Reviewed by Susan J Tweit
Posted on: July 26, 2024
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Twenty years after a halcyon summer spent working in Yellowstone National Park as a young adult, Marcia Hensley is a divorced single mom, restless and wondering where her life is going. So she flies from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she has grown up in the Bible Belt and teaches at Oral Roberts University, to Rock Springs, Wyoming, to interview for a one-year position at Western Wyoming College. Since her summer in Wyoming, she has dreamed of living there. She jumps at the chance to try that dream out, almost like taking a senior year abroad. When Hensley is offered the position, she persuades Oral Roberts University to let her have a year’s leave of absence and convinces her teenage daughters that it’ll be fun to live in Wyoming for a year.
Rock Springs in 1983 is not that halcyon dream: The town is in an economic tailspin, and the three of them, plus her eldest daughter’s horse, have never lived through a Wyoming winter, when the blizzards shut you in for days and keep coming into May. Still, Hensley is not daunted, and when she meets Mike, a fellow faculty member and visits his historic (read creaky and comfortably shabby) farmhouse an hour north in remote Eden Valley, she is completely hooked. Both by Wyoming and Mike.
And also by the stories of women homesteaders she begins to uncover as she researches the history of the settlement/conquest of Wyoming. Unearthing and telling those stories buried under the male-centric narrative gives Hensley a sense of sisterhood with these earlier women who, like her, left behind conventional lives and came West to find themselves. (The male-centric narrative also ignores the indigenous people who those settlers displaced, an issue Hensley does not address.)
The more Hensley digs, the more fascinated she becomes. Her year in Rock Springs leads to a permanent position; her academic passion settles on women homesteader’s stories. She and Mike eventually marry, brought together by their shared love of history, teaching, exploring Wyoming’s spectacular landscapes, and participating in the rural community of Eden Valley.
Away From It All brings Hensley’s transition from Bible-Belt wife and Oral Roberts University faculty to a jeans-wearing Wyomingite teaching at a college in rowdy and rural Rock Springs vividly alive. She clearly found the guts to chase her dream of living in Wyoming, just as her younger self imagined when she worked in Yellowstone decades before.
The first half of Away From It All follows a fairly straight-line narrative of Hensley’s journey from Oklahoma to Wyoming and her relationship with Mike. The second half is comprised of short essays Hensley wrote as stand-alone pieces for various publications about her life with Mike in Eden Valley, ending with his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and their moving away from their beloved rural idyll to Denver so he could get better care.
I found myself wanting to know more than the short bites in the second half offer. For instance, what happened to Hensley’s two daughters? Did they stay in Wyoming? Did they follow their dreams the way their mom did in mid-life? They appear in the first half and then essentially vanish from the narrative. Even Mike, a major character in the story, remains a bit shadowy.
Still, Away From It All is a fascinating picture of a woman discovering herself in midlife, and of rural Wyoming in a particular time. Hensley’s last line sums up her story: “with optimism, courage, a lot of hard work, and a little luck, a woman can not only dream seeming unattainable dreams, but she can also make them come true.” Amen!
