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.