Capturing Nature

One interesting thing is striking me almost immediately. There is quite a difference between being a foreigner in a new place and being on your home turf with foreigners. The mindsets are all still different and it is fun to compare differences between people from different regions (we had a long discussion in the dining room today about plain versus sweet tea), but being a Wyomingite here is weird.
For one thing, I know the Park inside and out and have spent a lot of time here. Most of the employees I have met have never even been here before. I have a hard time not getting frustrated when no one can talk about horses, fishing, or wildlife in the same context. The most overwhelming thing I have noticed is how I view wildlife and nature as opposed to people from big cities.
I see myself as a member of the natural world. An animal could kill me, but I could just as easily kill one myself. I appreciate the beauty of a cutthroat trout I catch, but they see a travesty in me holding it in my hands. They, on the other hand, tend to see themselves as protectors (and outside of) of this fragile ecosystem. I first started to notice this distinction when I told everyone how my cousins and I used to try to spit on marmots from the tops of cliffs, and eat the berries we found and fish we caught in the Bighorns. I was greeted with shocked looks and told I abused the natural world. Also, I was lectured on how killing any animal is wrong when I was explaining how skunks spray when you shoot them.

I have never seen myself in this light at all. I love nature and wildlife very much. I am passionately against poaching and advocate catching and releasing wild trout. But their views on preservation are very different than mine. But, most of them see the ecosytem from the outside looking in, while my perspective seems more like the inside looking out. Wyomingites seem to view the natural world much more “barbarically” than anywhere else. Yet, we have more of these wild places and seem to understand it better than just about anywhere else in the USA, barring maybe Alaska.
Food for later thought, I suppose.