Evidently, coyotes have found their way to this little
island as well. The local contingent were in good voice last night as they paid
their tribute to a full moon that will not be as big as this for another 500
years.
Another windy one this morning! It is merciless and relentless.
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| Pack this! |
I felt like a one-armed vagrant as I gathered up my
paraphernalia of the homeless and stuffed it clumsily into my shopping cart as
that unrelenting wind tried its best to wrest it from me..
I resolved to put 300 miles behind me today and succeeded.
But I’m bagged. Bought myself a stiff drink to end the day with (sorry—“with
which to end the day” because I know that a preposition is a bad thing to end a
sentence with J
One really needs to go out of the way to sidestep the
interstate freeways, but I did my best. Turning east on 83 from Brigham City we
cruised through range land with small rocky hills on one side and small briny
pools and salt pans on the other.
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| The "No Trespassing" sign hanging on the fence is hardly necessary. |
The cattle here must surely suffer from hypertension and
bloat and I imagine their meat is marketed as ‘pre-salted’.
ATK is a rocket manufacturing facility for NASA and the
military. Some of their products were put out on display. It is really out in the
bugger-alls with no habitation within, well, exploding distance. How satisfying
it must be to be able to parade around in a teeshirt that proclaims, “As a
matter of fact, I AM a rocket scientist”. But I suppose if they are all rocket
scientists the gag value would be compromised.
 |
Another sidestep was an ambitious one: Hwy 30/42 from Snowville, Utah to
Burley, Idaho.
The Bruiser and I stopped and studied the sign proclaiming “No Services for 102
miles” before taking a deep breath and forging on. The sign turned out to be
less than accurate—it was only 70 miles—but the road was meditative run for
about an hour and a half. There was no appreciable change in elevation,
temperature, scenery, speed or direction, It was an opportunity to think and
absorb where I was in time and space. I was not concerned about going to sleep.
(Someone in a parking lot asked me recently if I ever fell asleep driving this
thing. I replied, “If I did I wouldn’t be here to answer that question”.)
I thought about the themes and contrasts that have presented
themselves to me over the course of this trip. Notions of adventure and
convention; change and stasis (and I have come to appreciate that there IS no
stasis!), home and away, solitude and dependency, evolution and extinction,
tolerance and indifference, natural and commercial, and so on. More will come
to me. Good and bad is not among them. Even the rampant and inescapable
corporate message to the consumer has to be acknowledged. We have seen what
happens to communities over the centuries when resources and needs become out
of sync with one another,
Twin Falls,
Idaho has a truly amazing set of
waterfalls that needed to be seen, photographed and reported. Fees are
collected now at virtually every tourist site.
“Do you have a senior’s card?” I was asked by the attendant
who was trying to find a reason not to charge me for just going in for a
picture.
“Nope” I sez.
“How about military
service?”
“I was a school teacher for 36 years”, sez I. “Does that
count?”
“Close enough”, he responded,
and waved me through.
 |
| Shoshone Falls |
Back on the interstate aiming for a state park, when
something quite unexpected happened. The fuel light came on, indicating that I
was nearly out of gas. Bewildered, I considered a variety of possibilities. You
see, The Bruiser has no fuel gauge, so I just have to calculate how many
miles/km I have remaining after a fill up. By my reckoning I still had 100 km
left. Did I screw it up somehow? Ah, perhaps the idiot light is malfunctioning.
That must be it.
And then The Bruiser sputtered to a stop.
Nope. guess there is nothing wrong with the indicator light.
Evidently in my haze of many miles, dehydration and low
blood sugar I did indeed screw up. In any case, according to the road signs and
my GPS, I was about 3 km from the next gas station. So I pushed The Bruiser
along, hoping that the next downhill gradient would be enough to coast us
within striking distance. It wasn’t. After about 1 km I was done. And more than
a bit disappointed that not one of the hundreds of cars that blew past a
grey-headed old fart pushing a heavy motorcycle along the side of a freeway
thought to stop and offer assistance. I was reluctant to park it on the
roadside, because in my experience, freeway traffic is not as likely to ignore
a vehicle full of unsupervised loot at the roadside. Just then, guardian angels disguised as State
Troopers pulled up, splashed some fuel in The Bruiser’s tank using a fuel line
pump from their cruiser, and sent me on my way.
Thank you.
So here I am at Three
Islands State
Park. As I look out my back door I see an old
trail scar on the hill that a fellow camper pointed out to me is none other
than the remnants of the Oregon Trail. It is
the local equivalent of the Nachez Trace I saw in Mississippi that channeled the early
pioneers to their chosen Promised Land by horse drawn wagons (the forerunner to
the Hummer).
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| Can you see the trace of the Oregon Trail? There are two. I guess one is the passing lane. |
