The road
rose gradually heading west towards a three dimensional vanishing point , as it
does in all good western discovery stories.
It was night so we could not see the mountains floating like clouds on
the horizon, but we could feel them. The
road was still straight but the vertical curve to the west steepened imperceptibly
at first but ultimately exponentially. Indiana
and Illinois were flat as pancakes. Iowa
introduced some rolling hills as the lush natural vegetation faded away. In Nebraska the undulations increased in amplitude
and period as the surrounding population receded and we had to slow down to
miss the cows grazing lazily on the Interstate.
By Wyoming we were definitely going up.
We were three
young men, escaping the maddening traffic of New York, the inferno of Brooklyn
or the crowded ash-tray beaches of Long Island.
We were recent east coast, yuppie college grads making the awkward transition
into real life and we had everything we needed.
We were heading west for sun, snow and adventure, for a year or two or
for the rest of our lives. We didn’t know
what we wanted but we knew what we didn’t want and we left that in our rear
view mirror.
The old rickety
Country Squire station wagon we drove was
chaotically packed full of all our possessions; one large quadraphonic Stereo
with an eight track tape deck, three sets of skis boots and poles, three relatively
small suitcases full of clothes, three down jackets, a cooler full of empty
beer cans and week old groceries, one laundry basket full of toys –a football, basketball,
Frisbee, ice skates, hiking boots, one bike tire, a lacrosse stick, a very
large brassier and a cowboy hat.
We broke
down in a blizzard between Cheyenne and Laramie and spent a few bleak days
waiting for the plow and a part and decided, then and there, between living in
Jackson Hole or Park City. Jackson was gnarly
but Utah had jobs. We stayed left on the
freeway at all three opportunities to head north. That convenient, almost unconscious choice of
the road more traveled would set the stage for the next forty years of our lives.
How many other pioneers’ fate has been decided, for better or worse, by a
casual decision, lack of ambition, or a minor misfortune?
In western Wyoming,
at first light, the Uinta Mountains revealed themselves, like a blushing
bride. We were so taken by the site of
the snowcapped mountains that we failed to notice our speed or the cop hiding in
the divider monitoring it. Pulling over quickly
while stashing beers and bongs, we found our shoes and socks so we could
address the local law officer at his car window instead of at our smelly one, a
move that would get you shot where we came from. We tried explaining our oblivious wonder at
the spectacular mountains but the officer laconically replied ‘Yep, we like
them… 130 dollars please’ - which we
paid with all our cash on the spot and we were on our destitute way.
On the last
long ear popping drop from the Colorado plateau to the smoky Basin Range valley
of The Great Salt Lake, we slipped under a blanket of hazy pollution. We smelt something else burning and realized
it wasn’t just the inversion, it was our asbestos brakes. Maybe Neutral was not the best gear to ascend
these long grades into the valley of the Saints, our new western home, but what
did we know.
The well
planned, ecumenical streets of Salt Lake City spread out before us in every
direction, converging in a multi-dimensional parallax. With less than a million people sprawling
across the valley, it was not quite a real city yet in our eyes because there
was no there, there. It seemed like the suburban
Long Island we had escaped, with mountains.
The sepia colored, smoky skies were a surprising disappointment because
we could not see the mountains we came west to live in. We knew, however, that above Salt Lake City, in
Park City, the sun was shining, the slopes were uncrowded and the mountains
were covered deep in snow. That is where
we would go to live.
So this was our
conscious escape from the overly ambitious middlemen millionaires of the east,
the boring industrial agriculture of the mid-west, the over blown, Mork and
Mindy, Rocky Mountain High grooviness of Colorado and the conspicuous
consumption of California. Utah was off
the radar, out of the box, ecclesiastically edgy in the shadow of the Temple, so
we redefined ourselves one more time under the protection of the Zion
Curtain. Montana was too cold, Arizona
too hot, Wyoming too bleak, California too crowded and Colorado too cool. Utah was just right. We were home.
We could
hardly imagine that both of these small cities in this backwater state would be
redeveloped soon and obtain a critical mass, that the world would be welcome
here for a major Film Festival and the Olympics, putting them on the map and making
this place the center of winter activities and an international destination
resort. The population here would double
in no time bringing with it diversity and depth, definition and character and we
would help with this transition. We
would cultivate lifelong friends and fortunes, homes and families, and we would
develop a rich, recreational lifestyle that would be the envy of our friends
and the rest of the nation. We would
perfect this lifestyle and make this place our own.
