JULY 28, 2021 – By appearances, my boyhood town, Anoka, Minnesota, was a provincial place at the confluence of the Rum and the Mississippi. Many of my grade school classmates were farm kids. Some came from homes without telephones. Many folks had been stuck in Anoka or its immediate environs for much too long. Their take on the world was limited to a radius of around 10 miles.
My family were outsiders. Dad grew up in Minneapolis, 20 miles away. Mother was from New Jersey, pretty much a million miles away, where our uncle still lived. He’d been to Europe.
Yet, despite Anoka’s isolation, several of its citizens had traveled wide. Mr. Johnson, the county attorney, whose family lived two doors away, had been in the Marines in the Pacific during WW II. Mr. Cutter, another lawyer, whose family lived up the Mississippi from us, had been a Navy fighter pilot, also in the Pacific during WW II. (In the early 1960s, the Cutters hosted a foreign exchange student from Japan.) Dr. Martin—a dentist and accomplished oboe player, and photographer—and his wife took trips to exotic parts of the world and blew our minds with fully produced films of their travels, complete with titles, credits, narration, and music track. Our Welsh rector and his English wife had landed in Anoka after a stint in Canada. Father Hanney’s successor, Father Fenwick, was married to an exotic-appearing Hawaiian. Our next-door neighbors, father-and-son plumbers and the wife/mother—a trio who resembled the Beverly Hillbillies—traveled far and wide out West in search of geologic finds, which were on display in an addition to their (haunted) house.
But the guy I was sure had traveled on horseback across the American West was “Cowboy Mel.” Anoka wasn’t exactly in cowboy country, but there in our midst was a real cowboy—hat, boots, shirt, pants, belt buckle, swagger, gravely voice, and all.
Mel owned a barber shop downtown. He called it “Cowboy Mel’s.” The sign sported a lasso and a cowboy hat. Inside the shop he and his son John handled a steady flow of customers—grown-ups by day, school kids in the late afternoon. Everyone liked Mel. I haven’t met anyone since who could banter as well as he, with anyone from eight to eighty. I never saw—or heard—him when he didn’t have a log cigar jutting out of the corner of his mouth.
For all I know now, Mel never rode very far from where he lived outside of town, except to his barber shop, where his pick-up was parked in the alley. In those days I savored books about the American West, and my dream was to become a cowboy, herding cattle over the horizon by day and sleeping under the stars by night. Into the wide, wild West is where I wanted to travel, with bantering Mel as my guide. Surely, he knew the way and could talk our way out of trouble should any arise.
The rest of the world could wait.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
