For Classic Roadhouse, It’s Halfway in Outback

Some of the key guests here at the Halfway Station are noted for their capacity to demonstrate.

The guys from Australia, they decided that barkeep Rob Wheeler had an insufficient understanding of Aussie football. So they ran a play for him.

The ballcarrier commenced his run at the pool table and, rounding the bar, got lifted and turned upside down by his defensive mate and sent crashing, head-first, to the floor. That nobody died is only part of the good news.

The other part is that the ball, a odd bladderless leather number, now sits atop the bar TV, an alien trophy to the itinerants who pass through.

The Halfway Station, however, is no tavern full of drunks.

Instead it’s a classic roadhouse, circa 1955: a tidy barn-red cabin, with a hearth at one end and a “bathroom” door that leads outside, to a separate out building. The small, U-shaped wood bar is complemented by three round tables with red-check tablecloths. A jukebox is stocked with ZZ Top and Bon Jovi but heaviest of all on Merle Haggard.

Along one wall is a coffee pot with brew that is free for the taking in brown ceramic mugs hanging on nails. For those who momentarily forget where they are, a glance straight down while pouring reestablishes one’s coordinates: Framed in wood on the floor is a bear-paw print, a daunting 7 inches across, sliced recently from mud in a canyon across the street.

Welcome to the outback. The Halfway Station enjoys oasis status in Ventura County’s arid highlands along the northernmost stretch of perilous Route 33, 47 miles north of Ojai. It takes its name from being roughly midway between Ventura and Bakersfield, though no suggestion is made that people from either place are rushing to get to the other.

Even so, people find the Halfway Station. Or it finds them. There is so little else around.

There are no phones--the nearest, a pay booth, is 11 miles north on 33, in Ventucopa. The surrounding land is simultaneously alpine, with sharply defined mountain slopes covered in evergreen; and lunar, with treeless mountains cracked open to reveal serrated tan and yellow bluffs. Snakes and lizards are everywhere. Occasionally, a mountain lion is sighted. Occasionally, too, it snows, heavily; the roadhouse is at nearly 4,000-foot elevation. Running through everything is the Cuyama River, now a vast bleached wash but in heavy rains a wall of water that reduces huge boulders to clicking marbles.

Rob Wheeler came here five years ago from Oxnard. He worked on radar at Point Mugu. He got tired of his life, which was getting challenged by alcohol; and he got tired of fighting neighborhood thieves, who burgled his house repeatedly. He signed on as a handyman and, within a year, Dale Lingo bought the place and put Wheeler behind the bar. Wheeler, living in a cabin behind the Halfway Station, is a very happy, sober man.

And Wheeler, along with the peaceable Dale Lingo, is key to the ethos at the Halfway House.

“There hasn’t been a fist thrown in here yet,” Wheeler says. “I’m just not the burly bouncer type and I like a nice friendly crowd.”

This, of course, does not mean that the Halfway is without its celebrated cowboys. One of Wheeler’s duties is manning the grill, for the Halfway bills itself as a cafe and features a menu of mostly burgers and chili. And most prominent on the menu is The Wild Bill Bacon & Cheeseburger 645903.

The apparent serial number of the burger actually is the Ventura County jail’s booking number of a longtime patron whom the regulars call Wild Bill. Wild Bill works on the Chevron oil platform Hidalgo off the Ventura coast but has a deep belief in his cowboy destiny. He shows in black cowboy hat, a pair of black pistols mounted in hip holsters, and, on occasion, a long bowie knife dangling from his belt.

While Wheeler says everybody loves and feels safe around Wild Bill, “we’ve finally got him into the habit of leaving his weapons outside.”

That is good, Wheeler concedes, especially in view of the fact that the Halfway seeks to be “a family place.” Indeed, Lingo recently installed campgrounds out back, and until the place is a known camping destination with adjacent cafe, there’s no charge for a site.

Only a roadhouse cut off in time and place would offer coffee and a night’s sleep for free.