I was excited that morning to go into town. I’d just realized that I hadn’t really had a meal since Angie gave me my send off three nights earlier. So far I’d been surviving off of Clif’s, Luna’s, and cold oatmeal. I wandered in to find the restaurants closed but a general store open where coffee was based on donations and the lady sold polish sausages for a buck a piece. That suited me just fine.
The reason I hadn’t cooked any of my stove meals was very simple. One, I didn’t have much water to spare for cooking and cleaning. Two, in all of my supply runs back in Laramie I’d forgotten a sponge. I couldn’t have the beasts sniffing my tent for dirty pots at night so I refrained from cooking. I was also lazy and didn’t want to set it up when I went to bed those nights.
Anyway, I went in and chatted it up with the lady who owned the place and a few of the gents that stood in the doorway with their Styrofoam cups of coffee gabbing about the days of past and present. That day’s big news was that President Reagan had died and that some guy in Colorado fortified his tractor or truck with TV monitors and shotgun holes and proceeded to mow down the town he was disgruntled with. Typical news.
I lingered for about an hour and a half watching people come and go. One was a drifter who the shop keeper pointed out to me to be weary of despite that, in her own words, he seemed decent. I talked with him a bit and he did seem decent, just looking for work, but he seemed more of a Kerouac/cowboy cut than my head-for-the-coast exploration mindset. He drifted off, and an hour later I drifted off as well refreshed with brushed teeth, a new sponge, and an extra polish sausage.
Medicine Bow was next on the list of towns and that was 18 miles from Rock River. For some reason this walk was much more pleasant than the hot day before. Streams crisscrossed my path and the road curved around tree patches and windmills that were nice to watch and dream over. About ten miles off from the town I climbed a hill into the next county and took a rest stop at the Bone Home. It’s a house made completely of dinosaur fossils. As I rested there a family of tourists came by who I chatted with some before settling off again for the food I’d heard about at the Bow.
I got in around 5:30 and was nervous this was too late for a small town Sunday restaurant. Little did I know this restaurant was The Virginian. Famous from the book that told of gunslingers and whores that frequented the place back in it’s hey day. One of the patrons there even pointed out two bullet holes that the Virginian himself put in the wall through some sorry blokes head after he told him “when you call me that smile”.
The waitress there set me up with the biggest filling meal they had, a fat ole burrito under a tossed salad. Twelve cups of coffee and that beast did me just fine as I looked about the pictures of old gunslingers and talked to the locals about the wilds I was about to enter. My inquiries were to see if I should try and brave the back road country or simply stick to what I know and take the long way around via state and county roads. It was a fateful decision as time would soon show.
One of the guys there encouraged me to look around the place with all its history, so, along with another tight lipped cowboy and what appeared to be his son, I took a gander about. I took in pictures of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Another guy named Liver Eating someone or another who ate the livers of Indians in revenge for burning his family. The tight lipped cowboy told the story with a subtle pride, which…I suppose there’s pride in that sort of thing out here. Upstairs in the former brothel were individually adorned rooms still in western style. Pictures of the old west and those in it hung at every wall. I loved the place, but by 7:30 I figured I should be off.
The waitress told me she got the bill for me and good luck on my trip. I left her a five and a smile and off to the desert I went. It was three miles down the road before the turn off on to my first dirt road of the second leg. It would prove to be a long one. In it was the open range. Wild cows openly roaming and grazing. Never before had I confronted so face to face my fear of being trampled by something much larger and more easily startled than myself. I went a mile in and was forced to camp among them. To my surprise, after I pitched my tent, I discovered I had cell service and was able to call and tell my loved ones that they would not hear from me in most likely about a week. I got mainly answering machines, but I did get to talk with Angie, my friend Ana, and ole Cox for a bit.