Sometimes pictures do tell the tale better than words and the photograph I saw years ago on Brad Bonner’s office wall was a stark reminder of that reality.

It was a large black and white picture depicting one of those boxy old sedans from the post World War II era driving down a ribbon of road between Powell and Cody surrounded by a sea of sagebrush and nothing else. No farms, no subdivisions, just sky and sagebrush.

I would guess it was shot by the venerable late Fred Laing, and was likely taken in the vicinity of Dutcher Springs and the Eagle Nest area.

The picture has stuck in my mind for all these years because it illustrates one of the dilemmas we longtime Wyoming residents live with: That being the desire to slam the door shut behind us and not see the place we love overrun by humanity in the way much of the rest of the world already has been.

It’s a selfish impulse, but I confess it’s always been a strong one in my heart of hearts. That’s because one of the main reasons I have chosen this place to make my stand, and I suspect many of you are in the same camp, is the abundance of wild places still left around here.

It’s not that I don’t love humanity, I simply love humanity in small doses.

Compared to some of my friends, I’m a relative newcomer, only having been here since 1967, but the changes to the landscape I have witnessed have been large scale.

A person need only look to Wapiti Valley or the Clark area for a shocking reminder of the transformation. What was once a quiet and empty place, save for a few ranches and homes, is now host to a plethora of homes, some of them the trophy variety, businesses and shops.

The country has been fenced off and the inevitable No Trespassing signs have been posted.

Cody is twice as big as it was when I was a child and my hometown of Powell has added 2,000 more citizens. Where I live, southeast of Powell, one can see three new homes going up and a new subdivision has sprung into reality within shouting distance over the past winter.

Many of the changes have been more subtle. In the 25 years I have lived in my current home, it’s been a new house here and a new house there periodically. If I look back to 1991, when we moved here, most of the houses around my place had yet to appear.

I learned a long time ago not to feel too badly about things you don’t have the power to change and I’m pretty sure my impulse to lock the door and not let anyone else come here is a selfish one, but I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that way.

We have something here that’s lacking almost everywhere else: open spaces and the freedom to enjoy them. We can shoot our guns and take our photographs and ride our horses and four wheelers and hike and picnic and camp midst the silent splendor of the desert or the mountains and there’s nobody to tell us to get the hell off the place, unless you’re trespassing on Two Dot or some other private holdings.

Contrast that with Sheridan, just over the mountains from us. It’s a beautiful and historic town with an abundance of game and pretty country.

And you can’t really go anywhere close to town to recreate because it’s all posted. Keep out. I got mine, you go get yours.

If you think I’m exaggerating, try to get permission to go turkey hunting over there.

Maybe the lesson for me is simply that change is inevitable. Even in the natural world. When I take the dogs out for our early morning walk, I can hear a turkey gobbling down on the river. That was unheard of when I was a kid.

The whitetail deer that I see regularly around our place were a rarity when I was a boy growing up. The Shoshone River, which I messed around in a lot as a boy, has shifted its channel 40 or 50 yards in the space of a few decades.

The grizzly bears, who were listed as endangered when I was a kid, are showing up on Heart Mountain and around Clark and the outskirts of Cody in a way that was inconceivable a few decades ago.

And yeah, you can hear wolves howling regularly in the mountains from which they had disappeared decades ago. The ring-necked doves that crowd my mom’s bird feeder hadn’t yet arrived from Eurasia.

Even the forests that I rode my horse through as a young man have changed forever with the advance of the pine beetle.

The people who preceded us, the ones who once called this magnificent place theirs, are gone. They’ve left few signs of having been here. Tepee rings and rock etchings and a few arrowheads. They walked on the land and left a light footprint. Not like us.

But I’m pretty sure I know a little bit about how they felt on seeing the dust clouds raised by the oncoming wagon trains.