"Last week I was in Wyoming, driving westward on the southern edge of a big winter storm. For dozens of miles, sheets of snow arced across the still-dry pavement. After a long while, I made out the welcome lights of Shoshoni. When you find yourself longing for the lights of Shoshoni — the glow of a gas station — you know the driving has been hard.

I joined a convoy of vehicles coming out of Riverton and up the hill past the Wind River Casino, which was shrouded in a nimbus of snow. We slithered along at school-zone speeds, barely 20 miles an hour. Across the highway, the drivers of two pickups climbed into the ditch to check on a car whose headlights were now pointing up at the overcast, snow corkscrewing down into the angled beams. At last, I came down the hill into Lander, where two feet of heavy autumn snow would fall in the next 36 hours.

A couple of nights later I went back to the casino — on the edge of the Wind River Reservation — for dinner with friends. I grew up in a place and a time that considered casinos wholly and entirely evil, every bit as bad as a barroom fight spilling onto the sidewalk. So I have always assumed that the gamblers do not want to be noticed, when of course it is I who want to be invisible.

After dinner, we walked through the long corridors of push-button slots called Wolf Run and Coyote Moon and Dragon’s Tale. It was a Monday night, and most of the slots were going unused, their iconography flashing past to no purpose. This is a dry casino, owned by the Northern Arapaho tribe, and there was something businesslike about the few players on hand, as if they’d stopped by to confirm their luck, or the lack of it, on the way home from work. As I was leaving I watched a young couple come in, clutching their coats about them in the cold. I found myself thinking about the storm I had been in and the feeling of risk that such storms bring. What a casino does better than anything is exclude the outside world — all but the fragments you carry within yourself."

Get the Story:
Shelter From the Storm (The New York Times 10/19)
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