Go
West Young Man
Matt
Lindon
‘
Holy shit there are cows
on the Freeway’ screamed Chip from behind the wheel of the late model Country
Squire station wagon as he slammed on the brakes and swerved to avoid the slower
cows in the pitch black Nebraska night.
‘Ya don’t see that on the Cross Bronx Expressway’ he noted. Crash (me) and Heimy woke from our cramped, astronaut
sleeping positions,
to address the Bovinosaurs blinking back at us
through their icicle eyelids and their cud chewing complacency, like grazing I
80 was the most normal thing in the world to do. ‘Where are we, what time is it, I got to
pee’.
We got out to take a leak
and we chased the cows around, throwing snow balls at their dumb asses, and at each
other, amazed at their speed and agility on the icy road and in the snow on the
shoulders. ‘Shit boy, howdy, we are not
in Massapequa
anymore Dorothy, Crash told them. ‘It’s my turn to drive, my ass has a cramp
the size of Rhode Island.’ So I drove.
Swiping beers and
paraphernalia,
newspapers and pizza boxes out of the way we carried on into the night. The road rose gradually, heading west towards
a three dimensional vanishing point, as it does in all good western road
stories. It was midnight 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 diminished. By Wyoming we were definitely going up.
We were three young men,
escaping the maddening traffic of New York, the inferno of Brooklyn and the
crowded ash-tray, BBQ sands of Jones Beach. We were recent east coast, hippie-yuppie
college grads making the lonely, awkward, scary transition into real life but
we had everything we needed, we had each other.
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.
We were namely - Crash,
Chip and Heimy, dressed in almost identical flannel shirts, ski sweaters, down
coats, blue jeans and engineer chukka boots, we were different sons
from separate mothers but we were cut from the same stone. Clean cut Catholic convicts, we were polite
and bold and could schmooze the shorts off your sister but we knew how to play
the game and deal with nuns, priests, police, fathers, mothers and all misplaced
authority…. i.e. - ‘Good morning Sister
Mary Philippa,
you look wonderful this morning’ (in your pent up, penguin outfit) or ‘ hey
Mrs. Cleaver
your new haircut certainly makes you look younger and happy today’ (but what’s up with wearing pearls while
doing housework first thing in the morning).
We had survived our New
York, all male prep school together (Think Bill
O’Riley, and George Kennedy) and our separate sporto-preppy colleges (Think
Doug Flutie, and Joe Montana). While
dodging any true work or responsibility for 21 years, we were wildly successful
and were the pride and joy of our families, Golden Boys. With our way paved to Wall Street and Madison
Avenue we decided collectively to take the road less traveled and head west
after one last huge Thanksgiving dinner at home. So with a song in our heart
and a tear in our eyes, we crossed over the Hudson River on the Washington Bridge
and entered New Jersey - terra incognito.
‘Don’t cry momma, just wave goodbye’.
Chip was the strong and
sturdy pragmatist, a lifeguard, a water polo player, an economist and an endurance
athlete. A man of few words, he was
conflict adverse and private, hardworking and loyal, surficial and silly at
first glance but deep and devoted on second look. Heimy was the intellectual of the group who
read Russian novels voraciously, drank expensive Dutch Beer and used terms like
‘social consciousness’ and ‘all things being equal’ A quiet man, he had a good sense of humor, an
appetite for adventure and an uncanny ability to read people and situations. Crash was a jack of all trades
and a master of none. That might have
been because of his Dyslexia, ADD and bad spelling or because he saw the scale
of diminishing return with detail and minutia so he could not stay focused or
dedicated to anything but his passions.
‘Just get B’s baby’ was his motto.
Scrappy, innovative, inventive and entertaining he was the class clown
and all the girls pal and confidant with a sympathetic ear and an empathetic
heart. An Engineering - English Major,
he was a left-right brain dichotomy wrapped in an enigma. He wanted everyone to like him and they
usually did. But Chip still got all the
girls.
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, skis boots and poles, three relatively
small suitcases full of clothes, 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, and very large, pink
brassier.
The car reeked of old
laundry and smelly feet, stale Old Spice deodorant and Big Macs, both consumed
and remnants non-processed. Outside the
night was frigid and dry but inside the car it was overheated and moist with a
line of foggy frost forming on the windows where the defroster could not
reach. The thin car windows were a small
boundary between the cold, wild night and the climate controlled civility of
the car.
Crash thought of what he left
behind as he drove. The hole in his
heart had started to heal slowly. When
he left the east coast it was a constant unbearable pain but it had settled to
more of an ache with each passing mile and after a few thousand more miles it
would disappear altogether.
The-one-he-left-behind was still in the back of his mind and always
would be. Mary Anne, Mary Beth, Mary Ellen, or just plain Mary. It was always a Mary. But that’s another story. He could not shake that name or those catholic
girls with their plaid skirts enticingly jacked up to their thighs and their
knee high wool socks and patent leather shoes.
And this was before Britney Spears. They got ahold of his constitution and they wouldn’t
let go.
This last Mary was a piece
of work. She was long and lean, soft and
subtle in-between, with long auburn hair, jade green eyes and freckles
everywhere. She was smart, sassy, funny,
just the way he liked them, with salty pears, ‘way up firm and high’. She was from a good family, a nice town, and
a good school, and drank beer instead of wine, what else was there? She was way over his head but he was going
for it with all the gusto and gumption he could muster or fake. She understood him, read his mind, laughed at
his jokes, got his references without footnotes, finished his sentences, and
completed him. They got along famously
(they were in love with being in love) until time and distance and the entropy
of their age took their toll and they drifted apart. The final nail in the coffin was when he
didn’t invite her to his brother’s wedding, because he felt that he and his
family were not worthy, and he lost her.
Maybe it was on purpose – cutting and running early to savor his freedom.
Little did he know at the
time was that her family was tragically flawed and she was just as insecure as
everyone else. All she wanted was
someone to listen to her, to hold her ¸take care of her and to take her
away. She came to say good bye the night
before he went west and they talked and joked casually, like it wasn’t really
over, but when she hugged him, she was the first to let go and she did not look
back. He knew they were done. She would find herself a stable mature man to
love her, who would ‘keep her safe and warm and dry’ but he would not flip her
skirt. She would always wonder, as would
Crash, but for now, she was gone.
The-one-that-got-away.
We eventually and not unimpededly
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. Wyoming
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, a minor misfortune or
‘lack of ambition one’?
After weathering the
storms and the setbacks we continued west on dicey, icy roads that proved
challenging for the rear wheel drive wagon with baloney skin tires. Nonetheless Crash drove well with just two
delicate fingers on the wheel and a light foot on the brakes. He kept up with the pickups and the semis,
driving seamlessly with no quick turns and no stopping. It all worked fine until we hit a patch of
black ice on a long sweeping turn. The road
went right but the car went straight.
When we hit the shoulder, heading for the ditch, Crash hit the brakes and it
sealed our fate. We plowed into the wide
highway divide, full of snow and submerged for a while in a plume of powder
before coming to rest in the deep snow that packed under us up to the floor
boards. ‘Face shots’ was all he could
think of.
We all got out and walked
around the car, assessing the hopeless situation. Crash walked thru the middle of the divide
and post-holed thru the snow into six inches of ice-water flowing in the ditch
under the snow. Squish squish went his
sneaker. Shit. We
all put our coats on and walked around again and again and Chip and Heimy stepped
into the same wet hole. Squish squish
went their sneakers. Shit. After dropping a few F bombs and some
better-late-than-never instructions on how to drive on ice we laughed and
accepted our fate. ‘This will not define
this trip’ they swore with naïve, youthful resolve.
Heimy and Chip started to
wave at cars going by either way on the freeway while Crash crossed the road
and went up to the right-of-way line and sat on a snow fence to contemplate his
fate. As far as he could see in any
direction there was nothing, just shadow-less grey snow drifting simultaneously
in every direction with the subtle ‘contrast of white on white’. ‘Oh my god’ was all he could think, ‘this is
so cool’. He noticed a lone horse way in
the distance standing out in the cold with his ass to the wind. He could not stand solitude or animal cruelty and leaving a horse alone, in
his mind, was the biggest offense. Then
he heard some hollering from his chums and he looked back to the hopeless
situation to see an old jeep, coming from the west, pull over and offer help. ‘Whoo hooo’ was all we could say.
The crusty oil worker who
had stopped had a winch on the front of his Willys jeep and he pulled out
the cable, handing Crash the hook. ‘It’s
your car, you hook it up’ is all he could offer. He walked around our rig as Crash tied the
hook to everything hanging off the front end of the car and when he came back
we heard the squish of his sneakers. Shit. He hopped in and threw it in reverse and the
jeep ‘jumped like a Willys in four wheel drive’ to make the cable tight
and then he turned on the winch. At
first nothing happened except that the cable tightened and twisted and made an
ungodly noise. We all stepped back and
instinctively covered our faces. Finally
our car lurched and dragged and then slowly popped up and out of the ice and
was dragged ignominiously to the shoulder.
There were high fives all around and we thanked the guy profusely and
gave him all the beer we had left.
We jumped in and headed
east with traffic, rumbling violently from all the snow packed in our wheels
and wheel wells. It was 5 or 10 miles
before the next exit where we stopped and cleaned our wheels and headed west
again, slowly, cautiously and contrite.
We were barely settled in when we came to the infamous turn where we had
crashed and saw that there was a semi-truck laying on its side in the divide,
exactly where we had been, with its tires still spinning.
We stopped and hopped out
and started running around with the people from another car that had stopped
before us. I noticed that their sneakers
squished just like ours. Shit. The windshield had crashed in from the impact
and the cab was full of snow. We began
digging after the driver as other truckers stopped and tried to turn the truck
off or take it out of gear. At the
bottom of the cab we found the driver and a partner in shock, hypothermic and
barely conscious, dressed only in Italian wife-beater tee shirts and blue jeans
and an inordinate amount of jade. We
pulled one guy out and he seemed all right, no worse the wear and tear, but the
driver complained of a broken arm, a bad neck and back. We were gentle getting him out while Chip
stepped purposely out into the east bound interstate, as if he had been
practicing this all day, and authoritatively stopped the first car coming
by. He explained the situation to the
driver as we wrapped the driver in all our blankets and laid him out in the
back seat and sent him off towards the nearest hospital in Cheyenne or Laramie. It seemed his best bet and the right thing to
do at the time.
People were congregating
around the truck each with, one squishy foot, and the other wife-beater trucker
found his coat as the police showed up to save the day. We sauntered back to our car innocently,
jumped in and hit the gas. We were out
of there. We didn’t need any police or
newspapers or any more thank you or goodbyes.
If we had spent another 5 or ten minutes stuck in the snow we would have
been creamed by that screaming, sideways semi-truck full of turquoise and wife-beaters
and god knows what else.
In western Wyoming the
Uinta Mountains
revealed themselves, like a blushing bride.
Heimy was so taken by the site of the snowcapped mountains that he
failed to notice our speed or the cop hiding in the divider monitoring it. Pulling over quickly while stashing beers and what-not, we found
our shoes and socks so we could address the local law officer at his car window
instead of at our incriminating one. We tried explaining our oblivious wonder at
their 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
were on our destitute way.
On the last long ear
popping drop from the Colorado plateau to the smoky valley of The Great Salt
Lake, we slipped under a
blanket of hazy pollution. The first thing we noticed in the city were
two men in white shirts, black ties and
overcoats separately pushing old bicycles thru the dingy city snow, more hell
bent on teaching than learning, indoctrinating more than experiencing. ‘Weird’, we thought.
So this new city 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 groovy-ness 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 took this best
opportunity to define ourselves, one more time, for good, 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.
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 New Yorker eyes because ‘there
was no there, there’. It seemed like the suburban Long Island we
had just escaped, only 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 under a blanket of deep, lite snow. That is where we would go to live.
After a few days we
escaped the smoky city and drove up to Park City in a snowstorm, at
sundown. We hardly noticed the alpenglow
on two lonely gas stations at the junction, the wide open meadows and the
wetlands with the white barns on the county two-lane highway that brought us to
town or the abandoned miner shacks and closed down business on the only road
into Old Town. We found the flop house
address of some friends of some friends and after about a hundred beers they
had invited us to crash anywhere we wanted.
We woke up on the floor
the next morning, stacked together in the corner of the uneven and undulating floor
of the Old Red School House on Park Avenue.
Already the morning sun was blindingly bright, the sky - cerulean blue,
the ridge - deep dark green with the pure white of the newly dusted
slopes. We staggered down to a funky
brick breakfast place on a dilapidated,
Disneyesque Main street, wolfed down a humongous ‘Hungry Miner’ with a gallon
of bad coffee and waited for a rickety white city van-bus to take us skiing on
the ‘greatest snow on earth’. We looked around at the sleepy street and the
tawdry town, the clear sky and the fresh snow, sensing the clarity and the
coolness of the morning mountain air. We
could see the promise and the potential of this place, plain as day. When you find a place or a person who you
know will be with you, will be part of you, for the rest of your life, you recognize
it immediately. We looked at each other
and smiled knowingly. We were home.
