After yesterday's marathon drive, we slept in a bit through the morning. Around ten, I got up, and after showering and dressing, pried open our curtains.

Wyoming is exactly what you'd expect, in the best way possible. It's bleak to the point of beautiful. It inspires awe instead of agoraphobia. Outside our window are several short mountains cut by rivulets and crumbling at the bases. If you walk down the row of motel rooms, you can look out the back at a vast stretch of stark scrubland with a range of frosted mountains in the distance. Keep walking beyond the motel and you risk plunging into the Shoshone River, which rather shockingly winds directly behind where we're staying. It's nearly impossible to see until you're steps from the precipice.

Alone among this desolation is Heart Mountain, which utterly commands the broad plain upon which Cody sits. The mountain has two ventricles, a humped western one and an eastern thrust that resembles a wave crashing. It's this dramatic peak that gives the mountain such identity, and you can see it in today's photo.

After breakfast in a tiny diner across the street, Paul and I set out for the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, which occupies part of the land where the internment camp once stood. The center is about 20 minutes north of town and is a feat of design in the sense that it clearly managed to be both cheaply built and also a relevant commentary on barracks architecture. The building looks like a row of unfinished greenhouses, and is directly off the highway with very little fanfare. The exhibit was fantastic however. It was able to be either in-depth or accessible, depending on your interest. It contained not just the chronology of Japanese-American internment during WWII, but primary source details about life in the camps. People who at lived in the camps told their stories in quotes, or in the print recollections they left behind. There were a number of fascinating details, too many to do justice to here, and Paul and I each came away with a number of anecdotes that had intrigued us. At the end of the exhibit, Paul consulted the photo-copied logs of the camp and found the detailed record of his family in the camp, which the center is always happy to print out for family members. They were also able to identify the exact barracks where Paul's grandmother and her family had lived, and we were able to place the location on the map.

Up a hill from the interpretive center was a plain where the bulk of the camp had stood. At once point, just under 11,000 people had called this place home, enough to make it the third largest city in Wyoming. Our visit to the camp unearthed a striking paradox. In many respects, life at the camp was good. The camps had electricity, which was a luxury in Wyoming at the time. Internees organized clubs, watched movies, held festivals, and generally conducted cultural life as they had known it before. A number of officials from the federal, state, and local governments understood that the Japanese-Americans posed no threat, and a great deal of efforts were made to accommodate the interned. Yet the overiding fact of life was that this was not normal. As nice as people tried to make life in the camp, the reality of being surrounded by a barbed wire fence was unmistakable. In the end, there was nothing that could be done to change the simple fact that these people were being held prisoner against their will for no good reason, no matter the quality of the prison.

And the camp was still not a nice place to live. Paul pointed out that we picked a good time to visit. Late enough so that the cold wind and the early onset of winter could be felt without us being completely miserable. It was gusty and below 50 on the plateau, enough for us to begin to grasp just how difficult camp winters must have been.

We left the camp at mid-afternoon, and drove through the town of Cody. In the way that Wyoming is the kind of chalky Mordor that you'd expect, Cody is very much the wild-west turned strip that you probably envisioned. The whole town is situated on a single road, which forms an S-curve through town and becomes a highway at either end. The downtown has a mix of old brick buildings and modern chain restaurants in the cracks like weeds. It's a bit of old, a bit of new, and a lot of dust.

For the second half of the day, we drove out the other end of town and headed toward Yellowstone National Park. The nation's first and most famous park is of course still shuttered thanks to the government shutdown, but the road leading up to it is still a stunning drive. We caught glimpses of snowcapped peaks through mountain valleys, drove alongside turquoise mountain lakes, and passed under rocks hollowed out like church organs. We saw a number of deer and a lone buffalo minding his business. The river along which the road wound was insulated by a corridor of canary yellow trees. From the slice through the mountains where we began the drive, to the gas station where Paul was accosted on suspicion of voting Democrat (his story to tell), to the rainstorm pent in by the mountains, to the traffic-coned entrance to the park, it was simply spectacular.

Tonight, we're going to bed early once again, in preparation for our mad dash back across the country to the friendly flat confines of Minnesota. The sun has long since set on the political and geologic drama outside. Everything is in shadow once again.