In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, there’s a beautiful town square park that you enter through one of two huge arches made of elk antlers. When huckleberries are in season, you can sit in the park and enjoy a huckleberry lemonade or one of several other tasty huckleberry concoctions. They’re crazy for huckleberries in that part of Wyoming.
A few summers ago, my wife and I were enjoying a huckleberry iced tea in Jackson Hole Park when a lady came striding through an antler arch and across the grass toward us. She was balancing a softball-sized scoop of huckleberry ice cream on a sugar cone. The lady we later came to know as Dolores turned and plopped down on the bench next to us.
“Yep,” she said, taking a big lick of her dripping cone. “This is the first time I’ve been out of Oklahoma in 17 years. Now, you may be wonderin’, ‘Well, why ain’t she been out of Oklahoma even once in all of that time?’”
Truth is, we weren’t wondering anything. We hadn’t even had a chance to say hello before she launched into her monologue.
Dolores’ husband, it turned out, had come to her a year ago and said he wanted a divorce — immediately — because he had met another woman online.
“And that woman? That online woman? She was from Canada!” Clearly, the international component had made her husband’s infidelity ten times worse for Dolores.
Her husband, by the way, had tried to come crawling back.
“But I said no. I’m drivin’ my daddy up to Yellowstone, ‘cause we always wanted to see it. He’s havin’ a nap in the hotel room right now, but I wanted an ice cream,” Dolores explained.
She took a reflective lick on her huckleberry ice cream and said with a sigh: “You know, my daddy, he had a midlife crisis, too, but he didn’t leave Mama. He just bought a convertible and a pair of bell-bottom pants.”
Characters like Dolores are in a category my wife and I call two-headed cows. Back when we were both working, with two kids in school, we had a limited amount of time to take a road trip. So we always ended up driving 12 or 14 hours straight on the first day, trying to maximize our time at the vacation destination. But as we were racing down the highway, we’d zoom past little signs that said, “See the Two-Headed Cow!” or “See the World’s Largest Prairie Dog!” and we’d say, “Damn! We’d like to see a two-headed cow!” But we never had the time to stop.
Now that we’re both retired, we do have the time to stop. And whenever we’re road-tripping, we stop to see every two-headed cow and every other cheesy roadside attraction along our route. We also take the time to have a conversation with the people who are just as quirky as the tourist traps. Meeting those people is our favorite part of every road trip.
In Bandera, Texas, we met a gnarly old cowboy named Hoot Gibson who’d always wanted to attend the Calgary Stampede Rodeo in Canada. So he decided to just ride his horse all the way up there from South Texas. Two thousand miles of cross-country riding, camping and dodging semis. Hoot was a horseman, but he was also a two-headed cow.
In Antonito, Colorado, the two-headed cow was a guy named Cano who lived in a huge silvery castle that he’d built out of beer cans and scrap aluminum window frames. “All those cans?” he said. “I didn’t drink a one of them. Got ’em all from the city dump. I’m not a beer guy. But I did drink some of those wine bottles over there.”
In Hastings, Nebrasaka, we met a lady named Harriett, who has converted her entire house to a Bigfoot Museum. It’s a hodge-dodge of tree branches, photos, artifacts and life-size Bigfoot figures. “Just look around, wherever you want!” Harriett told us. “It’s all here! I got nothing to hide! Some people don’t like the way I did my house, but guess what? I don’t care! It’s my house, and I’ll do it however I want!”
None of those conversations would have been possible back when we were doing the butt-numbing 14-hour drives. But we take our time on road trips now. We don’t drive every day. And when we do drive, we limit our windshield time to a maximum of five hours.
There are a number of online resources we use to identify stops we want to make. Roadside America and Atlas Obscura are two of our favorites. You can search the websites by geographic area or by topic. That’s how we identified a couple dozen of the world’s largest things to map out the route for our recent World’s Largest Road Trip. The World’s Largest and Second-Largest Rocking Chair were both stops on that trip. So were The World’s Largest Popcorn Ball, The World’s Largest Concrete Gnome, The World’s Largest Perry Como Statue and The World’s Largest Mailbox.
We met some of our favorite two-headed cows because they happened to live at the attractions we’d found on Roadside America. That’s how we met Clyde Wynia, a former lawyer in Wisconsin who sold his practice so he could weld gigantic dragon sculptures, then display them in his yard.
But other encounters were purely by chance. We weren’t expecting to meet anyone like Dolores when we sat down on the park bench in Jackson Hole, for example. And we had no idea that we’d run into Hoot Gibson as we were grilling our own steaks on the giant charcoal grills out behind the 11th Street Cowboy Bar in Bandera on Steak Night. But if you aren’t in a hurry and you’re open to conversation with a stranger, you can meet some people who will become the highlights of your road trip.
A few years ago, we were having lunch at the counter in a tiny cafe in Gillette, Wyoming, when an elderly Native American man walked in.
“Howya doin’ Chief?” yelled the fry cook.
The old gentleman nodded agreeably toward him. They obviously knew each other, and both apparently understood that the “Chief” title was meant affectionately.
Chief wasn’t big on conversation, but he sat at the counter next to my wife and began explaining how he’d recently lost his own wife to an extended illness. My wife listened to his story and extended her sympathies. He thanked her for letting him ramble on. But he also wanted to show his appreciation in some more tangible way, so he told her, “I’ve never done this before, but I’m going to give you my secret family recipe for cooking elk neck.”
I won’t reveal the recipe here, because it’s secret. But if we ever find ourselves out in the woods, hungry, with a fresh elk neck, we’ll know exactly how to prepare it. Because we took the time to have a conversation with a two-headed cow.
Joe Norris is a writer and former Wichita marketing executive. He can be reached at joe.norris47@gmail.com.
