Driving southeast between Scipio and Salina, two of the smaller dots on the map of Utah. We missed the rain, but the hummocky two-lane highway is still wet, and it shines in the golden light of late afternoon. The asphalt has a pinkish tinge, a pale derivative of the vibrant orangey-red soil we occasionally spot through the dense brush that crowds the edges of the road. A sweetly acrid odor of sage infiltrates the Jeep Liberty I borrowed from my parents; I know from past experience that the smell is always most noticeable right after a storm, when the plants are still steaming. It smells fresh and clean to me. Anne is sneezing and rubbing at her eyes.
We’re three hours from home and haven’t encountered another car in nearly 20 minutes.
***
Dinner at Mom’s Cafe, a two-story brick building that’s stood at the corner of State and Main for a hundred years. A red and green neon sign buzzes over the entrance; a good ol’ boy in a ratty Harley t-shirt sits at the counter and flirts with his waitress. Our own waitress, a cute teenage townie with a blue bandana wrapped around her forehead, is getting frazzled by a late dinner rush. On the wall above our booth, there’s a signed photo of Willie Nelson with his arm around someone… “Mom” herself perhaps. His handwritten inscription notes how much he enjoyed his steak.
Coal trucks rumble past outside, their massive shadows intermittently darkening the whole interior of the cafe. We gobble cheeseburgers. The buns are toasted, the onion slices crispy and not too sharp-tasting. The meat is so fresh and flavorful, it was probably standing in a nearby field only the day before.
***
A black man sits on the concrete jersey barrier at the edge of I-70, midway up Salina Canyon. He wears knee-length shorts, a sleeveless green t-shirt, and a friendly smile for the passing cars. A stuffed and well-worn backpack sits on the ground between his ankles. He makes no attempt to raise his thumb, but I consider stopping and offering him a ride anyway. I don’t. I’ve heard too many horror stories about crazy people. So I blow on past and feel a nagging sense of guilt for the next ten miles. I hope he gets where he’s going.
***
I awake cold and aching from a light doze, the first sleep I’ve managed since going to bed six hours before. I’m curled in a ball beneath a pile of afghans and quilts that’s done nothing to stop the chill rising up from beneath me. The thermostat says its 55 degrees inside the camp trailer. I think to myself that I’ve surely endured worse nights, but offhand, I can’t think of any.
***
I spend the day in a groggy haze. I keep reflecting that my idea of “roughing it” is staying in a historic motor lodge somewhere away from the freeway ramps.
I feel like a hopeless city slicker, a tenderfoot, a real lame-o with no manly skills whatsoever. Earlier, I tried to connect a propane tank. For the first time in my entire misbegotten, everything’s-backwards-because-I’m-left-handed life, I actually remembered the “righty tighty, lefty loosey” meme. It turns out propane tanks are the one thing in this humiliating world that are threaded the opposite direction of everything else. If I’d turned the nut the “wrong” way on my first try, as I always have before, it would’ve worked.
I wonder what the hell I’m doing here.
***
The clouds finally blow past just before sundown. The camp grows dark with the coming of night, then darker still as the others turn out the trailer lights and bed down. The encircling trees become a shadowy rim for the enormous black bowl that has settled over the world.
Back home in the Salt Lake Valley, I live at the bottom of another bowl, and there’s so much light pollution from the city and its surrounding ‘burbs that about all I can see in the night sky is Orion and the Big Dipper. Here, though… here the bowl arcs up over my head, infinitely deep and deeply black. There are so many stars up there that it’s actually hard to pick out those two familiar constellations against the multitude.
As my eyes adjust, even more appear, and I start to perceive their colors, too: white-hot, gentle yellow, sullen red, intense blue. A shooting star etches a path across the bowl of the sky, like in a Spielberg movie. An orange spark crosses overhead, too high and too fast to be anything but a satellite.
The longer I stand there with my head cocked back and the darkness seeming to grow denser around me with every passing minute, the more I can see. Its as if the universe is an origami chrysanthemum unfolding itself, opening in a slow, sensual pace, revealing its secret inner surfaces to me. Then the final glory fades into view: a hazy white fog that gradually reveals itself, the longer you stare at it, to be composed of billions of individual points of light. The same points of light that have shone down on the human race since we walked out of Olduvai Gorge; the same points that will be there when one of us sets foot on Mars. I’m watching the entire galaxy as it watches us.
I think I hear something moving out there in the trees. Supposedly a bear has been seen on this mountain, and elk, too. But whatever it is, assuming it’s not just my imagination, comes no closer. The air is growing cold. And I am alone with the stars…
