At 1:15 on Thanksgiving afternoon, the Wyoming Highway Patrol shut the gates on I-80 between Laramie and Rawlins, and by 2:30 the Sagebrush Lantern was full.
Rita Lang watched it fill from behind the counter with a coffee pot in each hand. She'd been waiting tables at the Lantern for forty-one years, and she knew what a closure looked like.
First the truckers, because they heard it on the radio before anybody else. Then the families in minivans, pale and stunned, still holding their phones like the phones might fix it.
Outside, the wind was gusting past seventy. Snow wasn't falling so much as flying sideways across the parking lot, and the big rigs lined up along the fence were rocking on their springs.
"How long?" asked a man in a Denver Broncos jacket, a little girl hanging on his arm.
"Till the wind lays down," Rita said. "Could be tonight. Could be tomorrow. Coffee's free while you wait."
"Is there going to be Thanksgiving?" the little girl asked.
"Honey," Rita said, "there's always Thanksgiving at the Lantern."
She hoped she was right.
The Lantern sat alone at an exit on the high, empty stretch past Arlington, where the wind came down off Elk Mountain like it had someplace to be. It had twelve fuel islands, a gift shop full of jerky and snow globes, showers for the drivers, and a diner with twenty booths and a long counter.
Dale Kimball had built it in 1972. He was seventy-four now and spending the winter in Yuma.
Every Thanksgiving, the Lantern served a turkey dinner to whoever was there. Usually it was twenty or so drivers who couldn't make it home. Wes Archuleta, the cook, put a twenty-two-pound bird in the big convection oven at noon, and by five it was done.
Wes had put the bird in at noon. Then he'd driven to Rawlins to pick up his wife's pies from her sister's house.
He called at 2:45.
"They shut the gate on me," Wes said. "I'm sitting in the Rawlins Walmart lot with four pies and no way to get to you."
"I figured."
"Rita, that oven's got a mind of its own. The bird's got to come out at five. You check the temperature in the thigh, not the breast."
"Wes," Rita said, "I've been cooking that bird since before you could see over the counter."
That was true. Rita had worked every Thanksgiving at the Lantern since 1985.
She'd worked the November closure in 1991, when the road was shut for two days and she'd fed eighty people out of a kitchen built for thirty. She'd worked the blackout in 2003 when a transformer blew and the whole exit went dark.
That night in 2003, she'd learned something she'd never forgotten. A whole turkey takes four hours.
A turkey cut in pieces takes about ninety minutes. And a gas burner will light with a kitchen match whether the power is on or not.
She kept a box of kitchen matches on the shelf above the range for that very reason. Wes teased her about it every year.
By four o'clock, there were forty-three people in the diner.
Rita counted them, because counting was how she kept a crowd from becoming a mob. Twenty-six truck drivers. Two families, nine people between them.
An old couple from Cheyenne on their way to their daughter's in Salt Lake. A college girl going home to Rock Springs. A young soldier on leave, still in his uniform.
The truckers did what truckers do in a closure. They pulled the booths together. They made room at the counter.
A driver from Albuquerque named Ray Montoya went out to his cab and came back with a slow cooker full of green chile stew he'd been planning to eat for three days. He set it on the end of the counter with a ladle and a stack of foam bowls.
"Not one spoonful till they've had turkey," he announced. "But after that, it's a free country."
The family from Denver had a pecan pie in a cooler. The old couple had a jar of cranberry relish their daughter had sent them home with last year and they'd never opened. A driver hauling for a dairy co-op asked his dispatcher, and his dispatcher said he could bring in two gallons of the milk he had in his cab for his own breakfasts.
Rita wrote it all down on an order pad: what they had, who'd brought it, what it would stretch to. Forty-three people.
One turkey. Twelve pounds of potatoes in the walk-in, eight boxes of stuffing mix, a case of canned green beans, and enough rolls if each person took just one.
She could make it work. She'd made worse work.
At 4:15, she opened the convection oven and slid out the rack. The turkey was a deep gold on top. She pushed the thermometer into the thigh.
One hundred and twenty degrees. It needed another hour and a half, maybe less.
She slid it back in. She started the potatoes. She set the girl from Rock Springs to opening green beans and the soldier to filling water glasses.
At 4:40, the wind hit the building so hard the windows boomed.
The lights flickered. Came back.
Then, somewhere out on the dark plain, a power line went down, and the Sagebrush Lantern went black.
The music stopped. The coolers stopped humming. In the kitchen, the convection oven gave a long dying whir as its fan wound down, and the little red light on its panel went out.
Rita stood in the dark with a potato in one hand and a peeler in the other.
Forty-three people had gone silent. The wind screamed around the corners of the building, and out in the dining room, in a small clear voice, the little girl from Denver asked her father if Thanksgiving was canceled.