No good Americana sign watch on the way through Cheyenne all the way up the
edge of Wyoming to Devils Tower, except for a couple of city names: Chugwater,
WY, and Manville, WY – although with the rugged outdoorsyness of Wyoming, every
town is Manville. Southern Wyoming is a golf course waiting to happen – miles
and miles of flat prairie and no trees.
Stapled through the countryside everywhere here in Frontierland are train
tracks, most of them hauling hundreds of cars full of coal, with one engine in
the front pulling and two engines in the back pushing.
On the trip northward, I went into the RV to get a bottle of water and when I
opened up the refrigerator, the plastic carton of blueberries I had in there
sprang out like they had been poised for this jailbreak and went a-plinking
everywhere, rolling under the carpet under the slide-out and every damn place. I
think I got them all. (Squish.)
Here’s a fun fact to know and tell about trucker’s etiquette: Usually, when
you’re driving a car and want to pass someone, you’ll signal and you can see in
your rear view mirror if they wave you over; then, once you’ve passed, you can
wave “thanks” in your own rear view mirror. There’s no “rear view mirror thing”
with trucks and RVs. When you want to overtake a semi, you’re supposed to signal
and wait until they flash their lights at you to tell you that they’ve got
enough room in front of them. Then, when you pass them, you’re supposed to flash
your running lights as “thanks.”
The campground at Devils Tower , WY is right at the entrance to the monument. I
took these pictures of the tower right outside our RV. It’s located at the
former filming spot for the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075860/)
– and we got a chance to watch it again with the Tower looming over our
shoulders because they show the movie here every night at 9 pm.
The restaurant (with a scratchy/faux-“distressed” version of the Purina People
Chow checked tablecloth) on the premises serves burgers and steaks, including
buffalo burgers, which taste (no, not like chicken) just like regular beef. The
aliens must be in charge here, though, because the music they played last night
varied from somebody’s (sounded kind of Wynonna-Judd-y) Christmas album, to an
odd assortment of oldies, so we went from Winter Wonderland to BTO’s “You Ain’t
Seen Nothin’ Yet” to The Knack’s “My Sharona.”
B-b-b-baby you just ain’t seen nothin’ yet…here’s somethin’, here’s somethin’
you’re never gonna forget…you just ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
Keighley found a friend at the pool named “Kaley” and they marvelled at this
coincidence while comparing their vitals with all the crayon-specificity
necessary between 9-11 year olds. Stuff like: What’s your favorite color? Mine
is hot pink, then baby blue, and then sky blue. (When was the last time you
categorized your favorite color down to that level of granularity?)
Bored, Wes picked up my copy of this month’s Oprah mag and looked up at me,
incredulous, because he couldn’t believe there was actually an article entitled
“Special: How To Eat.” It didn’t even occur to me that this was hilarious until
he pointed it out. Next month in O Magazine: “Special: How To Sneeze”..."How To
Breathe"..."How To Shit"....