Meeting Rodeo

By Linda Berlin

I live in a cowboy town forty miles from the Montana border. I did not grow up here, but I am often asked how I ended up in Wyoming. To complicate matters, I work in Seattle, and grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago. I have no blood family here, but I do have Rodeo.

The first time I ever flew passengers on a commercial flight, my instructor was a wily, laid-back guy from Wyoming. Rodeo grew up on a hay farm sixty miles from Rock Springs, a redneck oil town in southern Wyoming. My first day flying passengers in a Dash-8 turboprop out of Denver, Rodeo was late to work. Ray, a friend of mine, would be observing the flight because he was learning how to be a new instructor at the airline where we worked, so when Rodeo finally showed up, both Ray and I practically pounced on him.

The training department had failed to tell Rodeo any of this. Poor Rodeo ordered Ray to get his flight bag from the crew room and me to do the interior checks on the Dash-8. As he raced toward the airplane, I followed him like a nervous duckling.

Four years later we started dating. A year after that, I moved in with him. Now, fourteen years have passed in a blink of an eye.  When I upgraded to captain two years after I met Rodeo, my first flight was to Rock Springs, near his childhood home. Just as I stepped off the plane onto the ramp, the wind ripped the sunglasses right off my face. I should have known the man I would fall for grew up in such an unsettling place. 

Rodeo’s dad grew hay for the state’s elk herd to keep their population up through the harsh Wyoming winters. Retired as a Game and Fish land manager, Jerry fueled airplanes at the airport to keep busy. He used to bring me bags of ice in five-degree weather and laugh about it. One night Rodeo made me an elk stew on a work trip. When I shared this with Jerry the next morning, he told me that his son’s cooking skill came from his mother. I thought nothing of going to Rodeo’s home for dinner, though my co-workers teased me endlessly about a “booty call.” They were mistaken. That came later.

Our childhoods couldn’t have been more different. I grew up in the land of country clubs and golf courses. A friend of mine got a yellow Trans Am for her sixteenth birthday. Rodeo lived in a double-wide. I took swimming lessons at a brand new Olympic-size pool near my house. Rodeo swam in an irrigation ditch behind the farm. At fourteen, we both had summer jobs. I rode my bike to work at a busy beach concession stand on Lake Michigan, while Rodeo rode a horse twelve miles to a job at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. 

The first day we met we flew to Aspen and I handed Rodeo my camera and asked him to snap a few shots of me flying into a place where I’d learned to ski with my sister years ago. When the plane iced up on the way back to Denver, Rodeo assured me that was normal and offered me some grapes from his food bag. We had a picnic together while I stared out the window at the frozen right wing.

Back then, I would never have guessed that I’d settle down with him near the east gate of Yellowstone. We live in a historic home off Main Street, where I wouldn’t mind living until the end of my days.

At my second airline job, I lived in four different states and seven different cities in just one year as a junior captain. I hardly ever got home to Wyoming and I worried about my relationship with Rodeo. He was making vacation plans without me. I offered to quit because it wasn’t worth losing him for a job, but Rodeo shook his head.

“We’ll be just fine.” He squeezed my hand. We were walking around our neighborhood on a glorious spring day, the lilacs in full bloom. I stuck with that job and a few months later, got hired at a major airline, where I work now. People always assume two pilots never see each other because of their schedules, but these days, we work it out just fine, lining up our schedules like two birds in flight, returning home at the same time.

I told Rodeo I was writing a story for Substack about how we met and he asked suspiciously, “Who’s Rodeo?” He has heard his nickname many times before, but he still feigns jealousy, as if someone else could ever step into his shoes and be the cowboy who stole my heart. 

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