I don’t wear my cowboy
hats much anymore. I have two, both bought cheap at Wal-Mart: a
gray wool felt for winter and a light yellow straw for summer.
Maybe I don’t wear them around town because fewer people seem
to favor them. Lately, Cody, Wyo., sports a new fashion statement:
those canvas, earth-tone wide-billed caps. I have a couple myself,
and find that I use more sunscreen on the back of my neck and ears
nowadays.
It’s not that the dominant cowboy culture
is abandoning Cody. But there seems to be a change in the air; a
distinct feeling that — after more than a century — the
prevailing buckaroo zeitgeist is hanging up its spurs. Cody has
been discovered by the cap folks, and the hat folks have
competition.
“I just hope we don’t get
Bozemanized,” said a friend. “After all, I’m just getting
used to the rednecks.”
The Rocky Mountain West has seen a
119 percent growth rate in the last three decades. According to
studies, 80 percent of newcomers regularly practice at least one
outdoor activity, whether it’s hiking, mountain biking,
skiing, fly fishing, ice and rock climbing, kayaking and river
rafting. I’m an avid day-hiker myself, and belong to a local
hiking club, High Country Hikers. We haunt nearby parts of the
Shoshone National Forest and Yellowstone National Park on weekends.
Anyway, I’ve been bumping into the cap folks a lot lately.
I was in a coffee shop recently, when a young mom with
two small kids in tow approached the counter and announced to the
smiling woman proprietor: “We just moved here and friends told me
to stop in because you have such great coffee.” Later that same day
I was in the public library, when I overheard a couple trying to
get a library card. The librarian patiently explained that they
needed some sort of proof of residence to get a card, and they had
none.
“Oh, I know,” said the woman to the librarian, and
then turning to her husband, said: “Honey, go out to the car and
get the closing papers for the house.” “That’ll work,” said
the librarian.
A few days later, I struck up a
conversation with a geriatric biker and his wife at the laundromat.
They were sun-bronzed and had fading tattoos, were dressed in
Harley black, and had gray hair (his long and in a ponytail). They
told me that they were from Florida. Eyeing the big bike parked
outside, I asked them if they where enjoying their Western road
trip. The woman’s eyes smiled through her sunglasses as she
carefully folded a small load of laundry into a backpack. “Oh, we
moved up here last month,” she said. “We got tired of the damn
hurricanes.” She nodded to her husband: “He rode the bike and I
drove the U-Haul. But I think we’ll get a truck for next
winter.” Motorcyclists don’t really count as cap people, but
you get the idea.
While standing on a corner and waiting
to cross the street at a busy Cody intersection last summer, I
noticed that most of the passing vehicles sported blue-and-white
Wyoming plates with our signature cowboy and bucking bronc logo. I
wondered if that cowboy would someday be replaced by a mountain
biker. Summer traffic in town is always heavy thanks to the
tourists, but this past year in addition to our visitors, it was
heavy due to all those new Wyoming tags. And those many Subarus and
Minivans and SUVs were hauling a lot of aquatic gear: kayaks,
rafts, drift boats and canoes, not to mention trailers laden with
all manner of luxury watercraft. The nearby Buffalo Bill Reservoir
and the two forks of the Shoshone River offer the cap folks a
variety of maritime experiences. It sometimes seems that there are
as many boats in arid, landlocked Cody on a summer weekend as are
found in Sausalito or San Diego.
“I kind of like it,”
said my friend. “It reminds me of growing up in Newport Beach. In
fact, when I was a kid I had an uncle who worked at the marina and
who used to scrape the barnacles off John Wayne’s yacht, the
‘Pilar.’ The Duke once hired him as a deckhand on a
cruise to Baja. My uncle had a great time; fished for dorado, drank
some tequila. Weird, huh? The West, John Wayne, boats, Cody.”
“Yes,” I said, humoring my friend, who is given to these
flights of fancy. “The times they are a-changing.” It was a bright
day, and I adjusted the bill of my olive drab cap, the one with the
mountain logo and the message “The Wilds of the Rockies.”
Bill Croke is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a
writer in Cody, Wyoming.
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