Wyoming frames the narrator’s year abroad as an experience of distance in two senses: the state lies far from home, and its vast, sparsely populated landscape seems to hold ordinary life at a remove. In Laramie and the surrounding country, the narrator builds a new routine, receives news that a brother has died, and chooses to return to the same setting rather than remain with the grieving family.

Geography and Setting

The book describes Wyoming as a state with 500,000 inhabitants spread across an area as large as Germany, with only Alaska less populous. That scale gives the exchange year its defining sense of space. The narrator had hoped for California or a large city such as New York or Chicago, but instead arrived in Laramie, where wolves howled at night. The sound recalled the howling and shouting of patients back in Schleswig, making the new landscape strange but not wholly unfamiliar.

The host family lived outside Laramie, in what the narrator describes as being beyond the outskirts of the town. Its home was a green oasis amid dusty prairie, with remotely controlled sprinklers moving through the garden from morning to evening. The surroundings offered a sharp contrast between cultivated domestic comfort and the dry openness beyond it. The high school had its own runway: some students flew in each morning, another measure of how distance shaped everyday life in Wyoming.

The Exchange Year in Laramie

The narrator’s host family echoed the family left behind in one basic respect: it had three sons and a dog. The narrator liked the host parents, Stan and Hazel, who were patient and kind, but their youngest son Don, the narrator’s age, disliked the newcomer. Don corrected the narrator’s English and, when his parents were absent, called the narrator The German Robot.

A casual answer on the exchange questionnaire had lasting consequences. Asked whether the narrator was not religious, religious, or strictly religious, the narrator selected the strictest option. In Laramie this meant attending church three times a week—not only for services, but also to sweep the church and polish the altar. The obligation was a miserable surprise, set against the freedom the narrator otherwise found in choosing high-school subjects according to personal interest.

Those classes opened onto the state’s outdoor world. At six each morning, a school bus took the narrator to the Rocky Mountains for rock climbing; breakfast came while the group waited for the rocks to dry in the sun. German class brought an unfamiliar distinction: the narrator became the top student for the first time. In woodworking, the class built rustic birdhouses of intimidating size. These specific routines—early departures, mountain mornings, and practical school projects—turned Wyoming from an imagined destination into a place of daily competence and adjustment.

Bereavement and the Return to Wyoming

The narrator learned by telephone from the father that the narrator’s brother had died in a car crash. At the time, the host family was preparing to leave for Yellowstone National Park. Because the narrator’s complicated return flight was still four days away, the group went ahead. The journey brought long drives through a grand landscape of buffalo herds and geysers, but the narrator found the scenery more desolate than any landscape encountered before. Wyoming’s expansiveness, previously a source of novelty, could not offer consolation for the news.

The narrator flew back to Schleswig for the funeral. Afterward, despite knowing how hard the absence would be for the parents, the narrator decided to return to Wyoming. The father asked through tears whether the narrator would rather stay at home, but the narrator insisted on going back. Fourteen days after the return to Germany, the narrator was again in Laramie with the complete host family.

At school, no one knew about the accident; only the host family showed sympathy. The narrator found comfort in being able to continue as before and refused to grieve, thinking of the dead brother rarely except after the weekly Sunday calls with the parents. That refusal did not erase the loss; it placed the loss alongside the ordinary activities of the Wyoming year, largely unspoken in the narrator’s public life there.

Everyday Life and Narrative Significance

After returning, the narrator resumed the activities that made up life in Laramie: playing basketball, learning to throw a football, carving a giant turkey, shoveling large quantities of snow, and meeting a girl at a whirlpool party. The narrator also took long rides across the prairie, visited a prison and found a pen pal there, and traveled extensively with the host parents. The sequence matters because it shows Wyoming not simply as a backdrop to bereavement but as the place where the narrator kept moving through a full year while resisting the demands of mourning.

When the narrator finally left the United States and returned to Schleswig, the year had produced visible changes: the narrator weighed ninety-five kilograms, could do one hundred push-ups, and spoke fluent English. Those measures of physical and linguistic transformation stand beside the unresolved grief. Wyoming is therefore remembered both as an expansive setting that enabled growth and as the distant place to which the narrator returned in order to carry on without openly confronting the death.