Where I'm from ...

People always ask me “where are you from?” Often I get that before or immediately after “hello”. It’s not an easy question to answer. Not when you were born in Alaska then moved to Arizona at 6 years old, which is what I blame my hot and cold personality on. Yeah, I just did that.

While moving from Alaska to Arizona I spent my kindergarten year in Riverside. Those are some of my earliest memories of the Platte Valley. A place of serenity that existed in the midst of a pretty tumultuous year for a young kid born in the last frontier of Alaska who then moved to the white-hot desert of Arizona. So, when people ask me where I’m from, there is no quick answer.

While I’m not a country boy, I’m certainly not a city kid either. I guess if anything describes the average Alaskan it is “misfit” despite the well known “maverick” governor who famously hails from there. So you see, I don’t really fit in anywhere. How then, you are probably wondering, did I end up here? That’s where we get to the part about where I’m really from.

My great-grandfather, A.B. Lawson Sr came to this part of Wyoming in the late 1800s and worked on the Platte River railroad tie-drives that lasted into the early 1900s. He ran the commissary for the tie-hacks in the Hog Park area out of the half-way house. Later in life he was the postmaster and ran the general store in Kings Canyon. My grandfather, A.B. Lawson Jr worked for the RR Crow Timber Co. before moving his family to Riverside in the mid-1950s.There he purchased and built onto the home that we still maintain as a family trust. In the 1960s Albert started his own sawmill operation in the back pasture and provided local ranchers and builders with lumber. My grandmother, Barbara Burke Lawson, taught in the Encampment School district for more than 20 years.

My mother, Helen, the youngest of three children, grew up in the Riverside/Encampment area where she raised sheep, was the fifth queen of Woodchoppers Jamboree and got in trouble for riding through town with her brothers throwing crabapples at houses. They dubbed themselves the “Three Musketeers”. Sorry mom, your secret is out. Hopefully there’s a statute of limitations on crabapple vandalism.

When she was finished with her “life of crime”, Helen attended the University of Wyoming where she met my father, and after college the two traveled up the Alaska-Canadian highway to Anchorage. More than 30 years later, she returned to the Platte River Valley where she is now the custodian of the family trust we have set up to take care of our little slice of heaven in Riverside.

While I only lived in Riverside for my year of kindergarten, we would spend a month or more of every summer here, escaping from the brutal Arizona heat. Growing up it was always here where I would get my yearly dose of peace, quiet, clean water and air, Hog Park hiking, fly-fishing and as many dips in the hobo pool as possible before heading back to the Valley of the Sun. No, it’s not an easy answer or short story, but that is where I’m from even if I’ve lived most my life in Arizona and California while working in the television and film industry.

Now I am here and like my mother, grandparents and their great-grandparents before them, I am here to stay. My uncles used to joke that Encampment should be called “Enchantment”. The older I get, the more I appreciate the stunning and unique beauty of the Platte River Valley and the more I think it really is an appropriate pseudonym. If life were a book then this is the beginning of a new chapter for me as rookie reporter for the Saratoga Sun and I am excited to be a part of such an honored institution here in Saratoga and the surrounding Platte Valley.