Letter from Rural Nevada: What About Bob?
Rural Nevada is chockfull of abandoned mines and ghost towns that suggest the Silver State’s colorful past. Those places that remain peopled are full of eccentrics like my new friend Cowboy Bob. So, let’s take a ride in Bob’s old pickup truck.
First of three parts.
I met Cowboy Bob on my first day in McDermitt. And, man oh man, I thought, if this is what this tiny western border town could offer in the way of zany, oddball eccentricity, I’d struck another Silver State gold mine.
First, though, there was a bit of loathing, even fear.
I had rolled into town on a Saturday afternoon, unpacked my computer inside my rental bungalow and set out for a walk. As I moved down the gravel driveway, I heard a voice.
A man was there in his yard, just over the fence; my neighbor, I presumed. He was bent at the waist, like he was pulling weeds. He was dressed in a farmer’s cap and wore a purple bandana around his neck, as well as work pants and a denim shirt.
He looked like Mr. Green Jeans from the old Captain Kangaroo children’s TV show.
But there was something else: On his side of the fence, there was no grass whatsoever, just an expanse of dirt that had been painstakingly raked into straight lines, with trodden walking paths in between, like a farmer might use to access rows of corn. There were also small stones of different colors and sizes, dotting the lines of dirt and arranged along the back porch railing, like a religious offering of some sort.
The scene reeked of those Midwestern crop circles, a glimpse into an obsessive-compulsive mind. The whole place felt like the backyard of some mental hospital.
And to top it off, there at the fence line, beneath my bedroom window, sat a small pile of rocks, a makeshift grave without identification, topped by a crude wooden cross, something a wagonload of pioneers might have left behind along the Oregon Trail.
Who, or what, was buried there? Did I want to know?
Still, here it was — my first chance for a local encounter. I turned to introduce myself, but suddenly noticed that my new neighbor was talking to someone, and with a tinge of urgency at that.
But there was no one there. He was carrying on an animated conversation with himself.
I didn’t interrupt. I walked on.
A few days later, I walked over past the deserted hulk of the White Horse tavern to check in with my landlords, Lorraine Huttman and her husband, Howard, whom everybody calls “Junior.”
“So, what’s up with my neighbor?” I asked at one point.
They filled me in: Bob had grown up on a ranch in southern Oregon. Nearly all of his working life, he’d labored on isolated cattle spreads, where folks came to know him as Cowboy Bob. He was a simple man, who for most of his life had led a detached, outlying existence. He seemed like a lost soul.
“But I’ll tell you one thing,” Lorraine said, “when he was young, Bob was one good-looking man.”
“What’s that?” Junior called out from the couch.
Lorraine repeated herself, as if for effect.
“Man, he was good-looking.”
Lately, Junior has had issues with Bob.
“I call him Sponge Bob,” he said. “He’s got sticky fingers.”
“Oh, Junior,” Lorraine said, as we all sat in the living room. “Don’t be so harsh. That’s just the way he is. He doesn’t understand.”
Well, I don’t care,” Junior continued, undeterred. “You’ve got to watch him.”
A few weeks before, as it turned out, Bob’s older brother had driven into town and Junior spotted the two men loading the back of a pickup truck. He rolled up to Bob’s yard and saw that part of the booty being hauled away was some old plastic piping that he’d had stored in his yard for the longest time.
Now, as far as Junior was concerned, Bob was not to be trusted.
Lorraine shook her head.
“Junior, you’d hadn’t touched those pipes in years. He probably thought you’d just abandoned them. That’s how he is. He doesn’t mean any harm.”
“No,” Junior said. “He took them. And now I’ve got to keep my eye on him.”
“Oh, Junior.”
After that, I tried to give Bob a wide berth, but that quickly proved difficult in a small town. Every time I left my house, he was there in his yard, pacing back and forth, pulling weeds real and imagined. He’d see me walking along the roadside and pull up in his truck. I pretended not to see him.
If cornered, I would wave and say hello but offer no encouragement until old Bob went about his way.
A few times, Bob walked onto my wraparound porch and rapped at the door a few feet away. I peered out the window like a suspicious old spinster, at one point hiding in the bedroom until he finally gave up.
Who was this man and what did he want?
It was like I was living next door to some kind of rural Boogie Man.
One evening at dusk, returning home form a walk, I spotted Bob in front of his yard, raking the dirt. People joked that he must have sat inside his living room with a pair of binoculars or a spyglass, waiting for the next unsuspecting passerby, ready to pop out for a rushed and unwanted encounter, an ambush.
So, this was it: There was no way to avoid him. We were on a collision course. And I was tired of playing the timid small-town mouse, biased by all that hushed gossip. I could no longer pass him as though he wasn’t there, like you might a homeless person with a panhandling sign.
I was a journalist, after all. My job was to seek out characters and I had interviewed my share of them, including self-proclaimed Mob hitmen, renegade Catholic priests and other vigilantes.
Why was I so afraid of this harmless old man?
As I approached, he kept his eyes to the ground, as though he expected me to just walk on by. But I stopped.
“Hi, Bob,” I said. “Gosh, it’s lovely out tonight. You sure live in a beautiful place.”
He looked up and his eyes widened and he even flinched, as though he hadn’t seen that coming. He jumped back in a theatrical, almost vaudevillian kind of way, like Art Carney did at the explosion of another Jackie Gleason outburst in those old Honeymooners reruns.
Maybe it was part of a routine.
But in those eyes that met mine on that September evening was a kind of joy.
The comfort of human contact.
“Do you know how old I am?” he suddenly asked in his high-pitched voice.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, then jokingly replied “Forty-nine?”
“Nope.”
He quickly pulled out his wallet and handed me his driver’s license.
“I’m 81! It says so right there.”
He looked right good for his age. Sure, his hair was thinning, and his jowls seemed loose like he’d lost a few teeth, but his posture was still cowboy straight. He could have passed for 70.
We stood there for a moment. Neither of us said anything. I turned to walk on. We’d finally broken the ice and I figured we’d made enough progress for one night.
Suddenly, Bob seemed a much less-menacing figure. One morning, I absentmindedly looked out my bathroom window to suddenly see his face right there below.
Was he peeping? I might have thought so, just a few days ago.
But no, of course not, I realized. He was there to retrieve a lawnmower that Junior had left propped up against the house. Bob had so much energy, that he quickly finished all the chores on his own little property, so he moved on to those of his neighbors.
He watered Junior’s lawn in the summer and for a week or so, when his truck was broken down and he couldn’t tool around town, he patiently raked the entire pot-holed back alley that runs behind our houses, acting out on his thing about raking straight lines in the dirt, making patterns.
It was just crazy. Bob crazy.
When I’d stop to chat, he’d mention the weather or point to planes in the sky. He didn’t need much in the way of response, it seemed, just a bit of human contact.
One September morning, Bob was in my yard. He always seemed to be in my yard, and everyone else’s. Raking, doing chores. Never asking.
“Am I in trouble?” he said.
“Why would that be, Bob?”
“Because I’ve been bringing your trash container in from the road.”
And that he had. I would put it out on Monday nights, rolling it several feet to the dirt road in front of my gate. And on Tuesday mornings, it was magically back in place.
“No, you’re not in trouble, Bob,” I said. “You’ve just got itchy hands, I can see that. Go ahead, if it makes you feel better.”
Getting to know Bob, albeit slowly, cautiously, tuned me into a strange new facet of small town life, where characters like him exist, wholly themselves, while the gossip about them takes on a life of its own, some of it cruel, defining them in negative ways they cannot control.
Around McDermitt, the word on Bob was divided into two camps. For many people, those who choose to avoid him, his reputation has become akin to Boo Radley, the character in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Gregory Peck. Like Bob, the neighbor of Atticus Finch and his daughter, Scout, is innocent, childlike, and somewhat shy, a person who has not had much interaction socially.
But to the town's children, he became a superstitious, even-sinister figure.
The gossip about Boo Radley started because he was a shut-in who avoided human contact, and yet Bob does anything but that. He’s always out and about, encountering whomever he can. Just beyond our backyards, along U.S. Route 95, there are two welcoming signs for Oregon and Nevada, depending on which direction you’re traveling.
Often, I would see a family stop for snapshots, Dad holding the camera, Mom and the kids laughing, posing. Within minutes, I’d see Bob hop into his truck and roll over to introduce himself, offering to take their pictures.
I don’t know how many families went scrambling back for the safety of their cars, but folks in McDermitt have labeled Bob the Town Greeter, an innocent-sounding nickname that gives him the cache of a Forrest Gump-styled character: simple, direct, kind-hearted, without agenda.
They see the same wandering pickup and perceive, not menace, but irritation, like a fly that won’t buzz off.
The more I explored Bob’s public perception, the more insight I got into this enigma. “Yes, Bob can be a pest,” said Vickie Easterday who, along with her husband Bruce, has lived on and off in McDermitt for half a century. “He’s eccentric and, frankly, quite lonely. Bob tries too hard to get your attention. He doesn’t know his limits.”
Then Easterday offered this insight into small-town irritants like Bob.
“People judge, especially in a small place like this. And once you’re judged, you become that person. Your reputation stays with you. People here in McDermit really don’t know Bob; they know the rumors. Sometimes I worry over what people say about me.”
Joe White Buffalo, who runs a rock-and-gem lot in the center of town, is another local who offers Bob safe harbor. One day, I stopped to visit.
What about Bob? I asked.
“He’s weird but he’s safe,” the old rockhound began. “People accuse him of driving around, trying to peep into windows or steal something, but none of that’s true. He gets up at 5 a.m., for god’s sake. He’ll knock on my door at 6 a.m. I have to be stiff with him and I hate it. He can be a pest. I tell him that he can’t come around here until after noon. People around here put up with Bob, but they don’t like him. And he can be a real nuisance. Customers will be at my store and he’ll just pop up and suddenly invite them over to his house to look at his rocks.”
Still, he’s perversely amused by Bob’s antics. “Every time he leaves, I say to him, ‘I love ya, but not that much. What you need is a wife.’”
Bob, White Buffalo says, is a creature of habit. Every morning for breakfast, he eats two Little Debbie donuts, cookies and a banana with a cup of coffee. Lunch is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and dinner is a bowl of Cheerios and bacon salad.
He talks about himself in the third person. Suddenly, he’ll slap his knee and say, “Well, ole Cowboy Bob is gonna make me a sandwich.”
White Bull suffers Bob like a nine-year-old boy might suffer his next-door neighbor.
“He essentially has nothing to talk about. He repeats what I call mindless drivel. It’s the same thing day after day. I’ll say to him, ‘Bob, do you know how many times you’ve told me that story? I’m tired of hearing it.’ He’s not a worldly man. He can’t talk about a lot of stuff. He’s led a very small life. Cowboying is a very lonely life. You live in a cowboy camp. You work, and that’s about it.”
In the end, he feels protective of the old man, whom he calls a throwback to the past. One day, Bob walked up to tourists on the road and said, “Don’t I get a hug?” And I told him, “Bob, you can’t do that anymore. Today, they call that sexual harassment.”
Sometimes, becomes the butt of his own jokes.
One day, he walked up to one of the local gas stations and cleaned a tourist’s car windows, White Buffalo said. When the guy went to leave, Bob said, “Don’t I get a tip?
“You want a tip, do ya?”
Yes, I do,” Bob replied.
“Well, here’s one: don’t play the horses.”
And the guy drove off.
NEXT: Bob becomes my reporting focus, and hightails it.