Chapter 4

Cody  

The wind was playing havoc with the truck as we eased into the south bound Fort Collins, Colorado rest area. Setting the brakes with a giant swoosh of captive air, I stepped out into the crispness of a night just shy of some kind of paradise. The wind made it all that more dramatic and facing into that chilly but brilliant starlit June evening, I could not stifle the shiver that rose up and played tag with my spine. To the West, the Front Range rose up jagged and imposing from the valley. Showcasing the last of the following winter’s snow high up in the alpine meadows, the moon lit those sacred high places that drive skiers to extend vacations, and people like me to cuss the endless throwing iron brought on by the whims of chain laws. It was good to see all those mountains from the distance of summer and the fading fears of winter.

At least, I thought I felt fairly secure in the knowledge that winter was over for awhile. We all live with our partial view of reality and its my song and I'll sing it the way I want to, thank you. Truckers live their lives looking into mirrors and reflections and we acknowledge that our blind spots sometimes are bigger than we are comfortable admitting.

It was a wind whipped night of summer gales feeding thunderstorms to the southeast. The only thing bigger than those mountains were the plains fading out of sight to the east. And , in hindsight I reckon that I really didn't need to know that in less than a week I'd be fighting a white out between Laramie and Rawlins. Take your good moments when you can and don't question them: The here and now and living in the moment stuff that no one seems to remember until those all too rare perfect moment's memories have long since faded into the sunset.

Dallas was still fast asleep and as I walked to the restroom I saw a man smoking a cigarette and leaning up against the grill of his pickup truck. I nodded and he returned the gesture but I figured he had just pulled over to keep from losing his truck’s canopy in the wind. As I left the men’s room I was surprised to see him enter. Again I nodded and this time he smiled back. If this had been a hand of poker I would have just been 'raised.' I was caught off guard and was splittin' thoughts between the business at hand and this hand whose smile just brought down the moon a notch or two in intensity. Dialing night dispatch to give them a check call, I said my yes sirs and no sirs and hung up the receiver convinced that these french fry loads were gonna be the death of my sanity if not Dallas'.

I'd forgotten about the wrangler clad cowboy who looked too damn legitimate to be anything other than what he was. As I walked outside back into the wind I caught sight of him again as he struggled to get his cigarette lit in these winds from January. The flicker of the lighter and the framed hand covering the flame cast a warm glow up and across his face. By the time I reached his truck he was smiling again. I stopped and he exhaled to the opposite side his of his shoulder to avoid casting me into a cloud. It wouldn't have mattered much as the smoke was instantly disbursed; carried off into the night by the gales.

We exchanged our third set of hellos and the smile never left his face. Or his eyes. I asked him if he wanted to get out of the wind and sit in the truck. He nodded and I told him I had a partner who was getting some shut eye in the sleeper. He kept smiling and nodded again in understanding. It wasn't a problem.

As we approached the truck we shook hands and exchanged names. I also realized that Dallas was awake and was now sitting up in the shotgun seat. I imagined that he was probably trying to figure out where we were and by the movement of the cb antennas, I figured the wind rocking the truck had put an abrupt end to any hope of sleep. Opening up the passenger side door, I introduced Dallas to Cody and Dallas moved down to sit in the opening between the sleeper and the cab. Cody stepped up into the truck and as he did, an old tarnished rodeo belt buckle caught the light of the moon. He was a horseman. And I could also catch from the wind the faint whisper of a night spent in some local cowboy hangout. Don't know if it was Jack Daniels or Coors or some kind of combination of both, but there were spirits that were running high in that horseman which gave an edge to the brightness in his eyes. He wasn't lit but he had been making a full evening of this Friday night. He was celebrating something. Maybe it was a birthday. Maybe it was an achievement sweated over long and hard. Or maybe it was just life.

Once on my side of the truck I swung open the door and was amazed when the wind didn't pull it off its hinges. After getting back inside to the comfort of the heat in the cab, it took both hands to close the door. This might be June but it was a version of it that the Rockies are famous for.

Introducing Dallas to Cody, the conversation took off with a mind of its own and the commonality of our lives was striking. Cody didn't give a lot of details but when he did speak he sent the imagination spinning. Cody wasn't full of himself. He wasn't out on a mission to make some fans. He wasn't looking for admirers. He was out celebrating something personal but we never did find out the occasion. Tonight he was a spirit on the loose and he was looking for some friends. And for some reason for which I will be eternally thankful, he choose us.

Part horsemen. Part nomad. He had rodeo'd. He knew the value of a good wreck. The joy of a good ride. There wasn't any roping in the details of his life but there wasn't any shortage of the bonding of souls either. We knew him deeply and he knew us just the same. But in this 'real time' world we live in now we didn't know much about the who, what, where, when, and why of which highways he'd traveled to become Cody. When we parted company that night, I felt that Dallas and I had seen something magical dancing down from the mountains. Half wondering if it was real, I had myself convinced that neither Dallas and I would ever hear from Cody again. Nothing that satisfying and wonderous could stay real for long. There had to be a catch.

He called our voice mail two weeks later. He'd been out celebrating another occasion. He was partying with liquid friendship and I figured from his message that on this special occasion he had put away a bit more than on the evening that we'd met. In his message, he left a phone number where he could be reached. Later that night Dallas called the number and reached a western military base barracks. Convinced we must have written the number down incorrectly or that Cody had been too lit to give us the right phone number we did not try again. Cody had never said anything about being in the service. Steering clear of trouble I did not want to jeopardize anything he had going with the military. If it was meant to be he'd call again.

He did. Messages would appear on the voice mail without warning like the sudden appearance of a good warm chinook wind in the middle of winter. Always he would call and leave us a message that he was in a celebratory mood usually in someone’s honor. I pictured him two stepping or waltzing some lonely lady around this deserted Salt Lake City bar or that cowboy haunt in Albuquerque. Cody was a gentlemen and his 'don't fence me in' way defied definitions. Somehow if Cody was in the service, I figured that even the military barely managed to contain him and that he'd probably missed going AWOL on several occasions by mere seconds. A soul that large probably gets pretty far from base in the course of a good weekend.

It was a very bittersweet time in our lives. Dallas and I were living with my grandfather and grandmother in Spokane. At the time, our house was under construction up on the land we had held for several years many miles north of Spokane. My Native American grandfather from Colorado was also in the process of leaving this life and he was none too happy about it. A sometimes feisty and difficult man, he was determined to fight the cancer that had hijacked his lungs. He was true cowboy from the old school who, in spite of one of the most outrageous tempers, was always eager to be a part of our lives. My grandmother, a native Montanan, made the perfect match for him. She could shoot and camp and ride and, according to my grandfather, "Hell, she's even pretty!" The times we spent under the security of their roof will never be forgotten. After several weeks of running hard and not seeing Washington, we came home to their home and another surprise. We had mail. It was from Cody.

Usually when we would get home, it was an unspoken tradition that all important things happened around my grandparents small kitchen table surrounded by honey pine paneling and my grandfather’s hand made and hand painted cabinets. The first time we received something from Cody, Dallas, my grandmother, and my grandfather sat around that small kitchen table with me while I went through eight weeks of mail. In that huge stack there were several letters and a few postcards from the intermountain west. They were from an unfamiliar address. They were all from Cody. I was amazed.

My grandfather was particularly intrigued with anything from "Colarada" and many of the postcards were from his home state. For some unknown reason, I began to read Cody’s writings to them as my grandpa would hold in shaking and frail fingers the postcards yet unread with familiar images on them. These were descriptions jotted down in vivid 'you are there' in the "right here right now ' of Cody’s near heart attack inspiring adventure. His travels were through the mile high homelands of my grandfather’s youth. Whereas his conversation with us in Fort Collins had been short on details, these letters were beautifully written glimpses into the world and the heart of a man not to distant from the persona of the soon to be gone bigger than life elder who sat across the table from us.

As I read about the 'the Springs' ( Colorado Springs), or the high camps Cody rode to, my grandfather would drift slowly away from us into his own world. Occasionally we would hear him mutter "yeah I remember that place.." or I've been there Tim..my..." so and so had a ...something or other there." His eyes would be wet, and as i read you could hear the memories Cody’s letters brought to life dancing across the trails from one man’s life to another. Cody was sitting at that table with us. We couldn't see him but we sure as hell heard him and he spoke into the heart of my grandfather, a man he'd never met. His writings of Colorado and Wyoming and of hopping trains and riding the rails through tunnels scared out of his mind were better than any of the old westerns my grandfather watched endlessly.

Cody would tell of horses that he had loved and of horses that he had befriended. Some horses he couldn't understand. Others seemed to be hell bent on pursuing every possible method of crashing Cody into this fence or that creek. This wreck on that mount, they were each perfectly understandable as Cody would explain the horse’s position on the matter. Horses that on a moments notice would bolt across a twenty mile valley and sometimes he would let them and at other times it would be a battle between two spirits of who would reign in who. Horse and man. Man and horse. And yet, they appeared to me to be the same spirit. Cody spoke in the voice of the horse and he spoke in the voice of a man. As I read, Grandpa would nod or chuckle and my grandmother would look across the table at my grandfather who was momentarily thousands of miles away from hospitals, chemo and radiation and she would smile in the rare peace of the moment. They were horse people too. They spoke Cody’s language. They had ridden his trails.

I thanked whatever stars that had smiled down on us a few months prior and brought Cody into our lives. If there is such a thing as grace for those times when we as humans don't make the mark, I can only hope that Cody gets an extra helping on his plate for the gifts he gave us through those letters that summer. He brought Colorado back into the forefront of my grandfather’s mind and I'm sure those promptings were all that my grandfather needed to get the courage and the strength to make one final trip back to his beloved state the following summer a few months before he left us.

It was also during that time that Codys' stint in the service came to an end. He finished it up with honors and I have to wonder if all concerned didn't breathe a sigh of relief that he had made it through. He took on work on one of the largest cattle ranches in the West and suddenly we had a way to speak with each other regularly. He would drive for hours to meet up with us for coffee in Laramie or breakfast in Cheyenne. Dinner in the Springs or a late night rendezvous in Denver. If we had time we would head back to the bunkhouse on the ranch and we would spend time there.

The first time we visited the original ranch he worked at I was in awe. It was deep into the winter and once again the Moon was our companion. White wide open fields and broad valleys were framed by stands of snow blanketed timber and peaks daring to shine against such a dark horizon, It was cold and we had been fighting to keep our own semi from jelling up in the frozen extremes. I was freezing and as I sat between Dallas and Cody in his pickup even the heater was unable to keep up with the pace of the frigid blasts courtesy of the artic. I was grateful to be in the middle.

Cody maneuvered the truck skillfully across icy and drifted, snowy highways. His smile and good hearted conversation melted the chills I felt and as we finally got to his digs I was savoring every moment no matter how cold I was. Parking his truck next to a corral attached to a barn, I was silenced when as soon as we were out the door and into the cold, we were greeted by a two year old colt who came out of an open stall and into the paddock at a gallop. He was a beautiful black Thoroughbred and as he kicked up the powder snorting and frolicking, the horse nickered to Cody and pranced around us. Cody and the colt were close and although the Colt briefly acknowledged us, he was drawn to Cody. It was something to see.

We didn't stay out in the elements too long and soon Cody was ushering us into his part of the bunkhouse. Inside it was warm and the walls were covered with Western memorabilia. Here was another man who felt perfectly fine placing barbed wire on walls and using saddle blankets as ready made picture framing. On one shelf were pictures and trophies of former rodeo winnings. There were books on the old West and horses and on all things in between. The couch was worn but comfortable. In the background a clear channel am radio station out of Cheyenne was playing country western music. The intoxicating heat was comforting and I eventually drifted off to sleep on the couch to the sounds of Reba, Clint Black and Martina McBride.

Eventually Cody must have placed a blanket over me because I woke up later, a little too warm, to the howling wind outside and Randy Travis on the inside. In the bathroom, Dallas and Cody were sitting in a four legged tubful of bubbles, one of them on each end, their knees forming mountains rising out of the water where they met in the middle. Their easy laughter drifted over to where I lay and the sounds of rodeo stories, horse stories, and truck stories lulled me back into an easy sleep where the world was right and everything in this moment was perfect.

Cody never knew when we would appear somewhere near him or at least within an easy drive and his letters would come to us just the same; without warning. I eventually asked him if he would consider writing to the same elementary school second grade class that we were writing to and he agreed. A suburban class full of future Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles began getting letters from a real live cowboy and their world was altered just as ours had been. I came home to letters from the teacher exclaiming the power of those letters over her children. She once told me that Cody's writing had the same effect on her; sending her into a hypnotic state and into a way of life that she had assumed to be almost extinct. Cody has that way with people.

Its been several years since we first met Cody. He floats in and out of our lives through letters and phone messages and chance meetings. It’s a friendship based upon an understanding between nomads. He never stays in any one place for too long and like the cowboys of other generations, Cody isn't known for riding under the same brand for too long. There are too many other hills he hasn't seen the view from. Another horse not yet ridden. And other adventures waiting to be lived or just barely survived. I have told Dallas on many occasions that Cody was born a hundred years too late.

I accept our friendship as it is and though I wish we saw him more, I also respect the wildness inherent in who he is. To tie him down and force a stationary existence and the demands of dependability upon him would kill that spirit. I can count on Cody. I can count on him to call from a cowhand saloon in the middle of nowhere Wyoming remembering our birthdays or some holiday and having a drink in our honor. I can count on him to call out of the blue when we are home and tell us about the latest filly who for no reason up and blows and bucks and how she is just not going to dump him again. I can count on Cody to understand our transient nature and where the freight takes you and our need to never stay long and to celebrate the wildness we share. The spontaneity of perfect moments and bubble baths on cold winter mountain nights. The gift of what time we do have. Together. And apart. No explanations. No excuses. No conditions. Just that he’s out there somewhere and so are we and its all part of the way things work.

When I need to see that smile and I know we are far from where he might be, I just grab one of the many pictures of him that we have all over the house or in the truck. Friends have seen and commented on those images. The light shines through and people will often stop in mid sentence and pick the frame up off the table to bask in the energy of Codys' pictures. In those snapshots, caught briefly, letting his life pause, he is always with a horse, with the fire of life reflected in his eyes and a smile that lights up the day time. And, gives a full moon a good run for the money.