There are just two working escalators in the whole state of Wyoming. Both are in Casper, my hometown, and both are at banks. (There used to be one at the airport, but it is long defunct.) So while you are depositing a check, getting cash or taking a free lollipop from the counter, you can ride between floors with ease.
As a child, I loved going for a ride.
“Look how fast we are going!” I would say to my sister, and we would ride up and down several times, our pockets full of lollipops.
Casper is an oil and gas town, and my mom used to joke that the escalators were like boom-and-bust: Sometimes things were up, sometimes things were down.
My dad, who worked in the oil fields, scoffed and took the stairs.
“Oh, he’s just old-fashioned,” my mom would say.
I LOVE OLD-FASHIONED things, too. When I was growing up, reading the Little House books and Anne of Green Gables made me long for bonnets and rag dolls. I was always wildly out of step with my peers. I played with paper dolls and jacks. And it’s something I have taken into adult life — I love quilting and sewing, like to bake and relish reading a book. Anything away from a screen. The tension between nostalgia and technology is ever present for me.
There’s a bumper sticker that’s common in Wyoming that says “WYOMING IS WHAT AMERICA WAS,” and I get it. But as my daughters grow, I realize that I need to get more up-to-date. Getting their reports from school requires downloading an app, and they know how to do that better than I do. Their world is moving faster than mine. They think video calling is the only way to use the phone, yet they also like to spin tops and jump rope.
I teach creative writing, and in recent years, I have noticed something peculiar. The majority of the stories that my students submit are fantasy or science fiction. Most are set in dystopian worlds full of creatures that aren’t human, worlds in which resources are scarce. I told my husband how strange it was to read these stories, and wondered why my students were all doing this. As a reader, I am firmly grounded in the actual world. Why this trend?
“It’s because we’ve messed up the real world,” he reasoned. “They’re trying to make a different one.” Teaching post-pandemic with orange wildfire light streaming into the classroom, all of us in masks, I realized he was right. They were building something new on paper as a way to feel a sense of agency in a diminished world.
In an essay on world-building, the writer Karen Russell said that to make a new world on the page, you have to have one foot in Kansas and another foot in Oz. In writing, there needs to be an equal Oz-to-Kansas ratio, a bit of both worlds to be believable. I teach this all the time. But I still find myself wanting Kansas. To my students, Kansas isn’t a viable option.
My daughters’ world is moving faster than mine.
I ONCE ASKED my dad why we didn’t have more escalators in Wyoming.
“It’s the West — we don’t need to build skyscrapers. There’s plenty of room out there.”
And it’s true, in the West, cities sprawl out across deserts and prairies with only mountains to fence them in. My hometown was ringed with sagebrush and open prairie. There are no city skyscrapers crowding and competing for space.
But is there really more space?
The horizon feels like it’s ever-shrinking these days. The distance is often no farther than the nearest screen, showing you exactly what you want to see. Our sightlines are increasingly compromised. We don’t always want to see.
One thing about escalators is that they are continuously in motion. There is no waiting for an escalator like you would for an elevator. And there is an escalator etiquette: You are supposed to stand to the right to let people who wish to climb pass on the left. It’s designed to move climbers and standers, and it can move many more people than an elevator at one time — though it isn’t very inclusive if you aren’t able-bodied.
At times, I think Wyoming is like an escalator, one where there are people standing both to the left and to the right. No one is moving, no one can pass. And when people do get off, it’s because the state is in a constant loop of young people leaving, the energy industry faltering, federal jobs being cut and the state needing to diversify its economy. Up and down and around we go.
And yet, I hate to think of us stuck in a cycle. I, for one, don’t want to go back to what America was — what even was that? Being stuck in the past gets us nowhere. It’s in taking elements from the past and going forward that we can truly evolve.
A funny fact about escalators: Over its average 40-year lifespan, an escalator will typically travel a distance equivalent to a trip to the moon and back. To the moon! How wild and distant that place once seemed. And now people take short flights into space as tourists. Maybe there will be a new world out there someday. Maybe my students will help build it. Maybe my girls will as well.
The horizon feels like it’s ever-shrinking these days. The distance is often no farther than the nearest screen, showing you exactly what you want to see.
ONE DAY IN early September, I was walking Juniper to school. She was still tentative about it. These were her first days of kindergarten.
She held my hand as we crossed the playground, tears in her eyes. “How long do I have to stay?” she sobbed.
“I’ll come get you later in the afternoon.”
She looked down and, upon seeing a set of boxes painted on the asphalt, her face brightened.
“Hopscotch! I love this game!” She dropped her backpack and proceeded to hop on one foot.
She loves a game that has been played for over a thousand years, one that may have started in ancient India in 1200 BCE, and was said to help train Roman soldiers to improve their footwork while wearing full armor.
I watched her as she moved from square to square: up, up, up, over, over, up, over, over, up. When she reached the end, she scooped up her backpack and ran away from me, toward her classroom.
Upward or outward? Perhaps I was thinking about this all wrong. It’s not either/or. It’s OK to keep one foot in Kansas, the other in Oz. That’s how we build the world — mixing the old and the new. It might be the very thing that saves us.
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This article appeared in the October 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Building new worlds.”
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