dawn arrived, my companions of the road re-appeared, and we moved on, through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, to Iowa, along Route 30, the old Lincoln Highway, which would take me all the way to Rock Springs in western Wyoming. Green country, endless rows of corn just coming up to ankle height, squared-off dirt section roads enclosing farmland, and that corn stretching to the ever-receding horizon. The Lincoln Highway was mostly two-lane, sometimes three-lane, blacktop, and you had to be careful, going fifty-five miles an hour or more, watching for farm tractors turning out of the section roads onto the Way West.
Crossing the Mississippi River meant little to me, but the thought of crossing the Missouri, the route of Lewis and Clark and of the fur-trading keelboat men, the route to the Big Sky country, stirred my blood.
We had stopped for the night in the college town of Ames, Iowa, where the world-weary proprietress of a homey motel looked doubtfully at the three of us when Gene asked for a “double room.” Accepting my pleas to be allowed to sleep on the floor in my bag between the two beds, and possibly touched by the sight of the swollen lumps on my face, she agreed to charge only my companions. I dined upon what I believe was my third burger and malt of the trip, and got a good night’s rest on the hard floor.
The third day saw another endless haul, this time across Nebraska and Wyoming. On the outskirts of a small Nebraska town, I saw a posted sign that has puzzled me to this day: ‘Swedes—we don’t want your kind here. Move on.’ It was not the bigotry, but the unusual choice of ethnicity, that I have not been able to comprehend.
Southern Wyoming was mostly dry and broken country, marked at long intervals during the last century where the head of track of railroad construction had left a good-sized town. And each town, in descending pecking order from east to west, had been graced with a public institution: Cheyenne (State Capitol), Laramie (State University), Rawlins (State Prison), and Evanston (State Mental Hospital).
In the mid-afternoon, we arrived in Rock Springs, a dusty grey straggling place that certainly looked to me to be at least seven parts rock to less than one part springs. Gene, Allan, and I grunted our good-byes, I stepped out of the Chevrolet, hauled out my Gladstone, and stood on the north-east corner of Route 191 and the Lincoln Highway. I set my bag between my feet, and lifted my thumb. I was on my own, headed north.
Within five minutes, a red Thunderbird stopped. “Well, where you headed, son?” The driver was perhaps ten years older than I was, and he had the boots and the big hat to go with his smile.
“Aiming for Alaska to find work this summer, sir. Name’s Steve.” I never did get his name, or perhaps he never gave it.
“Well, I can get you the first hundred miles or so along your way, so get on in.”
We roared north in the dimming but crystal light, the two-lane asphalt cutting through bunchgrass that seemed to go on forever. Antelope raced along beside the Thunderbird, and occasionally sprang with daredevil leaps across the road ahead of us. As we crossed the Fremont County line, I was regaled by my native host with stories of the bloody wars between cattleman versus sheepherder of only seventy-five years ago. He was clearly partial to the cattlemen’s side. “Well, there’s a pretty fair roadhouse up ahead a few miles. I’ll buy you a Wyoming steak, son.”
My host seemed well, perhaps intimately, acquainted with both the waitress-cum-bartender and the surly cook. He introduced me as if we had been long-time buddies, and we two solitary patrons ate two and a half of the biggest (and toughest) steaks it has ever been my pleasure to consume. The roadhouse restaurant-bar consisted of a huge room with peeled wood beams and a lingering aura of what it must be like on a wild Saturday night, out here in the middle of nowhere. We drank what I later came to recognize as “western” coffee: black and watery, as opposed to “cowboy” coffee: black and strong enough to float the spoon. The pie of last season’s berries was sweet, juice-drippy, and measured about three wedges to the circle. We bid our hostess adieu. “So long, darlin’s, stop by if you get back this way,” she waved. We were off, with the sun lying just above the westward ridges.
I asked my host if he knew of a good place along the road up ahead where I could roll my bag out for the night.
“Well, son, it cools down pretty quick at dark around here, but there’s this old line shack up ahead a few miles. Only used at the spring and fall round-ups. Nobody will mind if you bed down in there.” And, true to his word, he dropped me off just before sunset, in Cowboy Heaven. Then, to my astonishment, he U-turned the ‘Bird, and roared back down the way we had come, no doubt to engage the waitress in further conversation.
It was a narrow, well-grassed valley, bordered by aspen rising to the ridges. In the river meadow behind the sagging wooden buildings and empty corrals, cattle and antelope were grazing together, side by side.
The old, slant-leaning bunkhouse itself was rusty and dusty and empty; a broken windowpane was loosely stuffed with a rag. Inside the building was one metal bedframe with a rolled-up old mattress. There was an axe with a splintered handle, and a cast-iron stove, and outside a stack of bone-dry wood stood by the corrals. I split enough of the wood to warm myself against the gathering evening chill. I fired up the stove, priming it with pages from last autumn’s Plnedale Gazette, rolled my bag out on the mattress, and fell asleep, listening to the scurrying of the kangaroo mice on the bunkhouse floor, the owls hooting in the moon-risen meadow, and the quickening breeze in the aspen. It was June 14, 1957, and my heart was easy in my breast.
I awakened suddenly, disoriented, perhaps with the awareness, or the sixth sense, that something was not right. A pale cottony white light filled the bunkhouse, suffusing everything with a silent glow that was almost, but not quite, luminescent.
I looked at my watch. The hands showed seven-fifteen, but the second hand was not sweeping. I put the watch to my ear, and realized it was stopped; it must have been damaged while I was splitting wood.
Moving over to a grimy windowpane, I saw that the same white light was shining everywhere. Had I died of blueberry pie overdose, and truly woken up in Cowboy Heaven? Apparently not quite yet; for on the ground lay three or four inches of powdery snow, with more coming down by the bucketful. What time was it? Probably at least mid-day, given the brightness of the light. My groggy mind now remembered something half-heard on the radio, was it only yesterday, short of Rock Springs? “Possible late-season blizzard moving up from Colorado.” My brain, still set to Eastern time and clime, had refused to register the possibility of a sudden snowstorm in mid-June. But here we were.
I packed and rolled my bag, slipped the poncho over my head (thus exposing the sleeping bag to the falling snow), and felt my way out the twenty yards to the road. Nothing was in sight in either direction through the diminished visibility. No tracks lay on the road; none made by human, animal, or Detroit. Back in the shack, I considered my situation more carefully. While I might get a bit hungry, I had at least a bag of peanuts and half an O’Henry candy bar in my Gladstone, and plenty of stovewood to keep warm by, and to melt snow water. So I was not without food or drink. A car, or a plow, was sure to come through that day or the next, this was the major road between Rock Springs and Jackson Hole. Things would work out; all I had to do was to be patient.
It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes, with the snow still coming down hard, before I heard the sound of a car grinding up the road from the south. I grabbed my stuff, ran out to the road, and made the foolish gesture of sticking out my thumb, instead of waving my arms.
The car was all black, an ancient Nash, perhaps ’46 or ’47, with a dent for every mile. Behind it was towed a black flatbed trailer, and atop the trailer was secured, upright, a black Harley-Davidson, equally ancient and dented. The conglomeration came to a stop, skidding a bit beyond me in the powder. The sight presented an ominous and eerie apparition—a world of black on white.
He
