Go West Young Man

 

Go West Young Man[1]

Matt Lindon[2]

‘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,[3] to address the Bovinosaurs[4] 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[5] 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[6], 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[7].  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[8] sands of Jones Beach[9].  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[10], 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[11], you look wonderful this morning’ (in your pent up, penguin outfit) or ‘ hey Mrs. Cleaver[12] 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[13] 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’[14]. 

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’[15]  A quiet man, he had a good sense of humor, an appetite for adventure and an uncanny ability to read people and situations.  Crash[16] 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[17] station wagon[18] 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[19] 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[20].  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’[21].   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’ [22] 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[23] 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[24] 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’?[25] 

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[26] 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[27].  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’[28].  ‘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[29] 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’[30] 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[31] 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[32] 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[33].  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[34], we slipped under a blanket of hazy pollution[35].  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[36] of the east, the boring industrial agriculture[37] of the mid-west, the over blown, Mork and Mindy, Rocky Mountain High[38] 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[39], so we took this best opportunity to define ourselves, one more time, for good, under the protection of the Zion Curtain[40].  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[41] streets of Salt Lake City spread out before us in every direction, converging in a multi-dimensional parallax.  With less than a million[42] people sprawling across the valley, it was not quite a real city yet in our New Yorker eyes because ‘there was no there, there’[43].  It seemed like the suburban Long Island we had just escaped, only with mountains.  The sepia[44] 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[45] the sun was shining, the slopes were uncrowded[46] and the mountains were covered under a blanket of deep, lite snow[47].  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[48] 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’[49].  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. [50]

 

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[1] Horace Greely 1865 and/or John Babsone Lane Soule 1851, whomever you prefer.  Horace took most of the credit.

[2] Footnotes will be used liberally and freely throughout this text by the author in homage to and imitation of David  Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest".  These notes are designed to explain and elucidate, where necessary, and where a separate, more or less formal or whimsical voice or point of view is needed.  They can be ignored at the reader’s pleasure or puerile.  If some is good, more is better and nothing succeeds like excess so what appears to be over the top, is.  This format is weird but here ya go.

[3] I would have loved to be an astronaut but that cramped sleeping never appealed to me.  I like to rotisserie sleep, where I roll around every half hour.  I fear that, as an astronaut, I would wrap myself in my support system umbilical cord and choke myself.  That and the inability to take a walk was a deal killer for me as far as being an astronaut goes.

[4] A magical mythical cross between a dinosaur and a cow.

[5] Massapequa is a blue collar town, full of NYC Firemen and Police, on the south shore of Long Island named after a famous Iroquois Chief.  Also known as Matzo-Pizza or Massafuckinpequa.  Resident Jerry Seinfeld says it comes from an Iroquois word meaning ‘near the mall’.

[6] Don’t ask.

[7] Compounding upon itself.

[8] Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens.

[9] Jones Beach is a public beach on Long Island named after Thomas Jones, a Whaler from Queens and  built by the great social Engineer Robert Moses in the 30s for middle class white folks.  The Parkway bridges going there were even built low so the ethnic people from the city could not be bussed out there (called BBQ’s for Brooklyn Bronx Queens).  Now all those ethnics had cars and they were taking over Jones Beach while Robert and Thomas were rolling around in their graves.  The 12 mile stretch could accommodate over half a million slippery and slimy, slathered bathers on a hot summer day, complete with their discarded cigarettes and beer cans,  with plenty of places to park and almost as many places to swim and sit.

[10] Shit Stompers

[11] Sado masochist principal of their catholic grammar school, Maria Regina, with veins popping out of her eyes, a ruddy red, over scrubbed complexion and a penchant for whacking with a ring, a ruler or the back of her hand.

[12] The Beaver’s mother on a popular TV series.

[13] Chaminade High School, Mineola New York.  Runt by the Marianist Brothers who were too conservative and mean to be Jesuits.  

[14] Bad Company.

[15] I had a hard time with this one, being a scientist and all.  Nothing is equal, it’s just a matter of decimal places.

[16] More on the name later.

[17] Without the classic Ford remnants of the classic Beach Boys - Woody side panels, this was not a surf wagon or even the moniker of the middle class of the 70’s, it was a prosaic functioning family car.  Matt’s father did not need ‘all that fancy stuff’ and they could not afford Wood when the traded in the VW Buss for this status car in 1970.  Matt had subsequently bought it from his father for $800 and a Schwinn Varsity Bike and his VW Bug.

[18] After 40 years Crash is still driving a Ford wagon, a stylish Taurus with tear drop windows and retracting antennae.  This car is going to be real cool in about 30-40 years.

[19] Still me.

[20] Sassy late 80’s singer who danced around in a parody parochial uniform singing ‘Do it to me one more time’

[21] Bob Seger

[22] Dan Fogelberg

[23] A heater hose fell away from the carburetor and the fuel was running cold and burning badly.  We thought it was the thin air.

[24] I-80

[25] Robert Earl Keen and James McMurtry

[26] Hence the name.

[27] Tennis Shoes out west, not really designed for sneaking up on anyone but good at it nonetheless

[28] Counting Crows

[29] The first classic jeep used in World War II

[30] Grateful Dead

[31] Uinta Mountains he noted ….Yeah I dig them, I lamely replied

[32] Stroh’s Beer

[33] A move that would get you shot where we came from.

[34] Salt Lake and Park Cities lie at the triple point intersection of the Colorado Plateau, a high desert plateau that gets a lot of snow and sun, the Great Basin Range with its mountain ranges lined up like dominoes to the Sierra Nevada with 10 mile wide valleys in between, and the Snake River basin and floodplain with the Tetons and cold, cloudy, continental climate. 

[35] Salt Lake City has some of the worst air quality in the nation, if not the world, because it is surrounded by mountains that trap cooler air and pollution in the valley.

[36] Trump

[37] Monsanto.

[38] John Denver.

[39] Irrational fear of the Mormons had kept immigration to Utah to a low roar for many years, seldom exceeding the natural exponential population growth of babies having babies.  Not any more.

[40] The protection and censorship of the Mormon Church.

[41] Brigham Yong laid out the Grid In Salt Lake City, originating at the Temple and made the streets ‘wide enough to turn a mule team’.

[42] 3 Million by 2015

[43] Gertrude Stein said this about Oakland, I think.

[44] In pictures and my memories of the 70’s, everything is in black and white, even brown, sepia.

[45] Park City is named after all the meadows that surround this mountain town.  Meadows in the mountains are sometimes called Parks.  Ironically in modern times there is no place to Park.

[46] In 1979 there were no traffic lights in Summit County.  Now there are 10 between I-80 and Main Street, I think. 

[47] In the winter of 1983 Park City had 3 feet of new snow every Tuesday Thursday and Saturday, to my recollection.

[48] Eating Establishment

[49] Pithy Utah License Plate maxim.  Better than ‘ Pretty Great State’

[50] ‘Home, its where I want to be, but I guess I’m already the.’  Talking Heads.