Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs
Driving 5000 miles across really barren country gives one a lot of time to listen to music. We devoured a historical book on Custer and listened to a number of This American Life podcasts, but the music we listened gave us some fuel for the fire. The title of Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs perfectly describes the Adventure Buddy crew’s adventures. Not that we’re gunfighters (although Lu has her moments), but there’s something about our desperado aesthetic that shouts “gunfighter”—don’t you think?—and it’s always good to have trail songs for all the trails we do. I grew up listening to the Grateful Dead’s version of “El Paso,” but it’s nice to have Marty Robbins’ original, an epic tale of romance with a Mexican maiden and a gun duel. Throughout these entries, I will intersperse commentaries on the tunes that entertained us on our way through the West.
Wyoming
On the map, Kirsten saw a scenic detour, possibly unpaved, that we approached around sundown in our traversal across Wyoming. The Pine Creek Ski Area was marked with a tent sign indicating a campground and we thought it a possible route through mountains to get to the Flaming Gorge in Utah. We took the turn and the pavement soon ended while our path made a quick ascent over a wild range, surely populated with unsavory creatures such as grizzly, wolves and ornery moose. We kept on as the road got worse and worse. The dirt red brown mud sprayed all over Tommy Three Reds, covering even his high roof. We stopped to let Lu and Mar visit some bushes, a task distracted by a high-speed chase along a tall ridge. Fortunately, it was just a deer and not one of the aforementioned creatures. We came to a fork in the road. A sign indicated potentially long and grueling paths over old snowmobile paths. We turned around not seeing any indication of the highway that we sought after. We made our way back to the flats, where a large camper was parked, a sign indicating that it belonged to John. Evidently, John was expecting company and a small town of four-wheelers and huge Wyoming trucks with the ubiquitous bucking bronco decal on the license plate so attached to the spirit of all Wyomingans and their big rigs. We parked our tent in a gulch, ripe with willow trees and mosquitoes and an ileum of a massive animal, most likely an elk or moose. As she banned from the truck, her odor made too offensive by rubbing in another dead critter’s remains, Lupe slept in the dirt. The near full moon split through the tent like a floodlight illuminating an escape at a prison compound, waking us up and causing Lu to panic.
Frank and the Busy B in Kemmerer, Wyoming
The next morning at dawn, I walked straight up a mountain with the dogs to a view of more mountains, sage brush and willows. This rugged wilderness just seemed to go on forever and ever. We doubled back, abandoning our scenic route and rolled into Kemmerer, Wyoming, the fossil capital of the world and new age mining town with massive gas plants, where modern day prospectors scrape the earth in an effort to keep this country powered—computers on, cell phones charged and homes heated. There, we went into the Busy B café and met Frank, self-professed “Jack of All Trades and Master of None,” who told us about his life working construction, the gas plants and coal mines during the summer and cooking in Dalhart, Texas, a profession he ran into happenstance. We had some stiff coffee together and he gave us some recipes for a real gravy and chili.
National Belle Mine, Colorado
You can see Tommy way down below as we left him to hike to over 11,000 feet in the thin Colorado air.
Horse Feathers and the Conformer
Lindsey, owner of Horse Feathers western store in Taos, New Mexico, knows hats. The device he holds in his hands is a conformer from 1840s Paris. He slapped it on my head to get a sense of its shape, making a map of it that Don holds in his hand. What did we learn from this experience? That I have a “blockhead,” that I can’t wear hats with brims too long or too short. Armed with this information, I picked up a new hat in Taos that is just about perfect.
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