Oh, good. Thanks, vkm.
I had a thought related to Ennis and Jack's hometowns, brought on by reading this thread.
So Sage and Lightning Flat are in opposite corners of Wyoming. But they're also in really different landscapes.
When you think of Wyoming, you probably picture the big gorgeous mountains: the Tetons, the Wind Rivers, the Bighorns. Most of the state isn't like that, though. The eastern part of the state is mostly the western part of the Great Plains: there are isolated mountain ranges that pop up as far east as the Black Hills over the border in South Dakota, but mostly its wide open spaces, not much topography, grassland and sagebrush and rangeland. Not many trees. Long distances to the horizon. Boring as anything to drive across. And the wind, oh, the wind.
The western side of the state is a bit different, though. There's a range of smaller mountains west of highway 189, mostly fairly low (the peaks are around maybe 11,000 feet, but most of the mountains are lower, not quite above treeline). The moutains and valleys run north-south, so you can drive long distances in one direction, but there aren't many places to cross the divides and head west into Utah or east into the rest of Wyoming. Pretty country, actually, with trees on the mountainsides and small ranches in the valleys. (The green in the valleys is probably from irrigation, though, I would guess.) It kind of surprises me that there were 43 miles without a curve in the road in Sage, actually, but I haven't been through Sage itself, so I don't know for sure. Pretty in many ways, but also very isolated -- not spectacular enough to attract tourists and second home buyers, but with enough topography that driving a hundred miles would be hard work. And, maybe more important to thinking about Ennis, it's a place where the horizons are close in, where you can't see that far.
So Jack's from the Plains, from the part of the state that people think of as bleak and uninviting, but also the place where you can see forever if you lift your head and look. The sort of place where somebody like Jack could see the horizons and want to go there and across them and see if there was anything different. "Crazy to be somewhere, anywhere but Lightning Flat."
And Ennis is from the low, not-very-spectacular mountains in the western part of the state, the sort of place where it's hard to see the distance, where the world is hemmed in by topography. Even though Ennis moved, to Riverton, he never tries to push beyond the boundaries of the social world where he grew up.
And I've got to get a three-year-old out of bed, so I'll leave those incomplete thoughts, and hope I haven't mangled the characters to fit the landscape as I picture it in my head.
