Hi, I'm Willow Belden, and you're listening to Out There.

This is a podcast about the outdoors, from your window box and garden, to the fields on the edge of town, to the forests, prairies, seashores, and wilderness.

On the show, we explore our relationship with nature, through stories, interviews, essays, and even some fiction.

We travel around the U.S. and the world with tales of love and heart saw a photo on Fred.

The first time I saw a photo of Fred, this face and everything about him just struck me.

This beautiful young man, he was kind of scruffy, it looked a little unshaven, but he had this angelic, joyful smile on his face.

Standing next to what I thought was a horse, it turned out to be a mule, and I thought, what is his story? That was my second thought, because my first thought was,

isn't he beautiful? This is Lynn Downey. She's a historian in Sonoma, California, and at 62,

she's been experiencing a phenomenon not uncommon for women

her age, a bit of an obsession with a younger man.

That obsession led her on a trip through the vast expanses of Nevada and through time.

And it all started with this photograph.

He looked like the kind of young man that spent hours, if not his entire life, outdoors.

In this photo, there he is very close to his mule, and his clothes were a little dirty like he was

used to being in the outdoors. And I thought, here is a real Western man.

Many of us have been there, a bit of a crush bordering on an obsession. We can't get enough.

But for Lynn, it was a bit different. In her case, the object of her obsession, this young man

she's just been describing, lived almost 150 years ago. I was fascinated to find out what brought Fred out west.

I had to know everything.

I had to track his family down, and I had to learn everything about him because I needed to

know the source of that smile on his face.

What made him so happy?

...