Day Five – Thursday, September 16: The Green Table

And now, a few words about bugs. After four full days on the road, the front end of our car had become a vast graveyard of insect remains, a veritable repository of entomological innards, outards, exoskeletons, wings, antennae, and just about anything else associated with flying insects. I’m talking about a bazillion bugs who had unwittingly dashed themselves to their own demise against the glass, plastic and steel of my Honda. They would buzz, bite, and bother no more. They had ceased to be, bought the farm, sucked their last drop of blood, leaving thousands of bereaved little larvae behind. What I’m saying is, my car was a mess.

I had the bright idea of driving all the way to New Orleans without washing off any of this goop, other than the windshield, of course. That’s a safety issue when you can no longer see the road for all the bug carcasses. But the rest? Leave it be, baby. This, naturally, is a guy’s way of thinking.

Cool, dude, look at all those dead bugs.

For the wife, however, twenty pounds of caked-on bug remains was something less than cool. Disgusting, revolting, intolerable… well, you get the idea. I give her credit, she humored me and let it go for four days. By morning in Cortez, though, she laid down her ultimatum. Either the bugs come off the car or she would not be riding anywhere in it. After several minutes of serious deliberation on my part over this choice, followed by a spirited debate (this means an argument) I decided it was not worth the grief to continue the great bug collecting experiment any longer.

I took some photos for posterity and as we headed out of town, stopped for gas and then took the windshield cleaning squeegee and went to work. What I hadn’t counted on was that four days of baked-on bug splatter would have the physical characteristics of hardened cement. What I needed was a hammer and chisel, but not having those tools readily available, I did the best I could with the plastic squeegee. I soaked the bumper, headlights and hood repeatedly until the goop softened enough to remove about eighty percent of it (with a liberal helping of elbow grease) and vowed never to repeat this particular mistake.

(Ascending to Mesa Verde National Park)

So…on to Mesa Verde National Park we went, only a short distance from Cortez. I’d been looking forward to this particular day ever since I’d begun planning the trip months earlier, and heading out of Cortez, the day seemed full of good omens. The sun beamed bright and the sky shone blue once more.  Even the car felt lighter with the dead bug weight removed.

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Day Four: Wednesday, September 15

Moab and Vicinity – Dead Horses And A Lot Of Really Big Rocks

By nine a.m. we had gassed up the car and were heading back toward Moab, already able to laugh at our previous night’s motel misadventure with only a slight undercurrent of grumbling. Okay, truth is, I was still grumpy while Irina had already shrugged it off.  I  couldn’t get past the idea that a town that lives entirely on the tourist trade could be completely maxed out of rooms.

I mentioned this to the clerk as I checked out of the Super 8 in Green River  (which, by the way, I would have rated a 4 out of 5 but downgraded to 3.5 for our room being on the second floor and a long walk down the corridor toting a cooler and two bags). When we’d arrived at about 8:30 Tuesday night, the place was maybe half full. Loading the car Wednesday morning, the parking lot now teemed with vehicles.

“Looks like you got busy,”  I said.

The heavy-set lady behind the desk smiled ruefully.  “Happens all the time when Moab fills up. We’re the next closest place.”

‘So why don’t they build more motels in Moab?”

Her head bounced like a bobblehead doll, jowls quivering.  “Oh, they have.”

“Well.” My mind spun its wheels, searching for a crushing riposte, but the best I could manage was, “They need more.” Yeah, that’s telling her.

I often wonder how people from more crowded, urbanized regions of the country react to the vast, empty stretches of land in the western U.S. I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of my life – you know, damp, green, stand in one place too long and mildew starts to grow on you – and Washington also has some long distances between outposts of so-called civilization, but most of that area is covered with trees and nice, green living things. It’s a little different, to put it mildly, in parts of Utah and Nevada where if you don’t like rocks and dirt, you’re not going to find much to like.

The stretch of highway from Green River to Moab certainly qualifies as some of the most barren I’ve ever encountered. There’s the road and then there’s a lot of rocks and hard baked dirt, and, um, more rocks and more dirt. No trees, no livestock, no humans, scarcely even a tumbleweed to keep you company. And there is every conceivable variant of the color brown ever invented. You could fill an entire 48 count box of crayons with just the different hues of brown out there. At least they have that brilliant blue sky for contrast, which is good because otherwise you might think you went to sleep last night in Utah and woke up on Mars. Seriously, I read somewhere that a number of television and film sci-fi productions have shot footage in this region because of its otherworldy visual qualities.

(The Monitor and The Merrimack, sandstone monoliths along the road to Dead Horse Point)

We didn’t actually drive all the way back to Moab, turning off instead on SR313  to Dead Horse Point State Park. This is also the road to Canyonlands National Park, but that was a little farther afield and not on our agenda. Gotta save something for next trip, right? Immediately upon making the turn onto 313 you want to stop and take pictures of the immense red sandstone monoliths that surround you on three sides.

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Day Three – Tuesday, September 14: Pocatello to Moab, er, Green River

We dallied a bit in Pocatello before hitting the road at 9 a.m. and streaking south toward Utah. We sped across the border into our fourth state of the trip and zoomed right past Ogden and the whole Salt Lake City metropolitan area. I’m sure Salt Lake is a nice town, with the looming Wasatch mountains providing a spectacular backdrop, but it wasn’t on our agenda to stop and investigate its charms, as wonderful as they may be.

This is the third time I’ve done the drive-by on Salt Lake City and frankly I’m beginning to feel a little guilty about it. There’s got to be some good reason all of those nice Mormon folks decided to settle on the shores of a dead lake. You telling me they didn’t stumble across some green, verdant valley somewhere along the way on that long, westward wagon trek?  This dry, dusty flatiron where it’s 100+ degrees for months on end and a lake with five times the saline content of the ocean is the best place they could find?  Maybe they spent a few too many months out in the sun broiling their brains on the way there, I don’t know. I’m just saying it could affect your judgment. It could.

(Farmland in central Utah)

We continued south on I-15 to Nephi, then branched off on state highway 28 on  what was marked as a scenic byway on my road map. You know, with the little green dotted line paralleling the highway.  I don’t know who designates these things, but I didn’t see anything more scenic along this stretch of road than a few hawks circling the endless farm fields in search of lunch. It wasn’t an ugly piece of highway, don’t get me wrong, but in retrospect it wasn’t worth the detour. We could have made better time and missed nothing of interest staying on I-15 all the way south to the I-70 junction and then heading east, and that’s what I would advise anyone going that way.

We did in fact get on I-70 eastbound near Salina, and this was a real treat. Not Salina, a dusty and rather shabby little farm town, but I-70.  We were entering red rock country and for the rest of the day the views just kept getting grander and more spectacular with nearly every bend in the road.  Crossing the San Rafael Swell, a stunning, coruscating upheaval in the earth’s crust, we must have stopped the car half a dozen times to take pictures and simply gape open-mouthed like the tourists we were.

(San Rafael Swell along I-70)

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