Allison: So I came back to Casper to see the eclipse in 2017. I had to see it more than anything because I wanted to see—is Casper gonna do this? Are we going to show our best face? And I have this very... weird interest in administrative events—like, do they go well? Did the administration go right? What’s going on here? I have a fascination with it. And I was like, I gotta go see this. Gotta go see the eclipse. But I had to come here.

The day after the eclipse—on top of the mountain—I didn’t get to come up here, and I’m so sad I didn’t. Because you asked Michelle, and it was gorgeous. I thought it would be crowded up here. And I had a six-month-old son, so I thought, we’ll wait to go up. But we came the next day. We walked around, and it was beautiful. My son was here, and Michelle was sitting out here at the bench. I sat and chatted with her. We just hit it off—talking—and I said, I really want to come back here. I’ve always wanted to be a character. I’ve always wanted to be a part of this.

And she handed me this rock. It was a Japanese woman—a geisha—that someone had painted and left up here. And she said, Take this. I want you to come back and be the Wishing Well Witch.

I was home less than nine months later, living here. And that’s why I had to go find her. I was like, Hi, I’m here! I still have that rock—it’s in my kitchen. Every day I see it and think, I was supposed to be here. Michelle was like, No, you come back here. Here’s a token. I’m going to make sure you come back.

My life in Olympia kind of fell apart in its own way. We were like, We gotta go. I can’t stay here. When Amazon moved in and all the rent kept going up—paying $2,500 for a high-rise apartment—I realized I could go home, buy a house, and have a yard for my son.

So… I blame Michelle sometimes. That she gave me this talisman that made me go home.

(Michelle giggles in the background)

That’s her giggling.

The minute I got home—probably within weeks—I found her at her coffee meeting. I said, Hi, here I am. That’s also the magic of the park. We had that moment together. And she brought me home.

Nancy: You are a great storyteller. Both of y’all are.

Allison: We love to sit. We teach together—the OLLI classes with the college—so we take them around in tandem and tell the stories. Some of them, she tells much better than I do. She just goes. She does. And the others—I do.

Nancy: So y’all are a fit together?

Allison: We are. I take a very academic interest in a lot of it. So if you get me talking about ending the Sea Witch, it goes into this whole tandem of Wyoming history and where it came from.

Michelle has this good, motherly “I’m going to tell you a fairy story” way of being. So when we tag team—it feels like magic.

Nancy: Just like the deer!

Allison: Oh yes! Yes. At Bambi’s Castle.

So—we can just keep telling you stories. We come up here in the autumn, and we say goodbye, usually in October. I bring up crabapples from my home—we have a ton of crabapple trees. We walk down with those crabapples to Bambi’s Castle—one of the shrines down here.

There were little kids walking through the park with their mom, and they were kind of like, What are you doing? And we said, Oh, we’re putting the apples here for the animals to come and eat them.

And then—suddenly—here come the deer. And the kids were just like...

It was a magic movie for them.

It was so magical. Just that we could do that. And I bet they did smell sweet—those apples did entice them. But for those children and their faces—they were in a magical place. And we were enticing. We were enticing the deer: Come eat. Go to Bambi’s Castle. It’s hunting season—come here and hide.

And then—here they are. They showed up.

Nancy: That’s amazing.

Allison: It was so much fun.

Nancy: I love all of this.

Allison: So much fun.

Note: The transcript above has been condensed from its original audio recording to improve the flow and readability of the story.