BLING’S THE THING  by Mary Flitner         

Last week, the teenagers amidst our dinner companions were talking about “Bling”.  The older man at the end of the table asked  “what is this bleen stuff?”  “No,” the kids said, giggling.  “Bling.  You know, Bling.”  Well, no, he didn’t know.  “Really?  You don’t know?”  Hilarious laughter. then definitions:  “You know, Bling!   Like, shiny.  Glittery.  Sparkly.  Jewelry.  Like, fancy stuff.  Rhinestones.  Twinkly.  ”  “Like belts and chokers and pins and hatbands and stuff.”  More laughs when the definitions made it clear that these belts and bling things are expensive and popular, for looks only, and  “don’t even hold your pants up or your hat down” according to the older guy, new to this vocabulary.

Last winter I traveled home from Salt Lake City to Cody, Wyoming on the nighttime flight.  I had a window seat, and I could see the ground almost all the way along the route.  I thought it would be easy to follow the map of lights, dot-to-dot  -  from Salt Lake City to Evanston, Kemmerer, further north and north and north over little towns and a few familiar ranch outposts until I reached my destination in the Bighorn Basin.  Not so.  The once-empty wide-open spaces of Wyoming are filled with lights.  Wyoming’s floor as I looked from the ceiling of sky is spread with a glittering blanket of lights, clustered in some places and scattered in others.  Lights, though, nearly everywhere.  Bling.   

From above, I could tell that some of Wyoming’s lights distinguish oil and gas wells, developments related to the energy boom in the State.  Otherwise, highways and interstates are easily visible from the sky, gaudy strings of rhinestones creeping out across the land.  Towns and sparkling subdivisions spill sideways for miles from center, easy to see with streetlights and flashing-light intersections.  Too many lights for so few people, in a nation which supposedly has concerns about its energy consumption.

Dozing intermittently, I fantasized that things were upside down, and I could look beneath the plane to find the Milky Way, Orion, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia.  I remembered how those constellations used to show so plainly in our dark night skies, and how dim they seem nowadays.    I thought of recent magazine articles telling about light pollution, energy demands.  I recalled my surprise last fall when I looked north from the ranch house window and counted the obscene number of all-night lights in the small patch of our rural valley.  Houses, sheds and driveways gleam and glitter, an absolute regurgitation of bling.  Looking west, a pale yellow glow reflected from towns like Cody, Lovell and Powell, fifty or sixty miles away, and even beyond, Billings, Montana. 

Recently I participated in a study group with our county planning and zoning board.  As we tried to determine what’s appropriate in our area, I read statistical information which showed that much of Big Horn County’s residential growth has occurred outside of incorporated towns or cities, and the facts are similar throughout Wyoming.  Frequently, taxation in rural areas increases as development occurs out in the countryside, since the accompanying demands go beyond what shows up at night.  Obviously, residents outside towns demand road maintenance, ambulance service, sheriff calls, fire department calls, school-bus service.  Domestic water, waste disposal, power-line transmission.  Property values change quickly since some of the homes and properties are very extravagant, a far cry from a farmhouse or a little café.  Bling in every style and size fills our landscape, cheapening the purity of open space and rural culture. 

Night-time country lights used to mean lambing or calving sheds.  The lights might have signaled a destination, a gas station maybe, refuge for someone out in a storm.  Nowadays lights are everywhere, one more thing we have because we can, even in remote Wyoming valleys.  A modest porch light makes sense, maybe a motion-triggered security light, a light you can switch on or off.  I question whether rural residences need outdoor lights blazing all night, and I dislike this intrusion into our countryside.  I can’t help but think that people who need the security of yard lights and garage lights and 24-hour driveway lighting would be better off in the city limits. 

I think we ought to turn off un-necessary lights and quit wasting energy.  We might resume a country life which offers privacy and peace.  We might enjoy night skies.  In the long run, sparkly things won’t hold your pants up or your hat down, or hold intruders at bay.  Bling’s for fun, that’s the thing.