death + diaspora in the land of dick cheney

My brain is still operating at amputee mode; I’ll mine deeper when I have cavernous hours in Wyoming to reboot.
Last night, I was describing Cheyenne to some friends, that we regularly hosted high school parties at abandoned nuclear missile silos in the plains’ empty guts; I spent at least three months of 11th grade climbing radioactive steel girders and spraypainting phrases like “FUK DEATH” on the walls of underground bomb shelters.
Here is how industrial-boom Americans end up living in a place like Cheyenne: In the first part of the 20th Century, after the Wild West promise of gold and cattle led US cavalries to nearly wipe out the Plains Indians, the Union Pacific Railroad lured an influx of workers, largely Mexican immigrants fleeing the bloodiest moment of the revolution, including my grandparents. The UP was grooming Cheyenne as the midpoint for East Coasters looking to pan, but eventually lost out to Denver thanks to capitalism and monopolies and steel empires and such things.
After the UPR wound down, FE Warren Air Force Base was the only enterprise that kept anyone coming. Still is. Its welcome mat, flanking the city below an overpass and near the fairgrounds: two life-size replicas of nuclear missiles. An alpha greeting, a cold war memo. 150 Peacekeepers slept here. Western expansion.