I’ve been hanging on to a copy of Carrion Comfort for years, supposedly because I intended to read it again, but really because Dan Simmons has written one of the best descriptions of Southeastern Wyoming I’ve ever read.

The area northeast of Cheyenne, Wyoming, was the type of western landscape that made some people rhapsodic and gave others instant agoraphobia. Once the state road left sight of the Interstate, forty miles of driving afforded views of endless grasslands, wind-blown snow fences looking dwarfed and forgotten against expanses of prairie, occasional ranches set back miles from the road, buttes to the north and east rising like massive keeps, and occasional stream huddled about with cottonwood and brush, hesitant clusters of antelope, and small groups of cattle looking unworthy of their millions of acres of grazing land. And the missile silos.

I grew up in that landscape. It’s lonely and wild and beautiful and desperate, and it does induce both rhapsody and agoraphobia—sometimes all at once.

I miss it sometimes—the endless landscape, the thick blanket of stars, the summer thunderstorms and the barbed wire fences. In the 1980s, though, the missile silos were the part of it I couldn’t stop thinking about. They were just over the hill, and we wondered if the mountains would be enough to save us. Almost 20 years after I read this book, that’s the part of it I remember. It’s time to let it go.