Hemingway, Buffalo Bill and a Table Riding Shotgun

I rolled over with one long sigh. The last vestiges of rest gave out, and it was time to make tracks. We had a Rav4 to load, eight hours of travel ahead of us, and one piece of cargo that needed babying more than the suitcases around it, a resin top barely thirty hours cured on a table that had been a quiet blessing to build since spring. But before any of that could happen, there was a chicken.
An emergency preparedness chicken, the second in a new whimsical animals series I am creating, mounted, sealed, and delivered along with his buddy the emotional support goat to the Signs of Rural Life show at the Prairie Arts Center. Both jobs finished before noon, on a day we were supposed to already be an hour down the road. We got the table balanced on top of the chairs in the back, top up, treated like it mattered more than everything around it, because it did, and pointed west.

About two hours in I hit the rumble strips on the passing lane and woke myself up headed for the ditch. Cruise still set at 80. Not the thirty-minute fight I know well, the one I call "driving by guardrail," where you're gripping the wheel and counting mile markers and telling yourself you can make the next exit. Toothpicks holding your eyelids up. None of that lead-up. I was just gone, dipped, a moment of blind solitude, and then adrenaline did in half a second what no amount of caffeine ever has, and I was back on the road. Heart rate tapping the rev limiter, no harm, no foul. My wife didn't close her eyes again for the rest of that drive. Here's the joke I can't get past. That same morning I'd finished the painting of a chicken who was ready for anything, and two hours later I nearly put a Rav4 and a thirty-hour-old resin finish in a Nebraska ditch, and nothing about that chicken would have helped me one bit.

I love Wyoming, or at least the idea of it, the flat dull stretch first and then, further north, trees showing up among rolling hills, and something in me settles right into that. It's the pace of a western, the cattle and the rural rhythm, close enough to home that it doesn't feel like a different country, just a different room of the same house. Sheridan sits right at that edge, gateway to the Bighorns, and it's a working town for makers in a way I didn't expect. King Saddlery is there. So are potters and jewelers and the Brinton Museum, full of Native American and western art. One stretch of downtown has a beautiful sculpture every 30 yards or so. And there's a literary footnote too: Hemingway stayed at the Sheridan Inn and put the finishing touches on "A Farewell to Arms" in one of its rooms.

We were tempted to stay there ourselves, partly for the Hemingway of it, but mostly because Buffalo Bill Cody invested in that inn and used it as his headquarters while he ran tryouts for his Wild West show. That hits closer to home than it has any right to. My own house sits on one of the last parcels sold off from the Cody Land and Cattle Company, a mile from his ranch house and barn, which is a state park now. I've lived a mile from that man's front door for the last 25 years without ever quite connecting it to a hotel room four hundred miles away where he used to interview cowboys and sharpshooters. Small world, or maybe just the same world, still doing what it's always done.

.

The resin table is finished! Complete here on its base in the kitchen of my youngest daughters new place.

We didn't stay at the Sheridan Inn, though. A friend who grew up in Montana and has driven these roads for fifty years steered us to the Budget Inn on North Main instead, and I loved it on sight, one of those low-rise 1950s motor courts built to catch highway traffic instead of downtown foot traffic, parking right at your door, the whole postwar auto-tourism aesthetic still intact. Clean, close to food, and the most comfortable bed I've slept in on a trip in years.

Dinner was the real find. We pulled up Apple Maps looking for something close and landed on a place with 426 reviews and a 4.9 average, which is rare enough on its own that I got suspicious of it in a good way. The Himalayan Kitchen, tucked behind what looked like a hotel lobby from the outside, nothing about the entrance suggesting what was on the other side of it. A hanging buffalo sculpture caught me while we waited to be seated, I liked it enough that I went looking for the artist's signature before we even sat down. Then the smell hit, and it was the kind of good that makes you stop talking for a second. Our waiter was from Nepal, happy and generous with recommendations, and told us a little about home when we asked. I ended up with a cashew curry, medium heat, my wife took a spinach curry on the mild side. Holy buckets. Best meal I've had on the road in a long time, in a town I'd only ever passed through before.

And through all of it, the table waited in the car, then came inside with us that night rather than trust a finish that young to the weather change, set up on the little table the room already had, a table on a table, both of them just waiting out the dark together. It struck me later how much of that day had been about things built by hand outlasting the people who built them, a saddle shop still making saddles the old way, a museum full of work made by hands long gone, a hotel room where a writer once finished a book, a ranch house a mile from mine still standing under a different name. And one table, not yet a day and a half old in its final form, riding quietly toward a house it was built for, in the company of all that older, harder-won permanence, doing what handmade things have always done. Showing up. Lasting. Meaning something to somebody, long after the maker's hands have moved on to the next thing.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio