LITMIR.BIZ

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door clunked behind it.

      “Hey, whacha dune? Nice morning, huh?” This around a mouthful of pancake.

      “Just getting in. Was in Rock Springs yesterday. Terrible place. Name’s Steve. Going to work trail crew.”

      “Hi, I’m Dick Robbins. Chicago (this pronounced just as in the old song: ‘Chicken in the car and the car won’t go. And that’s the way to spell Chicago.’). Want to go fishin’?”

      The rest of Dick emerged from around the jamb. He was slightly above middle height, brown hair and eyes, round face, stocky but solid, and moved with fluidity rather than in bursts, kind of rolling smoothly along.

      I learned, once I was able to interpret the strange speech (“moo’n pitcher,” “chorkorlit”), that Dick was indeed from Chicago, and was at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he was majoring “in skiing and girls,” working as a short-order cook to get by. He thought Chicago was what was left over after they had made the beautiful Rockies, and, after he got expert enough in skiing and girls, his further ambition was to fly airplanes, big airplanes, for the United States Air Force (and, indeed, he did become a Strategic Air Command pilot, spending his career in such garden spots as Minot, North Dakota, flying the B52’s). Dick was nothing if not decisive. If it could be climbed, skied, fried, flown, or gently sweet-talked, Dick Robbins was your man for it. It also seemed they had Smile Disease down there in Colorado as well as in Wyoming, and Dick had a bad case of it.

      “I got my private pilot’s license this year. Maybe we can go flying some time out of the Jackson airport. Should get some wonderful bumps from the thermals in front of the mountains. Fly up to Yellowstone. Fly over the Falls. Take some girls. But today we got to go fishin’.”

      There was a phrase in my Western novels I really liked: “A man to ride the river with.” It took me only about five minutes to figure out that, if there was such, Dick Robbins was it. Nothing rattled him and his good humor. He took reverses and obstacles in the same easy stride as he took good fortune. If there was a tool, he knew how to use it. If there was a problem, he would give it some thought and then go ahead and fix it.

      “Let me go upstairs and drop my gear, and I’ll be right with you.”

      “Doncha warnt some pancakes first?”

      “No thanks, Dick, I had enough pancakes this morning at the Silver Dollar to last me two days. Check with me in the morning, though. I could be ready.”

      I went up the wooden stairs at the side of the kitchen, and adjusted my eyes to the dim light under the log eaves. Twenty or so metal bedframes, with mattresses, slipless pillows, and Army blankets, were lined along the two longer walls. Open white-painted wooden lockers, most with clothes on hangers and shelves, stood at intervals and on the inside short wall. Two large windows let light in through the fourth wall, and shaded bulbs were hung from the peaked ceiling. A large, white-painted washroom was at one end, with sinks and mirrors, Johns, and showers. There were about a dozen towels on the hooks. I found what appeared to be an empty cot, threw down my Gladstone, and sat for a minute, thinking how far I had come in four days, and how far I had come since the snow in Hoback Canyon just several hours ago. I thought about the Mountain Men, seeing this country for the first time, as I had seen the Tetons just this morning. I wondered if it had felt to them as it had felt to me, and if it had changed something nameless inside them as well.

      A soft and liquid voice issued from a cot in a dark corner. “Hi, my name’s Larry. From Montana. The Flathead Rez. We’re goin’ fishin’, if you want to come.”

      “Yeah, great, Larry, that’s what Dick said. I’m with you.”

      “Great. Jim too. He’s got the car.”

      Larry rose soundlessly and effortlessly from the bunk, all five and a quarter feet of him, dark straight hair and dark, dark eyes, and big knotted shoulders. I followed him back down the stairs. His soft footfalls were barely audible; my clumsy boots clunked behind him.

      Dick was sitting straddling one of the benches, still chewing pancake, one in each fist. As we went over to him, the bunkhouse door blew open and in came the Wild West Wind.

      “Hey. Let’s go. Ready? Get a move on, the fish won’t wait all day. C’mon, it’s past eleven o’clock already. Be dark soon. Head ‘em up. Hi, name’s Jim, Jim Burdock. Let’s go. Bang bang. We won’t know what’s there if we don’t go look.”

      Jim was about one hundred and forty-five pounds soaking wet, a couple of inches shy of six feet, not an un-oiled joint in his lean whipcord body. He always looked like he was moving fast, but he was really always moving slow, and smooth, and effortlessly. I never have met anybody who gave more the impression that he was in a terrific hurry, while he was really taking his time. He had nondescript brown hair, pale ice blue eyes, and, man, he was the inventor of Smile Disease. As I learned later, he could talk you out of your socks (or any other piece of apparel), and was a bit of a devil with the ladies. He had that “Aw, shucks, ma’m, my hand isn’t really there” cowboy way that snaps like a mousetrap on (especially Eastern) girls, but he was very quiet and polite about it. Jim had been raised in the Sandhill Country of western Nebraska, a ranch kid, and was a couple of years older than most of us. He had graduated from the University of Wyoming down in Laramie, and spent the past year teaching school over in Dubois (here pronounced Dew-boys), a settlement just over the mountains northeast from Jackson. What he wanted to do with his life was, “Well let’s just go look, and see what happens,” but, hard as he worked at it, the keen intelligence under his hat was hard to hide. He had the Western hat and the Western boots, and he drove a garbage pick-up truck for the park. Said it was a good job for the summer, because he got to meet a lot of girls in the campgrounds and parking lots.

      We headed into the yard, piled into Jim’s old rattletrap Ford (made back when you could get any color you wanted, as long as it was black), and, trailing oily smoke behind the black and orange bucking horse Wyoming license plate, turned north on the main park road towards the Jackson Lake Lodge. I was a bit surprised, because nobody seemed to have any fishing gear.

      After five or ten miles, when I thought I had better mention that we had forgotten something, Dick looked at Jim, Jim looked at Dick, and Jim said,” Well, Steve, here’s how we go fishing up here in the Tetons of a Sunday afternoon. First we go up to the Willow Flats below the Lodge, and Larry here will show us how to really catch trout. Then, after we cook and eat ‘em, and rest a while from our labors, it gets to be about four or five o’clock in the afternoon, and we go up to the bar in the Lodge, and sit there, and have a little drink, and go fishing for the girls who work up there. It’s early in the season yet, just beginning, but I think it’s going to be a good year. “

      This was the second summer in the Park for all three of my companions, so I thought I better just follow along and work it like they said. Sounded good to me.

      It took us about a half-hour to reach the Jackson Lake Junction. On the way, I got my first look at the crystal blue waters of Jackson Lake, the largest lake in the park. Across the water to the west soared the flat-topped Mount Moran, girdled by glaciers, and with a distinctive oxide-colored natural dike running down its upper east face. Mount Moran was currently best known as the peak into which an airliner had slammed during a winter storm a few years earlier; the bodies and parts of the plane were still up there. The mountain was named after the great early painter of the American West, Thomas Moran. Strangely enough, Moran never saw ‘his’ mountain from its most dramatic, Jackson Hole, eastern side, but he did get to paint it from the west.

      Thomas Moran, a rather mousy and timid-appearing Philadelphia engraver, British-born, had been engaged as the back-up artist on the Hayden expedition of 1871. Led by the Director of the US Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, Ferdinand V. Hayden, the expedition set out to document the wonders of the region that included what was to become Yellowstone Park. Moran formed a close partnership and friendship with the expedition’s photographer, William H. Jackson, and Moran’s watercolors and later-executed oils of the geysers, steaming

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