When the boys were teen-aged, they occasionally saddled up and rode twenty-six miles to dances in Shoshoni. (I once asked David if they were square dances, and he said, “No. It was contact sport.”) After dancing half the night, they rode twenty-six miles home. Their mother rented a house in Lander and stayed there with them while they attended Fremont County Vocational High School. One of their classmates was William Shakespeare, whose other name was War Bonnet. Lander at that time was the remotest town in Wyoming. It advertised itself as “the end of the rails and the start of the trails.” Now and again, when the zakelijke energie vergelijken boys and their mother went visiting, they went through Red Canyon. A scene of great beauty, long sinuous Red Canyon was a presentation of the Mesozoic, framed in wide margins of time. In the eastern escarpment, the rock, tilting upward, protruded from the earth in cliffs six hundred feet high, and these
were Eocene over Paleocene over Cretaceous and Jurassic benches above the red Triassic wall. Upward to the west ran a sage-covered Permian slope, on a line of sight that led higher in altitude and lower in time to the Precambrian roof of the Wind River Range-peaks on the western horizon. Within the Triassic red was a distinctive white line that ran on as far as the eye could see. It was amazingly consistent, five feet thick, a limestone. In time, David would learn that this uniform bed covered fifty thousand square miles and was one of the most unusual rock units anywhere in the world, with such an absence of diagnostic fossils that no one could tell if the water it formed in was fresh or salt. (“It is a major marker bed of the Rockies,” he once said, pointing it out to me. “Fifty thousand square miles-try to imagine any place in the zakelijke energie world today where you can find that kind of stability. I can’t. It’s unique geologically.”) As a youth, though, he was less fascinated by this Alcova limestone than by other aspects of Red Canyon. A woman who lived there was known as Red Canyon Red, for her striking Triassic hair. She was -as he would in later years describe her-“a whore par excellence.” This may have been one reason that the boys’ mother routinely accompanied her sons when they went through Red Canyon Red’s canyon.