17-July-99 North along the Wasatch Front
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Friday the 16th continued -- At this point Rolling On One turns into a travel journal for a week. From the afternoon of the 16th until just before midnight the 24th we were on a trip to Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. I'll add some pictures pretty soon.
I had written down notes in one of my mini books as we went. I've transcribed them all to the computer and put up pages with just those notes; so expect this to be very rough and uninformative until I get around to rewriting and expanding everything.
Dave Letterman often jokes about South Asian cab drivers in New York. Our cab to the airport had a Pakistani driver. He had pretty strong opinions as to which side was in the right about Kashmir.
Why, all the time we were waiting to take off from Logan, was I trying to remember the name of the airport in Tokyo? Haneda is the old airport there, that's not what I was looking for. Right, it's Narita. Phew.
Three planes landed while we were waiting to take off. You could see the lights in the sky way off the end of the runway, and every time I said to myself, darn, another one we have to wait for before we can go.
I had brought along a Len Deighton book, XPD to read on the plane. Diane says in her essay on journaling, “details, details, details.” If you want to see how it's done, read Deighton. XPD is a terribly outdated cold war spy thriller, but worth reading just for the descriptions. He talks a lot not only about the look of the streets and buildings, but also how his characters are guessing what other characters are thinking and doing, and why they guess that. Ian Fleming's books, from more or less the same era, have details along lines of the often parodied “shaken, not stirred,” but it feels more like name dropping. The details in Deighton are there not to make the characters more suave, but to let you see where they are.
I had a window seat, but there was a lot of cloud cover and not much to see until the sun started to set. Usually you see clouds up in the sunset, but this time the sunset was over the clouds. The clouds took on more and more contour below us as the light became more and more nearly parallel to the cloud tops, and the contrast between the orange sunward side and the purple gray shadows got stronger and stronger.
I just heard a snippet of conversation between the car rental agent and the young woman on line ahead of us:
“Oh, are you a forest ranger?”
“No, a biologist.”
“I always wanted to do that.”
We were pretty thirsty in the low humidity intermountain air, and walked across the street to a cafe to look for ice cream sodas. They were about to close and didn't do ice cream anyway, but we found two Cream of Weber chocolate milk “milk chugs.” They were one pint plastic bottles that looked a lot like old-fashioned bottles of milk with big tops. We dispatched them in seconds, and they hit the spot.
Darn! My copy of XPD must have fallen out of my bag somewhere between the jetway and the rental car. It was just a yard-sale paperback, but I was getting into the story.
Saturday the 17th -- Being two time zones ahead of the local clock, we had no trouble getting an early start in SLC.
The first time I was in Utah was in 1959, when my family moved from Lexington MA to Mill Valley CA. We stayed overnight in Vernal, UT, and did a little sightseeing in Salt Lake. In 1964 I drove across the country with some other students (another guy and two girls) at the end of the school year and in SLC we got a six-pack of 3.2 beer, the best we could find out there at the time, and drove up to a secluded road in the hills overlooking the state capitol and the rest of the city, Several other cars were parked up there. I guess even the 3.2 beer had some effect, because we got out of the car and started singing Hava Nagilah and dancing a hora. The other cars took off! And that's how I busted up a lover's lane in Utah.
Then I think Buzzy and I tried swimming in Great Salt Lake on our way back from California in 1967. Around 1977 Arlene and I drove with Charley and Anne, who were little kids, from Denver to Albuquerque, the Grand Canyon and Painted Desert and Petrified Forest, up through Kanab UT and Bryce Canyon national park and north to Pocatello, and two summers ago Arlene and Anne and I drove south from SLC to Panguitch UT and Bryce and Zion national parks (and then out to Orange County and back through San Francisco and eventually to Pocatello.) And then there are other times we've flown to SLC and driven to Pocatello but not hung around Utah at all.
Out motel had a free continental breakfast. The pastry was good, but the coffee was the weakest I've ever had. A woman behind me looked at it and commented to her friend, “It looks just like brown water -- tastes that way, too.” I said that we were lucky to get anything with caffeine in it in Utah. My sister Hanna says that she never drank as much coffee in her life as when she lived in Salt Lake. Whenever anyone invited her to their house they would serve her coffee to let her know that they weren't Mormon, and she would have to drink some to to let them know that she wasn't Mormon.
Around here I never listen to country and western music on the radio. Once I'm in the West, firstly, there's not much alternative to it, and secondly, it seems to fit the whole gestalt. We had country stations on most of the time. A lot of the lyrics are totally predictable and you can just make up the words to the next verse before you hear them, but once in a while a song comes along with a line that cracks me up or gets unexpectedly to the heart of matters. One song in the “I'm trying to get over losing you” genre had a line like “Bobby told me that he saw you yesterday. He said that you were looking good, as if I cared”
We drove north on I-15 through green farmland and rapidly exploding suburban sprawl, with Salt Lake in the distance on our left and the Wasatch Front on the right. That's mountains, fans, BOOM! rising in a wall maybe five miles away, going on for forty or fifty miles north of Salt Lake City. I won't say it's as impressive as the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, but it's something like that.
We got off the highway at the Hill aerospace museum. It has a huge collection of real airplanes -- we had stopped there a couple of trips ago and checked them out; where else but in the Utah desert do you have enough space to display a B52? -- but this time we just asked directions to the golden spike site.
The final link in the first railroad across North America was at Promontory, Utah, in case you've forgotten. It's twenty or thirty miles off I-15 maybe fifty miles north of SLC. We've seen the exit for it many times, but have always been in a hurry either to get to the airport or to get to my mom's house. This time we had the time to go out there.
Now, fans, if you haven't driven in the intermountain west, it's time to tell you that there are big stretches of nothing out there. After a couple of towns within five miles of the interstate, there are no gas stations or food stores for the 26 miles left to the national historic site.
When my mother drove my sisters and me out to California when we moved there in 1959, she was stopped by a cop in western Colorado for going 66 in a 65 mph zone. She swears that there must have been a radar in one of the cows, because she hadn't seen another car for ten miles. From there to Vernal, UT (see above) she was singing, to the tune of Oh, What a Beautiful Morning, “Oh, what a whole lot of nothing! Oh, what a heck of a state! You can keep wide open spaces, they look like a rusty license plate.”
Two trips ago we saw a sign at Craters of the Moon National Monument that helped put things in perspective. It had a quote from someone: “Before you can appreciate the West, you have to get over green.” You just have to stop thinking that lush green grass is a requisite of a beautiful landscape, and be able to enjoy browns and gray-greens. I'm still working on it, and there were plenty of brown-green and gray-green hills to practice on along the way to the golden spike site.
The irrigated fields close to the interstate were bright green, though, and the area around the salt lake is a habitat for glossy ibis. We saw flock after flock of them flying for the first few miles, before we got to the hills.
The site where the rails coming from the east met those being built from the west has a nifty little museum with exhibits about building the railroad and running it. An exhibit about railroad time had a picture of an old pocket watch from Crescent Street, Waltham, Mass, the next town from here. It was an unexpected reminder of home. There was a case of pottery from a camp of the Chinese workers who had built the railroad out from California, with a ginger jar and a soy sauce container. Another exhibit showed the link-and-pin coupler that connected railroad cars in those days. Making up trains was a dangerous job. The label on the exhibit said, “a switchman's first mistake was often his last. You be careful with this coupler, too.”
The railroad coming from California had one big sawmill in the Sierra Nevada producing all its ties, which were nice and uniform and squared off. The other company bought ties from small sawmills and independent contractors all through the rockies, and they were rougher and less uniform. You can see the difference exactly at the place where the last spike went.
We figured the bird sitting on the fence behind the golden spike site museum was a Saye's phoebe.
Out in back of the museum was a short section of track (most of that line hasn't been used for years) with two period locomotives in concours d'elegance condition.
Caution, this locomotive is not a toy. Another, about the same size, different but equally beautiful, was almost nose-to-nose with it. That's Arlene standing on the ties.
The museum staff and volunteers re-enact the driving of the golden spike every day, and pleaded with us to stay and watch. We were far from the only visitors, but at a small scale place like that every visitor must be important. We wanted to get on to Pocatello, though.
We hadn't been listening to anything but songs on the radio. It wasn't until after we had lunch at my mother's that we realized that everyone was glued to the TV watching for news from the waters off Martha's Vineyard.
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