Chapter 7
Had I gone mad traveling across country with these two lunatics? Most twenty-six-year-olds were already settling into the sweet life by now . . . saving for a house; in a meaningful relationship with someone; working toward the future. Hah! But were they truly doing something they loved? You see, we didn’t want to be like the oil derricks. They grind endlessly, work tirelessly, spending all of those minutes up and down, up and down, until the life that they are looking for eventually is sucked completely dry—and then life is gone.
Viewing the lakes and the valley below from the winding mountain road I noticed how the beautiful but forlorn terrain abruptly turned rust brown and dead as we got closer to the city. Carson City was exactly how I had envisioned it, a stereotypical western town. We arrived at dusk with the sun at our backs, just like Clint Eastwood did in the movies, and we drove through Carson City without stopping, lest we be ambushed again by the casinos and the one-armed bandits that hid in the shadowy hills around it.
I always loved this time of the day. Even the word “dusk” itself was not quite day and not quite night; it was a time of day when the western setting sun does funny things with the light from its low-to-the-horizon vantage point, making building façades wave dreamily at you and turn all different colors of purple and gold, as if you were driving on the set of an alien world, perhaps on Mars.
“Don’t you think ‘dusk’ is a cool word?” I asked Declan and Luke.
Reno’s casino lights lit up the eight o’clock sky as we passed straight through there too, with all of those ringing slots crying to reel us in, but our determination to lock with Interstate 80 and move on toward Utah would not waiver. Perhaps we’d drive all night until we hit Salt Lake City. We were suddenly alone. There were no friends or family to see until we got to Aspen now.
It was a great vast desert sky, and the music that we brought with us opened up that sky warmly with memories of the friends and the times that once had accompanied those familiar sounds; comfort flooded in from spaces unknown. There was an endless supply of cassette tapes in the car that really helped us pass through the many miles. Dave Mason’s “Feelin’ Alright” ripped the very heart right out of me; James Taylor sang about fire and rain and how Suzanne had committed suicide; Cat Stevens swam on the devil’s lake. We tore across a silhouetted mountain range to our north while fiery bottomed clouds in a fading orange-to-gray sky crawled forever behind us. I experienced déjà vu moments where this whole trip had already been taken on a perfect day in a distant time.
A little bit further on in the night, I had Declan’s small flashlight going in the backseat as I poured over the highlighted zigzag map of the trip ahead.
“Are we only just now in Lovelock?” I had to wonder why our journey of the past few hours had taken us barely a quarter of the way into Nevada. Declan was driving, and Lucas was asleep. If we wanted to be in Salt Lake City by the morning, we were going to have to take turns fighting off this angry sleep. Man, these were big states out here! Huge states to drive through if you didn’t know anybody.
We stopped in a small Nevada casino town off of Interstate 80 to get gas, Winnemucca, Nevada. It was late. It was a true ghost town in my night of dreams. A few lonesome gamblers crossed a street under construction in front of us without even looking up to see the surfboard on the car. Declan shouted to me, “Who would ever live here and why?”
“Who would have put a pushpin in this section of the map?” he asked.
“Those that were probably born here,” I replied calmly, talking like a zombie.
“But what about the first person who came here?”
“I don’t know, maybe they came for the gold.”
“Was there ever gold here?”
It surely looked like one of those painted red towns out of an old Clint Eastwood movie, maybe High Plains Drifter, or The Outlaw Josey Wales. I envisioned the building façades suddenly falling down behind the road construction and the moving night gamblers, throwing up a huge cloud of dust as the reinforced plywood-painted buildings crashed on the hard ground, exposing a full-on production crew, bright lights and a wide-open Utah sky hundreds of miles in the distance.
“This reminds me of The Outlaw Josey Wales,” I said aloud.
“Yeah, where Clint spits right on the dog’s head with his tobacco spit,” Declan chuckled.
I took my shift at the wheel about midnight and was happily relieved by a refreshed Lucas about two in the morning. I crawled into the back of the comfortable Fairlane and stretched out as best I could.
Then it was suddenly four o’clock in the morning, and Declan and Lucas were waking my sprawled out carcass from the backseat of the car as they stood out on the shoulder of the road.
“You gotta see this, come on, wake up, Mike!” they said. “You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”
Groggily I stepped out of the back into the open night air. There wasn’t a human sound other than that of the soft wind in my eardrums for tens of hundreds of miles, and the incredible beauty of the lighted sky hit me with a cracking wake-up punch that lifted my senses to an everlasting high. It was a sky so completely illuminated by eons and eons of just arriving fresh starlight. I had never seen so many glimmering lights before. Every star ever identified by the history of mankind; every nebulous cloud; every faint light that had ever graced the face of our earth . . . all of it now stood above us in a complete canvas exhibit of the endless heavens. The vaporlike gases that formed the outer stretches of our galaxy dispersed among the stars in a cloudlike line. We stood out there in sheer amazement for at least a half hour, pivoting in circles as we looked up, our feet imprinting the salt flats that we stood on. When I tired of standing, I lay down on the desert floor. I identified the big sauce pan of the dipper and followed it across to Polaris like I was a little kid again. We guessed possible constellations; we discerned the distinct yellow light of planets compared to the blue light of the stars; we saw distant blinking satellites crossing the star dust and tens of shooting stars that dove toward the horizon all at once. This was the night sky before the electric light had ever been invented; the sky of the great oceans and the Sahara; the sky of Antarctica and Siberia; the sky of our past; the sky where men of long ago sat around crackling fires and talked of what it all might be . . . Those crazy blinking lights that came out every night and revolved around that single shimmering light that pointed due north; these were the night fires of the gods.
I made a wish on a shooting star
I made a wish in a speeding car
People in jars
Stay away from the stars
’Cause they’re airtight
I wondered if where we now lay was the Great Salt Lake Desert. I looked at the white flats beneath me, I felt the cold moisture from the ground through my clothes, and I followed the desert plain with my eyes forever toward the horizon until my eyes met up with some dark shadowed mountain ranges, mountains only discernible because of the star-filled sky beyond them. I wondered how many souls before me had seen these silhouettes from this exact vantage point.
Civilizations’ nighttime city lights had drowned out the skies of the Native Americans. I imagined the incredible wonder that the ancient peoples must have experienced staring up at this incredible canopy every single clear night of their lives.
A totally acoustic version of Pink Floyd’s “Mother” played in my head, strumming soft strings, over and over again. It must have been the last song on the tape deck while I was sleeping with my friends already out in the flats looking up at the night.
We were in Utah for sure. It was August 28th, 1984, and only the fourth day of our travels. The Lord had created these heavens, with millions of tiny lights that flickered in and out of the endless abyss of earth’s night. It became clear to me that the day was always meant to be separate from the night. Exhilarated about life again, I crawled into the backseat of the car to sleep some more. One hour and a half later, I opened my eyes and looked up at the upholstered ceiling to realize that the engine wasn’t running, and it suddenly scared me. We were stopped somewhere again, and the other two were gone. I abruptly sat up and looked out at the now grassy fields off of the interstate to our south and saw that Lucas and Declan were running through the fields like kids toward a single mountain out in the plains about two miles away. The scarecrow and the tin man were running through the poppy fields toward the distant skyline of Oz, and it was barely the light of dawn.
I fell back asleep, too tired to care, and dreamt about Herb Albert and The Tijuana Brass. They stood in perfect yellow flower fields with their golden horns on a video album cover. I awoke again a half hour later and got out of the car. Where were they? Atop the distant mountain I heard two barely audible yells that sounded as if they were beckoning me to run out and join them. I could hardly see them at first, and only when they moved, did I imagine that it must be them on the very top of this steep treeless amber hill. So it was settled in my mind that the naked eye could only see for two miles at best. I wanted to sleep some more, and I did. It would be a long time before they’d return.
I woke up with them knocking on the car window and laughing at me. The scarecrow and the tin man were back. They talked of views of grassy fields for miles and miles.
It was my turn to drive. A while later, as we neared the Great Salt Lake with the other two asleep now, I watched the big orange morning sun rise right out of the east from the side of a grassy hill in front of me. The sun disappeared behind the adjoining hill as the car bottomed out in the valley and then quickly rose again above the whole range. Sunrise, sunset, sunrise again, it all occurred in the course of ten minutes.
Once the mountain range was behind us, the road set upon some sort of salt marsh now; grassy marshland lined up on both sides of the car. The salt air smell through my open window brought back memories of Paradise Beach and the coastal wetlands of my native New England.
When I was young, we drove the back road border towns into New Hampshire in our family station wagon on our way to Tidebrook and Paradise Beach. It was my father and mother in the front with three or four of us in the back. I’d be looking out of that bubble as we drove through the side streets of Tidebrook. My father always tried to cut through the old town to avert the vacation traffic on the main roads. There were stretches of tidelands everywhere that reached into the shantytown of Tidebrook; blue water canals that ran through miles of green marshy grasses. On a dirt road that had been laid above the marshland right off of the paved street that we traveled on, a row of dilapidated shacks skirted the edges of the swamp and disappeared around the bend. I was maybe ten years old when I first noticed this young teenage girl in the back of one of the shacks that was closer to our paved street as we slowly roared by her. She was hanging rag clothes on a rope clothesline that was tied to a tree. I remember that people called them all the “Brookers” who lived in these rows of poor houses. Rumor had it that the Brookers were all inbred; brothers marrying sisters and cousins with their lines running across only one or two families in the entire community. A fictitious phone book that only consisted of two surnames in the whole book of 200 pages.
There was so much sadness in that moment with the poor girl hanging out her family’s old laundry. I tried to look for her the following year but saw no one. I wondered why these poor people had to live this way and what they thought of us—we tourists who passed along their roads . . . beach bound, heading for the Coppertone sunshine, fresh fried clams and summer rental cottages. I remembered how the girl had looked back at me with her fallen eyes as we drove by; our eyes locked for a moment, and for that moment in time, our thoughts crossed into a common barrier as we both tried to comprehend each other’s world.
We had poor folk in Lowell too, like the family that lived behind Smitty’s Barbershop. Old Smitty had cut my father’s, my grandfather’s, and probably every uncle in Lowell’s hair for three generations. The houses behind his shop were in terrible shape. Smitty would leave the back door to his shop open on those hot, muggy summer days; days where the air hung thick with nearly visible droplets of humidity. As my father sat in the big moving chair and talked to Smitty about all that was wrong with the world, I’d stand at the back screen door and look out onto the backyards of the poor. I watched the sad-faced kids come up to the locked screen door and look up from the stoop at me. I was probably eight years old. Their mother hung clothes on a makeshift clothesline that was tied to a post in the yard. Why were they always hanging up their clothes? I guess my mother had done that too before my grandmother had bought us the new clothes dryer.
Now the road in Utah that I drove on was under repair. Declan and Lucas still slept. The whole area looked to be flooded by an expanding Great Salt Lake. On one side, I looked off into the distance at a lone mountain where the floodwater from its base came all the way up to our road. It was a good mile of it. On the other side of the road, an oversized structure that looked like a giant plastic castle sat alone. It was about a half mile from the road but was also surrounded by the engulfing tidewater. Was it a deserted boat marina out here in the middle of nowhere? But where were the boats? It was a ghost town castle memory of happier days that had since gone by. Nothing else existed. With the early-morning haze about us, the stage setting was completely surreal, like we were driving again in some eerie music video made on some distant planet. The Ford Fairlane with the surfboard atop it drove through the last days of the world, I imagined, with me and my companions, the sleeping tin man and the snoring scarecrow. Where was Dorothy? Would I ever find her? And Toto (Taboo the pit bull?), he was gone too. It was just the three of us now.