Around a bend a town of six houses called
Fields lies down the road. I coast through and almost miss the gas pump, the
last for 100 miles, across a dirt lot. I pull up to the pump and am scolded by
the attendant as I once again forget it’s illegal to pump my own gas in Oregon.
She forgives me and invites me inside for a milkshake at their bar. I start to
decline and she counters with the suggestion of a raspberry-chocolate shake and
when she sees the look on my face she tells me to pull around the side of the
diner while she gets it started. As I come in she’s pouring the shake from a
steel tumbler into a cup to go. It overflows and she hands me a spoon and the
tumbler and tells me I’m not leaving until I first finish what’s left in the
tumbler.
Back on the road with my melting milkshake I descend a hill
into a valley on a 20 mile stretch of straight road. The road in the distance
at the bottom of the hill is reflected by the shimmering road in front of my
car and it looks as if the highway folds back on itself and drives into the
earth. The road finally bends and I’m over a hill into Nevada and I see the air
conditioned, windowless big box houses clustered on the hills above sand dunes.
The billboards on the roads advertise the beginning of adventure over the towns
that hold Inez’s Dancing and Diddling Bar and all breed of ranch.
At Wendover the flashing lights make one last attempt to
hold you back from the dark void of the salt flats below in Utah. Steak dinners
and guaranteed winners shine on the floodlit billboards and the main street
stretches out in line with the highway so you can see every car parked in front
of every casino.
On the salt flats the lights of the potash plant shimmer
through the heat as it rises from the salt after the sun sets. The highway that
skirts the flats is a train of headlights and taillights that give the only
hint of where the ground and sky meet. One pair of lights is bigger than the
others, it breaks off from the train and I hear a sound like someone pulling a
continuous piece of wet fabric off of a rock. It looks like the car is driving
on top of water until it gets close and I see the salt and moisture that its
tires are kicking up. It drives right at me and hops back up on the paved road
and drives back toward the highway.
I stand out on the cracked flat white earth and the sunset
light fades into the lights of the casino town in the distance and a storm
builds across the flats. The heat of the ground warms my legs while I shiver in
the breeze on top. Under the clouds a policeman chases speeders all night long
on the highway while above the clouds the milky way runs up and over my head
into the mountains that contain the basin.
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