The first has to do with a guy in the next spot over. He was driving a Tacoma, and pulling what I learned was a restored 1967 Airstream, one of the little ones. He and his wife had bought it from the third owner, and spent a year restoring it. He came over when he saw my bike, and started talking about his bikes. This is common: some guy sees the bike, walks over to talk about it, and winds up telling me about his bike, and how envious he is becasue I am riding mine and he isn't rding his. I listened a lot. But this guy had lots of other stuff he wanted to talk about, and so I listened. I never did see his wife, as she never left the trailer. It turned out that she has lupus, and he had retired from the Bureau of Prisons as a case manager to be the caregiver for his wife. He was an extraordinary man, very much in love with his wife, and attending to her. They both had the courage to get out and see our country even with her debilitating condition. You have to admire both of them.
Oh, and he recommended that if I went to Yellowstone, I should stay at the KOA in West Yellowstone. As it happened, I did, where I met Carlos and Nick, and we will get to those two later.
The second story is about the guy who came to take a shower at the campground, and why pre-judging is bad.
The campground offers free showers to those who pay for camping, and charges two dollars for all others. I saw a few men and women come and pay their $2 to get clean, all of them arriving in vehicles that were neither new nor shiny. Once, as I was headed over to the bathroom, a dirty, rusty former mommy-van pulled in, and an old guy got out. He was about my height, but outweighed me by an easy 75 pounds. He shuffled as he walked, his feet stuck into some old fake-fur lined house slippers, the palms of his hands turned backwards, one hand carrying "Alaska Carry-on Luggage" (a white plastic grocery bag for those who don't fly to or from Alaska) in which could be seen his toiletries and clean clothes. He was covered from hat to slippers in dirt and dust, and he moved with seeming weariness.
He was accosted by the camp hostess, a woman who seemed to forget to put her teeth in before meeting the public, and she asked him about payment. In what sounded to me like a curmudgeonly tone, he told her that he had paid at the box by the gate. He shuffled on into the shower, and I could hear him in there huffing and puffing and sighing until the sound of the shower prevailed.
The next morning, I decided I needed to eat more fruit, so I found the local market, and went in. I had toyed with the idea of getting a breakfast of some sort if thy had a deli, but when I got to the deli, all of the breakfast food was gone. A bunch of geezers were sitting in the booths, picking their teeth and drinking coffee from paper cups. I figured them for the offenders who had eaten all the scrambled eggs and sausages. So I got some bananas, an orange, some bagels, and a gallon of water, and went outside for my breakfast. I'm eating my banana, drinking my water, and eyeing my bagels, when I noticed I had parked near what looked like the old guy's former mommy-van. Sure enough, halfway through my bagel, he comes out, shuffling towards me in those same slippers, but in new clean clothes. In one hand he had something wrapped in a napkin, and it seemed likely he was one of the guys who had cleaned out the breakfast food in the deli.
To my surprise, he stopped to chat. He wanted to know where I was from, and where I was going. We chatted some more, and there was never a less curmudgeonly man. He was 76, had been in Rangely since 1948, because you could always find work in Rangely. There was work in the coal mine east of town (three seams, he said, and gave me the thickness of each seam), or in the oil fields, and "there is the richest man in Rangely right there." Turns out the richest man made his money in the oil fields, but was paying the price from breathing the fumes occuring in the oild fields by contracting emphysema, carrying his life-giving oxygen bottle with him these last few years. The old guy I was talking with carried on about energy policy in our country, and his views on it, and so forth. But the whole while we talked, he was leaning on something, as though gravity was trying to pull him down, but he was going to prop himself up and not let it win. Told me he felt pretty good, pretty good, and we parted. He walked over to his former mommy-van, pulled the door open, and in the nicest, sweetest voice, said to his dog, "Here buddy, I got something for ya', a treat." I never saw the dog, it must have been on the front seat both times, quiet, patient, waiting for the old guy.
I hope I can quit pre-judging people.
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