Scenery

“Wow, that’s pretty,” he said.  He got up from his stool and took a couple steps over to see through the door of the café and into the convenience store.  “Damn.”  He put his hands on his hips and watched for a second.  The guy in the corner leaned over to see, and he nodded.

It was 7:30 in the morning and I was sitting at a breakfast counter in Centennial, Wyoming.  Centennial is not a big town.  There are a smattering of houses spread out among dirt streets on a hillside, a couple cafés, a couple bars, and a post office.  The only way into or out of town is along Wyoming 130, which leads through Medicine Bow National Forest.  The cafés, bars, and post offices all face Wyoming 130.  It is a one-street town. 

The guy retook his stool two seats over from me.  He had an unruly gray beard, wire-rimmed glasses and a deep, gravelly voice that sounded like he drank whiskey with prairie dust in it.  If he had range and a sense of pitch he would have made a great country music singer.

I took a bite out of my biscut and leaned over to look toward the convenience store.  I didn’t see anything.  I drank some water to wash down the biscut.  After awhile I asked, “what were you looking at?”

“A girl.”  He seemed surprised that I’d asked.  “I don’t miss ‘em.  Times gets tough up in these mountains,” he said.  He ran a thumb through his beard.  “Sparse.”

“I bet,” I said.  “I’d think you’d get a few coming by in the summer, but in the winter – I could see how there wouldn’t be much to look at.”

“A few comes up in the winter from the ski resorts,” he said.  “Sometimes they come for the music.”

Centennial, he told me, had a pretty good music scene.  Apparently bands will stop through on tours between other places, or when a band is in the area to play at ski resorts but has an empty night on its schedule.  They’d get some pretty good bands, he said, in front of some pretty small crowds.  I said it sounded cool.

I was wearing a shirt from Athens, Georgia, and I asked if he’d ever been through there.  He’d only been through Georgia once and had stayed on I-95.  I told him about the Athens music scene, about REM, the B-52s, and now the Drive by Truckers.  He said it sounded cool, and I asked if he had ever been to Austin.

“No, my girlfriend tried to drag me down there once,” he graveled.  “But I’m not about to go to Texas, even it is Austin.”

“I like your style,” I said.  “I don’t care much about Texas either.”  I was about to tell him about a line from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley – Steinbeck loved Montana, disliked Texas, and wrote that Montana looked the way a small child would envision Texas if he listened to Texans talk – when the guy in the corner leaned over and looked toward the convenience store.

“Hey hey,” he said.

The guy next to me stood up to see.  “Oh, yeah,” he said, looking toward the convenience store and nodding.  “But she’s got her boyfriend in tow.”  He sat back down.

For a guy in his late twenties, it’s encouraging to know that grownups don’t necessarily act any differently then I’ve been acting for the last ten years.

From left to right: convenience store, café, and bar.  Centennial, Wyoming.

I have passed through Centennial three times now -- 1996, 2004, and 2009 -- and 

the population has remained suspiciously unchanged.