As I shamble into the Cowboy Cafe, a lonely outpost along the I-80 corridor in Western Wyoming, Kristen is there.
“Same as last time?" she asks. "Hamburger steak, scrambled eggs and tomatoes?”
“Nah, let’s go with salad instead of tomatoes this time.”
"Onions and mushrooms on your steak, still?”
How about that, sure. Kristen is the last truck stop waitress in the United States whose name I know. Her tenure at the weathered but tight eatery has been lengthy by contemporary standards: eight years. She has the uncanny ability to remember peoples’ orders. I’m not sure she knows my name, but clearly she remembers my order. It’s a skill set among restaurant servers that has gone the way of the 13-speed manual transmission, it feels like.
Maybe it’s because nobody sticks around long enough to remember anymore.
Most days, the place is buzzing. But it's slow for a Friday. There’s just a middle-aged couple in the corner, Kristen, me and the cook.
“It used to be a lot busier than this”, she sighs.
Kristen, longtime Cowboy Cafe server
The hamburger steak arrives, and it’s the genuine article. A generous portion of fresh ground beef browned to perfection, piled high with caramelized onions and mushrooms, truly the best on I-80. Mom-and-pop cafes like this were once plentiful, those blue-collar oases author John Steinbeck rhapsodized about so long ago.
I pay my bill. $14.50 plus tip. Two bucks more than a large Big Mac meal might cost down the road. I say goodbye and start heading out in the truck. Headed eastbound, I begin to wonder just where and when I might make the next independently owned cafe with good-ol' American comfort food. There are plenty of places that sell food. But I’m talking about this kind of place. The kind of place that doesn’t break the bank and still tastes good. I couldn’t think of one.
So I called Shawn McIntosh, owner and operator of Oklahoma-headquartered Black Smoke Trucking.
“Foodwise and price-wise, there’s not another cafe like that until you get to Etna’s Oasis in Ottawa, Illinois,” he said.
Ottawa, Illinois? That’s like 1,200 miles.
It sneaks up on you. One day you’re just another guy out here, living and working like everyone else, then you wake up one day and somebody at a truck show dubs you the "vestigial remains of a once-noble profession.”
Maybe my attachment to the Cowboy Cafe and its ilk of eateries stems from the fact that it is part and parcel of that same vestige, harkening back to a time when people still did things like sit down to eat.
In Booker T. Washington’s memoir, “Up From Slavery,” he made note of the fact that, while he himself had been someone else's property, he never sat down for a meal. From the book:
I cannot remember a single instance during my childhood or early boyhood when our entire family sat down to the table together, and God's blessing was asked, and the family ate a meal in a civilized manner. On the plantation in Virginia, and even later, meals were gotten by the children very much as dumb animals get theirs. It was a piece of bread here, a scrap of meat there. It was a cup of milk at one time and some potatoes at another. Sometimes a portion of our family would eat out of the skillet or pot, while someone else would eat from a tin plate held on the knees, and often using nothing but the hands with which to hold the food.
By no means will I compare modern trucking to 19th-century chattel slavery. But couldn't that describe us all in some ways these days? One of the most fundamental acts of agency a person could perform, simply sitting down to eat when hungry, has been largely lost in our GPS-monitored-time-structured-fast-food-fueled environment, regulatory-inspired and otherwise.
[Related: Welcome to the 'deckplate diner,' can I take your order?]
Part of what makes sit-down meals out of reach for many is simple cost. Shawn McIntosh in our conversation noted he'd just “spent thirty dollars yesterday for a chicken-fried steak in Atlanta. Thirty f___ dollars! And it didn’t even include soup.”
I’ll be first to concede that all these lamentations about the death of the good, reasonably priced sit-down cafe may just be a boomer thing, and our ever-diminishing ranks may have a lot to do with the paucity of options. In a recent CCJ report, Pamella De Leon showed baby-boomer-generation truckers-- a demographic that seems, based on simple observation over the years, to be the majority of the Cowboy Cafe’s clientele -- have dwindled down to just 20.7% of the total trucker workforce.
We are the "Smokey and the Bandit" generation -- that breed of drivers who came of age by and large in the 1970s during the very pinnacle of trucker-cowboy mystique. Constantly seduced by movies, stories and songs into becoming truck drivers, we left home at 19 on a 48-state quest to find our own Sally Field. One day you wake up, you’re 66, and your own Sally Field is back home on Social Security. Your DOT physical now only lasts a year, and most of your friends are dead.
You didn’t think you’d get old this soon. It happened so fast.
So, yeah, it’s really nice to have someone remember the mushrooms and onions that you got on your hamburger steak the last time you popped in.
As the 10-4 date approaches this weekend, let's set the day aside for those humble workers like Kristen at the Cowboy Cafe who keep us keeping on, c'mon.
