Long Way Home (22 page)

Ray's and Ben's vied for diners in what passed for downtown. Ben's was closed, so I chose Ray's by default, stepping around four Hispanics involved in a make-work project. They were creating something from cement—a curb, maybe, or a square of pavement. The work went slowly, but they didn't seem to care. It was work, after all, and it paid better than farm labor.

Ray's was a classic tavern, with a long bar and booths along a wall. I joined two other customers. The comely woman bartender seized on me the way a thirsty prospector falls on a watering hole and handed over a menu. The burger cost $8.50—Manhattan prices in the middle of nowhere! I settled for peanuts and a beer. The bartender grunted, not quite so comely anymore.

When in doubt, et cetera. Thirty minutes in Green River is quite enough unless the river's running.

U.S. 50 soon blended with Interstate 70, a six-lane highway connecting Cove Fort, Utah, with Baltimore. Between Green River and Salina, a distance of 110 miles, there are no services or towns. When planners first proposed I-70 in 1956, the media dubbed it the “road to nowhere” because it traversed so much uninhabited country. It winds through a dizzying array of land forms so various and striking that one's consciousness of the earth's incredible diversity expands.

The San Rafael Swell, a dome-shaped anticline, initiates the magnificence. Fifty miles long and thirty wide, it's an uplift of buttes and mesas cut through with deep gorges. There are cliffs, too, and canyons and slickrock. Again the colors mesmerize—reds, rusts, shadowy purples. The highway snakes into a tunnel, then erupts into the light with the force of a revelation. You can't think beyond what's happening. Even a dabbler in psychotropics would recognize the sensation.

The yellowish sandstone becomes more pronounced around Fremont Junction. Another ascent begins when you cross the Muddy River, a climb through Fishlake National Forest. Trees appear, the first in ages or so it seems, and look strangely Edenic—firs and spruces higher up, and aspens and cottonwoods along the streams.

On the forest's western edge lies Salina, named for the salt deposits Mormon pioneers discovered in 1861. They found lots of anthracite, too, and coal is still the town's chief source of revenue, trucked to refineries rather than loaded on trains ever since a flood washed away the railroad tracks in the 1980s. Some livestock, a turkey processing plant, a Latter-Day Saints chapel—that's Salina in a nutshell.

Evening caught me out, or I might never have stayed there. Though my motel was almost empty, the owner treated me rudely, as if I had infringed on her privacy by being a guest. She took down every scrap of information as well, including my home phone in Dublin, a foreign entry that increased her suspicion. If I figured a way to act up in Salina, a challenge that would have foiled Led Zeppelin in their prime, she'd have called the sheriff for sure.

I violated a rule of Nelson Algren's that night and ate at Mom's Cafe, the only game in town, but I did not play cards with a man named Doc or sleep with anyone whose troubles were worse than my own, as Algren had advised.

Mom's was not exactly buzzing. The temptation to rest one's head on the table and go to sleep was ever present. The café served no alcohol, of course, so my desire for a drink with dinner, ordinarily in the high normal range, turned acute.

After the meal, I located a state-run liquor store and bought a six-pack to accompany the first game of the World Series between the Phillies and Tampa Bay. The motel's off-brand TV needed some adjusting—a couple of brisk smacks, that is—before it delivered a clear picture.

The patriotic pregame show, virtually required by law, did not surprise me, but I couldn't believe the ugly behavior of the Devil Rays' fans, who hooted and razzed and rang bells and waved banners and sweatshirts to distract the Phils' pitcher and disrupt his rhythm. Maybe I'd been away too long, but the mayhem rattled me in the same way the Palin rally did—the American masses, our face to the world.

IN NEW MEXICO,
while camped on the Continental Divide toward the end of his journey, Steinbeck confronted a moment of truth. Beneath the “cut glass stars,” he confessed that he'd been pushing himself lately, pounding out the miles without hearing or seeing very much. Each hill he passed looked like the last. He felt helpless to assimilate his impressions, overstuffed with them, and he'd lost interest in talking with strangers and just exchanged monosyllables.

I had a similar experience in Salina. Though I hadn't yet tired of meeting people and being charmed or offended by them, I'd grown weary of long-distance roads, particularly the lonely ones, and there were more to come. From the Sevier Valley, U.S. 50 ran north to Delta and then west across some scrubby desert to Nevada and the Great Basin, where for the next 286 miles the highway is officially known as the “loneliest road in America.”

That was one lonely road too many. Moreover, I'd traveled it once and knew what I'd find—defunct mining camps, tumbleweeds, lizards, a house or two of ill repute, and an assortment of cantankerous old dudes far too eager to tell you the stories they've told a thousand times before. On the other hand, the southwestern route to California was new to me, attractively green and timbered in my atlas, with towns all along it to the Arizona border, so I decided to scrap U.S. 50 for good.

The moderately liberal and progressive atmosphere in Moab was the exception rather than the rule in Utah, though, a state almost all white, 70 percent Mormon, and so dyed-in-the-wool Republican that in 2004 not a single county preferred John Kerry to George W. Bush.

This was a troubled Utah, reeling from the economy's collapse. In the Salt Lake City metro area, entire subdivisions were being foreclosed, and many frantic owners were selling short for less than they owed the bank. The ski resorts were singing the blues even before a snowflake had fallen, certain that a vacation on the slopes would be among the first luxuries cash-strapped citizens would sacrifice. On the radio, I heard that the folks in Utah increasingly depended on antidepressants, although—as the talk-show host pointed out—Mormons don't permit themselves the solace of alcohol.

One blogger made light of the report and posted a comment: “I've been in Salt Lake for a year and a half now. Anyone got some Zoloft they can spare?”

Came the reply: “Get it yourself. I don't have the energy.”

The towns on my route had little to offer beyond LDS-related activities and the wonders of the great outdoors. Richfield, once a farming community, had become a hospitality center for motorists on the interstate. Elsinore, Joseph, and Fort Cove were links on the Mormon Corridor. Beaver's native sons included Philo T. Farnsworth and Butch Cassidy, but that was scarcely reason enough to spend the night.

Cedar City, larger and yet no less tedious, rested on the fringe of the Mojave Desert beneath a rim of reddish sandstone. By rights it should be called Juniper City. When Brigham Young dispatched the pioneers who founded it in 1851, they mixed up their trees, but they did find some iron, and mining enriched the local coffers into the 1980s.

As I cruised the downtown streets, I passed four police cars in ten minutes, ready to protect me from myself. I checked into a motel, and put a pillow over my head until dinnertime. An uncanny stroke of luck led me to Cafe Orleans, a Cajun place with an excellent jambalaya that lacked only a cold Pearl beer to achieve perfection.

The chef had lived in Louisiana, my server told me, and still made forays there to buy ingredients such as andouille that he couldn't get in Cedar City. She was an affable college student about to embark on an LDS missionary effort in Boston and very anxious about it. She'd never left Utah before, or been separated from her parents.

“I think I'll like it,” she said tentatively.

“Oh, you will,” I encouraged her, although I had my doubts about such missions, and felt put upon when anyone knocked on my door to try and sell me on a religion. “There are lots of students in Boston. You'll make new friends.”

“I hope so.”

I uttered a few more words of polite reassurance, then retreated into the drowsiness of the Cedar City night.

W
HAT ELDERLY AMERICANS
want when they retire, apparently, are sunshine and golf, both of which St. George, Utah, supplies in abundance. It's another Mormon enclave in the high desert, where Brigham Young's followers once grew cotton. The land sprouts subdivisions now, particularly for seniors.

St. George has more golf courses per capita than any other city and receives only eight inches of precipitation a year. Though July and August can be hellish, with an average high of 102 and 100 degrees respectively, that doesn't keep the golden agers away.

In the past decade, St. George has added about twenty-five thousand residents, making it one of the fastest-growing spots in the country along with Las Vegas, 110 miles away. Even Mesquite, Nevada, once a dull patch of sand across the Arizona border, has benefited from the spillover effect. About half of St. George's population is over forty-five, and Mesquite's is probably older based on what I observed during a brief spin.

Mesquite sits above the northern tip of Lake Mead, where a dam impounds the Colorado and also the Virgin River, formerly a scourge that flooded out the town three times. As a planned community, it has an inorganic feel. It's a very strange place, abnormally normal. Its motto goes, “Escape, Momentarily,” not much use if you're on the lam.

The architects of Mesquite must have studied Sedona, Arizona, because the resemblance is close, but the real estate isn't nearly as expensive. A tiny condo, slightly bigger than a motel room, costs less than $50,000, while a decent if unfancy house is only $150,000 or so, a mere pittance to the clever Californians who unloaded their overpriced homes before the market crashed.

Everywhere in Mesquite I saw healthy-looking seniors committing exercise. They jogged, power-walked, swam, and whacked golf balls at a driving range. Tanned and attired in colorful leisure wear, they were enveloped in a glow of well-being, suggesting wise investments that had miraculously eluded the shredder. It wouldn't be bad living here, I thought. Just, well, strange.

For the indolent few, the gaming tables beckoned. At the Eureka Hotel and Casino, the front door bore a stenciled warning:
NO WEAPONS OR FIREARMS PERMITTED
. A small, devoted group of zombies were diddling the slots at ten in the morning, while I took advantage of the air-conditioning. On October 24, the mercury had already zoomed into the low nineties.

The desert between Mesquite and Las Vegas was a “great and mysterious wasteland, a sun-punished place,” as John Steinbeck aptly put it when he drove across the Mojave. Signs dotted the raw, unpromising land, crying
LOTS FOR SALE
!, as if a sucker truly was born every minute.

Like Los Angeles, Las Vegas belonged to the night. By day, the city center was a repellent, smoggy clash of highways and mismatched high-rises, where frustrated drivers worked out their pent-up aggression. The tension in Clark County, an epicenter of the subprime crisis, was tangible. Almost all Nevada's foreclosures, the most anywhere in the United States, had occurred there. The banks were slowly taking possession of the county.

Soon I was trapped in traffic and trying to find the Excalibur, not my hotel of choice but the hotel I'd chosen, anyway, because of its bargain deals and my depleted bankroll. It had escaped my notice that the Excalibur deemed itself family-oriented and would be crawling with kids. The Camelot Steakhouse, Roundtable Buffet, and Sherwood Forest Café were among my dining options.

The schlock is inevitable, of course, but once you look past it, the reason for Vegas's popularity even during a recession becomes clear. For the same price as a Moab motel, I rented a room with a marble bath, a forty-two-inch TV, and a splendid view of the city. Access to a first-rate pool and spa were included in the package.

Although I'd been to Las Vegas before, I never really understood it. I'd always been quick to belittle it for the obvious reasons, but on my travels I'd seen how desolate and absent of culture and even simple entertainment so much of America can be. The genius of Vegas was to create a twenty-four-hour playground where bored grow-ups could indulge their childlike impulses, a playground that synthesized all the branding and franchising and brought them to a logical conclusion.

Vegas was a giant suburb posing as a city, or perhaps a city posing as a giant mall. You move about over trams, walkways, and escalators that connect one casino to the next, so that you occupy a kind of rarefied space far above the ordinary cares and woes confined to the wretched pit of existence below.

If you want to live dangerously and try some Thai food, you can give it a go, but almost every hotel features a food court with such staples as McDonald's, Burger King, Krispy Kreme, and so on. Vegas on a budget is just like home except a million times more exciting, alight with neon and vibrating to a recognizable tune. The gambling almost seems beside the point, but that
is
the point, of course, and the drinks are on the house.

At sundown, Las Vegas began to gather its energies, waking from the torpor of the afternoon. The indigo sky masked the smog, and the seductive desert air caressed your skin and made you feel sexy. Everywhere couples were holding hands or locked in an embrace, and I realized how infrequently I'd witnessed any public displays of affection on my journey. The couples lent a sweetness to the night. Imagine the romance of a weekend at the Excalibur for some newlyweds from Olney, Illinois.

I played roulette for a half hour, but my heart wasn't in it, and that killed any chance of winning, as every gambler knows. Gambling demands a purity of intent and a belief that the planets are aligned in your favor or else you're finished, so I circulated instead until a chunky woman from Boise intercepted me. She'd caught the scent of romance and was maniacally pursuing it with a friend in tow.

“We're missing her husband!” she blurted. She'd put a dent in somebody's bottle of scotch. “Have you seen him?”

“What does he look like?”

“Tall, dark, and handsome!” She laughed uproariously and tapped her friend's forearm. “Just kidding!”

“Where's your husband?”

“I don't have one, and I don't want one. I'm in the mood for some fun.”

I beat a hasty retreat and escaped into the simulacra of New York-New York where, as serendipity would have it, I found a faux pub called Nine Fine Irishmen. A singer was belting out a passable version of “Galway Girl,” and the Guinness, though a pale imitation of the real black stuff in Dublin, went down smoothly enough.

Patrick and Sean Conway were seated at the bar, brothers from Syracuse. They were familiar with Ireland and had visited Easky, near Sligo, where their family had roots. The talk made me lonely for Imelda, and when I expressed this to the Conways and told them about my project, they were sympathetic.

“
On the Road
. What a great book!” Sean exclaimed, skipping so briskly over John Steinbeck I felt slighted on his behalf. “There's something about the way Kerouac writes.”

“I've been working on a novel for five years,” Patrick confided, although he paid the bills by operating a company with Sean that makes a fingerprint-activated locking device. “I majored in English.”

“I did history,” Sean said.

“We're proud of our company,” Patrick continued. “Syracuse is dead, and we contribute something. We treat our employees well, and they get good benefits.”

“Who's older?” I asked Sean.

“Patrick is. We've got a sister in the middle. She's a terrible liberal.”

Politics had reared its sneaky head again. The Conways were sick of the presidential campaign and tired of the pundits milking it for profit. They'd already decided what they were going to do, anyway. Patrick would cast a protest vote for Bob Barr, while Sean liked John McCain.

“I'm anti-abortion,” he explained.

“Obama's a nonstarter.” Patrick drained his pint. “It'll mean higher taxes. He'll redistribute the wealth.” I switched the topic to the gaming tables.

“We've been playing blackjack. I'm down five hundred,” Sean owned up. “That's it for me. That's the limit I agreed on with my wife.” He glanced slyly at his brother. “Of course, Patrick might lend me some money.”

I parted with the Conways, two fine Irishmen, and wandered through the casino. In the mood for a nightcap, I found a quieter bar conducive to rumination. Banks of TVs loomed above the rows of bottles, each tuned to a football game or Fox News. It had been the same in almost every restaurant, tavern, motel breakfast room, and convenience store, always the TVs and sports or Fox News.

The balm of the desert air. As I walked into it, I spotted Sean and Patrick at a blackjack table intently studying the hand they'd been dealt.

WHEN DON LAUGHLIN
was a teenager, he worked as a fur trapper in Minnesota and used his earnings to buy slot machines and install them in hunting lodges. Soon he was bringing in five hundred bucks a week, enough to encourage any ambitious youth to neglect his studies. That wasn't lost on his school principal, who ordered Laughlin to get busy or take a hike.

Laughlin took a hike. In the late 1950s, he relocated to Las Vegas and bought the 101 Club casino and sold it in 1964, the same year he became attracted to the potential of the desert between Bullhead City and Kingman, Arizona, and Needles, California, a prime stop on Route 66. Subsequently, he acquired a funky, eight-room motel and six-plus acres on the Colorado River. Davis Dam, built in 1951, would supply the water to spur further development, he believed.

In the early days, Laughlin's big draw, aside from gambling, was a ninety-eight-cent chicken dinner. From such humble origins, he created an empire with the Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino as its linchpin. Laughlin, Nevada, is a low-key version of Las Vegas now, laid-back rather than insistently blowing its own horn, and its founder, currently in his late seventies, still likes to shake hands and work the room.

I drove Highway 95 to Laughlin, my last stop before California. ATVs and dirt bikes were carving up the desert, while hang gliders floated above it. This was an ugly stretch of country, ragged and punch-drunk, sizzling under the burning sun and pressed into service as a dumping ground for unmentionable substances. To survive here, you'd need the scaly hide of a reptile.

A late breakfast in Searchlight. The town's gold mines once made it bigger and richer than Vegas, but it had sunk into the bargain basement. At the lightly patronized, infernally smoky casino, a plate of eggs, toast, and hash browns cost less than a fiver, leaving some change for the slots.

Here was the material for a novel by James M. Cain or, better, Jim Thompson. Somewhere on the premises a hot blonde lurked, applying crimson lipstick and fingering her husband's insurance policy as she waited for a drifter to propel the murderous plot into motion.

Laughlin gratified me with its homey style. I hardly gambled at all. Instead I took long walks on a lovely path by the Colorado, where palms grew amid orange and lime trees to create a faint essence of the tropics.

The river, wide and deep here, begins as snowmelt in the Rockies, then flows for 1,140 miles through 3 deserts before emptying into the Sea of Cortez. Without it, there'd be no West as we know it—33 reservoirs, 990 miles of pipes, 345 diversion dams, 50 power plants, and 14,950 miles of canals.

On Sunday I attended Mass in Don's Celebrity Theater at the Riverside. I'd been meaning to go to church all along, mainly because John Steinbeck had put churches on his short list of things to do. He only mentioned a service once, though, in New England, where a John Knox preacher subjected him to a fire-and-brimstone sermon.

“He spoke of hell as an expert, not the mush-mush hell of these soft days,” said the chastened traveler, “but a well-stoked, white-hot hell served by technicians of the first order.”

The Celebrity Theater, with a bingo parlor and a Mexican restaurant for neighbors, seemed an unlikely venue. Only the night before, the country star Lynn Anderson had entertained there. The aged congregation sat at marble-topped tables at the foot of a stage-cum-altar decorated exactly like Wayne Smith's barbershop—a cardboard John Wayne, a cow skull, wagon wheels, and so on.

Over some loudspeakers, a taped voice recited the rosary ad infinitum until the Mass proper started with a hymn and a pair of readings from the Bible, after which Father Charles Urnick took charge. Round-faced and genial, he belonged to the school of priests who prefer to praise rather than berate. His parishioners clearly loved him. They were silent and respectful, hanging on his every word.

His past week had been blessed, Father Urnick began. Several friends had returned from trips with gifts for him. He'd received maple syrup from Vermont and Gouda cheese from Holland.

The blessings didn't stop there, either. He'd also been treated to a revitalizing massage and invited to dinner seven times, once for a fantastic supper of lobster and portobello mushrooms. Never before had I been hungry in church, but the Lord works in mysterious ways, as my mother used to say.

“I met my friend Billy for breakfast, too,” Father Urnick went on, twinkly-eyed. “He has a demanding infant at home, and he was grateful to be out. Billy said to me, ‘Father, this is the first meal in a long time where nobody's thrown food at me or pulled on my glasses' ”—a pregnant pause—“so I reached out and pulled on his glasses.”

That earned some appreciative chortles from the audience, each of whom had no doubt learned a different lesson from the anecdote. It was one of those capacious vignettes that could be interpreted variously. I'd still be pondering its meaning days later in the Mojave.

Father Urnick segued into a mention of the election and alluded to all the laws voters had to decide on. For a moment, I thought he'd endorse a candidate for president, but he was just setting up a routine that let him enumerate some of the strange laws already on the books.