Originally posted on Killoggs
Watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at Josh’s the other night inspired me to revisit an old story.
The burning smell started just outside of Grand Junction, a mid-size city in western Colorado about five hours west of Denver and about 15 minutes from the Utah border. You sort of ignored it at first, pretending it was in your head, and when it got stronger—an acrid tinge of burning plastic or rubber inside and outside of the car—you imagined it was coming from one of the mines you imagined were around.
This is about two hours past Grand Junction, well into Utah. And east-central Utah—200-ish miles south of Salt Lake City, heading north now–is exactly what most people imagine when they hear “Utah.” Ahead to the north, just at the horizon line, is the grey dingy outline of the first rise of the Wasatch mountains, and every other direction is flat, with a scrubby pimple of desert here, and a short, late-stage plateau there. The last town was an hour or so ago, and the next one is about an hour and a half away; Price, and its soot-stained little sister Helper, notable for being the meeting place for full coal trains creeping out of the surrounding foothills.
In between is a nothing you just can’t imagine if you’ve always lived in cities or, for that matter, the east coast. A house every 30 miles; a new fence, a new property line every 15 miles; a clump of cows every ten; a dark-red crushed rabbit every five. And restaurants, gas stations, motels, or anything else refuge-like are the thing you think about to keep from getting bored or even from thinking about an acrid smell that’s been trailing you since the last city you were in that even had a bus station.
If you’re driving to, say, Los Angeles (with a detour to visit a future sister-in-law in SLC), it’s a little early to be getting bored. Seven hours in? Almost, very close to dark, but not yet. The landscape doesn’t change much from roadside to squinting-distance: low scrub sage bushes; wind-not-water now worn arroyos, a clump of cows; hard, pinkish brown dirt; no, not even straggler trees. But birds, and airplanes. You can see every bird and airplane in the west from east-central Utah. Horizon to horizon contrail chalk lines from plane schedules now how old. Continue reading →