Day 43: Monk King Bird Pottery

July 18, 2022 in Jeffrey City, Wyoming

Today's ride was brief and nothing of consequence, so I'll skip right to the fun stuff.

Tonight, we stayed in the ghost town of Jeffrey City where our church-turned-bike-hostel was the only building in site.

Bikers of stays past wrote their names and hometowns, and little messages to future riders.

I added my own as well.

I'm on dinner crew this week, so my chore-mates and I made vegetable stir-fry, which was truly spectacular. I also baked some sweet potatoes with chili powder, and I was very impressed with myself. It hit the spot times a million.

After dinner, Caroline and I walked to the only functioning business in town besides a bar–– a pottery store called Monk King Bird Pottery.

Whatever assumptions you have about this fine establishment based only on the name are both all true and entirely false. Byron, the 53-year-old owner of Monk King Bird, who appears to be about 75, would tell you the same (as would his dog Floyd).

Byron paid for the building in cash. He was tired of paying the rent on four art galleries in Lander when he could be paying a quarter of the price to outright own a property in Jeffrey City. But god was it lonely.

Since moving, he'd had all sorts of visitors, from a traveling photographer from Los Angeles, to collectors who'd pile the pool table in the middle of his store high with thousands of dollars of pottery, to Trans Am college kids who can only afford a shot glass.

There's a special appeal to his shot glasses though, as they are marked with a shotgun blast right through the center of the once-wet clay. In case you forget about his creation process, Byron keeps the clay-covered shotgun on the pool table, beside a red solo cup. A picture of Americana in a desert of covered-wagon dreams.

When Byron isn't home, you can get in touch with him via transistor radio, or the air horn he keeps below the sign telling you to holler at him.

The Los Angeles Times article reprinted on a piece of printer paper and tossed serendipitously on a table beside the air horn praised him for his use of three different colors of clay swirled in a rock-like pattern in each piece.

Pottery is Byron's sole art form. Unless you count the occasional painting, which he only makes when he's drunk. And he hasn't been drunk in five years, though the neatly arranged blue bottles along his ceiling may imply otherwise.

How do I know so much about Byron, you ask? Because he told us himself, without being asked a single question.

On our way out the door, with Floyd loudly chewing some sort of vertebra he'd found on a bunny run, we promised Byron we'd honk his air horn in the morning as a sort of farewell.