Part II – The Road Home
He cajoled
his hippy chick kid sister Mary to drive him through the City in his hand me
down VW, through the dingy, dark, dangerous and depressing sections of Harlem, and
drop him off across the Hudson River at the iconic George Washington Bridge,
his gateway to America and freedom. Four
years younger and the spoilt forgotten baby of the family, she had been an early
and unending source of aggravation to him but had grown into a fun, funky and
funny partner in crime. She would
eventually, accidentally burn up that VW and only lament for her skate board in
the back seat with the ‘Grateful Dead’ and ‘Hot Fuckin Tuna’ bumper stickers. They joyously swung a mad, high speed U-turn at
the toll plaza, and as he jumped out she kissed him goodbye and told him to ‘have
a great life’. He was giddy with excitement
and trepidation, tasting the freedom, the potential palatable.
Crossing dreary,
overcast and industrial New Jersey was his first challenge. He found himself hitching with lost and
confused soldiers and poor old black men.
They decided they looked too imposing together and that some of them
should hide in the bushes. When they didn't get a ride for an hour or two he came out of the bushes to realize they
were all hiding and no one was hitching. He spent the afternoon fending off drivers in
modern convertibles that would rather take him to a motel than to the rolling
hills of Pennsylvania. By the time he
broke out into brilliant Ohio sunshine he was bouncing down the freeway in the
back of an old pickup, with a fledgling folk singer and his sharp clawed dog,
on his deflated air mattress, with his inflated spirits.
They all
spent a hot night in his old college house in northern Indiana, and they split
up the next afternoon somewhere between Chicago and the Quad cities, naively
promising to stay in touch. The rest of
the trendy Midwest was a blur of heat and humidity, corn and flatness. Somewhere in the cool of the Nebraska night he
felt the imperceptible tug of gravity as they started rising slowly towards the
high plains and the Rocky Mountains. He
woke up startled up as the semi he rode in slowed for some cows on the open
range freeway. This wasn’t pedestrian Long Island or the
mediocre Midwest, it was the western wilderness. Somewhere in Wyoming they broke down and he
wandered to the fence on the edge of the right-of-way and sat looking out over
and endless horizon of sage and sunshine, with nothing spreading out in every direction.
He was
recklessly driving a large panel truck in the early morning while the driver
slept and as they rounded a long rolling rise, the Uinta Mountains spread out
before him like a long lost friend. When
they popped out of the canyon west of Wanship Utah, the snow-capped Wasatch revealed
themselves like a blushing bride, with dozens of peaks, canyons, bowls and
resorts and he knew he had arrived.
He detoured
for a day in Park City and slept in the corner on the slanted floor of a little
red house above town. It was cold,
clear and casual when he walked down to the bustling Main Street in the morning
and gorged himself at a sunny, funky-friendly eatery. No one was wearing a tie. When he was done he caught a free, little white
bus that drove all around town and he hiked in the woods on the hills like they
were his western wilderness and his own backyard.
Eventually
he made his way to the west coast beaches of sunny Hotel-California to start
his traffic survey job of America. He
was a fledgling transportation engineer and with 20 million drivers, California
was a good place to start studying traffic.
He discovered quickly that with so many people and despite its great
geographical diversity, California had already been had. It was one endless
traffic-jam society predicated on perfect climate and real estate, where people
were defined by how they looked and what they drove. With Proposition 13 freezing tax rates,
Californian’s wondrous infrastructure and excellent educational system were
already in a seedy decline. It was a tawdry
mimicry and a mockery of the modern American dream, complete with all its
superficial excess and obliviousness. He
could not check out fast enough.
In the late 70’s Disco was all but dead but
the digital age had not yet been born. A
Deadhead by default to avoid Disco, he wandered up to Seattle before Bill Gates,
Curt Cobain or Eddy Veder arrived and the place was a quaint northwestern
backwater of flannel shirts and grungy music.
Chris-crossing the country again, this time in rental cars and jets, he
was enchanted in Santa Fe by the native songs, disappointed in Dallas where
they proudly played only country and western, and he discovered Punk in Austin
with tattoos and piercings galore.
Colorado was majestic but had too much of that John Denver, Rocky
Mountain High and contrived Mork and Mindy groovy-ness to be genuine. Arizona had Winslow but no Flat-Bed-Fords,
and the Grand Canyon, where he dashed around tourists and burros to the bottom
one day in 120 degree heat. He kept
thinking of that little resort town in Utah that was playing his song.
Temperatures
dropped in the land of the wind-chill-factor as he explored the Lake Woebegone ambiance
of Minneapolis and the damp and dirty, working class pubs of Milwaukie. He felt a migratory urge to go back to
school, but that ship had sailed so he wandered down to the sweaty south and Cajun
New Orleans, the sordid underbelly of the country. He spent a Jazzy but disillusioned Halloween
there with frat boys puking on Bourbon Street and Sorority girls displaying
their tawdry wares off bulging balconies to the adoring crowd below. Finishing his trip in the raw weather of
colonial and claustrophobic Boston before Thanksgiving, he felt disconnected
from all the college kids there and the approaching overcast and overbearing New
England winter.
He turned down several grad school
opportunities and lucrative engineering jobs back east, realizing that to be a
traffic engineer you had to live where there is traffic, and he hated
traffic. He decided traffic flows like
water and water is king out west, so west he would go, and become a western
water guy. Water was in his blood. He finally had a plan. He celebrated his last nostalgic family
Thanksgiving back in the damp, heart wrenching cold of New York. Then he nervously
loaded his old station wagon with his skis, stereo, a new suitcase and two old
friends and headed back out west to that little ski town that shone in
comparison to everything he had seen and experienced the past two seasons on
the road.
He didn’t
know what he wanted but he knew what he didn’t want. New York was old and dirty, the Midwest flat
and boring. Oregon was too ‘granola’,
Washington too rainy, California too crowded, Colorado too cool, Wyoming too
bleak, Montana too cold and Arizona too hot.
Utah was edgy, unknown, under the radar, unexploited, an unexplored
wilderness. When he rolled into Park
City in late 1979, it was a sleepy town of endless potential and unlimited possibility
about to explode, and it was snowing. He
quickly met an older, Mormon, Hippy Chick and the local engineering firm needed
a water guy to help them build ski resorts in the woods. No ties required. His spirit soared. Perfect, he thought, Home.
Home, that’s where I want to be,
But I guess I’m already there.
David Burn
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