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.
If you’d stopped in Grand Junction, or even a few miles outside of it, near Fruita where the Colorado River twists red-muddy underneath grassy, hundred-foot shelves, to pee off the road, maybe by that one camping spot on the gravelly plane in between the highway and the low, nondescript hills hills hiding the river and its grass halo. If you’d have stopped here, even just because some of these things are worth remembering, you would have noticed the acrid smell dissipating as you walked down the embankment trying to see if even the local kids are maintaining the fire pit (a very loud campsite, yes). You would have crept toward the smell, underneath and toward the rear of the car. It’s just a spot—a bit of sweat on the bottom side of (must be) the gas tank dripping onto some bulbous part of axle and, yes, burning but not flaming.
But flaming now, of course. Flaming out the sides and back of the car, giving up big black plumes that fill the car, and melting through something down there such that the brakes only half work, or less. It feels like smoking a cigarette dipped in dirty motor oil and hits the eyes like an over-chlorinated pool. So, even as the car rolls just another few inches, we’re on hands and knees gagging while a close-trailing semi pulls behind. A man says “I’d get away from that thing if I were you” and creeps up and around the side of the car—down the embankment almost to the fenceline—with a fire extinguisher. Not like a sniper, but like a little kid playing sniper. The truck driver graciously empties the extinguisher all over the side panels of the car, and shrugs.
At this point, it’s important to have a very clear understanding of the layout of this particular half-mile stretch of Utah road. 50 yards or so to the south is a small bridge over a trickle of river, denoted across the landscape by a serpentine trail of stunted trees. On the west side of the road is a tall chain-link fence that runs from the river until at least the next bend in the road. (Also, most fence out here is three-wire barbed.) Behind it is a gas station, not on the road actually, but set back quite a ways as if the road (now a smaller state highway) is passing it incidentally. The relationship is further complicated because it’s difficult to tell which way the station is actually facing; there are old gas pump islands on either side, and the signs are all faded or removed. The station’s corner office and store is actually on the southwest side of the building, so facing away from the highway. It’s dusty and apparently abandoned, but the only way you can confirm that is by the tall fence in between it and the road; a lot of open businesses in places like this are very good at looking closed via brutal weather and exposure, age, dust, and a culture that doesn’t give much of a shit. The away-facing office doesn’t help.
So: standing there roadside watching a car and soon possessions burn—all of them; this is a moving trip–but maybe not actually explode. You evacuate a few boxes of books, then a couple of bikes, and the there are two new people standing the side of the road. One is a very old but fit man with a specked white beard, and who looks as weathered as the likely ex-gas station across the road and out a surprising distance into the desert, like maybe a poorly calibrated hallucination.
The other person is a little kid, and maybe you’re not the sort that little kids register with, so we’ll leave it at little kid. They both have full buckets, and as the old man douses the underside of the car, the little kid goes back to the river and refills the empties. Soon enough, the fire is out, and we’re all left standing out there at exactly sunset with the very acrid smell of much melted rubber and plastic. (The truck driver wishes me luck and drives on.)
This is the part of the story where you should probably feel some kind of fear, or least pre-fear. A bit sick, perhaps, or a little sweaty. But, no, instead it’s anger. It’s the feeling that this has fucked everything up—fresh start, grad school, radical life decisions planned and agonized over beached on a not-even-sand dune in the Utah desert. And here are your books spilling out onto the highway shoulder. And here is your car, certainly dead forever, or at least dead beyond the $1,500 you have in the bank. So maybe it’s the brutality and awfulness of the past two years, and, like a star expanding just it can suck back even harder, you’re looking at this piece of shit pink now underneath the dusk, and you just want to kill.
And all of this is probably why when someone says we should tow this thing to our station across the way and take a look underneath, you don’t think but shrug. You don’t think about why they would need to tow a car 100 yards, or how they’re going to get the car in there when there’s no gate, or about how you could pay for repairs to a car at a service station with no apparently electricity when all you have is a debit card. Then you’re standing there with a little kid and a burned-up car waiting for the old man to come back with a tow truck.
Instead of going through the gate however you imagined that was supposed to happen, the old man drives up the highway for a half mile, and turns left onto a dirt road. It’s spectacularly dark; headlights, a dash light, and stars. There are some low hills here and trying to pin them down outside of the truck window, you might as well be tracing night sea swells lapping at the sky on or submerged in some black ocean. At about this point, the rear car axle seizes and we’re only to leave it there on the road. So, we’ll drive on to the station which must have a back entrance in these hills somewhere and, we’re to understand, a telephone.
Eventually, the road flattens back out into the scrub desert and there’s a tall, padlocked gate. A couple hundred yards off, there’s highway traffic and, in between, the service station and you can now see an old RV behind it all lit up. We’re on a big concrete pad now, cracked and dirt-covered, making up a sort of yard for the station/RV complex, which itself is dotted here and there by rusting machinery that looks more farmlike than auto shoplike. The old man hasn’t been silent this whole time. He’s been reassuring you that he can get someone down from Price tonight to tow the car, and at a reasonable rate. You shouldn’t worry. Everyone is good people around here, and he knows the best ones.
You’re given a dusty can of soda from a warm stand-up cooler in the office/shop part of the store, and the old man goes into the garage to use the phone. It’s clear the store has seen the end of the world and isn’t waiting for anything. Dust all over; toppled post card and comic book racks; filmy windows; enough grit on the floor to make it go crunch; old bags of chips tossed around; mostly empty shelves; an old flickering fluorescent. (I shouldn’t need to describe it really; you’ve seen it— you’ve seen almost exactly this gas station. It’s more than a TV and movie trope; by now, it’s a tattoo on the brain on anyone older than 25. It’s the end times refuge, with expired end times soda that has the aftertaste of a dusty hard-boiled egg.)
You don’t know precisely how you’re feeling because you’re just now starting to feel something about the situation. And it’s not fear; it’s more an awesome hyperreality that you almost want to savor. Everything is so clear and out of your control it makes your teeth hurt. It’s like when the old man comes out of the garage and says you should come drive out in the desert to open the gate for the cows with him, you of course say yes.
You pull out of the gas station yard and drive not back the way you came but instead onto another road you didn’t see before. It’s cracked asphalt, eroding into the dirt on either side, and beneath the accumulated dirt and sand, you can see the road is highway striped. Then you’re driving south on this highway, empty but still marked with roadside reflectors, a half mile away and parallel to the first while the old man explains how the state came in so many years before and built a new highway, and this was the old one. His gas station was condemned in the process, and he’s spent the interim basically being a good Mormon and waiting for the OK to reopen.
It’s another two or three mile drive, at some point steering off the old highway onto a two-track, kicking up dust clouds to block out the stars. It’s been a lot of talk about state bureaucracy, organizing lawsuits, and generally reversing time in a way that will never happen and, judging by the sort of told-this-story-a-thousand-times tone in the old man’s voice, he knows it will never happen and is mainly telling the station’s story out of habit (and probably to explain driving down an abandoned highway behind a tall fence.)
And, abruptly, we stop. The dust clears and there’s a gate. We’re well out of view of the highway by now and the gas station or any sort of recognizable geography but yawning flatness and yawning darkness. It’s just headlights on the gate, silence, and a quiet cyclical engine shutter from the truck. It’s like looking forward is looking off of something. He tells you to get out and open the gate for him, and getting out feels like stepping off of something. But there it is, the ground, and you walk forward using its friction to the gate and open it like he said. And this, finally this, is the point where you’re afraid, that either he’s going to do something horrible to you, or kick you out into the dark to get sucked up into space.
But, no. You get back in and he’s telling you about this surprise he has for you, the awesome thing that no one ever gets to see. And you’re driving down a third, different dirt road heading in who knows what direction. Around a bend and there in headlights is a man walking. A grubby kid about 15 or so, with an old Army backpack hanging off his shoulders and a rifle hanging off of that. He sees us and kind of does a little dance there in the headlights before jumping in the back of the truck without saying a word or anything.
The kid’s retarded, the old man explains. He doesn’t go to school, spending most of his time out in the desert just wandering and eating stuff he shoots. After about a week or so, he usually finds his way home in a manner similar to what just happened. (After living for six years in small mountain towns and sub-small town places like this, it’s only now, six more years on, that I realize just how enviable of a life this is.) You look back and the kid’s all sprawled out in the truck bed, still unconcerned or oblivious to the fact that his grandfather or father is driving around with a stranger–like, maybe this happens all the time.
With a sharp upward bump, we’re on the old highway again, a different part further along than when we got off. Right across from it is what looks like an old rest area. It’s completely in ruins; a couple of small dusty stone boxes as bathrooms, a larger stone box as some sort of visitor’s center; a large flat area beyond presumably a parking lot; and in the middle of it all, right ten feet in front of the truck now is a pond. He turns out the headlights and for the first time you realize there’s a moon up, and the crumbling little roadside complex, filled out with shrubby trees, looks not new but preserved. Flashed, burned white onto a surface not like a picture but like a picture that makes it’s own light and is three-dimensional.
“Watch,” the old man says, pointing at the pond. “Wait. Watch. Just watch.”
And within a minute a spout of water shoots into the air, maybe 20 or 30 feet, dancing and glimmering up there in the light for who knows how long before flopping back down onto the pond with a undelicate slap.
He explains that it’s one of the only cold water geysers in the world. It used to be a roadside attraction, but now it’s just here.
Later, after my car had been loaded up onto a flatbed tow truck, the old man gave me an old post card of the geyser. I think it’s still at my dad’s house in Washington. I later confirmed that the geyser, named only Roadside Geyser, is one of 12 cold-water geysers in the world.
Tags: cold water geyser, desert, greenwell inn, olden days, utah