Americana Sign Watch:
Days Inn: Beaver 30 miles (snick)
Eddie McStiff’s Bar & Restaurant
Ye Ol' Geezer Meat Shop
Wendys: Now Hiring All Shits (I kid you not – see attached photo)
The Crazy Horse Inn (there is one in *every* town out west)
Something you see all the time out west (also in Australia ) that you don’t see
back home: road trains, which is a semi with several trucks hooked together. I
saw several Roadway and FedEx trucks hooked up as three-fers.
You start thinking like a trucker after hauling a rig for awhile. You start
looking ahead for diesel signs that mention trucking, or how accessible the
McDonalds promises to be for big vehicles. Not just because it’s a bitch to try
to wedge a truck and an RV into one of those gas islands – it’s a bitch to turn
it around, too. You have to think several steps ahead to how you’re going to
exit when you need to swing wide. You realize how much space truckers need in
front of them to have enough braking room. You start noticing rest stops as not
just being a place you might be able to pull over and throw out some trash or
use a rest room – you see it now as nice, big spaces ahhhhhhhhh :)
You also watch the road more carefully when you’re thinking like a trucker, and
some of the other drivers will make you cuss like one, too. Wes keeps exhorting
people who insist on passing without enough room to overtake the driver in front
of them, to “Go to plaid!” which is a reference to "Spaceballs” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094012/)
a supremely dumb (and funny) movie where they spoof the way Star Trek movies
would go to Light Speed. In “Spaceballs,” the speed past the speed of light was
“plaid.”
All of the state roads are indicated with a little beehive icon – which I
thought was a geodesic dome until I looked it up. Utah is the Beehive State ,
which refers to some Mormon lore. The state is also filled with references to
people with faux-Bible names (the way some African-Americans will name a kid "Shaniqua"
thinking it sounds "African" when there probably isn't a single "Shaniqua" in
all of Africa). You'll come across a name like “Nephi” – which I thought was
“Nehi” (like the soda) until I saw it on another sign.
Ribbons of roads cut through Utah for miles and miles with nothing but the great
outdoors to be seen from the windows – no billboards, just you, the scenery, and
all those mile markers. The altitude changes dramatically and quickly, as much
as 4000 feet within a matter of minutes – suddenly the world muffles, and then
there’s a roar of air when your ears pop. And what you see outside is amazing.
It's not for nothing that a lot of the fabulous background used in the movie
"Thelma and Louise" was filmed in Moab.
The land changes from what looks like red clay, to white sandblasted-looking
rock, to silvery gray crags resembling wrinkled elephant legs. Miles of huge
rock outcroppings – and then flat desert. And back to red rocks. We came across
some salt flats on the side of the road. This isn’t a national park or anything
– this is just the side of an ordinary road in Utah .
Here and there you see a fake lake – a dead giveaway when you shave off the
edges into perfect right angles as if you used a T-square. And then, without
warning – it’s back to moonscape and craters.
There are a couple of theories for Utah . One is that those swept up piles of
multicolored rubble and dust are sand castles from a day off with those Easter
Island dudes. Keighley thinks all the red rock formations are really port wine
cheddar cheese, and if she’s right, God’s been scraping upwards on them with
some giant crackers.
The other possibility is that those huge whorls of lumpy clay formations are the
result of God having a frustrating time in ceramics class, and getting
aggravated – you stupid !@#$% piece of clay! – and flinging it at Utah . It's
like looking for shapes of things in clouds: you can see what might have been a
decent vase or a pitcher if it wasn't listing to one side, or a bowl that sags
where it should flare into a lip.
The city where we're staying is called “ Mo-ab ” with two syllables, although at
first I thought it might be possible that it was one syllable, the way you might
address the Great White Whale if you were really close buds. But I looked it up,
and it's an arcane name from Genesis and Exodus, so it's not even a "fake" Bible
name, although they did have to go to the back of the rack to dig it up. "Nephi"
didn't make the cut, though and neither did "Nehi" (grape or orange) :)
After visiting the Moab Diner and Ice Cream Parlor (best BLT *ever* and some
pretty good green chile on top of fried potatoes), we went to Arches National
Park (http://www.nps.gov/arch/), an underground salt bed covered with debris
that eventually formed dramatic arches and spires, balanced rocks, sandstone
fins, and eroded monoliths. It's more of the same
rejects-from-God's-pottery-wheel, with big blobs of what look like sagging
chocolate cakes and weird giant rocks perched precariously on top of spires. We
tried huffing and puffing in unison to see if we could make the rocks tip over,
with no luck.
Back at the campground, the ever-present summer smell of charcoal grilling and
burnt marshmallows was wafting everywhere, and Keighley wanted to go back to the
pool. The pool was full of Europeans, giving away their ethnicity with their
German accents and tiny Speedos, and their preteen daughters not wearing any
tops.
I watched two German boys play grab ass in the pool, and they were *exactly*
like the two American boys I saw at the pool in Cedar City. Both sets of boys
included an older boy around 15 years old and a younger one around 11, and the
older one ragged on the younger one constantly about how lame he was and how
much more physically superior he was. You could clearly understand "watch me!"
and "try this!" and then the inevitable cackling and humiliation and "you wuss!"
and the defensive, "you're a fag!" even without knowing a word of German.
I found myself sitting next to a French couple, smoking cigarettes in their
Speedos and tiny bikinis, and eavesdropped as hard as I could, hoping to
overhear something scandalous, but they were saying things like, "What do you
want to do after this?"
The cable offerings in this campground (very scenic, like there’s any choice in
Utah ), included a station running reruns of old Perry Mason episodes. Wes and I
both remembered (and sang) the theme tune, but neither of us could remember the
tune to Raymond Burr’s subsequent series, “Ironsides.”
Anybody? Anybody? Buuuueeellllller?? (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091042/)
The Mormons named one of the pull-off-and-check-it-out spots on Rt 70 “Devil’s
Canyon” which just goes to show you – we were stupid enough to give all this
glorious landscape to the Mormons, and they were even stupider and gave it to
the devil. Paybacks really *are* hell!
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