I’ve always thought that if there’s a cowboy heaven, they hand you a pearl buttoned snap shirt at the door. Rocky Mountain style. Like some Colorado powder rider coming in from the cold at the ultimate high-country honky-tonk, only to find all the best buddies and best dogs already waiting there.

The Eddy has been the one and only snap shirt at the heart of those daydreams of mine for the past 10 years. On overnight flights across the Atlantic to write and report from Munich, Zurich, Innsbruck, Levi, and Sestriere, it’s the only shirt I ever wear. Calm, cool, unfrayed and unfaded, it can go right from baggage claim to the Ratskellar or Augustiner, or rocketing across the Autobahn with John Denver singing Country Roads on my internal radio.

It’s the open range elegance that makes the Eddy a favorite for doing anything in the States as well. Because the mountains are a state of mind, more about who than where you are. This shirt stands out as well as it fits in, making me feel special whether it’s for business downtown, watching the peaks going gold in the twilight, or stopping at the Local, where the tourists and the townies talk friendly across the bar.

The truth is, I started wearing snap shirts in junior high school. Because, growing up in Denver, I wanted to dress like the ranchers and ropers with the giant belt buckles who I saw every year at the National Western Stock Show. Along with the requisite snap shirts, every couple of years I got a new pair of cowboy boots as well. So Westerned up that when I went to a tiny ski college in Upstate New York, a classmate asked me if I used to ride a horse to school.

“No. A truck,” I smiled.

Thanks for being the shirt on my back, Eddy. I wrote this poem for you.

Cowboy Folklore 

You are the mountains but you are also transformed by them
Every day
This is what you wear in your world
And you take that world with you wherever you go
Skyscraper sunsets, like golden gleaming peaks
Rodeo highways
Saloons on the sidewalks by the side of the road
All the country is your country
Beautiful and bold
Now seize the twilight
Laughing as you stride into another alpenglow