Vacation Vignette: Cows and Cowboys and Bears in Rifle, Colorado

steak sub at the Base Camp Cafe

We had been driving all day toward the end of our trip, the last stop before Denver airport (a Best Western in a lesser Colorado ski resort), and we were hungry enough to eat a bear.

We were not, however, hungry enough to eat at McDonald's or Wendy's or any other Fast Food Nation feature. So we passed up highway entrances toward better-known towns and opted for the Rifle, Colorado exit. Only one restaurant had paid for a slot under the green Food sign on the highway: The Base Camp Cafe. We searched the two-block commercial district in the rain until we found it.

Our waitress was one of those small-town beauties—off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, low-rise denim skirt, boots, and brown, wavy hair that defined cascade tumbling around her bare shoulders. Her dark eyes twinkled. Tables of men lingered much too long past lunch. It was already three.

We each ordered the cheese steak sub with various additions and subtractions and listened to a CD by a Grand Junction folk singer named Lisa Lingo while we waited.

We weren't surprised by the perfect plate of fries that arrived quickly. (The more you restrict potatoes from your diet, the better they become!) We were, though, by the sub, which appeared to be made of real steak, thick and medium rare, piled high and smothered with Swiss cheese, onions, and green peppers, all standard.

As we were finishing, a man sat down at the table behind us, ordered a salad and a pen, and began to write what looked to be poetry—four-line stanzas taking up half the page. My daughter whispered, "Is he a real cowboy?"

"Why don't you ask him?" I said.

My husband did it for her: "Excuse me, sir, are you a real cowboy?"

Our cowboy looked at Serena, tipped his hat, and said, "Yes, ma'am, I am."

My husband said the cowboy hat had given him away, but my daughter disagreed; it was the belt buckle, a silver chunk that could have covered our sandwiches. This cowboy had a ranch with a few cows and goats and was an engineer for one of the big oil companies. Before that, he lived in Catonsville, Maryland, not thirty minutes from us. And before that, he was a Capitol recording artist from Austin, Texas. He wrote, ate his salad, which he salted generously, and had eyes like a puppy's whenever the waitress was in the room.

We didn't get his name. But as he and I stood in line to pay for our meals, he said to me, "Your daughter is a beautiful girl," and, perhaps appropos of nothing, "Don't let her be shy."

bear! oh, my!

On the way out, we visited the bear rug on the wall. "Is this a real bear?" Serena asked.

"Why don't you ask him?" I said.