Page 33 of Christmas at the Ranch
He couldn’t deny it. It was as if he’d walked straight out of an ad for men’s cologne: white crewneck sweater, loafers without socks, blond streaks in his hair. His skin already had a new glow, he was going to tan easily.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he put down the ketchup bottle.
“The idea was to go somewhere I didn’t fit in,” he said. “Somewhere I could become someone new.”
“What’s wrong with who you are?” I wondered.
I scrunched my nose—another habit my mother doesn’t approve of.
“Unless you’re hiding something,” I suggested. “You were expelled from university, or convicted of a felony.”
He laughed. He had a nice laugh; it was confident, like everything about him.
“Neither of those things. I even donated part of my pay last summer to charity,” he responded. “It’s because of Thoreau.”
“Thoreau?” I repeated, puzzled.
“Henry David Thoreau’s experiment living on Walden Pond. He wanted to leave the overcivilized life and see if he could live off the land: ‘I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life… to reduce it to its lowest terms, and publish its meaning to the world,’” Dutch recited. He looked at me carefully. “‘Or if it were sublime, to know it by experience.’”
Until that I moment I thought he was the typical East Coast summer help. You know the type: he probably received a convertible at graduation, and his parents paid for his first apartment. He was here so he could talk about “horse wrangling” and “ironing a bull” to girls back in New York this fall.
But Dutch had a depth about him. I never readThoreau but somehow, I knew what he was talking about.
“How do you find Jackson Hole so far?” I wondered. “Mean or sublime?”
Dutch looked at me with those brown eyes. From that moment I was completely lost.
“Sublime, of course,” he said as if I should know his answer. “How could I not?”
We both ate silently. We followed the bison burger with Chuckwagon’s famous deep-dish apple pie with buttercream topping.
“What about you?” he said, handing me a fork.
We had agreed to share the dessert. Not even I could finish off a piece of pie after the burger and onion rings.
“Where do you want to travel?” he asked me.
“Nowhere.” I scooped up vanilla ice cream.
“All young people want to travel,” he argued. “They want to visit cities like New York and Chicago. Or go to the West Coast and see the ocean. The sunset over the Pacific is like finding the treasure at the end of the rainbow. And there’s a whole world outside of America: Paris and Rome for history, South America for music. Asia for thousands of years of knowledge.”
“They sell postcards of cities, and I can read about history and music.” I shrugged. “Where else can you wake up in the morning and see mountains and rivers? Where can you swim in glaciers in summer andski on fresh powder during the winter? Not to mention the animals. You’re as likely to run into a buffalo or deer in town as you are a friend,” I finished. “Jackson Hole has everything I want. I’m happy here.”
He started to say something and stopped. A smirk crossed my face and I glanced down at my plate. My mother said you never smirk in front of a boy, it was unladylike. For once, I was going to listen to her.
Dutch didn’t argue with me. Who can argue with someone who’s happy, when happiness is what people search for all their lives?
He took out his wallet and set down his credit card.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He smiled that movie star smile again.
“I’m paying for your dinner. I’d like to see you again.”
Samantha turned to the next page. There was a photo of a young woman on a horse. She had dark bangs and pigtails but Samantha could tell she was pretty. Her legs were long and shapely and she had a beautiful smile. There was something familiar about that smile.
The caption under the photo read: Grand Teton Dude Ranch, Summer 1991.
