Mikey, a studly 18-year old finds himself intimate for the first time with Mike, his namesake 24-year old uncle whom he's idolized all his life during a cross-country drive. Steve is the 20-year old collegiate gymnast who hitches a ride with them.
"So what about this ranch?" I asked.
"Well," Steve said, "I better start at the beginning. My mom's folks own a ranch. Technically, I suppose, you'd have to say they own two ranches, but they are side by side and these days operated as one. They located in Carbon County. Rawlins is the county seat; we went through there about two hours after we left home. The spread's south of Saratoga in a beautiful well-watered valley between the south end of the Medicine Bows and the Park Range. My grandma's is a cattle ranch. My granddad's ranch raises cattle and these days they also grow some sugar beets. My grandparents grew up right there, neighbors; and they married one another about a little over sixty years ago. They both were only children, after they both inherited, they merged the two operations. The homeplace is on my granddad's ranch, where my mom and her brother grew up. My uncle died in Vietnam, leaving only my mom, Nell (really "Cornelia"). She went to Smith in the east, and was involved in the anti-war movement. That's how she met my dad, who was at Columbia at the time, though he grew up in Montana.
My brother and I grew up on the ranch, too. Or at least until we were 11 and 12. We moved to Cheyenne then, partly for schooling, and partly because of my dad's business. My mom's folks staked him, and he bought a small bank there. He now owns four banks in county seats around Wyoming. They are small, but they are well-run and profitable and actually stuffed with deposits - you'd be surprised at how much cash some of these ranchers have in the bank. Some day they'll probably be sold to some big chain and there'll be some real money there."
(Later, we learned the whole story. Back about 1915, Steve's great-grandad, seeing what was happening around Wyoming, didn't want to have a lot of outsiders coming in and drilling and digging on his land. So he went out and managed to buy up the mineral rights for his ranch, and, while he was at it, he bought the mineral rights for several of his neighbors' ranches too, so they wouldn't be bothered. Decades pass. His son, Steve's granddad, now turns out to be the biggest holder of subsurface rights in Carbon County, and a lot of his neighbors' ranches are now owned by big out of state corporations. By the 1970's these gas and oil rights were incredibly valuable, and he's been collecting on both leases and royalties. Mark and he are each beneficiaries of big trust funds, and one day they will inherit it all. For the present, however, Steve is happy with his tee shirts and an old Honda and he hardly touches the income. We learned about the Boxster a little later.)
"Anyway, Mark and I grew up on the ranch. We learned to help with the haying and help with calving, and the usual sort of ranch chores, milking our milch cows. When we were really little we had our own ponies, and we got horses as soon as we could sit them. Still have our own horses in fact. Every year as soon as school was out, we'd go back to the ranch for the entire summer, and we're still doing that. It's incredibly beautiful out there, like a paradise. We're fairly passable ranch hands, and can mend fences and all sorts of crappy stuff like that, and we're damn good at handling cattle.
"Big thing for us in the late summer is rodeo. Me and Mark, we've been a calf roping team for years, and we're pretty good. It takes a lot of practice and teamwork, and the more you work together the better you get. That's why a lot of the teams are brothers or cousins, guys who work together season after season. Our other event's totally different. Bareback riding. Thing about it is that, it's really close to gymnastics. It's all a matter of balance and timing and practice." (And, he didn't add, but it was perfectly obvious, really good abs). "Course you have to know your horses, too. We've both won a few events, at least at the county level.
"Me and Mark, we always work together if we can, no matter what the job is. And the last two summers especially, since Mark's been at Wharton. It's the first time we've ever been apart, and, frankly, it's killing us both.
"Why did you guys go to different schools then?" I asked.