US Highway 50 and the Great Basin: A Young Boy Discovers a Lonely Highway, (Second Installment of a Highway Journey)

This is a continuation of the previous post that touched on the discovery of a mysterious highway when I was 10.  Although what I saw may have been affected by weather, it was the strange geology of the place that captured my imagination. The endless succession of mountains and valleys was nothing but hypnotic.  



A dry lake along US Highway 50. Since I left the details unidentified in the writing, I did the same thing here.

There may be a need to explain the voice of the piece being written.  There could be a thought that says this does not sound like a ten year old.  Although, I intend to write what comes to mind of the drive I experienced, the way I encounter things remains the same.  When I was two, I stepped outside a drugstore and felt the weight of neon sputtering light into cast iron darkness.  Of course, language was limited then.  At the age of six, seven, or eight, I wondered whether I was a physical presence, or just an idea with the impression that it had a reality.   My mind isn’t anything but average.  It just happens to cling to things like the sights and sounds of a playground.  It is not sharp enough to find banality loitering around a parking lot.  All it sees is the light that illuminates crumbling pavement.  Story telling can be tricky, and although I intend to give it to you straight, all truth winds up being fiction.  I will try to work from a place of honest deception.  When a narrator is needed, I will rely on a travel guide.

 

Getting back to the sand dunes, the range to the south is closer than it was, there is another beyond that, and it stretches out for as far as the eye can see.  A single butte in silhouette, rides the horizon.  From any position, the valley is like a sea with this island sailing away in hues of blue and gray.  Here a shift in blue has everything to do with how far away you are from your destination.  I have never thought about this that way before, but blue is separation.  In a strange way, if the separation is severe enough, earth and sky merge into a swell of uncertainty.  As a phrase, “the cutting edge” is an odd way to describe the pursuit of the unknown.  An edge is a boundary, and boundaries define.  It might be better to portray a lot of what goes on as “cutting corners.”  My way of thinking about the edge, may be unfair.  The phrase probably refers to the extension of something beyond where it was before, like from city to suburbs, but right now, I am in a place where art cannot not compete.  It never has.  It never will.  We are not dealing with empty walls that could use the break that paintings often provide.  Our vaulted ceiling is sky.  The butte seems to move as we roll along.  A river is crossed, a town creeps up on a slowing car, and one highway turns into another simply by taking a right at the stop sign.  Now, that didn’t take long.  Skim through a few pages, and the highway arrives.  This is it.  This is our point of entry.  In the presence of a ten year old, there is no distinction between highways.  All I know is that this is supposed to be the scenic way home, and as far as I can tell, it is.  As far as I am concerned, the highway has no number.  It is my favorite though, and I can feel it.

 

The fields around town display gray combinations of sandy soil and plants compressed by the bitter weight of winter.  Windbreaks give way to sage.  The mileage markers are lean and the desert is spare.  Stunted brush grows close to the ground in clumps no larger than clenched fists.  The land is mean.  The desolate environment endorses a trickle down reality.  Annual stockpiles of rain, sleet, frost and snow may measure less than 4 inches.  Mountains to the west capture the promise of rain by taxing the clouds rolling over their summits.  The earth grows prosperous.  If the right’s enterprise creates wealth for the nation as a whole, they should have chosen a better image to prove their point.  Nature does not produce abundance on scant rainfall.  Conditions like these generate desert.  Try a little trickle down economic philosophy on your garden and see what comes up.  Who in their right mind, would want to be trickled on anyway?

 

A dry lake shimmers.  Blue mountains break the shoreline.  Surrounded by hills and mountains, it reminds me of the Bonneville Salt Flats.  In fact, I wonder if it is connected.  I look to see if I can tell.  I can ask dad.  He will know.  I don’t.  I ride in silence.  It is interesting to see bleached mud flats.  The lakebed is substantial.  The sky is overcast.  There is nothing ominous about the weather overhead.  Gray can be kind to shades of green.  However, there is none along the highway that now looks down into an empty lake.  I begin to wonder how much longer the desert will last.  Even I tire of the subtleties that subterfuge separation.  Simple sentences can stun, but I seem to be shying away from them.  I should stop the shameful game I am playing, but so sleepy now, shall my mind succumb to something as severe as reason?  Should I save this sad search for satisfaction found in the sound of the letter S as the highway steels away from the lake, or shall I leave it lying on the shallows of shoreline silence?  Now that sentence is hard to surpassed, at least by someone like me.  I have been out here too long and I am tired of trying.  Is this pure nonsense?   I mean, can it be clean?   Or, do unraveling thoughts prevail?

 

sky shatters

over a dry lakebed

 it could have been

a thunder clap command

conducted by a bolt of lightening

  the laceration,

the blast

military flight

divides sky

asunder

                                                                               

In an effort to skirt a mountain, the highway climbs a fan only to fall away.  A valley is waiting just over the rise.  Below, the scenery has shifted.  Openness closes down into a narrow basin.  The facing ridge is a row of rough and tumbling outcrops that disfigure falling shadows.  This spectacle takes place out in the open and in the light of day.  Who knows what goes down when the sun slips behind the horizon.  Actually, the temperature does, and night can be brutal.  If the temperature was 90 degrees during the day, you may be facing a low of 45 under a canopy of stars.  I hope you planned for this and not some soft yielding Texas evening filled with the sound of cicadas.  Summer is a season that climbs into the sky each morning.  Autumn rules the night.  I’ve even seen ice hiding in a garden hose strung out across the lawn in July.  Rise and shine to the bite of a frosty morning.  The thrill of a new day is chilling, and in the arid atmosphere, steam quickly withers away.  A freeze can take place at anytime of the year, and it is rare for it not to cool off when darkness settles in.  This is not Las Vegas, and contrary to common perception, the state is not excessively hot.  Even though Utah snows are more abundant, they melt away more quickly when summer arrives.

US Highway 50 and the Great Basin: A Young Boy Discovers a Lonely Highway (First Leg of the Journey)

This is the first segment of something I wrote a few years ago while
I was preparing for an art show based on US Highway 50 (The Loneliest Road in America) as it crosses Nevada.

 

 

Since I left the details of the trip as a recollection of a child, I've chosen not to identify this mining town.

 

 

I was ten when I discovered the lonely highway.  My parents were still married then, and lived in Reno, Nevada.  Spring break, took us to my grandmother’s place for a visit.  At the time, (this would have been the late sixties) Orem was a small town just north of Provo, Utah.  In many ways, it really was not much of a town.  Off State Street, the layout was a farming community of blocks so long that the cross streets seemed to complete the horizon.  Agriculture still had a lock on the community.  Residential housing, the idea of neighborhoods had not yet replaced the furrows of open fields.  The white stucco house sported a red tile roof.  Two junipers framed an entrance that was nothing more than a concrete step, a landing place to scrape the mud off shoes onto a welcome mat, and two blue ceramic pots.  In the pleasant weather of spring and summer, they contained flowers.  From the living room, the view was lawn, a line of spruce trees, a mailbox, the street, fruit trees and mountains.  In yards of historical houses, these trees seem to be enormous.  They are as old as many of the settlements of Utah.  An irrigation cannel raced on the other side of the road with water that had not yet learned how to meander.  Cold as snowmelt, it was a cooling brew to thirsty orchards.  Fruit trees framed the mountains around the valley.  Looking to the east, the Wasatch Range rises.  Almost no urban area in the United States of America, sits in such a dramatic location.  The flight over Mount Timpanogous is breathtaking.  The shores of Utah Lake embrace the west.  Although in the same valley as the lake, Orem is much higher.  It sits on one of the ancient shorelines that register as steps as they bump up along the mountainside.  Lake Bonneville covered most of the western Utah and spilled over into eastern Nevada.  This and the Great Salt Lake are all that remain. 

 

The spring was wet and cold.  Clouds rolled in and out, breaking up for perhaps part of the day.  Each morning rose in a fresh coat of snow that failed bury the green blades of grass.  Orem never really knows the meaning of buried in snowed.  However, the same does not apply to other towns around the valley.  An inch of the white stuff in Orem may measure a foot or more of glorious powder in the towns of Mapleton or Salem.  This inclement weather may have influenced some of what I saw as we made our way home along the new highway.  Although, I have no way of knowing.  I’ve never crossed the state at the same time of year again.  Heading south, the interstate follows the Wasatch Range in a westerly swing that terminates with Mt. Nebo.  At 11, 877 feet above sea level, it rules as the range’s highest peak.  The freeway swings around it, skirting its fan down into Juab Valley.  Highway 50 can be reached by leaving Interstate 15 at Santaquin.  I did not know any of this information at the time of our trip.  What I describe now, is a journey across a land beautiful and mysterious.  This is an exercise in recall.

 

Leaving the freeway, a two-lane road crosses a small valley.  Out the side window, Utah Lake is off in the distance.  The mountains ahead are like many I have seen before.  They are average, but here average is mean.  The car pulls under the weight of a climb up into juniper and pinion pine.  I want to say it is overcast, that is what I see, but I can’t be sure of that.  It is such a long time ago, and impressions of sunshine fall in dry and open places.  Whether this is accurate or not, I have no way of knowing.  There is a sense though that these broad flats and valleys are less omminous, that they escape drizzle if there is any.  Many of the places I have in mind have names, but I have decided to leave them out, for that is how I encountered the terrain of a long and lonely highway.  And in thinking about it, that may not be a bad way to approach this description of land I have never seen before.  Like the settlers and the explorers before them, it is unknown to me.  That is how many travel anyway.  They have their maps.  They know what towns and highways to look for.  However, they have no concern for landmarks.  A low ridge on the horizon goes by.  It is lost to talk, or to the tuning of the car radio.  There just has to be a station out here somewhere. This is the kind of place for a pillow and a book, and with food in the cooler, it will be fine.  Never mind the travel.  Are we making time?

  

 and distance

is a swell

and a long haul

stammer

 

 

I must confess that these are never my attitudes while riding in a car.  Every attribute the land has to offer, features a narrative that runs through my mind.  Sometimes I am an early explorer, but more often than not, I am a travel guide sharing beauty with those that follow. 

We come to a town at the top of the hill.  Its prime is past.  The mines played out long ago.  The one thing mining never fails to do, is to place a town in a dramatic location.  Here streets are cradled in ruggedness.  Winding down through the canyon, a valley lays claim to more mountains.  All this can be seen from living room windows, or at the very least, from mailboxes posted by crumbling steps and struggling roses on the verge of going wild.  If I lived here, I would be checking the mail all the time.  As far as I am concerned, the wealth of these towns was never the ore, and the ones that find a way to stay are well aware of this.

 

Coming to a tee in the valley below, the pavement extends in two directions.  A left turn happens to be the right choice.  A weathered highway rolls down a valley of juniper and pinion pine and the mountains diminish with ease.  A range rises to the south, the west opens on a horizon of sand, and the land broadens.  I am not sure I remember all these details.  They may come from events more recent.  Still, it is hard to imagine that I would have missed sand dunes.  They are romanticized in movies of the West, and of course, there was Lawrence of Arabia.  That was my favorite film as a child.  Sand is singular in the way it rides the wind.  Unlike dust, it never gets lost in a storm or settles down in mud flats.  It is much too particular for that.  Although at ease in large congregations, it has no interest in bonds and is always ready to move to the persuasive sound of wind, even if it just happens to be a whisper.  It is also as rare as radio, out where towns have no real significance.  I keep coming back to the idea of a land without radio.  Welcome to radio free Nevada.  The interior of the state has a ban on the airwaves.  Static is the sound of love songs and commercial spots in a land locked between mountain ranges.  This is this country’s Tibet.  Much of it is high, open and remote.

One Way Off Mckinney Avenue, Dallas, Texas

This painting can be seen at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas

One Way Off McKinney Avenue, Dallas, Texas
acrylic, ragboard, canvas, charcoal graphite and wood
52 9/16 x 17 3/8 x 2 1/2 inches

One Way Off McKinney Avenue, Dallas, Texas is abstraction in just about as many ways as can be imagine. It started with the middle piece and for a while it was nothing but that painting. The bottom piece was also completed the same evening; it just so happened that the paintings fit existing frames. Abstraction embraces a game of chance. It was a lucky break. The frames fit the new paintings.  Even though I did not know it, chance had already played a role in the structure of the painting.

 My focus remained on the center painting. Although I thought I was finished, I continued to make subtle changes. As I evaluated what I saw, my mind would say yes, then it would say no, and no always required further action. Abstraction is always at risk from the very beginning. A wash or simple gesture is almost always beautiful. Yet the question of whether it is enough is always lurking. Any advance could mean destruction. Ease no matter how exquisite, is not that satisfying. Painting was never meant to be routine and ease can be just another form of boredom.

This was the original orientation of the painting. The bottom part of
this pairing is where it all began. In the beginning it was simpler and developed over time. 

As I looked at the two paintings, I considered putting them together. Because I saw them as a vertical expression, there was no way to see them standing on one another. They needed to be physically connected. Doing that was risky because it would be hard to undo. I liked what I saw. The horizontal abstraction occupied the top spot. When I began to think of introducing a street scene into the mix, I decided to flip the whole thing around and the top became the bottom. That change in orientation meant that I needed to do more painting. The problem was resolved one night listening to the Beatles’ album Revolver.

When I flipped the painting around, I thought of adding imagery
to the top of the frame. Here we see some imagery of the wet street between the
two abstract paintings.

To make a place for what would be a new painting, I extended the frame. I had no way of knowing if a street scene on top of a couple abstractions was something that would work. I pressed ahead. As snowmelt began to coalesce, I imagined a section of the wet pavement and cobblestone painted on the top angle of the bottom frame. I liked the idea of imagery fanning out from underneath the middle frame and bumping up to the beaded lip of the frame below. I placed a blank piece of paper in that position to get a feel for what it would do to the overall structure. Again, I liked what I saw. Because the information on the angle of the frame was limited, it would remain abstract no matter how accurately it was rendered. I liked the idea of a vague reference and painted it that way.

Here the frame was extended to accommodated the new painting of McKinney Avenue

Part of my experience with abstraction has been collage, and this ended up being collage as I never imagined it. The entire process including the frame was based on being open and alert. When you paint that way, there is no telling what will happen. There has been a trend in the art world to limit the range of imagination. You were supposed to paint bottles, or cats, or abstractions that were light and airy, or abstractions that were stockpiles of paint. The other was to be ruled out in favor of a singular position that stood for commitment, sincerity and vision. I immediately responded to the work of Gerhard Richter because it blew all that nonsense away, demonstrating that it was okay to be involved in many things. Knowledge should not be shut out just to become a specialist. We look up to and admire those that can speak more than one language. If painting were language, a multilingual understanding of paint would be a celebrated thing. By bringing the abstractions and cityscape together, I demonstrate a grasp of some of those language skills and show that in many ways, they really are the same. If you can do one, you should be able to the other. The artists that gave us modernism could do many things. What happened? 

Full view of the finished painting.

 

 

 

US Highway 50, Utah, Nevada and the Border Inn

Border Inn Motel, Slots, Café
oil on canvas
16 1/2 x 21 1/4 inches

This painting can be seen at William Havu Gallery in Denver, Colorado.

The Border Inn lies on the Utah-Nevada between Delta and Ely, Nevada. It is a welcomed sight for those not noticing the sign that read NEXT SERVICES 83 MILES back in Hinckley, Utah. That is a long haul without any habitation. The course of the highway and the signs that remind you to watch for deer, cattle and falling rock lie in brush and stubble. Because of the beautiful nature of desolation, bullet holed trashcan pullovers pass by in silence.

If the border tied into traffic from Salt Lake City, it would be like Wendover and Mesquite crawling with Mormons on gentile retreats for the weekend. The alpine peaks of Great Basin National Park are not much of a draw. Before the park, nobody knew what was there. As it is, most of the time, you can have much of the park to yourself.

On many Nevada highway borders, there are places like the inn proudly displaying gambling signs. This is too small for anything more than a few slot machines. Still it is small town Nevada away from the industrialized gambling of Reno and Las Vegas. The West survives in these towns along the highway due to isolating wind, heat, cold and snow. Because of the lack of water, farming was never really an option. When the ore played out, many towns vanished in the sage. Part of what kept these hanging on was vacant highway. You’ll probably have to stop at two or three of these for a hamburger and gasoline. Nevada takes openness for granted. NEXT SERVICES 83 MIILES was a courtesy of Utah. Nevada goes on the assumption that you are not going to gamble on the accuracy of a fuel gauge as you leave Ely for Eureka or Lages Station.

Handmade booklet for painting
4 9/16 x 3 1/8 x 3/8 inches