I was a little worried that this road trip wouldn’t leave me much to write about. But like any journey taken with only a general goal and no set plan, things were bound to get interesting.
The thing about America is you can get into a crash in the of the road and the cops will be there within the hour, but if you park in a pullout for the night, they’ll be there too. I woke up startled to a knock on the driver’s side window (why the driver’s side when nobody’s in the front seat?) and stared down the brights of the Wyoming sheriff’s F150 pickup. I can now check off what it would feel like to be abducted by aliens on a dark night. He was just checking on my safety and I thanked him after the initial startled shout. What safety concerns were on his mind with a Prius+bike parked out in the frozen Wyoming tundra an hour before midnight? Car broken down and one freezing to death, too timid to walk the 1/4 mile to the highway to flag down help? Suicide in a state recreation area? Either way, I don’t mind the kindness.
I made it through Utah late the following day and took my bike across some salt flats outside the great salt lake. I couldn’t remember exactly what conditions to look out for when wary about quicksand, but the mud didn’t get too deep and I kept my hat.
As I found out, outside SLC there exists the Bonneville Salt Flats, where even you can take your servo-motor powered Prius and attempt to beat the 600+ mph land speed record. It was glorius fun. Parking there I stared across that desolate salt-scape through a pair of Nikon binocs at the mountains jutting up in the distance as two instagram influencers were performing yoga synced to an impressively played handpan steel drum. They were hot so I didn’t talk to them.
At the moment I’m sitting in the sun reading some old Life magazines from the 1970s, parked in a hidden logging road on ‘Lassen Fruit Suppliers Ltd.’ or some such nonsense. Should I worry the fruit company lackey will wake me up with the brights on his F150 tonight? Probably not. In the magazine Ted Kennedy and Solzhenitsyn’s exile are big news and it seems the only thing that sold back then was cigarettes and sexism. I’ve got another one on Castro that might be good reading to pass on to the homeschooled kids at the farm I’ll be arriving at next week. At least they won’t get Animal Farm from the public school system.
On a related note, I’ve found I really cannot read (listen to) Ayn Rand anymore without genuinely laughing out loud. I’ll leave it at that.
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