In a Cowboy Bar in Wyoming

Eight hours on two-lane blacktop, a Harley rider's dream. We left Spearfish, South Dakota at seven a.m., after having spent the previous day at the bike rally in Sturgis. Through the Black Hills into Wyoming, we traveled from the lush coolness of mountains with waterfalls, to a barren moonscape terrain for the next eight hours. The temperature rose to over one hundred degrees, and the isolation and other-worldliness of the terrain transported us to thoughts and inner conversations that we had no previous recollection were part of us. Even though it is somewhat of a tired cliché, I am pleasantly reminded during long-distance touring that it is truly the journey, both physical and mental, not the destination.

Five p.m., and we pulled in to Cheyenne, Wyoming, tired and hot, looking for a room. We arrived on the tail end of a Frontier Days celebration, and rooms were at a premium. I stopped at a place right off the interstate that looked mostly acceptable, crossed my fingers and asked for a room.
"Sure thing," said the desk clerk. "That'll be eighty seven dollars."
I looked around at the tired, tacky 1970's decor, then outside at my sweetie; wilted, face flushed, her eyes closed.
"I'll take it," I said, handing the clerk a steamy credit card.

We entered the room, turned on the lights, set the A/C on "stun" and started peeling off road clothes…all in one swift motion. Heat escaped our bodies in visible streams, wafting upward, giving up its essence of sweat, sunscreen and vehicle fumes. A quick swipe with a damp towel and we're immediately into civilian street clothes; shorts, sandals and sticky T-shirts, headed to the bar across from the hotel. The front of the place was a discount liquor store and the back, a seedy, dark, cool escape, full of cowboys.

We decided to take our chances.

"What do you wa…" I asked my wife, as she cut me off in mid sentence.
"Very tall, very cold, lots of alcohol," she said and leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes. The greasy pamphlet on our table, marked with drink stains and faded penciled-in telephone numbers taunted us:
"Try our special Bloody Mary!" I wondered... a Bloody Mary at a shot-and-a beer place? The combination of thirst and curiosity has made better men make worse decisions. I was game.

I bellied up to the bar, watching the bartender serve the people at the end, a small group of about six…cowboy attire, drinking tall boy beers out of the can, keeping a wary eye on me, the outsider.

He came over to me and stared.

"Two of your special Bloody Marys," I said. He nodded and took two tall glasses from the bar, filled them about 1/3rd of the way with ice, and added premium, top shelf vodka and poured it over the ice...making little, deliberate circles over the cubes, making sure every cube was wet.

That sure looked like a lot of vodka.

As he started to pour the second one, I counted: "One Mississippi, Two Mississippi…Six Mississippi worth of vodka. I smiled. I was waiting for the prefab Mr. and Mrs. T Bloody Mary mix to go in next, but I was pleasantly surprised.

He picked up a shaker of pepper with one hand and shook it into each glass, and with the other hand, several dashes from another shaker of celery seed. Happy with that, he picked up a bottle of Tabasco and added two quick dashes to each glass, watching the red tendrils of heat slowly seep through the ice. I smiled as the corners of his mouth lifted in his first show of expression. He looked me straight in the eye and added more: 1-2-3-4-5-6 shakes in each glass, a true smile now covering his face. Next, the Worcestershire sauce and grocery store tomato juice out of a can. Then, what I guessed was his secret ingredient, olive brine, poured out of the jar and filtered by his fingers to keep the olives from splashing into the drink. That, it appears, was not a real worry though, as the next step was for him to fish two large olives out of the jar with his bare fingers and plop them into the drinks. A squeeze of real lime juice, a quick stir with a knife and he presented them to me.
" Six bucks," he said, speaking for the first time. I counted seven ones and laid them on the bar.
"Thank you sir," he said as he smiled.

Back to our table, I set the drinks down. My wife was smiling now, having watched the show from her seat.
"Cheers," I said, and clinked her glass in a toast as we both took tentative sips. We smiled, looked at each other and agreed we were in the presence of greatness. Maybe it was the road, maybe it was the ambiance, but these were Bloody Marys to write a story about. Thirty minutes later, both of us cooler and much more relaxed, I took the empties back up to the bar and in my best non-verbal cowboy fashion made a circle over the top of them for another round. The bartender nodded, took two more glasses out and started filling them with ice. I sat to watch the show as he started pouring vodka.
" One Mississippi, two Mississippi…"