That Nice Old Cowboy Kind of Feeling in Prineville

My destination that evening was Prineville, a small cowboy town near the geographical center of Oregon. I rolled into town just after dark. As a treat, the giant orange full moon was rising above the rim to the east.

I'd booked a night at the Econolodge, the budget end of the Choice Hotels brand. The lobby was pleasant. I rang the bell and a woman from the Subcontinent came out and greeted me, obviously the proprietress. She was very friendly and helpful. Sometimes I dread seeing an Indian person behind the counter---a some of the independent motels it feels like an unwelcome I'm a trespasser in their house. But this was not the case here. Everything was just fine by me, even though the motel was a bit old. It could use a remodel at some point down the line. Having a national flag like a Choice brand means things have to be a certain standard.

No complaints, and---TCM! It fulfills my general observation that the smaller the market, the more likely you will find that channel on hotel cable systems. Partly this is because Comcast and the other big systems that dominate large markets have bumped TCM up to a premium channel.

I indulged that evening in lying on my bed and re-watching Meet John Doe (1941), one of the movies that Capra made for Warner Brothers during his hiatus from Columbia. It's probably Capra's most overtly political movie, made right after the start of World War II. As I've mentioned before, I'm a big Gary Cooper fan too. He was actually a real cowboy who became an actor.

For dinner that evening I dined at the Barney Prine steakhouse, just half a block away. From the hotel, I simply walked down the alley and entered the back. But I think I need to institute a new rule, to always use the front door.

Coming in the back, I was greeted by no one except the stares of other diners. I had to track down the waitress at the bar and wait patiently while she chatted with the bartender for a couple minutes until I could interrupt. They looked at me confused. "One for dinner please," I said. Nevertheless the steak was passable. That's all I'll say.

Being in Prineville gave me flashbacks to another cowboy town where I'd visited the local steakhouse---Williams, Arizona, where I'd stayed at a Super 8 last February. Moreover the terrain in that part of Oregon is strikingly similar to the plateau of northern Arizona, and the scattered patterns of snow were nearly the same.

That was a good feeling, since I had been missing that feeling I had when I was driving around Arizona in aimless fashion.

One often has a tendency, after an intense extended travel experience, to believe that to recapture the feeling, one needs to duplicate that same path, over the length of time, with the same intensity of immersion.

My observation is that this is false. It is often quite possible to reignite the feeling one had in certain place by a brief visit to a similar place. Trying to duplicate the original experience often is counterproductive. Instead it is best to stumble upon some place that evokes the same kind of feeling, as Prineville did for me. In such cases, one only needs to be reminded of that previous feeling. It's still all there, inside you. It never went away. You just needed to remember how to access it, and how vivid it is, when you experience it.