Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  The restraints of law could not make themselves felt in the rarefied population, western chronicler Walter Prescott Webb mused in 1931. Each man had to make his own law because there was no other to make it. He had to defend himself and protect his rights by his force of personality, courage, and skill at arms. All men went armed and moved over vast areas among other armed men. The six-shooter was the final arbiter, a court of last resort, and an executioner. The knight vanished from Europe around 1400, the theory goes, only to appear again four hundred years later in the American West.

  Across the street, a homeless man was moving through the well-dressed crowd, pausing to check rubbish bins. Mythology seemed to be everywhere afoot on the prosperous streets of Jackson Hole. He made me think of Odysseus finally returning to Ithaca in the disguise of a beggar, moving invisibly among the godless party crowd. Unable to contain his rage at the way his homeland has been spoiled, Odysseus finally throws off his disguise and slaughters his grieving wife’s suitors, and given the choice of sparing a wealthy priest or an impoverished poet, he spares the poet, ensuring that his saga will be told for ages to come.

  The sheriff of Jackson Hole was telling the cowboys he wanted them to clear out of his town, and one of the cowboys hooted derisively. I had difficulty seeing what happened next because the mime had paused directly in front of me and was making cute happy-sad faces. He was pretending to be terrified of Amos, who appeared almost as annoyed as I was by his presence. There should be a federal law prohibiting left turns in traffic and public miming, I often think, and had this been the Middle Ages—or even just twenty years ago—I might have punched this palefaced jester for being such an unwelcome nuisance. See how civilized I have become? I merely asked him if he wouldn’t mind moving along so I could see the show. He made a rubbery sad face and moved but it was too late to see the sudden exchange of gunfire that sent both desperados sprawling theatrically to the pavement of Jackson Hole. The crowd applauded enthusiastically and when the smoke had cleared the public-address announcer was thanking people for stopping in town and reminding them most stores stayed open late. In the new mythology of the West, men came armed with plastic gold cards and swaggered after their wives into Eddie Bauer.

  We found our way to the lively saloon Tom recommended, where people were dining in one room and two-stepping in a line in another to loud country and western tunes. Troubadours and country music singers—was this another link to the doomed Middle Ages? After supper, Maggie and I found our way to vacant bar stools in the crowded dance hall, ordered shot glasses of straight Cherry Coke, and watched groups of middle-aged tourists trying to learn the Cotton-Eyed Joe, shuffling to a Patty Loveless torch song. Observing the men stiffly stumbling past in their brand-new Levi’s reminded me of why white guys really shouldn’t dance, so I concentrated my attention instead on a sharp-looking redhead whose jeans looked as if they might have been helpfully sprayed on by Earl Scheib. As she sashayed by, the redhead gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket and the guy she was with frowned as if to say he was fully prepared to climb a water tower armed with a can of spray paint to defend his sister’s honor. I remembered that every time he saw a pretty girl, Mormon founder Joseph Smith admitted, he prayed for grace.

  “Dad,” Maggie said, nudging me. I realized she’d seen me watching the red-haired lady. “Can I ask you something?”

  I nodded and leaned over to hear her question better. Basically I go deaf in honky-tonks.

  “Do you think you’ll get married again?”

  I straightened up and smiled, then drained my Cherry Coke. I motioned to the barkeep for another one, almost asking him to make this one a double. It wasn’t a question I was prepared to answer, not least of all because I wasn’t even legally divorced yet. Would she be happy if I admitted I would eventually like a new woman in my life, or sad that somebody else might try and fill the void her mother’s departure was going to leave in my life? We were traveling through uncharted territory here, a Wild West of unexpected dangers and ambushing emotions. I chose what I hoped was a suitably obscure response, taking the high road over the dangerous gulch.

  “Not unless Patty Loveless is looking for a rhythm guitarist.”

  Maggie nodded and smiled. I didn’t know if she thought I was just trying to be funny or telling the truth. The truth is, I didn’t know, either. It was an uncomfortable evasion on my part—she must have felt that as much as I did. How a child processes the events of her life is really a mystery, but from my perspective I was beginning to feel she was either doing a heroic job of suppressing her anger and disappointment with her mother and me, the inevitable sense of betrayal, or else was somehow working through the sadness with an almost eerie composure and levelheadedness. Perhaps the constantly shifting landscape helped, giving her something new in front to look at rather than something painful in back to figure out. It was certainly helping me that way.

  First the wedding ring. Now this. It must have startled her to see her old man being a man and admiring a woman other than her mother. I wanted to answer her question honestly—Yes, babe. I’d like to get married again someday. You see, I loved being married. I need a good woman in my life. When the right woman comes along…—but it just wasn’t the right place and time for such revelations. I was still mad at her mother and still madder at myself for somehow ruining Paradise, and I still hadn’t figured out how we’d managed to do that and was largely unable or unwilling to forgive either of us at this particular moment. Any conversation with Maggie beyond what we might do and see tomorrow seemed grossly premature—and potentially scarring. As a family, we already had enough scars to last a lifetime.

  So I did something that surprised even me: I asked my daughter to dance. We joined hands and wandered out in fish clothes to join the fancy line dancers in all their western-style fringed and sequined glory, a couple trout among the rainbow fish. It was quickly another case of a child leading the man, the man feeling faintly absurd on his two left feet, a laughing girl somehow getting them through the ordeal. Trisha Yearwood was tenderly wailing that maybe it was love that she’d run away from. And that maybe it was love that would bring her home again. Sing it, girl, I thought.

  A little while later, Maggie yawned and said she’d had enough of Jackson Hole and line dancing. It was a half-hour drive back to bed and I wound up carrying her sleeping in my arms through the lobby at Jackson Lake Lodge, wondering how my firstborn lamb could have become so long and heavy or else how I’d become so elderly and weak. She suddenly opened her eyes as we passed by the reception desk.

  “Has the president left us any messages?” she sleepily asked the clerk on duty. I paused and gave him our room number and he checked our box and told us, barely suppressing a smile, that he hadn’t. “Would you tell him we have to leave real early if he wants to have breakfast or something?” Maggie said, dropping her head back on my shoulder.

  “Certainly, miss. Who shall I say?”

  “Maggie,” she answered, leaving it at that.

  The clerk raised his eyebrows, waiting for me to supply a last name. My date was already gone.

  “Just say a fishergirl named Maggie,” I said.

  —

  We followed the Snake River and Route 26 to the Idaho state line, then angled due south on U.S. 89 through the Salt River Range, going through towns with names like Smoot and Cokeville, passing beneath the “World’s Largest Elkhorn Arch” before reaching the Salt River Pass and sliding into the right-hand corner of Idaho. A road sign informed us Idaho was “too great to litter!” and another told us it was celebrating its centennial that month. We reached Montpelier—“Settled on the Oregon Trail by Mormon Pioneers in 1864”—and pushed on past Bear Lake to Fish Haven, pulling over at Gladys’s Place to reprovision Gatorades and ice down the cooler. The radio reported that the intense heat wave had caused a nine-state power outage and much of Utah was affected. Salt Lake was our destination.

  Gladys herself was there, running the counter. I asked her wh
y Bear Lake was so incredibly blue—it looked almost unnaturally blue set against the evergreen forests in the hazy distance.

  “Limestone,” she answered curtly.

  “What kind of fish?”

  “Kind that swim.”

  Maybe Gladys didn’t care for hayseeds from Maine, or maybe she was just too dad-blamed hot. It was barely ten o’clock, and the mercury on a tree thermometer outside read ninety-two. Salt Lake was projected to top one hundred. I asked the gregarious Gladys how far it was to Salt Lake.

  “Two hours if you know the canyon. Four if you don’t.”

  We didn’t know the canyon; it took us five. When we reached Logan, the Miss Cash Valley Pageant was going on and “Twister” was playing at the Utah Theater and the marquee read “All seats $150,” a misprint, I hoped. Then a bank’s time-temp sign announced it was 3:41 and 97 degrees. We passed a golf course where several people were out pursuing golf balls and heat stroke, then saw a weathered barn pitching “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription—Women’s Tonic!” At Brigham City we picked up Interstate 15 and the temperature rose another eight notches to 105.

  “Dad,” Maggie suggested, “could we turn on the air conditioner?”

  I reminded her we’d left the air conditioner at home in Maine and assured her things would cool down in Salt Lake. I suggested she have Cool Blue Gatorade and that she wet down our elderly occupant with ice water while she was at it.

  An hour or so later on the fringes of Salt Lake, we passed a Buick on fire and came to a halt in dense rush-hour traffic. The radio was warning motorists to avoid the main thoroughfares, if possible, due to numerous overheating vehicles. Old Blue must have heard this because she immediately began to run hot, too. As we sat there broiling, a boy about seven or eight in the luxurious Jeep Grand Wagoneer next to us began making puke faces at me. The windows of his mother’s vehicle were rolled up and he was obviously enjoying an air-conditioned ride.

  I tried my best to avoid his rude gestures but he kept making faces and I realized he was beginning to really get under my skin. True, our truck was ten years old and we were covered with the dust of five states and sweating like sinners on Judgment Day—but was that any reason to be so darned unfriendly? We were all in this traffic jam from hell together, weren’t we? I glanced at the kid again. The second he caught my eye, his face contorted into a pig face; then, to my even greater surprise, he gave me the universal anti-sign of motoring brotherhood, a smug singly raised middle digit. I smiled in amused disbelief and then did something I hadn’t done in probably forty years: I stuck my tongue out at the pint-sized creep. It felt strangely…liberating. In some eastern tribal cultures, sticking your tongue out at a stranger is simply a safeguard meant to keep his infectious evil spirits at bay. That’s all I was really attempting to do but the boy looked stunned and turned abruptly to his mother, evidently squealing about some child-hating pervert in the ugly rust bucket beside them. The mother turned and looked at me in horror and I immediately steered Old Blue onto an exit ramp because a sign to the tabernacle had given me a good idea how we might kill time until the heat backed off.

  A few minutes later, we parked off the square and staggered up to the front doors of the mother church of Mormonism. The church rose above us like a mighty rampart, an American Vatican. What better place to cool off and plot our next move than a huge stone church. I opened a large door and we felt a refreshing gust of cool air. A suited man immediately materialized, smoothing his hair with a palm, and softly informed me our dog was not permitted in the church. I asked if we might just stand unobtrusively in the entrance foyer and cool down for five minutes and take in the splendor of the church and he repeated, with quiet urgency, that dogs were not permitted in the church and we would have to leave. At least he didn’t stick his tongue out at us.

  “Dad,” Maggie wondered right on cue as we left, “do you think dogs go to Heaven?”

  I said of course dogs went to Heaven, the place was probably crawling with mutts of all shapes and sizes. If and when I got to Heaven someday, I grumbled as we hoofed back through the heat of the square to Old Blue, I fully expected to find every dog I ever owned faithfully waiting to say howdy. Brigham Young was so busy collecting wives, I almost added, it was too bad he didn’t take time out to own a dog. A dog would have done him a world of spiritual good. Dogs are walking seminars in loyalty and blind faith.

  “What exactly is Heaven?” she asked next, and I should have seen it coming.

  “Everyone has a different idea and no one knows for sure exactly what it is,” I said. “One place in the Bible says it’s a place in the clouds filled with sapphire streets. A guy named Plato said it was the most beautiful star you can imagine. The people who built this church, the Mormons that is, say Heaven is a place with lots of swell lakes and beautiful cities where everybody is happily hard at work—sort of Heaven for Republicans. Your grandfather once told me that the way to Heaven is Heaven, but that may have been the Indian influence in him. My own thought is that Heaven is where your dreams finally come true, it’s the place of your best hopes, your heart’s desire, the place you really want to be.”

  Was this sufficiently vague?

  “Cool.”

  “Definitely cool,” I added.

  Speaking of cool, Salt Lake felt like Hades, no place I particularly wanted to be, so we drove on to Provo and found a motel with industrial-strength air-conditioning next to the Brigham Young University stadium and ate dinner at a joint filled with BYU freshmen and their parents—all of whom, I noticed, were intensely blond and entirely dogless.

  At dinner, Maggie said she wouldn’t mind seeing Las Vegas because she’d heard Elvis was born and lived there. I explained, over ice cream pie, that Elvis was born in Mississippi and died in Memphis, both of which we might catch a glimpse of on the way home, time permitting, but actually we might be dead, too, if we attempted to reach Las Vegas across a desert where the reported temperature was 120 degrees.

  I suggested we make a beeline straight for the dude ranch in Durango, Colorado, where I’d been fortunate enough to snag somebody else’s canceled reservation. The famous riding ranch was expecting us tomorrow or the next day, I said, and we faced a hard ten-hour drive over the southern Rockies. That also meant we were less than a day’s drive from a legendary river I couldn’t wait to fish. We shook hands on the plan, ordered extra ice cream pies for strength, and decided to turn in early.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Oldest Thing on Earth

  TWO AFTERNOONS LATER, I drove into Durango to a fly-fishing shop to purchase dry flies for a planned excursion to the San Juan with three guys named Ted, Chris, and Michael. They were fellow dads from Colorado Trails, the splendid dude ranch spread over five hundred acres of a narrow canyon rising above the banks of the Florida (pronounced “Flo-reeda”) River east of town. There, less than five minutes after our arrival, Maggie had fallen enthusiastically in step with a gaggle of little girls in the “Buckeroo” riding group and fallen for a large chestnut gelding named Luke. After her first afternoon ride, the Buckeroo group leader, a young woman named Wendy, pulled me aside and asked how long Maggie had been riding, and seemed genuinely surprised when I replied, “Never, if you don’t count this afternoon.” Because we were late arrivals, we’d missed the ranch’s rigorous introduction program, which every guest, regardless of horse skills, must go through.

  Colorado Trails’ ninety-eight horses are widely considered to be some of the most expertly trained animals in the West, and egos must be parked at the gate in order to ride them. George, the head wrangler, had given me my own indoctrination on a mustard-colored mount called Poncho. But, once again, my rudimentary skills were nowhere close to my daughter’s apparent aptitude for horses. She was cantering fearlessly by the end of the first day, and all I could do was marvel. She asked me to buy her a real cowboy hat, black preferred, and that’s why I went to town.

  A fellow in the shop said the local trout were taking some small dry flie
s like midges and duns but because of the drought if I really wanted to catch trout I should use wet nymphs with a sinking line. I thanked him, bought several beautiful elk-hair midges, and skipped giving him my speech about dry flies and free-will salvation.

  Besides, the theology debate was waiting for me out on the street twenty minutes later when I returned to Old Blue with the flies, two cowboy hats—one black, one white—and one brand-new pair of men’s size 11 Tony Lama cowboy boots. A curious little man with a tense red face and rawly barbered white hair peeking from under a sweat-stained straw hat was standing beside my truck, more or less glaring at Old Blue.

  “That your dog?” he demanded as I unlocked the truck and dumped my shopping bonanza in the back. The windows were down and Amos had been peacefully dozing on the rear seat. I said yes and he snapped, “Here. You better read this.” He handed me a printed piece of paper.

  I thought he might be an angry pet activist, stalking the streets of Durango to ferret out dog abusers. I was about to explain to him that the windows were wide open and Amos was perfectly fine—about to do a nice restful stretch, as a matter of fact, at an attractive, fully air-conditioned kennel on the edge of town—when I read his leaflet.

  The paper warned me that I wasn’t saved. I nodded and looked up at his truck, which was parked beside mine. It was a weather-beaten camper van with Texas tags and a large hand-painted sign of doom on the side. How could I have missed it? An orbiting satellite couldn’t have missed it. The lettering was the bloodred of a martyr wanna-be. Wicked baby burning thugs and sinners please listen! 86 dead in Waco and suicide not likely. We don’t want a wicked sex perverted color blind drug addicted baby burning society! I am not color blind, spiritually dead, spiritually blind, not a queer loving Satan worshipping sinner! Start reading the Bible and awake ye hipocrites, I speak to you of your shame. Your wickedness perverts drugs, abortion, Waco, AIDS, Ruby Ridge, Dr. Death’s euthanasia, burning babies in the USA! Don’t blame me. I voted for Bush. Time is short Eternity is long. Hell is horrible. This is America’s holocaust.