WYO SHIFT

Alexandra Fuller, the woman who wrote the wonderfully accurate portrayal of Wyoming's landscape and its energy industry and its meth problems in the New Yorker a year ago, has now written a book based on the essay, and she is profiled in the Times today.

Wyoming, my home state in case you didn't know, where I spent the first 19 years of my life, really is a red zone, a hot spot in the oil war. It's appropriate that the dark father Dick Cheney is from there, and I grew up looking at nuclear weapons replicas in the middle of our city, proud statues like the Esther Hobart Morris "equality state" tribute in front of the capital, and now they're destroying its landscape with insatiable drilling and mining. Wyoming is supposed to be left alone. It's a place no one is supposed to come to, and barely anyone is meant to leave. And as much as I hated it growing up, it's a travesty to see it change, and to see its citizens, hard working and spirited and proud, be preyed upon.