velotel
11-25-2016, 04:30 PM
On to California via US Highway 50. Mat said he’d never done it. I was like, what! You’ve never done US 50! That’s it, that’s how we go, no question, I mean US 50 is the classic, the iconic road to California, one of those have-to’s.
Normal people don’t do 50. They do the interstate, the easy way, the safe way. US 50 is the wild way, the road that some call the loneliest road in America. A certain catch to the phrase even if it’s not particularly true. Actually it’s not wild either, just another strip of asphalt, two lanes, white lines, the usual. Well, maybe not quite the usual. Like sections that are 10, 15, even 20 miles of dead straight! And towns, there aren’t any towns. Okay, there are but they’re rare. And we’re talking towns, not cities, small towns in fact. This is one of those roads where people watch the gas gauge, not the speedometer. Then again some people only look at the speedometer, for grins, to see how fast they’re going. A road for drivers with cars capable of sustained thriple-digit speeds. And drivers who can soak up the potential costs.
It’s also the mountain biker’s highway, or the mountain biking crowd I know in Marin County. That’s how they get to Crested Butte and Moab. We had to go that way. No choice. We were heading to the Marin Museum of Bicycling for the 2016 Mountain Bike Hall of Fame induction celebration so following those illustrious tracks was mandatory.
Blue skies, leaves turning, warm enough for open windows, total cruise mode, kicking back in Mat’s outrageously comfortable pickup, a Toyota Tundra double-cab, burbling V8 under the hood, one full-suspension big-wheel mountain bike and two fat-tired road bikes in the bed, handlebars just poking up above the cab like they were checking out the view ahead, wondering where they were going to be released to play. They had awhile to wait, like a day and half. It’s a long way to California. We weren’t in a hurry.
North out of Moab, through the gap between Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, desert and slickrock sprawling to either side, a paradise of mountain biking and dinosaur tracks. How crazy a combo is that!
Crescent Junction, where we catch the interstate. They call it Highway 50 even though it isn’t really. The old highway got swallowed by the interstate. Some drivable remnants of the old road to the east of Crescent Junction, through Thompson and Cisco and then close to the Utah/Colorado border it starts again and from there on it’s pretty much the old highway all the way across the mountains through Gunnison to Pueblo and on across Kansas and all the way to the coast in Maryland. From Pueblo east on 50 is foreign to me, never been there.
Mat rolls up onto the interstate and we’re off, but only for a bit. He swings off into Green River, tells me there’s a taco truck there we need to stop at, in honor of that wonderful menace of taco trucks appearing on every corner in America! And there it is, a taco truck using an abandoned gas station for its base, complete with picnic tables and shade. And damned good food too. Right on taco trucks!
On to the San Rafael Swell. Gotta love that name. A huge uplift of sandstone and shale bulging up like the land is pregnant. Used to only be accessible by foot, horses, motorcycles, or four-wheel drives until 1970 when the interstate opened. Might not have been a great idea, maybe even a horrible idea, but it’s there now and have to say it’s one hell of a spectacular drive. Way more interesting than through Helper, over Soldier Summit and around to Delta, the original US 50. Did that over the years before the interstate arrived.
We hit the base of the swell and do this long, winding climb up past waves and prows of sandstone then roll out onto a plateau of rock and sand and scattered trees and shrubs. I hadn’t forgotten how gorgeous this land is but I had forgotten just how friggin unbelievably gorgeous this land is! If I still lived in the states I’d put together some sort of 4x4 camper and head off into the swell with a fat-tired road bike and an even fatter-tired mountain bike, some good hiking boots, food and lots of water.
Now we’re just passing through. Which was like going to some insane 3-D, total surround movie theatre featuring canyons, slickrock, a brilliant blue sky arcing overhead, in the distance pockets of rain splattering down on some barely seen valley. Both of us are constantly scanning left and right, just looking. We’d come around some long, slow bend and there’d be this brilliant flash of yellow or orange or red leaves against a wall of whitish-tan sandstone. We’d look at one another and laugh. An intoxicating drive.
Down the western slope, the swell’s gentle side, a long glide path out into the valley and the interstate between Salt Lake City and Vegas. Lots of cars heading to Vegas, or probably heading there. Majority Utah plates. Gambling’s illegal in Utah, against their religion.
Get to the junction where the real 50 kicks in. The grand traverse begins. I’m staring out the window at this vast landscape of golden grasses and low shrubs under a gloriously blue sky and I tell Mat I always wanted to do a book of photographs all taken from a moving car. Except I was always the driver. With that some bell in my head rings. I’m not driving, just behind me is my camera. Yes! After all these years I can shoot from a moving car! Man do I love digital photography! Shoot all I want, maybe get lucky and end up with some keepers. Why the hell didn’t I think of this way back when we left Boulder!
Into Delta, classic Utah farm town. Super wide streets (wide enough to turn around a wagon being pulled by teams of horses), houses low and surrounded by space, more farm equipment businesses than most of us see in a year or more. I bet if we cruised around for half an hour we’d see an International Harvester Scout. Maybe more than one. Instead at a stop light we end up alongside a Porche, Colorado plates of course, driven by a woman, road bike and some aero luggage box on a roof rack. I’ll bet you could count with the fingers on one hand how many Porches with a road bike on the roof pass through Delta – and have fingers left over.
Traversing Delta doesn’t take long. One moment we’re in civilization, the next we’re staring out the windshield at a road disappearing into the distance, dead straight, dead flat, at least visually. Up ahead and off to the left a vast stain of white. A dry lake bed. Lots of these in western Utah. Hard to believe but they really do fill up with snow melt or after lots of rain. Then the heat arrives and the water evaporates. This one is huge. I have this vague memory of driving by it once in the past when it was brimming with water with thousands of birds either in the air or splashing around.
Mat’s impressed with how long the straight is, some twenty miles worth. Then a slight bend to the right and on for another maybe ten miles of dead straight. Flatness everywhere. And no towns, no houses, nothing but desert and sagebrush and whatever else that loves the environment. Welcome to US 50.
I’m going a little bit nuts with the camera. Shooting away left and right like I’m trying to make up for all the years I never did this. Mat’s sitting, driving, totally focused on the road, and getting a kick out of his dad acting like some kid with a new toy. I tell him how long ago I always thought it would be great to drive around the country taking pictures of the old style, one-story motels with their strings of colorful neon lights strung up under eaves and dangling from trees or wherever the owner thought they’d look good. Figured someone ought to do that before they all disappear, lost to the anonymous motel chains selling serial blandness along all the highways. Those old motels were the kind my mom, my two brothers, and I stayed in when we drove across the country in 1955. They could be pretty funky, even downright goofy. Individual cabins in a long row, log siding painted red, maybe a wooden cowboy or bear at the entrance with a sign saying howdy folks. I think it took us a couple months to get to cross the country. Lots of stops, and every night in a motel, and never once with a swimming pool. Those were just coming onto the scene and motels with pools were pretty rare. We drove part of 50 back then, in a ’52 Oldsmobile, 4 doors, bench seat up front, V8 under the hood, 3-speed auto, comfy cruiser.
Memories like that would come to mind out of the proverbial blue while we were cruising along, generated by I had no idea what. Most of the time the two of us were just sitting and looking, entranced by the beauty we were driving through. I suppose an odd beauty in some respects. No snow-capped alpine peaks, no ocean crashing onto beaches or waves smashing against cliffs, no picturesque towns with the ubiquitous white church steeples, etc. Here it was just these silent valleys that were so wide calling them valleys would have been ridiculous except they were all defined by chains of seemingly barren hills.
A lot of those hills get pretty high. Like the ones just across the Utah/Nevada border in Great Basin National Park. The highest is up around 12,500 ft with its neighbors not much lower. We could see them in the distance as we were drilling across the last valley in Utah. They didn’t look all that high. Fuel gauge was starting to move towards the-we’ve-got-a-problem point but with enough, in theory, to get us to Ely which was somewhere beyond the mountains in the distance.
Turned out to be no problem. Straight ahead (of course straight ahead) dancing in the heat shimmering off the land was a structure looking suspiciously like a gas station. It was. Perfect, stretch the legs, empty the bladder, fill the tank, feel the heat. Back in the truck and as Mat’s starting to roll I say that as soon as we’re in Nevada we should stop and get some beer. He says we are in Nevada; the border’s right there behind us. Yes! He pulls back in, I stroll inside the store and there it is against the back wall, a generous wall fridge of beers. In twenty-two years of living in France I have never, ever seen a wall fridge of beers in a store. Never. Beers, yes, all room temperature, never cold. I’ve also never, ever seen an ice machine in France either. The kind where you can buy blocks of ice or bags of cubes. Don’t exist in France.
My eyes cruise over the selection. I grab a six-pack of Sam Adams. Seems like a great idea buying beer from Boston on the Nevada/Utah border. Café, motel, store, beers, gas and slot machines, all within pissing distance of the Utah border. Classic.
And we’re off, music from some satellite, gps display from I don’t know where, drinking beers from Boston, heading to California. Up through a gap in the hills and into another flat, dry valley. The story of Nevada. Narrow north-south lines of mountains, parallel wrinkles on the land’s surface. Between them valleys of desert. Through the hills is about the only time the road isn’t straight. Even then more wiggles than turns most of the time.
Down the valley and past a wind farm in perfect rectangular geometry. I like it. Beats the hell out of giant hills of coal and plumes of smoke gutting the air. Past the wind turbines, traverse the valley, into more hills, another valley, and into Ely, biggest town in the region. It’s not very big. Visually not particularly interesting either. We pass through.
Whoa! What’s this! Cyclists coming towards us. Then some more. Can’t imagine where they’re coming from. Ely’s in the middle of friggin nowhere! Spot a lone rider, well behind the others, looking tired, must be the tail. Nope, quite a bit further along still more stragglers grinding out the cadence. Never thought I’d see road cyclists around Ely, Nevada. Looks like it could be a great place for fat-tired road bikes and mountain bikes based on all the dirt roads we saw disappearing into the hills. Move around with a 4x4 camper and weeks could be spent riding the mountains on dirt tracks that may have never seen a bicycle. Then again maybe/probably mountain bikers have hit ‘em.
We rolled on, ever westward, following the sun. Through Eureka, a small town where someone struck a rich deposit of gold I suppose, a worker’s town whose better, or at least boisterous, days are long gone with about the only sign remaining the old opera house. Funny how back in the glory days of gold and silver strikes building opera houses was the rage. Still a mining town but now mining on a massive scale with giant machines and a huge hole in the earth and lots of chemicals. Probably still some lone prospectors out in the hills scratching around in the dirt looking for their eureka moment.
Ours was leaving Eureka behind, rolling through the hills and dropping into the next valley with the road an arrow under a hard blue sky and thick clouds bunched up against distant hills with pockets of rain momentarily washing distant valleys. The light is astounding, the desert glowing in waves of psychedelic oranges and yellows and tans and soft greens. On another day, in another season, I suppose the effect wouldn’t be the same but for us on this day western Nevada was bathed in pure beauty.
Into more hills, this time a real climb with the road swinging through linked turns across rocky slopes covered with yellow grasses and shrubs then down the western slope and into Austin. Probably another mining town only this one apparently never had any eureka moments and looks like it’s been a slog from whatever high point it once had. A wealth of dirt roads wandering up and over the surrounding hills and mountains More terrain for fat-tired road bikes and mountain bikes. There’s even a hot springs in the valley east of Austin. Undeveloped, camp, soak, no rules, just be prepared for self-sufficiency.
I tell Mat I remember well this next section. Used to be a sign, maybe still is but if so we missed it, announcing that for the next hundred and something miles there’s nothing, no services, no water, nothing. And as I recall a huge percentage of that distance is straight. And flat. All the way across this valley that’s so wide the word valley isn’t big enough. Then the clincher. The road crosses over some low hills, swings north, and there it is, the first habitation since back around Austin, a whore house and bar, or maybe bar and whore house, damned if I know. And across the road and a bit further along are these giant, white sand dunes. Hell of a way to end the drought, so to speak. I also remember seeing signs along the road in the big valley stating that it’s terrain for the military, jets dropping bombs and strafing targets, like maybe on people who wandered off the highway.
Through the hills, swing north, nothing there. Start wondering if my memory has really slipped the rails. No bar, no whore house, no building, not even any sign of a building having been there. Ah, memory saved, a bit further and we see the sand dunes. Maybe some pilot didn’t like the bar’s beer or the women and bombed it back into the stone age. I’m kind of bummed it’s not there anymore. There goes my story out the window about this section of the road.
There is a recompense, the sun a white ball of intensity burning through an orange-red sky. A brilliant end to a glorious day on the road. Another day that made me realize all over again how spectacularly beautiful this planet is. And what an insanely good drive US 50 is across Utah and Nevada.
We roll into Fallon, your classic strip city of gas stations, beer stores, fast food boxes, motels, loan stores, junk shops, used car lots, all strung along the highway’s fringes with their garish neon lights flashing their credentials. Not bad, Moab to Fallon, 650 miles in one steady push. Time for a motel. Tomorrow another day and a total environmental shift, up to Lake Tahoe, across the Sierras, and on to Fairfax and the Marin Bicycle Museum and the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame reception party.
Made for a long day and yet I think neither of us really noticed. I know I didn’t but then I wasn’t driving. Being a passenger was fun. If this had been some movie about a dad and his son, or maybe a son and his dad, doing a grand road trip across the country, for sure there would have been some sort of emotional tug-of-wars with the two of them plunging into past histories, feelings, fears, hopes and, being an american movie, at the end some wonderful burst of understanding and empathy bringing them closer together than they’d ever been. Or something like that.
It wasn’t a movie, just the two of us enjoying each other’s company, sharing thoughts and stories that came up, feeling the same joys or at least damned similar joys of watching the phenomenal country we were passing through. We laughed, we watched, we listened. We pretty much totally ignored politics. We were on the same train there so nothing really to say. Besides, the day was too gorgeous to be pissed on by such a depressing subject.
I did learn that our tastes in music are pretty different. I also saw a lot of myself in him, like the way he drives, his sense of the space in which he is, and a certain obstinance that from personal experience I must admit isn’t always a great trait to have. A good drive, a son and his father on the road and simultaneously in another sense just two friends doing the cruise to California together, savoring the time together, loving the day, loving where we were. Better than a movie actually.
Normal people don’t do 50. They do the interstate, the easy way, the safe way. US 50 is the wild way, the road that some call the loneliest road in America. A certain catch to the phrase even if it’s not particularly true. Actually it’s not wild either, just another strip of asphalt, two lanes, white lines, the usual. Well, maybe not quite the usual. Like sections that are 10, 15, even 20 miles of dead straight! And towns, there aren’t any towns. Okay, there are but they’re rare. And we’re talking towns, not cities, small towns in fact. This is one of those roads where people watch the gas gauge, not the speedometer. Then again some people only look at the speedometer, for grins, to see how fast they’re going. A road for drivers with cars capable of sustained thriple-digit speeds. And drivers who can soak up the potential costs.
It’s also the mountain biker’s highway, or the mountain biking crowd I know in Marin County. That’s how they get to Crested Butte and Moab. We had to go that way. No choice. We were heading to the Marin Museum of Bicycling for the 2016 Mountain Bike Hall of Fame induction celebration so following those illustrious tracks was mandatory.
Blue skies, leaves turning, warm enough for open windows, total cruise mode, kicking back in Mat’s outrageously comfortable pickup, a Toyota Tundra double-cab, burbling V8 under the hood, one full-suspension big-wheel mountain bike and two fat-tired road bikes in the bed, handlebars just poking up above the cab like they were checking out the view ahead, wondering where they were going to be released to play. They had awhile to wait, like a day and half. It’s a long way to California. We weren’t in a hurry.
North out of Moab, through the gap between Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, desert and slickrock sprawling to either side, a paradise of mountain biking and dinosaur tracks. How crazy a combo is that!
Crescent Junction, where we catch the interstate. They call it Highway 50 even though it isn’t really. The old highway got swallowed by the interstate. Some drivable remnants of the old road to the east of Crescent Junction, through Thompson and Cisco and then close to the Utah/Colorado border it starts again and from there on it’s pretty much the old highway all the way across the mountains through Gunnison to Pueblo and on across Kansas and all the way to the coast in Maryland. From Pueblo east on 50 is foreign to me, never been there.
Mat rolls up onto the interstate and we’re off, but only for a bit. He swings off into Green River, tells me there’s a taco truck there we need to stop at, in honor of that wonderful menace of taco trucks appearing on every corner in America! And there it is, a taco truck using an abandoned gas station for its base, complete with picnic tables and shade. And damned good food too. Right on taco trucks!
On to the San Rafael Swell. Gotta love that name. A huge uplift of sandstone and shale bulging up like the land is pregnant. Used to only be accessible by foot, horses, motorcycles, or four-wheel drives until 1970 when the interstate opened. Might not have been a great idea, maybe even a horrible idea, but it’s there now and have to say it’s one hell of a spectacular drive. Way more interesting than through Helper, over Soldier Summit and around to Delta, the original US 50. Did that over the years before the interstate arrived.
We hit the base of the swell and do this long, winding climb up past waves and prows of sandstone then roll out onto a plateau of rock and sand and scattered trees and shrubs. I hadn’t forgotten how gorgeous this land is but I had forgotten just how friggin unbelievably gorgeous this land is! If I still lived in the states I’d put together some sort of 4x4 camper and head off into the swell with a fat-tired road bike and an even fatter-tired mountain bike, some good hiking boots, food and lots of water.
Now we’re just passing through. Which was like going to some insane 3-D, total surround movie theatre featuring canyons, slickrock, a brilliant blue sky arcing overhead, in the distance pockets of rain splattering down on some barely seen valley. Both of us are constantly scanning left and right, just looking. We’d come around some long, slow bend and there’d be this brilliant flash of yellow or orange or red leaves against a wall of whitish-tan sandstone. We’d look at one another and laugh. An intoxicating drive.
Down the western slope, the swell’s gentle side, a long glide path out into the valley and the interstate between Salt Lake City and Vegas. Lots of cars heading to Vegas, or probably heading there. Majority Utah plates. Gambling’s illegal in Utah, against their religion.
Get to the junction where the real 50 kicks in. The grand traverse begins. I’m staring out the window at this vast landscape of golden grasses and low shrubs under a gloriously blue sky and I tell Mat I always wanted to do a book of photographs all taken from a moving car. Except I was always the driver. With that some bell in my head rings. I’m not driving, just behind me is my camera. Yes! After all these years I can shoot from a moving car! Man do I love digital photography! Shoot all I want, maybe get lucky and end up with some keepers. Why the hell didn’t I think of this way back when we left Boulder!
Into Delta, classic Utah farm town. Super wide streets (wide enough to turn around a wagon being pulled by teams of horses), houses low and surrounded by space, more farm equipment businesses than most of us see in a year or more. I bet if we cruised around for half an hour we’d see an International Harvester Scout. Maybe more than one. Instead at a stop light we end up alongside a Porche, Colorado plates of course, driven by a woman, road bike and some aero luggage box on a roof rack. I’ll bet you could count with the fingers on one hand how many Porches with a road bike on the roof pass through Delta – and have fingers left over.
Traversing Delta doesn’t take long. One moment we’re in civilization, the next we’re staring out the windshield at a road disappearing into the distance, dead straight, dead flat, at least visually. Up ahead and off to the left a vast stain of white. A dry lake bed. Lots of these in western Utah. Hard to believe but they really do fill up with snow melt or after lots of rain. Then the heat arrives and the water evaporates. This one is huge. I have this vague memory of driving by it once in the past when it was brimming with water with thousands of birds either in the air or splashing around.
Mat’s impressed with how long the straight is, some twenty miles worth. Then a slight bend to the right and on for another maybe ten miles of dead straight. Flatness everywhere. And no towns, no houses, nothing but desert and sagebrush and whatever else that loves the environment. Welcome to US 50.
I’m going a little bit nuts with the camera. Shooting away left and right like I’m trying to make up for all the years I never did this. Mat’s sitting, driving, totally focused on the road, and getting a kick out of his dad acting like some kid with a new toy. I tell him how long ago I always thought it would be great to drive around the country taking pictures of the old style, one-story motels with their strings of colorful neon lights strung up under eaves and dangling from trees or wherever the owner thought they’d look good. Figured someone ought to do that before they all disappear, lost to the anonymous motel chains selling serial blandness along all the highways. Those old motels were the kind my mom, my two brothers, and I stayed in when we drove across the country in 1955. They could be pretty funky, even downright goofy. Individual cabins in a long row, log siding painted red, maybe a wooden cowboy or bear at the entrance with a sign saying howdy folks. I think it took us a couple months to get to cross the country. Lots of stops, and every night in a motel, and never once with a swimming pool. Those were just coming onto the scene and motels with pools were pretty rare. We drove part of 50 back then, in a ’52 Oldsmobile, 4 doors, bench seat up front, V8 under the hood, 3-speed auto, comfy cruiser.
Memories like that would come to mind out of the proverbial blue while we were cruising along, generated by I had no idea what. Most of the time the two of us were just sitting and looking, entranced by the beauty we were driving through. I suppose an odd beauty in some respects. No snow-capped alpine peaks, no ocean crashing onto beaches or waves smashing against cliffs, no picturesque towns with the ubiquitous white church steeples, etc. Here it was just these silent valleys that were so wide calling them valleys would have been ridiculous except they were all defined by chains of seemingly barren hills.
A lot of those hills get pretty high. Like the ones just across the Utah/Nevada border in Great Basin National Park. The highest is up around 12,500 ft with its neighbors not much lower. We could see them in the distance as we were drilling across the last valley in Utah. They didn’t look all that high. Fuel gauge was starting to move towards the-we’ve-got-a-problem point but with enough, in theory, to get us to Ely which was somewhere beyond the mountains in the distance.
Turned out to be no problem. Straight ahead (of course straight ahead) dancing in the heat shimmering off the land was a structure looking suspiciously like a gas station. It was. Perfect, stretch the legs, empty the bladder, fill the tank, feel the heat. Back in the truck and as Mat’s starting to roll I say that as soon as we’re in Nevada we should stop and get some beer. He says we are in Nevada; the border’s right there behind us. Yes! He pulls back in, I stroll inside the store and there it is against the back wall, a generous wall fridge of beers. In twenty-two years of living in France I have never, ever seen a wall fridge of beers in a store. Never. Beers, yes, all room temperature, never cold. I’ve also never, ever seen an ice machine in France either. The kind where you can buy blocks of ice or bags of cubes. Don’t exist in France.
My eyes cruise over the selection. I grab a six-pack of Sam Adams. Seems like a great idea buying beer from Boston on the Nevada/Utah border. Café, motel, store, beers, gas and slot machines, all within pissing distance of the Utah border. Classic.
And we’re off, music from some satellite, gps display from I don’t know where, drinking beers from Boston, heading to California. Up through a gap in the hills and into another flat, dry valley. The story of Nevada. Narrow north-south lines of mountains, parallel wrinkles on the land’s surface. Between them valleys of desert. Through the hills is about the only time the road isn’t straight. Even then more wiggles than turns most of the time.
Down the valley and past a wind farm in perfect rectangular geometry. I like it. Beats the hell out of giant hills of coal and plumes of smoke gutting the air. Past the wind turbines, traverse the valley, into more hills, another valley, and into Ely, biggest town in the region. It’s not very big. Visually not particularly interesting either. We pass through.
Whoa! What’s this! Cyclists coming towards us. Then some more. Can’t imagine where they’re coming from. Ely’s in the middle of friggin nowhere! Spot a lone rider, well behind the others, looking tired, must be the tail. Nope, quite a bit further along still more stragglers grinding out the cadence. Never thought I’d see road cyclists around Ely, Nevada. Looks like it could be a great place for fat-tired road bikes and mountain bikes based on all the dirt roads we saw disappearing into the hills. Move around with a 4x4 camper and weeks could be spent riding the mountains on dirt tracks that may have never seen a bicycle. Then again maybe/probably mountain bikers have hit ‘em.
We rolled on, ever westward, following the sun. Through Eureka, a small town where someone struck a rich deposit of gold I suppose, a worker’s town whose better, or at least boisterous, days are long gone with about the only sign remaining the old opera house. Funny how back in the glory days of gold and silver strikes building opera houses was the rage. Still a mining town but now mining on a massive scale with giant machines and a huge hole in the earth and lots of chemicals. Probably still some lone prospectors out in the hills scratching around in the dirt looking for their eureka moment.
Ours was leaving Eureka behind, rolling through the hills and dropping into the next valley with the road an arrow under a hard blue sky and thick clouds bunched up against distant hills with pockets of rain momentarily washing distant valleys. The light is astounding, the desert glowing in waves of psychedelic oranges and yellows and tans and soft greens. On another day, in another season, I suppose the effect wouldn’t be the same but for us on this day western Nevada was bathed in pure beauty.
Into more hills, this time a real climb with the road swinging through linked turns across rocky slopes covered with yellow grasses and shrubs then down the western slope and into Austin. Probably another mining town only this one apparently never had any eureka moments and looks like it’s been a slog from whatever high point it once had. A wealth of dirt roads wandering up and over the surrounding hills and mountains More terrain for fat-tired road bikes and mountain bikes. There’s even a hot springs in the valley east of Austin. Undeveloped, camp, soak, no rules, just be prepared for self-sufficiency.
I tell Mat I remember well this next section. Used to be a sign, maybe still is but if so we missed it, announcing that for the next hundred and something miles there’s nothing, no services, no water, nothing. And as I recall a huge percentage of that distance is straight. And flat. All the way across this valley that’s so wide the word valley isn’t big enough. Then the clincher. The road crosses over some low hills, swings north, and there it is, the first habitation since back around Austin, a whore house and bar, or maybe bar and whore house, damned if I know. And across the road and a bit further along are these giant, white sand dunes. Hell of a way to end the drought, so to speak. I also remember seeing signs along the road in the big valley stating that it’s terrain for the military, jets dropping bombs and strafing targets, like maybe on people who wandered off the highway.
Through the hills, swing north, nothing there. Start wondering if my memory has really slipped the rails. No bar, no whore house, no building, not even any sign of a building having been there. Ah, memory saved, a bit further and we see the sand dunes. Maybe some pilot didn’t like the bar’s beer or the women and bombed it back into the stone age. I’m kind of bummed it’s not there anymore. There goes my story out the window about this section of the road.
There is a recompense, the sun a white ball of intensity burning through an orange-red sky. A brilliant end to a glorious day on the road. Another day that made me realize all over again how spectacularly beautiful this planet is. And what an insanely good drive US 50 is across Utah and Nevada.
We roll into Fallon, your classic strip city of gas stations, beer stores, fast food boxes, motels, loan stores, junk shops, used car lots, all strung along the highway’s fringes with their garish neon lights flashing their credentials. Not bad, Moab to Fallon, 650 miles in one steady push. Time for a motel. Tomorrow another day and a total environmental shift, up to Lake Tahoe, across the Sierras, and on to Fairfax and the Marin Bicycle Museum and the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame reception party.
Made for a long day and yet I think neither of us really noticed. I know I didn’t but then I wasn’t driving. Being a passenger was fun. If this had been some movie about a dad and his son, or maybe a son and his dad, doing a grand road trip across the country, for sure there would have been some sort of emotional tug-of-wars with the two of them plunging into past histories, feelings, fears, hopes and, being an american movie, at the end some wonderful burst of understanding and empathy bringing them closer together than they’d ever been. Or something like that.
It wasn’t a movie, just the two of us enjoying each other’s company, sharing thoughts and stories that came up, feeling the same joys or at least damned similar joys of watching the phenomenal country we were passing through. We laughed, we watched, we listened. We pretty much totally ignored politics. We were on the same train there so nothing really to say. Besides, the day was too gorgeous to be pissed on by such a depressing subject.
I did learn that our tastes in music are pretty different. I also saw a lot of myself in him, like the way he drives, his sense of the space in which he is, and a certain obstinance that from personal experience I must admit isn’t always a great trait to have. A good drive, a son and his father on the road and simultaneously in another sense just two friends doing the cruise to California together, savoring the time together, loving the day, loving where we were. Better than a movie actually.