Crying Out Loud Ranch, Essay Example

In Alva, Wyoming, five hundred acres spread out under the banner of the Crying Out Loud Ranch, a resort and space unlike any other.  In a sense, the Crying Out Loud is not a place designed or created to attract guests at all.  Rather, it is a vast stretch of land that has been identified as a Western paradise, and simply offered as such. The ranch does very little, beyond ensuring that minimal comforts and basic needs are available. It is the landscape, and the land itself, that work the magic and keep people returning, summer after summer.

This land has attractions both ordinary to the region of the country and absolutely unique to itself.  Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, and the Dakotas boast many ranches and farms, set in valleys between lush mountains, and framed by sloping hills. What is not immediately realized is how, as with a forest of the East, each scene is remarkably individual. Every turn a person makes reveals a different horizon, and the mountain ranges themselves, then, become very personal. They border the Crying Out Loud Ranch in a way that makes the visitor feel they are in a place like no other. As vast as the reaches of the country are, it feels intimate.

Then, nature is not restricted to the fields and the hills.   Life is everywhere at the ranch, and even a city guest from the East begins to understand how other creatures are woven into the fabric of this natural scene.   Horses are not just for riding; in seeing them eat, idle, and slowly move across the Wyoming meadow, there is a sense of how entitled every living thing is, in the eyes of nature. They belong to the land, and it is their home. People enjoy them, of course, and the rides at the ranch are wonderfully freeing experiences.The open countryside all around adds to the exhilaration of galloping through a stream, or across a broad meadow.  Still, the experience is a little humbling, for the rider understands that the horse belongs, not to the ranch, but to itself.  Riding is then a kind of gift, and it provides an awareness of how all life is a treasure, and sometimes a privilege, to be near.

It may be that the ranch’s greatest quality is how it instills in children a sense of wonder.  There is something instructive about watching the chickens peck and move, in their loud, busy communities at the Crying Out Loud, and instructive in a wholesome and effortless manner.  Children observe the chickens and toss them grain, and get an idea of the essential movement of life, and even of how creatures accommodate each other in clusters.   It’s fun, certainly, and especially for children who have only seen chickens in plastic packaging at the grocery store.   It is also, again, immensely valuable.  At the ranch, a child begins to learn how everything on earth is linked to everything else, as even the frantic behavior of chickens somehow echoes the way human beings live.

This is all a part of what the Crying Out Loud Ranch offers, and also the whole of it. The ranch is no luxury resort, built to shelter and pamper visitors.  It is there to expand views and senses, and through the endless possibilities afforded by a wide, sweeping landscape enclosed by green hills. It is there to let both adults and children capture sensations simple and often lost, such as the joy of smelling fresh bacon cooking in the morning, or the way the air is scented when it comes down from the hills. It is there to let guests rise and greet the day with no barriers of buildings, streets, and crowds. The guest opens his eyes and sees the entire planet in the surrounding scene, through the gentle curve of the horizon. In the day, the sky is larger than any sky seen from a city can be, and the stars are night are extreme in number and brightness. They face no competition from man-made light, and blaze on a background of black velvet, Wyoming sky. Every breath taken in is clean and rich, with a million fragrances of the earth in it.   By only placing a name on these acres and providing the basics of comfort, the Crying Out Lout Ranch gives guests the greatest accommodation of all: the natural wonder of the earth.