is a prolonged infancy: warm, womb-like, comforting, and half-perceived if perceived at all. If you stay, you dream. If you leave, it may become little more than an interstate corridor.

            Some of my first hard, clear, sharp memories came from leaving Missouri. Driving my eldest sister to and from her undergraduate studies at Thomas Aquinas College across Kansas, Nevada, Utah, and Northern California in 2003 and 2007, followed by driving my second-eldest sister back and forth from Lander from 2007 onwards. Most prominent in these memories are the sky, the inescapable light, and the deafening quiet. From KC to California, I was almost blinded by the light and dizzied by how we never ran out of sky to run up into. From KC to Fremont County, the sky and the light met stillness. The interstate noise faded after Rawlins, moving my focus from the road we traveled to the mountains sitting sharp against sky into which we were always traveling. And then the drop: from high dry stillness into the Lander valley, into quiet streets with backyard brooks, cottonwood, pine, and aspens, the glow of the Lander Bar, and the mountains’ shadow stretching black fingers towards Holy Rosary on summer evenings. The valley sits cradled by light and sky and stillness, dry, fragrant, and shining under a close, warm sun.

            Into this cradle comes the student. Consider the following image. In the Midwest, when our burr oaks and sugar maples and sycamores fall or are felled, and the wood is chopped and stacked on the bare earth, it becomes waterlogged. If not elevated and covered, the wood slowly loses its ability to burn and instead feeds the ground and the insects. The one good is traded for another, of course, but that wood will not light anything. However, when pines or cottonwoods or aspens drop in Fremont County, this good is not lost as immediately and sometimes not at all. Unless this wood falls on in a swamp or along a creek, Wyoming wood dries, becoming more capable of lighting. In the Midwest, wood soaks and rots; in Wyoming, it dries and leaps more readily into flame. In the same way, the student drawn out of the womb-like Midwest into the sun and sky and stillness blinks, breathes, and begins to feel with his hands and map out in his mind the contours of this bright, hard, bracing place. As he climbs and thinks and considers, his memory sharpens, his limbs harden, his cheeks ruddy, his eyes shine, and his laugh quickens. And, when he enters class, all of him has become such as to be lit by the pages of old books.

            If what I have described of the Midwest can be broadened to the current culture of this nation—insofar as both are dissolute, distracted, and infantile—I think Wyoming Catholic College stands as an unique and irreplaceable antidote to the illness within the American soul. By being of or from Wyoming, the school prepares souls to be of or from the great books—something we already were, but which our nation has forgotten. The great surprise that WCC offers to its students is not only this elevation into sky and sun and stillness—the clarity of a mind freshly aired from a social space grown close by distraction, faction, and intemperance—but the consequent joy of finding oneself rejoicing in the burning. We rejoice in our proper act, our fulfillment, as that which can be prepared by the natural world and fired by the pages of old books. To read God’s first book—and, hence, to read what we have written in response—it is best to move closer to the light and out of the dim; from distraction, faction, and comfort into sun and sky and stillness.