In the Solomons, the Battle for Henderson Field ended with an American victory, and the Battle of Santa Cruz Islands was raging. On this date, the USS Hornet of Doolittle Raid fame was badly damaged, which would lead to her scuttling the following day.
Japanese losses in trying to take Henderson Field were grossly outside, with over 2,500 men being killed in comparison to less than 70 Americans.
In the Second Battle of El Alamein the Defense of Outpost Snip action began.
This Romanesque style church is the First Baptist Church in Torrington Wyoming. I'm unaware of the history of the church itself, so I have no other details on it.
Wyoming's largest utility to retire majority of coal-fired power plant units by 2030
Wind Farm north of Glenrock as viewed from Muddy Mountain south of Casper.
This includes units at Dave Johnson, outside of Glenrock.
At the same time, the sale of mines to a Navajo corporation has been given the go ahead in spite of some questioning by members of the Navajo nation on whether the purchase is a good idea.
The reason that might be questioned is because a person might legitimately look at the trend line for coal and not be too optimistic about it. The closure of coal fired electrical generation units right withing the state really puts that into focus. Most of the coal mined in Wyoming goes elsewhere, but if generating units are being closed down in the state, where transportation costs are obviously the lowest, there's reasons to be pessimistic about coal's future in general. Particularly when the owners of one of those plants announced one of the units was being converted to natural gas.
Glenrock may be in the very epicenter of what we're seeing in terms of changing times and reflective of them.
I like Glenrock.
Indeed, in an odd tidbit, I guess, my wife and I spent our first night as a married couple in Glenrock where we stayed at the Hotel Higgins.
The little Converse County town between Casper and Douglas was originally Deer Creek Station, an Army post along the Oregon Trail. It shares that sort of history with Casper, which of course was the site of at least three "stations" during the 1860s, and which is bordered on both sides, if you include the neighboring communities, by the locations of former Oregon Trail bridges. In being an Oregon Trail place marker, Glenrock also shares a common history with Casper, as it was a marked place on the trail. A small batholith there was the "rock in the Glen".
Glenrock as a town is at least as old as Casper, or at least I suspect it to be. It supported ranching in the area, when transportation was much more primitive, and was an established compact town prior to World War One. Oil was discovered between Casper and Glenrock in 1913 and the Big Muddy field was in development by 1916, fueling the refineries in Casper. A refinery was built in Glenrock in 1917 to take advantage of the production which was closer to Glenrock than to Casper.
Following that, like all of Central Wyoming, Glenrock was tied to the oil and gas industry, and it has been ever since. But at some later point, and I don't actually know when, the major Dave Johnston Power Plant was built there.
Dave Johnston borders the North Platte River and is just a few miles away from a coal bed that at one time fueled it. It became the economic hub of the town for decades. It's been there my entire life and its so much in the background that its one of those things I don't ever think of as having not been there. At least one of my earliest memories involves me going with my father to hunt east of Dave Johnston when I was no more than five. My father's 1956 Chevrolet truck became stuck and we started to walk out, but a railroad crew stopped and pulled us out before we had to walk too far. I recall my father was impressed that I hadn't been worried by the event.
St. Louis Catholic Church in Glenrock.
During the 1970s and 1980s Dave Johnston was a mock target for the Strategic Air Command, and occasionally you could see B-52 bombers flying low over it, using it as a mock Soviet target. And during winter months you always take note of the plants steam rising up from a distance, a marker that you are near Casper if you are heading that way, or not far from Douglas if you are going in the other direction.
For many years now, the workforce at Dave Johnston has been declining, and the town has been hurting as a result. During the oil boom of the 2000s the town picked up in economic activity as oil and gas workers passed through it. Some lived there, but many more were temporary residents or Casper residents, pulling off of the Interstate Highway to access the oilfield north of town. An effort to boost the local agricultural community by putting in a sale barn failed, as modern transportation, perhaps, continued to give Riverton and Torrington, the established barns, the regional advantage.
And as wind has been coming in, the same is true. Now, when you go by Glenrock, you not only see the massive coal fired power plant steaming just east outside of town, but massive wind turbines turning north of town. If you take the highway out of the town, you run right past them on the highway.
Where this leads is yet to be seen. Converse County is having a major oil boom right now. And it has a lot of wind turbine construction going on at the same time. The ranches in the area remain, but the town has also seen, very slowly, a unique retirement phenomenon in which Casperites retire there, wanting to stay in the region but tired of Casper's growth. No fewer than three of the men I've served with in the National Guard have settled their in retirement, with two in Glenrock.
Glenrock was a way station on the Oregon Trail. Then a small ranching town. Then an oil and gas town, and a power company town. Where it's headed can't be known, but through Wyoming's boom and busts, it's remained remarkably viable, if not always fully well, compared to many other Wyoming communities. It likely will weather the storms it seems to be facing fairly well.
There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee,
and the mother of Jesus was there.
Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.
When the wine ran short,
the mother of Jesus said to him,
"They have no wine."
And Jesus said to her,
"Woman, how does your concern affect me?
My hour has not yet come."
His mother said to the servers,
"Do whatever he tells you."
Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings,
each holding twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus told them,
"Fill the jars with water."
So they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them,
"Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter."
So they took it.
And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine,
without knowing where it came from
— although the servers who had drawn the water knew —,
the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him,
"Everyone serves good wine first,
and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one;
but you have kept the good wine until now."
Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee
and so revealed his glory,
and his disciples began to believe in him.
John, Chapter 2.*
Okay, we've done beer, and we've done whiskey, what about wine.
And no, we're not grasping for those lyrics from the famous John Lee Hooker song.
Frankly, I know nothing about wine.
I've always known that, but it really occurred to me after I decided to add this post, following my one on beer and whiskey.
Indeed, I pondered why that might be.
My parents rarely drank wine, but for that matter my father only bought beer during the summer and while we often had a bottle of Canadian Whiskey on hand, it usually lasted an eternity. Indeed, when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, it was considered to be a social obligation to have whiskey on hand for social occasions. My folks weren't huge entertainers (they were definitely better than we are here however), and that's about the only time the whiskey was ever brought out. We didn't stock more than one kind and for whatever reason, the only kind of whiskey my father ever bought was Canadian Lord Calvert. I supposed that this might be because my mother was Canadian, but as she never ever drank it, that supposition might be way, way, off the mark.
One of my aunts and uncles liked Scotch, and liked Cutty Sark for that matter. Asking my father about it, he told me that it tasted like paint thinner, and I have to agree. And not just about Cutty Sark, but all Scotch Whiskey.
Anyhow, when I was a kid, on very rare occasion, my father would buy Mogan David. I'm not sure why. It always came in big gallon sized bottles, and it lasted forever. I haven't had it for years and years, and indeed not since I was young, probably ten years old or younger, and I'd get a small glass when they bought it. As it isn't the kind of drink you serve to guests, and as they so rarely bought it, and quit buying it at some point, I don't know what the thought was.
Anyhow, when growing up and still young, "wine" to me meant Mogan David.
When I was in my very early teens my mother, for some still unknown reason, took a wine making class at the local community college and she accordingly started making wine as a hobby. Simply taking up wine making was really odd for a person who basically didn't drink and who was living in a family that nearly didn't, so I don't know what she was thinking. It was a mistake all the way around for a variety of reasons.
For one reason, she was a horrible cook and at least based upon her wine making experiment, being a bad cook equates with being a bad vintner. Her wine was awful. She made most of it from berries that she harvested from where our garden was located and for years and years I assumed thereafter that the berries must have been basically unpalatable. Later on, I found they weren't, when other people made other things out of them. Go figure.
Fortunately, after stinking up the house with the fermentation process for awhile, she gave it up. Pretty bad stuff.
I don't know if that early experience left me tainted on wine in general. I'd had beer obviously so apparently that didn't carry over. As an adult I've been exposed to wine a lot more, but I've picked up a very limited taste for it. Basically, I like Chianti and buy it on odd occasion. I don't like any other wine much unless they are very close to Chianti. Some of the wines that people really like I absolutely detest. Most of them actually. Dry Champagne I like, but it's not like you are going to drink gallons of that unless you are Winston Churchill.
So my knowledge on wine is super limited and will stay that way.
Anyhow, as I did beers and whiskey, and as I'm looking at this from a Distributist and local agricultural level, and as I know there are a couple of wineries in the state, I decided to complete the Tour d'alcohol with that.
Now, going into that I'll note that I'm very skeptical about the ability of Wyoming to produce any wine in the first place, unless it's made out of the wild stuff that my mom used, and I'd discourage that. While my mother, in her brief vintner stage decided to plant a couple of Concorde grape vines over my objection (she never had a grasp on agricultural yield and she couldn't accept that a couple of vines weren't going to yield adequate grapes for fermenting, and she didn't accept that the harsh weather here wasn't conducive to grapes), Wyoming doesn't really have the climate for growing grapes.
Indeed, grapes are sufficiently susceptible to climate that you can actually tell what the climate of a past era was like based on them. The line basically north of the Rhine in Europe and west the English Channel are the beer lines, basically (with some blending of the two) as you can grow grains north and west of there, but not grapes, usually. When you can grow grapes in those regions, something odd is going on. We know, for example, that there was a period when England produced a lot of wine. It was during the Medieval Climatic Optimum. You can't grow them there now. Likewise, during the same era Newfoundland had abundant wild grapes. It doesn't now. There's never been a time when you couldn't grow grapes in France, Spain, Italy, Greece and North Africa, which is why all those areas have been wine regions (the modern exception being North Africa but only because of Islam).
So you can't do much with that here.
Apparently you can do a little, however.
Before I go on, there's one additional thing I should mention that I recently learned. I've always known that there are wines that are attributed to regions that surprise me, but I didn't realize that simply labeling wine is a big deal. I had no idea. Apparently in California, for example, a lot of wine labels are basically that. Some big mega winery produces all kinds of wine and ships it out under lots of labels under contract. People buying the label tend to think that a winery by that name is produced there, but nope, it may be just a label.
Indeed, a Benedictine Monk I know told me that the wine sold under the label of his home abbey was not produced there, but in another state and sold under the abbey's name via contract. He was careful to note that as the abbey did in fact produce other things, but not wine. The abbey was located in the far north so I would have really wondered about how the accomplished producing wine but, nope, they didn't do it.
That's a bit of a shame really as both wine and beer were once widely produced by monastic holy orders and for practical reasons. Somehow, as we've progressed through the 20th Century and became more and more hedonistic and amoral we none the less found more in more in the way of societal puritanism to apply to people otherwise living moral lives. Odd. And its further misguided in that the Puritans themselves were not teetotalers at all.
Well, anyhow, I've come to know something about beer and whiskey but I remain really ignorant on wine.
So, anyhow, back to wine and Wyoming.
There are, surprisingly, a few Wyoming wineries.
The claimed first winery in Wyoming was Table Mountain Winery. It interestingly was the brainchild of a UW student from a southeastern Wyoming farming family who researched the topic while a student and went on to apply what he learned, receiving a grant in the process.
And its a true winery. A ten acre vineyard supplies the grapes for seven different wines which, after looking at their website, I realized that I have in fact seen in the stores. I haven't tried it, but once again, this is a Distributist or Agrarian triumph, as its amazingly all local and they've been at it for nearly twenty years now.
I should note, before I move on, that the "claimed" item above is because well prior to this time, when I was a student in Laramie in the 1980s, there was some sort of winery in one of the small towns up in the mountains west of Laramie. This was the Hiney Winery. I know nothing about it other than that it advertised on radio a lot, back in the days when people, including me, listed to their car radios. I recall it as their kitschy advertisements always closed out with the line "buy a little Hiney" or something like that, featuring that obvious double entendre. I never tried it, and have no idea how it was produced. Laramie is already 7,000 feet in elevation and the towns in the mountains were even higher than that, so I'd be amazed if the grapes were produced locally.
Moving on, Cody Wyoming has a Buffalo Jump Winery. Knowing what a buffalo jump is, I wonder about the name, but the tourist town has a winery so called. The last time I was in Cody I noticed it or at least an outlet selling the wines, but I didn't stop in (I'm obviously a very poor candidate for wine tourism). Their website indicates that the grapes are from California, Oregon and Washington, and they have a second outlet in Arizona. So they're producing wine, but they're acquiring the grapes. The owners also indicate that they're in buffalo ranching, and indeed they were in that prior to being vintners.
There's also a Jackson Hole Winery, making Jackson Hole the location of at least two breweries and one distillery, or perhaps two distilleries if we include nearby Driggs Idaho in the mix. Their website indicates that they produce 2,500 cases of wine per year and a large percentage of the grapes are from a farm owned by the vintner, which is a family operation. However, the vineyards are in the Sonoma region and other grapes are acquired via partnerships and business arrangements. As Jackson Hole is over 6,000 feet high, the lack of local grapes isn't surprising. They do produce the wine themselves.
Weston Wineries, which apparently also produces liqueurs, is another Wyoming winery that relies upon importing the constituents from other states, in this case grape juices. Indeed, their website specifically notes that they do that and that its common in the industry, which it truly is. In looking it up, I realized that it too is something I've seen in the stores but never tried.
A really unique winery is found in Gillette Wyoming and was mentioned here the other day in the context of distilleries, that being Big Lost Meadery. As it name indicates, it specializes in mead.
I'll be frank. I can't stand mead so I'm not going to try this product.
Most people have never tried mead and are only familiar with it, if they are at all, from stories about Vikings quaffing down buckets of mead. Given that, we imagine it in our minds being something like Russian Imperial Stout or something. It's not like that at all.
Mead is made from honey.
That's right, it's made from honey.
Now, I'll confess that my experiences with mead are quite limited. When I was 19 years old, and hence old enough to first drink in Wyoming (the drinking age was then 19), I bought a bottle of mead due to the Viking legends. It was awful. I likely didn't make it past the first glass before I tossed the bottle out.
Recently I've had mead again, but for an odd reason.
Up at the start of this entry I noted that my mother tried her hand at wine making after taking a class at the local community college. About a year or so ago my son, in college, decided to try it too. His efforts were less reliant on products of the wild, indeed they weren't at all reliant on it, and he gave it up after an initial effort. Nonetheless, a friend of his wanted to try mead and so they recently made a batch.
Their mead wasn't nearly as bad as the mead that I had when I was young, and I note that there's "dry" mead that's less sweet. His friend and his family were really impressed with it. While I was much less unimpressed with it than with the stuff I had years ago, I'm not going to take it up.
Which means that I'm not going to try Big Lost Meadery's product. It may be great, if you like mead, but as I don't, I'm not going to bother.
Based on their website, Big Lost (which also brews beer) plays a bit with the manly man image of mead. But the fact that the Norse and other northern Europeans drank it at one time actually tells me something else.
Grapes don't grow in the far north but there are plenty of bees up there, and bees make honey. The fact that the early Scandinavians made mead (and they weren't the only ones by any means) tells me that if people figure out how to make ferment something, they'll ferment anything available. Honey was available. As soon as beer became available, it's worth noting, the Norsemen switched to that.**
*St. John covers here, of course, Jesus' first public miracle, the changing of water into wine at the Wedding Feast at Cana.
The entire story is an interesting one, and not simply (but of course principally) because it was Jesus' first public miracle. Like most of the Bible, the story is multi dimensional in all sorts of ways. One thing we can take from here, from a historical prospective, is the practices that pertained to wine at the time.
Very clearly, then as now, there were various grades of wine. We learn from this story that the wine that Christ created from the water was of superb quality. The steward was amazed that the hosts had saved the best wine for last, a practice that woudl be the reverse of what we'd expect then and now.
Also, based upon the common size of water vessels at the time, this involved a very large quantity of wine.
That's interesting not only because it tells us of the commonality of wine at the time. . .nobody was shocked that there was a lot of wine, but running out of wine would have been a disaster for the hosts, but also because it touches on a theological point, that being that the drink that was brought into the room at the Last Supper was wine, not "grape juice", as some take great straining strides to maintain.
**I've referenced before, but the novel Krisin Lavransdottir, while a novel, gives a really good account of daily life in Medieval Norway including the drinking habits of Norwegians at that time. Citing a novel for factual information is always hazardous, but its so well researched I feel it can be relied upon for those details, and it makes it plain that a vast amount of beer and ale were consumed. Mead is mentioned exactly once in the book.
My father took this photograph of sheep in a pen, but I don't have any of the other details and can't quite tell where it is. It's clearly on a railroad, and the building in the background makes me suspect that it's near Glenrock, but I don't know for sure.
