Sarah Haas, Nederland.    I met Dusty at Dot’s Diner where he’s a special sort of regular. Every day he sits outside for hours, drinking black coffee, smoking cigarettes and watching people pass by. He’s the first to greet customers as they come in, and the last to say goodbye. He’s a part of the landscape. It’s because of folks like Dusty that a server always keeps the coffee hot, even on a slow day, just in case.

After he eats, he walks to his car and pulls out a guitar and starts to play, his chords wafting inside to mix with the Grateful Dead soundtrack, forming an oddly wonderful and decidedly hippie sound.

There’s a certain kind of lucky I feel when Dusty plays. It’s not like at a concert when a musician puts on a show and not like passing by a busker on the street who you throw a buck for adding a little sweetness to the world. Rather it’s the sort of gratitude reserved for that very special kind of occasion when a person is courageous enough to let you see them be totally vulnerable.

“I started playing guitar on October 12, 1968,” Dusty says. Back then he was just out of basic training and starting the Army’s dental technician training program and he’s been playing on a 12 string guitar and hand carving porcelain teeth, at nearly twice the industry’s average output, ever since. That’s more than 50 years of putting smiles on faces, two ways, with twice as many strings, and twice as fast.

I want to ask him so many questions about what it’s like to carve teeth, I’ve never thought of teeth as craft before, but I’m so thrown off by how quickly and surely he invoked the date: “October 12, 1968.”

“You have a good memory,” I say.

“I sure do,” he says with the easiness of someone who knows himself well. Over the next hour he’ll exhibit such expert mental precision, over and over again offering dates like I do flowery adjectives.

The detail that impresses me most is of his first, crystal-clear memory of the time right before he was born. While still in the birth canal he remembers hearing a voice guiding him into this world, urging him in.

“I told it I didn’t want to enter in because I knew I’d be alone and I didn’t want to be,” he says. But it was too late to turn back, and he came out kicking and screaming like the rest of us.

Indeed, his life has been lonely, and it hasn’t been easy, which isn’t to say he’s dealt with more than the rest of us, but only that he senses life more fully and feels it more deeply.

Twice while we talk, Dusty is almost brought to tears and he closes his eyes and asks me to talk about “something, anything” to help move his emotions. More than anyone I’ve met, Dusty lives in the sensory and, despite his penchant for dates and details, his life seems oddly ahistorical, as if his experience has very little to with linear time or narrative structure.

Later, it’s me that’s having a tough time, struggling to tell his story without a clear beginning, middle or end. I’ll call him to ask, again, for dates. Happily he provides them, adding that his 1950 birthdate, “makes it easy to keep track of my time in my life, a date that’s one of the only few things I’ve been able to trust.”

“Trust,” as he says, rarely comes easily, it’s not easy to have firm belief in the reliability of our world: especially if you’ve been burned like Dusty has, and especially if you aren’t so sure this world is what it portends to be.

Dusty says he has memory of over 250,000 reincarnations on this planet, that’s a quarter million different perspectives into life as we know it, and, while the rest of see a three-dimensional world, he experiences it in 12.

“For all 68 of my years I’ve been trying to explain how I see and sense this world,” he says, with an air of frustration in his voice.

As I try to write his tale I feel frustration too and I can’t help but wonder if Dusty’s story wouldn’t better be told in music, the form that is, perhaps, best-suited for what lies beyond the limits of our three-dimensional world.

I close my laptop and turn on Dusty’s favorite song: Jim Croce’s, “Hey Tomorrow.”

It’s a cautiously optimistic song, reflective as it is forward looking, but ultimately an ode to the delightful torment of the here and now. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll pass by the diner sometime and hear him singing:

Hey tomorrow, I can’t show you nothin’/ You’ve seen it all pass by your door/ So many times I said I been changin’/ Then slipped into patterns of what happened before’.

Cause I’ve been wasted and I’ve over-tasted/ All the things that life gave to me/ And I’ve been trusted, abused and busted/ And I’ve been taken by those close to me

Hey tomorrow you’ve gotta believe that/ I’m through wastin’ what’s left of me/ ‘Cause night is fallin’ and the dawn is callin’/ I’ll have a new day if she’ll have me.

Mountain Folk Tales is a weekly column about locals living along the Peak-to-Peak. To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com. No story is too big or too small.