Wisdom Road Day 12: Sharon Utter From Wheatland, WY

Sharon Utter’s shirt reads, “America Needs More Cowgirls”

Sharon Utter grew up on a ranch between Jay Em and Lingle, Wyoming.  She helped me organize a set of interviews, portions of which I will post over the next several days. Like the others I met in Wheatland, she is a bit older than she looks.

“We want accountability. How do you say this without offending everybody?  Consequences, I guess is the best way. Because if I slapped you, you have every right to hit me back. I’m sorry, I just I raised my kids this way and I was raised that way. And if you did something wrong, you got your butt paddled.”

“I was a ranch girl. I’d say I didn’t fit into even a small town because the girls in my class all were raised in town except one. I rode horses from the time I was three years old. I rode bareback. My dad wouldn’t let me ride the saddle for fear I’d get caught up in the stirrup because he had a friend’s son get killed that way. The girls in town, they made fun of me; I guess I was what they called a tomboy.  Right now the teachers would say you need a sex change, because you were a tomboy.”

“When people got cars it changed everything. That’s what changed everything. Yeah, the automobile changed the world.”

“I think the biggest thing our parents taught us was respect. We never called any elderly person by their first name. And also accountability. You had to pay for your actions.”

“100%, they say it takes a village to raise a child. We didn’t have a phone. I still don’t know how my dad and mom knew if we did something wrong in school, but by the time we got home from school they knew about it.”

“I think mostly we are worried about our kids and our grandkids, especially grandkids.”

“If we had term limits, maybe people wouldn’t be so me, me, me. If people would quit thinking, ‘I’m better than you’. I think with term limits, people would realize they had to think of the people more than themselves.”

“Quit thinking of yourself. God didn’t put you on earth to do that. He put you on earth to help people.  Think about the Greatest Generation ever, the kids that stormed Normandy. They were in college, and they all of a sudden left schools and jumped in. There was a tape I heard the other day. This gal was talking about history. She went through all the big, big people like Rome, lasted about 240 years and then they all fell. We are at 240 years. And that’s just how it goes. History repeats itself whether we like it or not.”