‘Timberline Froyo’s’ mascot is a winking man in a trench coat and its buffet pickings are largely (but not completely) inedible. Past the whirling drums of frozen yogurt (plain, chocolate, or swirl), the toppings start with ammunition. Ammunition for firearms. There are a few trays of your standard caliber offerings up at the front, but most people come for the weird and legally gray stuff and it shows in quantity.
Hollow point.
Irradiated lead.
Dragon’s breath shells, which I believe are incendiary.
All this and more can be scooped into the bowl with that dollop of frozen yogurt. In fact, ‘Timberline’ offers a small, sunken lid-like piece of plastic for keeping the toppings away from the yogurt. A sign suggests this is to keep things from getting soggy during transit, but it’s framed as a speech bubble emerging from the mouth of the same trenchcoat-wearing figure.
An unnecessary flourish, really. Nobody gets this far without knowing something’s up.
‘Colorado is a liberal state, chock-full of repressed liberal hunter-types that sometimes see the fun with which their conservative peers flaunt insane and unnecessary weaponry in states with lax gun laws and decide they’re willing to flex their own moral boundaries in private. Mostly this has resulted in even more insane and even less necessary weaponry, designed by people who, in the day, use their degrees to engineer jet engines or refine highly efficient fuels.
It’s all still illegal, of course. To make. To sell. And nobody wants to lose their jobs.
Enter ‘Timberline Froyo,’ which is laid out like any frozen yogurt buffet except that their toppings are largely donated by the same freaks that make exploding guns. ‘Timberline’ keeps its sources anonymous and, due to a quirk of Colorado law, they’re able to sell those donations legally, as long as they do so by weight and as long as they’re sold with a visible portion of frozen yogurt.
The largest take-away container on offer at ‘Timberline Froyo’ is a ten-gallon bucket, and people leave with them teeming all the time.’
I go for the smallest bowl portion and really consider my options. The by-weight cost of the frozen yogurt at ‘Timberlines’ is outrageous, something they seem to pride themselves on referencing as bait for the FBI or the ATF agents that must lurk about and make purchases of their own from time to time. They talk about the serene life of the cows. Of organic farms and ethical milking and slow-churning and love.
I move past ammunition (none of it would fit in my gun) and into an area labeled ‘animals, living,’ which indeed features snakes, birds, and insects the colors of which suggest they are exotic, at least, but probably also venomous.
I don’t think I’m ready for a new pet.
Past ‘animals, parts’ and ‘drugs’ (prescription and recreational) and ‘furs’ I start to understand that things are set up alphabetically and that it isn’t the chaotic mess that it seems to be. By the end of it, the only thing that has really caught my eye are a pair of magnets so strong that one normally needs a license and a good reason to own them. The thick, plastic encasings to keep them separated don’t add much to the weight, and they make a fun but expensive souvenir from a place I doubt I’ll have the money to visit again.
A day later I accidentally loose one magnet from the case and it affixes itself to the top of the camper. When I try to use the opposite end of the other to pop it up enough for a fingerhold, the original magnet promptly flips and attaches to its brother, pinching off a piece of skin from my finger about the size of a grain of rice.
I count myself lucky and leave the magnets where they are.
A place like ‘Timberline Froyo’ could be dangerous for a guy like me.
-traveler
