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I ordered a burger and a PBR and sat for awhile at a table against the back wall while I waited on the burger. There were eight other people in the place, all bellied up to the bar – the bartender, three folks talking about oiling, a woman who announced herself to be drunk, the man she was talking to, and two gray-headed men in cowboy hats talking about cattle. I sipped my beer and watched the football game on a TV above their heads. There were a couple empty stools between the oilmen and lady who had described herself as overserved, so when my PBR got down to the dregs, I took a barstool with the oil folks on my left and the lady on my right.
“Another one?” the bartender asked me.
“Yes ma’am.”
When she came back she asked where I was from. I told her Georgia.
“My ex-husband was from Georgia,” she said.
“I hope he was a good guy,” I said.
She frowned.
“At least for a little while,” I amended.
“Yeah, for a little while,” she said. I told her it was the little while that was representative of Georgia, not the afterwards. We talked about Georgia in the fall, moonshine and retrievers. She brought me an excellent burger on a styrofoam plate. The lady to my right told some anecdotes about honey-flavored moonshine that a guy from Utah had made, and apricot flavored moonshine from somewhere else. Mississippi, maybe. The ‘shine was damn good, she said, but it would knock you out.
Eventually the lady to my right and her husband stood to leave. As she walked out, she bent toward one of the gray-headed men in a deeply creased white cowboy hat. He lifted his face to hers, and she kissed him on the lips. She left.
The bar had thinned, and Karrie asked if I would like to meet a salt-of-the-earth, honest-to-god cattleman from Arizona who “came from the dirt.” I was finishing my burger, but I said sure. “Jeb, this is Dude,” she said. “Dude, Jeb.”
The guy in the deeply creased cowboy hat had a long thin face that had seen plenty of sun and wind. He wore a denim jacket over his blue jeans, and his nose pointed to the left. His heeled boots were the lace-up kind that cattlemen favor over the slip-on kind that Hollywood prefers. He extended a weathered hand to me. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “Dude.”
Dude wore rose-tinted wire-rimmed glasses a little like John Lennon’s. He asked about my camper – the folks in the bar had seen me pull up – and I told him I was living out of it for the next few months. It was convenient to travel with your home on your back, tortoise-style. I told a story about how my buddy Ben and I had spent a couple nights camped in the parking lots of bars in Alaska. Karrie told me I was welcome to camp out in the Green River Bar’s parking lot that night.
“I’ve got two horses and two dogs,” Dude told me. “The horses make me less mobile. I have to use a trailer.”
Dude was raised working cattle on a ranch north of Tucson. He was in the service from 1955-57 as a paratrooper with a unit that merged with the 101st Airborne. Since then, he had moved around a good bit. He had lived around Daniel for three and a half years, looking after someone’s cattle. He liked it here, but the winters were cold. He’d stay awhile longer, probably. He had a fifth-wheel trailer parked in his sister’s backyard in Arizona that he could go back to if he was broke. I asked him where the cattle that he looked after were, and he pointed through the barroom wall. They were still at summer pasture. Soon they’d drive them to winter range. He told me about driving cattle though Daniel’s main street, and calling the cops ahead of time so that they could block both ends of the road to slow motorists down. I asked if they used four-wheelers to drive cattle now instead of horses. He shook his head. “Too damned dangerous.”
The football game on which Karrie had a bet riding was ending, and I was mostly finished with my second beer. I stood to leave, and Dude pulled out his wallet and laid his money on the bar. When the game ended and Karrie won her bet, she brought me a check. She asked Dude if he was leaving. He told her yes. She leaned over the bar and kissed him on the lips.
Some guys have all the luck.
The Green River Bar in Daniel, Wyoming.
POSTSCRIPT. By the time this entry posts to the blog, I will be backpacking across the Wyoming Range and Salt River Range. I will be on the trail somewhere between five and ten days, and will obviously not be able to post live blog entries during that time. So I've written a few entries ahead of time and scheduled them to post while I'm backpacking. There will be no new entries for Saturday and Sunday.
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