Long Way Home (21 page)

“I had no time for anything,” Rose told me. She's from Iowa, a slender, direct, well-educated woman. “I've been so busy I just finished reading a book somebody gave me last Christmas.”

“What brought you to Bedrock in the first place?”

“After college, I thought about graduate school, but it didn't sound right,” she said, “so I joined a tree-planting crew in Minnesota instead. I met some wild and crazy guys from Moab there, and they got me to come out to Utah.”

Though she liked Moab, she was restless and moved on. For a time, she lived in Marin County, one of my old California haunts, and worked as a private health caregiver for an invalid. She plays the guitar and writes songs, and still regretted the opportunities she missed while there.

“What's the name of that famous club in Mill Valley?” she asked.

“The Sweetwater?”

“That's it. That's where I wish I'd performed.”

She returned to Moab eventually and hooked up with a man who dreamed of owning a country store. They bought the Bedrock place together, but the reality of the situation failed to match her partner's fantasy. He couldn't handle being so far away from civilization, Rose said, so he was back in Moab again, and she had listed the store for sale, although not just to anybody. She'd be picky about the new owner.

“Where will you go when it's sold?”

“Up there.” She nodded to a slope behind the store. “I've got a house on two acres. It already has a well dug.”

I admitted to being taken aback. “What'll you do with yourself?”

“Play my guitar. Work on my music, and write some more songs.”

Blackie escorted me to the car, and I patted his head. He was a terrific dog, really, and probably had no desire to leave Bedrock, either. Home is where the heart is, as the old saw has it, but it wouldn't surprise me if Rose took off for Sacramento or Seattle someday. Lives out West may be more adventurous, but they're also more risky and complicated.

I
F YOU MENTION
Sagebrush Jack or Swayback Johnny in La Sal, Utah, you'll surely draw a blank, but they were as gifted as Seabiscuit and Secretariat in their day, two of the fastest cow ponies ever to compete in the match races the valley's ranchers conducted in the 1880s to relieve their boredom.

The ranchers had earned a fortune by selling their steers for thirty-five dollars a head in Colorado rather than ten dollars at home, and in the absence of any fun other than whiskey, they gambled with a passion and sometimes combined to bet as much as seventy-five thousand dollars on a single race.

The Paiutes put an end to the frivolity with their frequent raids, and a gang of rustlers called Robbers Roost later caused so much consternation that the ranchers gave up cattle for sheep and then gave up altogether. As westerners will do, they left town, moved to Coyote, changed the name to La Sal, and started over.

I traveled through La Sal on my way to Moab over Highway 191, skirting Manti-La Sal National Forest, with its rolling ridges of conifers. The red rock country of the Colorado Plateau gradually revealed itself, layers of sandstone and shale compacted over centuries. Though red is the dominant color, you can pick out shades of salmon, pale orange, blue-gray, and even streaks of yellow and purple in the various cliffs and slopes.

Hole N” the Rock, just south of Moab, restored my confidence, all but vanished, in the tenacity of roadside attractions. If you've ever thought about living in a cave, the former home of Albert and Gladys Christensen could be your proving ground. It took Albert twelve years to hollow it out. He carted away fifty thousand cubic feet of sandstone between 1945 and 1957, the year he died of a heart attack.

Albert also considered himself an artist. His masterpiece, they say, is the
Sermon on the Mount
, but his paintings of Jesus are just as masterful. So, too, is the head of FDR he sculpted into a wall. Gladys collected dolls and helped with the rock and cactus garden. The petting zoo came into being after she'd departed, I believe, but I gather she would have approved.

The scruffy fringe of Moab, once the world's uranium capital, soon came into view. A strong wind was blowing again, raising more dust devils that twirled across the desert, but the chill of Bedrock was gone. Instead a relentless sun burned through the thin, clear air.

I'd visited Moab once long ago and remembered it as a gritty town where a chance remark in the wrong bar could cost you a few teeth. The Atlas Uranium Mine was still in business then, but it went bust in 1984 and pitched the city into a deep depression that subsided only when Moab reinvented itself and banked its future on tourism.

The strategy worked almost too well, coinciding by accident with a growing interest in outdoor activities. Moab is nothing if not scenic, and its mild winters coupled with the reliable sunshine drew buyers looking for a second or even a third home, just as in the Colorado Rockies. The city commands top dollar as a destination resort now, so resentful locals have been priced out of the market in the same way.

I've never felt so old as I did in Moab. If Pistone's in Falls Church had fostered the illusion that I was a spring chicken, Moab plucked the feathers and fitted the chicken with thirty-pound weights on its scrawny legs. Everyone in town appeared to be twenty-five or under, and they were fit, tanned, and very attractive in a healthy, granola-fed way, although they refused to preen about it. So much physical superiority was on display it would be absurd to crow about one's own.

In need of sustenance after instantly aging, I doddered, or so it seemed, to the Rio Grill, where Utah's weird liquor laws denied my need. To order a drink, I'd have to pay four dollars to join a private club, even though I'd be leaving Moab tomorrow. Moreover, I couldn't ask for a double, only a single dispensed by a metered device at exactly one ounce per serving. You can't call for your second drink until you finish the first, either. It's illegal.

The bartender, under twenty-five, explained all this. “You could have a beer at the Moab Brewery without becoming a member,” he suggested, without specifying the reason why.

The Moab Brewery proved to be a very citadel of youth, and its customers affected a style peculiar to the city, wearing their hair shaggy and their expensive designer shades perched on the crown of a ballcap or a knit cap even indoors. It was the North Face catalog come to life, then given a red rock twist.

Every table in the place was occupied, as were the chairs at the bar. After a brief wait, a pretty young brunette showed me to a seat next to a pretty young blonde. On my other side were a mom and dad trying to ferret out whether their son might be gay.

“We thought you were seeing someone,” the dad stated flatly, disappointment coloring his voice.

“I am.”

“Why couldn't you bring her along?”

“She's not here.” The son sounded annoyed. “She's backpacking.”

“By herself?”

“No, with her dog.”

He changed the subject to mountain biking, clearly his one true love. Jill, the pretty blonde, was also a biker. She wore a splint on an index finger and an elaborate bandage that ran halfway up her wrist. She held the hand close to her face and inspected the dressing minutely, as if she couldn't figure out how it got there.

“Have an accident?” I asked.

“Yeah!” she chirped, waking up. “It's dislocated!”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not anymore! They gave me some pills at the hospital.”

Maybe that accounted for her intense scrutiny. “How did it happen?”

“I fell into a snowbank at Geyser Peak!” Geyser Peak winter trailhead starts at an altitude of about ten thousand feet. If Lewis and Clark were still around, they'd have wanted Jill on their team.

I ordered a Scorpion Ale and some fish tacos, pleased once again to be eating real food. Fish tacos and other “gourmet” dishes were frowned upon as being elitist on talk radio, another aspect of the unstated and perhaps unconscious attempt to convince listeners that America should be the land of lowered expectations.

The evening was mild enough for an after-dinner stroll. When the sun went down, the temperature would take a radical dip toward freezing, though. Autumn in the desert can bring daily swings of fifty degrees or more. I walked by a park where two peewee football clubs were butting heads, then up a path into a canyon, just like that. Ten minutes later, I sat on a ledge and watched the twilight colors spill across Moab. What a marvel is the West.

ANOTHER CLEAR, BRIGHT
desert morning. The temperature, as predicted, had dropped severely. It was only in the mid-thirties when I reached Slickrock Trail, high above the city, where the sandstone took on a fiery glow when the sun first struck it. The snow I'd worried about in Ouray had fallen in Grand Junction the night before, in fact.

Despite the early hour, bikers clustered in a parking lot and geared up to tackle the trail, a 10.6-mile loop that attracts more than one hundred thousand visitors a year. Only horses find the rocks slick. Their metal shoes don't offer enough traction, but bike tires grip the stone and let riders careen around at improbable angles, as if freed from gravity's limits. Faith in Friction and Steep Creep, two sections of the trail, accurately describe the riders' maneuvers.

The bikers were all under twenty-five, naturally, except for Mike and Wendy Graham, two middle-aged Californians who own a ranch in Santa Paula. They were Slickrock veterans, having been to Moab a number of times.

“Is the trail as dangerous as they say?” I asked. I'd read some devastating accounts of accidents.

“You can make of it what you will,” Mike felt. He meant your chances of a fall are directly related to the amount of care you exercise. An avid outdoorsman, he started as a rock climber and has no use for physical activities that don't entail a challenge. Hiking bores him silly, for instance. He and Wendy came late to mountain biking, taking it up as a family sport with their kids.

“The girls wanted no part of it to begin with.” Wendy brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. “But the boys loved it.”

“They're eager to go faster and harder,” Mike said approvingly. “The more rugged the terrain, the better they like it.”

The Grahams can afford to indulge their hobby. Mike had sold his company, a clothing manufacturer, almost ten years ago, and he and Wendy had been coasting along and enjoying themselves ever since, practically an un-American attitude toward being wealthy. People who cash out usually feel compelled to try to repeat their success in a different field. We're not very good at what the Italians call
dolce far niente
—how sweet it is to do nothing, although the “nothing” is really an indefinable something everybody craves.

Because he had owned a small business, Mike said, he'd been a lifelong Republican, but not this November.

“I'm voting for Obama,” he told me. “He's a smart man. We need to improve ourselves in the eyes of the rest of the world.”

Never once in the heartland did I hear that sentiment expressed, precisely the words Nicolas Sarkozy spoke to Condoleezza Rice at their first meeting when she inquired, “What can I do for you?” In the eyes of the world, we'd sunk to a nadir, but that seemed not to matter to those with an insular cast of mind.

“Governments ought to work together,” Mike went on, checking his bike a last time. “Not squabble.”

Then he and Wendy took off to cycle Slickrock, a round-trip of about four hours at an average pace. I hiked to a ridge for a view of the trail and saw a campsite that would have done Robert Baden-Powell proud. The campers, sequestered in a tiny tent, were prepared for a long stay. They'd laid in propane tanks for cooking, cases of bottled water, reams of toilet paper, a generator for electricity, dirt bikes to escape should Mad Max breeze through, and plenty of food.

A big bearded guy in Jockeys and a sweatshirt lifted the tent flap as I passed by. He'd only just emerged from the cocoon of his sleeping bag and seemed befuddled to see another human being. “Got to pee,” he mumbled.

“You go right ahead. I'll look the other way.”

“ 'Preciate it.”

Tim came from Arizona, and I'd guessed his plan correctly. He and his girlfriend intended to stay put for another couple of weeks until the really cold weather drove them away. They'd rented a Jeep in Moab to carry up their provisions and rode to town as necessary to restock the larder.

Every morning, they biked a trail before the sun kindled the sandstone—Hurrah Pass, Negro Bill Canyon, Mill Canyon Dinosaur, they'd done them all and kept a log of their hairiest adventures, such as the time Tim almost lost it on Porcupine Rim.

“Porcupine Rim.” The girlfiend shook her head in wonder. “That was awesome.”

“Porcupine Rim is deadly, man,” Tim agreed.

When I sought a second opinion on Slickrock's dangers, he offered to loan me a bike to ride the practice loop, a mere 2.3 miles. I'd done enough biking in California to accept, especially after I borrowed a helmet from Tim's girl, whose head was considerably smaller than his basketball-size noggin.

I proceeded with caution. I expected the rock to be slippery, regardless of what I'd heard. It
feels
slick to the touch, but the tires did grip it firmly as promised. The practice loop, rumored to be much easier than the main trail, still demanded an effort, at least from me. Twice I dismounted to walk the bike over tricky downhill patches, but I managed to complete the ride and won back some of the years Moab had earlier robbed from me.

ARCHES NATIONAL PARK
was a bad idea. I should have skipped it. I'd visited it before and, besides, I was starting to share Steinbeck's aversion to such places. Because Arches is largely about the spectacular scenery, the traffic backs up as it does at Shenandoah, and you're often stuck behind some gapers in an RV or, worse, tailed by a fiend using the park to enact his or her Grand Prix fantasies.

The views are undeniably stunning, as are the geological formations, but they're only rocks in the end. What enlivened the landscape for me and gave it some human resonance was John Wesley Wolfe's old ranch by Delicate Arch.

Wolfe, a Civil War vet with a bad leg, came West from Etna, Ohio, with his son Fred in search of a drier, more salubrious climate, and acquired a one-hundred-acre tract near Salt Wash in the late 1880s. He had enough water and grass for cattle, and lived in a one-room, dirt-floored cabin so hideously filthy and primitive that his married daughter Flora Stanley almost keeled over when she joined him eight years later with her husband and two children.

Flora put down her foot, so the menfolk harvested some cottonwoods along the Colorado River and built a new cabin with a real floor and one little window for light. The cabin looks like the frailest of gestures in the enormity of all that space, and yet there it stands more than a century later. At first glance it suggests an extraordinarily harsh life for its occupants, but then you realize that the simple fact of
being
alive was once enough to satisfy most people.

It satisfied John Wesley Wolfe, anyway, and had the desired effect on his health. He sold the ranch in 1910 and went back to Etna, where he died at age eighty-four.

The wind screamed through the park that afternoon. Hiking up Delicate Arch Trail, I ate so much grit I turned on my heel after a mile or so. My eyes stung, and my cherished Paints cap blew off my head and skittered across the desert. I packed it in then and started north toward U.S. 50 with no real goal in mind, obeying the traveler's eternal injunction—when in doubt, keep moving.

Past Devil's Garden near the far tip of Arches, big swaths of white sand replaced the familiar red rock. At Brendel, I swung west and stopped in Green River, as dead as the proverbial doornail. The river wouldn't float an inner tube in late October, much less a crowd of rafters, and the fabled watermelons had all been picked. An oil rig pecked at the dirt. Green River felt geriatric after Moab, a pensioner limping toward oblivion.