Jeffery City was a uranium boomtown now home to an official population of fifty-eight according to the 2010 census. Bryon Seeley, whose bright blue eyes and sun-worn skin match the distinctive glaze and weathered texture that characterizes his pottery, is one of those fifty-eight people.
Driving north of Rawlins along U.S. Route 287 for the first time in five years, I was overjoyed as I passed through Jeffery City to see the familiar hand-painted lettering for Monk King Bird Pottery.
“You look familiar. Have you been in here before?” It was an unexpected welcome that meant more than he knew.
“I’ve been here fifteen years.” After a long pause he continued “If you count the first nine years where I was drinking. I’m four years sober.”
Quickly moving past his questionable math, I fixated on the word “sober.”
I lived in Lander off and on between 2014 and 2016. During that time, Bryon, whose last name I didn’t know at the time, was a familiar character in the small Central Wyoming town of just over seven thousand people. I say this in the most affectionate way possible, but at the time I knew Byron as the town drunk. I certainly didn’t know Byron well, but everyone who spent any time drinking in Lander knew of him.
“[20]17 was the solar eclipse year and I was on my way out...I wasn’t trying to drink myself to death, I just didn’t care if I did.”
Byron says that after waking up in the hospital “I realized I didn’t want to die after all.”
He describes his journey to sobriety in slow, short sentences, “It’s hard. I loved alcohol. It was fun. My life’s a lot better.”
Today Byron’s pottery business is doing better than he ever could have imagined. He’s selling his work faster than he can make it, and yet he’s still running his business on his own terms.
After picking out a beautiful mug and bowl, I realized I didn’t have enough cash for both. Byron told me not to worry—to take the bowl and send the $12 I owed him to his P.O. box in Lander.
As I left he said “Say hello to Lander for me.” He rarely goes into town anymore and when he does it’s only to help take care of his mother.
I had been apprehensive about going back to Lander and many of the places I’ve visited in the last month. Not because things ended badly, but because they ended so perfectly. I didn’t want to complicate the golden memories I had of some of the places I was returning to. And yet, I had planned to come back and inevitably complicate those memories.
But reconnecting with Byron was incredibly impactful. It was the kind of magically serendipitous interaction that seems to happen for me frequently when I’m out West.
As I’ve returned to familiar spaces and reconnected with people from my past, it’s easy to remember them as they were. But we’re all changing, shifting, progressing, regressing, and evolving.
The town drunk got sober and doesn’t go into town anymore.