Bio: Dude Kid 1953-1960; Wrangler 1961-62. Descriptor: Adolescence foolishness, the Cowboy Bar, and a scary encounter with my car and a DC-3 at the airport.
Bernie’s Story: Assuming there’s a statute of limitations for this sort of thing, I suppose it’s finally time to fess up. Blame it on some combination of adolescence and testosterone, coupled with a gawky case of teenage inferiority complex. Sing Anderson, a cabin girl, and her tent-mate (Padget?), and I set out for Jackson one Saturday evening. My parents, who were at the ranch as guests even while I was working there, around 1960, had let me take their Oldsmobile. When we broke out onto the bluff above the Snake River, we pulled off the road on the chance there was a moose feeding down below. We parked at the edge of the drop-off and got out to have a look. Sure enough, there was large bull with his entire head underwater, blissfully unaware of us. Maybe this is what cued the predator in my limbic system. With absolutely no premeditation or, for that matter, any kind of rational thought, I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out a cherry bomb left over from the Fourth of July. The moose’s head was still submerged as I lit it, but just before throwing it I noticed a car turning in way down at the other end of the overlook gravel…with a big gold star on the driver’s door. The die was cast–or you might say, the bomb was lit–and so all I could do was throw it. But what a throw; it splashed exactly between the moose’s front and rear legs, sank for half a second and then went off, sending a gusher of water up against his belly. Unfortunately I don’t know what the moose did next as the three of us were piling into the car, spinning wheels trying to get back to the tarred road. I could see the Sheriff’s patrol car pause and then turn toward us, which was all the incentive I needed to embrace fully the need to depart the area. Like a seasoned getaway driver, though in truth I had never done anything quite this foolish, I floored the Olds, thinking ahead that if we could just get down the bluff to Moose and over the Snake River bridge, we might be able to turn onto the main north-south highway without the sheriff’s deputy seeing which direction we went. I can’t say we slowed down going through Moose. Luckily the intersection with the main road was just out of sight on a rise above the bridge, which let us turn north, accelerate to the turnoff onto the dirt road that runs out behind Blacktail Butte, and disappear. Except of course, I then realized, in our haste we were throwing up an enormous rooster tail of dust. But maybe the deputy turned south and so didn’t see it, which we recognized for the lack of a pursuing rooster tail. Of course once behind the butte there were only two places you could go: to the generously named town of Kelly (one building? maybe two?), or Jackson by circling around the east side of the butte back to the main road. But remember, it was Saturday night. And so hoping we weren’t riding into a waiting trap, we went on into town and the Cowboy Bar…where we must have felt pretty proud of ourselves, and so celebrated with multiple beers. This, in turn, led to a renewal of irrational youthfulness, this time consisting of a little visit Jackson Airport on the way home. Now circa 1960, Jackson Airport was just a two-mile strip of asphalt and a small terminal building. No fences. No lighting. And, evidently, no people. I drove around to the back side, that is, to the airstrip itself. And then recognizing the opportunity presented by two miles of six-lane paving, drove down to the south end of the runway with my lights off. I can’t remember any more if the little blue runway lights had been left on. Probably so, but once we started north and built up speed, I had to turn on the headlights, though we were clearly driving beyond their reach. That’s about when I saw the DC-3 parked square across the runway, much too late for us to stop. At 120 miles an hour you really can’t turn very sharply, and so, slowed to maybe 80 miles an hour, we just managed to slip under the plane’s right wing–I heard the aerial twang against the metal–next to the landing gear. Needless to say we left the airport more slowly, but promptly. I never told my parents, who would have been no more pleased than the Homeland Security folks who make air travel so much fun these days. Bernie Huebner.