COLUMN: Utah on the Road
Twenty-one years ago I packed up a green Honda Civic with red Missouri license plates and tediously explained to the U-Haul dealer over the phone that “yes, Honda makes cars now and there are lots of modern settlements west of the Rockies.”
I lied about the car’s power and ability to pull a big square box through the mountains and wind and headed toward Utah. In doing so I crossed what most Midwesterners and Easterners considered the edge of the flat earth. I left an angry girlfriend, disbelieving relatives and frightened evangelists giving me the spiritual equivalent of malaria shots to ward off Mormon infection.
What was supposed to be a Gilligan-like, three-year cruise ended up being an extended shipwreck on the sit-com that is my life.
Of all those who had given me various warnings, few had driven further than Colorado and considered everything between there and California to be just “fly over.” Oh, there was the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas and Yellowstone, but Utah remained little more than a big float-on-your-back lake, roadside attraction postcard, an Osmond colony and a Tabernacle choir.
Cut to my sit-com 21 years later and the island is overrun with cruise ships and crazy immigrants pillaging the landscape with home equity checks in their hands. Utah is almost, dare I say, “hip.” To confirm this I hit the road during peak tourist season last summer.
It is simultaneously appalling, delightful and insidious that on a scorching Southern Utah day I can be served a vegetarian black bean burrito by a woman with three nose rings in the town of Hurricane, Utah.
And on another musty night I walk down the streets of Kanab and hear religious Karaoke songs at the city park. On the other side of town I walk for an hour without hearing a word of English spoken by passers by. There’s a waitress with a shaved head in Moab serving yet another black bean vegetarian burrito, and suddenly I see my trip has a theme. In Springdale I hit yet my third cafe with black bean burritos and MTV fashion victims.
I drive on Highway 12 for two hours without seeing anything but out-of-state license plates. It scares me that people are talking about Torrey, Utah becoming the next Moab when I can remember when Moab wasn’t even the next Moab.
It’s hard for me to image a nuclear family of four sitting down in Paris, Frankfort or London leafing through Euro-AAA guide books and picking Torrey, Utah, as their destination. But I stop there and while in search of a vegetarian black bean burrito I spot one of those Euro-families. Le Griswalds are speaking French and I’m pretty sure the kids are saying something about how “dorky they feel in this rented mini-van and how all their friends are going to Disneyland” and the parents are saying “Well, if everyone jumped off of a bridge …”
When and why did Utah become so hip?
Cities burp and weirdness and black bean burritos spew out over the West. If you could see it from outer space it would look like Fourth of July sparklers shooting out from places like L.A. and San Francisco and Seattle with the sparks dying in places like Moab, Kanab and Torrey and Hurricane. People come here not so much to find the truth, but to escape from it. The cities are Cuba and Utah has become the promise of a better life.
It’s a sign of the times that you can live in a place for only 14 years and start getting nostalgic. I miss places with bad coffee and without black bean burritos; places like El Bambi and The Garden of Eatin’ and Famous Dicks Cafe; the Moab newspaper called The Stinking Desert Gazette and I even miss the Nephi “Death Strip.”
It’s a strangely compelling irony that about the time I was born, the government was still dropping atomic bombs near an area of the country that has now become a favorite of tourists worldwide … some of them speaking Japanese.
If you want to see what Utah was like, take a drive on Highway 30 in the forgotten Northeast corner. There’s a stretch of road out there so open you can steer with your feet and never see any life other than the occasional suicidal jack rabbit. You won’t see any cafes, expresso bars, Lycra or people with a roof rack full of adventure toys. It’s a great place to help me remember why I came to Utah in the first place.