We're on the dawn plane
to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, my brother and me. Coming from San Francisco, flying over the chalky pink Great Salt Lake, we're the youngest guys on board. The other members of our chartered party are mostly in their mid-fifties. They're wealthy and confident and ready to have fun. Most of them are Californians who made their money in the gilded 80's and are now flying to Wyoming to play at being cowboys in the bitter 90's. The guns and ammo are stowed below, and the fishing rods stored above in the overhead compartment. They can't wait to start shooting.
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We'll soon be descending on a former cow town, now a tiny five block stretch of luxury boutiques and art galleries. And at the Dude Ranch where we'll be staying the next week, we'll be riding horses, fishing for trout, and dining on each day's kill (grouse, partidge, perhaps even a wild turkey) with a bottle of fine wine from the cellar. We arrive. My brother and I are met by our assigned cowboy guide, Ed. Ed is around 45, has a Swedish last name, red hair, and a big handlebar mustache. He sure looks like a cowboy to me. He shows us around the grounds, nestled against a blue-green mountain ridge, and tells us how much he loves the open spaces of Jackson and how much he hates developers. This seems like a good time for me to tell Ed that my brother is a developer.
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This doesn't seem to bother Ed at all. "They're mostly developers who come here," he says amiably enough. And soon he is breaking us into all the activities of the ranch. My brother, wearing a newly purchased ten gallon cowboy hat, is ready to conquer all of them.
