Bosler
I’m dreaming of a trailer
In Bosler Wyoming
With tires on the roof dear
And you by my side.
…. From the song, “Bosler” by Jalan Crossland
With all due respect to Mr. Crossland, nobody, but nobody, seems to want to go to Bosler, Wyoming. There isn’t an intact trailer in the town, and no real streets for kids to play in as implied in his song. But his near-comical lyrics about a lonesome city apartment dweller longing for the open plains of Wyoming are an allegorical feast that says much about the spirit of the West. There are times when I feel that way myself.
Bosler was once a cattle town with a railroad mail stop, post office, stores, a school and the usual church. There was even a four-room motel, unplumbed of course, but with “Men” and “Women” privies. The need to use one of those “facilities” in a wind-blown January night would have hopefully been alleviated by chamber pots in the rooms. Bosler remained a colorful pass through as long as US 287 was the main route from Laramie to Jackson, but Mr. Eisenhower’s interstate system nailed Bosler’s coffin shut. So now it looks like Jeffrey City, a once-thriving uranium-mining town a bit further along 287, and other ghost towns in Wyoming. The famous Virginian Hotel, or what’s left of it, is in the crossroad of Medicine Bow, a few miles north of Bosler.
(Note: The following images were processed in a Jack Spencer-inspired style.)
The truck is doing what most vehicles do in Bosler, passing through without slowing. The four small buildings on the right are the remains of the “motel”.
The Bosler Consolidated School sits starkly empty on the plains on the north side of town. As with the rest of Bosler, the school is abandoned - with broken windows, peeling paint on the classroom walls, and the campus a sea of prairie grass.There are miles of open space between the school and the distant Laramie Range forming the horizon. There’s a road over there in the distance, where cars are mere specks.
Bosler is a graveyard for old, abandoned vehicles, of which there is no shortage, some in the open, others behind a decrepit wood fence. A large yard west of the railroad is also filled with junk vehicles, including old school buses.
The last business in Bosler may be Doc’s Western Village. Like the fenced-in junk yard a little way down the road, there is still stuff inside the old store. Somebody is paying a utility bill for it as indicated by a drop cord coming from a side door to an old motor home parked to the right of this image. As Jalan Crossland’s song says, “In Bosler Wyoming there ain’t much to buy”.
So, as the sun began its descent behind the Snowy Range, I got into my car, pulled out on US 287, and headed southward to Laramie, pondering what I had seen and sensed, while the never-ceasing wind and the prairie grass continued their slow reclamation of Bosler.
Thanks, Mr. Crossland, for reminding us that we can dream.