Category: Uncategorized

Driving south out of Salt Lake City on I15 I discovered one more interesting tidbit about Utah.  They are terrible drivers.  Even though traffic was not heavy I was cut off numerous times for no apparent reason.  Although this happens a lot when you are driving an RV, the frequency of it on this section of road was extremely high.  Judy got on the CB and talked to some truckers who were complaining about the same thing so I don’t think it was just me.  

Since I am on the subject, a little advice to those of you who are not driving RVs.  It is not a good idea to tailgate, cut off, or hide in the blind spot of an RV.  You might get away with this with semi trucks as they are driven by professionals with years of experience and a special license to drive the big rigs.  Some of them have even gone to truck driving school.  RV drivers on the other hand have no experience.  Chances are they drive their rig just a few times a year and have learned what little they know of their craft by the seats of their zip-up-the-front jumpsuits.  Some of them are in their eighties and blind as refs at a Seahawk game.  Their left turn signal may have been blinking for the past 50 miles because they are planning on randomly turning left without looking at some time and for no particular reason. They often are driving well below the posted speed limit as their minds cannot handle speeds higher than 50 MPH.  Trust me, their rigs are faster than semi trucks, if they are going slower than the trucks it is for a reason, probably medical.  Pass with care as you cannot trust them to see you.  Their rig is five to ten times bigger than yours so if you challenge them to a highway duel, you will lose.  On two lane roads it is worse.  Sure the RV can go faster but on the curves all the canned goods fall out of the cupboards and that scares the hell out of fluffy, their little porch pisser of a dog.  And finally promise me one thing.  When one of the old farts, like myself, takes a turn out or finds a wide place in the road to stop and let you by, don’t acknowledge their courteousness by the one finger salute.  They were nice enough to let you pass safely and by doing a little wave or beep-beep you are encouraging them to pull off again when traffic backs up.  A little mental reinforcement at our age certainly can’t hurt.  

We left I15 and drove south along Utah Lake on highway 68, through some pretty pastoral country on a nice two lane.  The road connected with highway 6 then 50 as we headed east and up into the mountains.  We stopped a couple of times to view the scenery and wished we had planned for this to be a longer leg as it was an interesting country with lots of  rocks.  On any other occasion I would have stopped and enjoyed a few side trips, but we were headed to Lehman Caves which is just across the border of Nevada in the  Great Basin National Park.   Somehow I had talked Judy into having yet another cave adventure and I was afraid that she was going to figure a way out if I gave her any extra time to think about it.  The farther we drove into Nevada the more desolate the country became.  We were driving through a desert with no trees which only seemed to get worse as the darkness settled in.  Finally, well after dark, we turned off at the little berg of Baker, NV and began to climb up a narrow steep road into the hills.  It seemed to take forever and the higher we went up the cooler it got.  Exhausted, we camped for the night at a small campground well above 7000 feet in elevation and near the cave.    

The next morning we were shocked to find ourselves in a grove of aspens which had tuned golden in their fall glory.  There was a small creek running through the middle of the campground which was as cold and crisp as the morning air.  What a surprisingly beautiful little Eden after the hell of driving through the desert the evening before.  The day was stunning and the cave was a limestone wonderland.  Neither of us had been in a limestone cave before and it was quite an adventure with a tour guide who obviously enjoyed what he did.  The cave was an easy hike without the claustrophobic feel of the lava tube caves that I was used to.  Judy even enjoyed it, much to my surprise.

We reluctantly left the cave and the park before noon and began the drive back down the mountain to the desert below.  We were now on highway 50 known as the loneliest road in America.  It deserves that reputation.  We stopped for groceries and a fill up in Ely, NV and began the drive in earnest.  Mile after mile of sameness with occasional climbs up to passes over 6000 feet, a quick descent on the other side then twenty miles of straight road though the sagebrush flats below.  

Judy and I soon got bored.  We tried playing games like guessing how far it was to the next turn or pass, but you can only do that for so long.  Looking at the map we saw a “rest area” and planned a stop for lunch.  The rest area turned out to be a single picnic table without a cover and a couple of 55 gal barrels for garbage cans.  No phone, no trees, not even a vault toilet.  I guess you were supposed to do your business in the sagebrush.  We talked to a trucker who was stopped there and asked him how long he thought it would take us to get to Reno where my uncle Bob lived.   He said just a few more dreary hours of more of the same sameness. I had hoped that the “rest area” would have a phone so that we could call him to let him know that we were planning on being at his place a day earlier than we thought, but there was obviously going to be no phone for miles.  But much to my surprise the trucker said that he had cell service.

Cell service here!  No people, no trees, no water, not even a decent taco stand, but there was cell service! And this was in the old flip phone days!!  Must be something going on in this area that “they” don’t want you to know about.  Some secret military base with aliens.  They do have a road in this state called the UFO highway where there have been several “encounters” of the first and second kind.  Perhaps the name of that road was just a diversion.  This looked more like the kind of country you were likely to find aliens. Given a choice I would prefer to be abducted by the leggy Nordic blonde female type aliens but in the last few years seems like the most common alien were the grey guys with the bug eyes and anal probes.  Fuck that!  

I had recently read Steve King’s “Desolation” which was set someplace along this highway.  If the aliens didn’t get you then some possessed sheriff or something far worse would.  I motioned to Judy to get in the RV and we drove though the rest of the day and night.  Judy wanted to stop for the night a couple of times but I kept going, looking with haunted eyes in my side mirrors waiting for the funny lights to show up behind me, then raise over the MSP and suck our spines right out of our bodies though the air vents.  It was well after midnight when we pulled in and parked at Uncle Bob’s single wide, safe within the urban sanctuary of a trailer park in Reno, the biggest little city in the world.  I guess every city has to have a silly motto.

We spent a couple of nights with my Uncle Bob.  You might not think Uncle Bob much of a success in life.  He lives alone with an overly friendly pit bull in a single wide.  His marriage to Jean, who was the sweetest little old lady, ended after 30 years, producing only one offspring, a violent, drug using felon which I suspect did not help their marital situation.  After the split Bob moved to Reno and worked at a variety of low paying jobs like taxi driving, motel night manager, and casino cashier. These jobs are certainly below the dream he set for himself in his youth of being a neighborhood bakery/bread truck driver.  But WWII diverted him along a different pathway as it did with so many of that generation.  Bob served honorably in the Army as an airplane mechanic.  He had wanted to join the Navy but switched lines at the last moment when he realized that the Navy had faggoty looking uniforms that were not for him. He eventually settled down with Jean in Yoncalla, OR which you may be able to find on a map if it has not totally evaporated.  He owned and operated a gas station which had its heyday in the 50’s but went slowly down hill when the freeway bypassed the town and the saw mills closed.  

So it is understandable that you might think of Uncle Bob as a loser, but you would be so wrong.  When he moved to Reno in his late 60’s he had nothing.  He lived in the back of his pickup for a while but managed to find work and put a roof over his head.  He rediscovered his love of music picking up the sax after 50 years and ended up playing in a couple of swing bands and traveling with them to Europe and Australia.  Now well into his eighties he is about to give that up not because he can’t play, but because he has problems driving at night to band practice.  

Bob has always been a character.  His visits to us are entertaining and embarrassing.  He has a self deprecating type of humor, making himself the butt of most of his stories.  He regales us for hours with what happened in his youth, the time he owned an airplane, or when he passed out driving and woke up in the ditch, but managed to get himself out of it and back home. He has no sense of class structure.  He would shoot the same shit with a senator or an itinerant roofer and not know or particularly care about the difference.  

In a lot of respects he reminds me of his father, Clark, who I knew as Pappy.  Same kind of humor and careless hygiene.  Pappy, in his eighties at the time bragged to my mother that he was saving lots of money by not laundering his clothes or dishes with detergent, 

“Hot water works just as well as soap.”  

That was definitely the wrong thing to say to mom.  Bob’s trailer was a lot cleaner than Pappy’s digs but he could have done a lot better.  

We were taking him out to eat at a nice restaurant when the incident occurred.  He had a coughing fit on our way out the door, wet himself pretty good and did not tell us about it till we arrived at the eatery.  We offered to drive home and let him change but he insisted that we go in as he would hide it with his hand till we got in and the restaurant would likely be dark enough so that no one would notice and it would dry quickly because he was not wearing any underwear.  Now there is an image I could have done without.  Somehow he managed to pull it off, but I was a little disconcerted when he seemed to be wearing the same pants the next morning.  Yep, he’s Pappy’s son all right.  But all in all he’s happy, busy, active, knows no strangers, and thoroughly enjoys life.  Although I don’t see him a lot, I will miss him when he is gone as I suspect most of the people he knows will.  If that is not a success in life then what is?

After leaving Bob, we headed north though California and into Oregon on highway 395.  Turned west on highway 30 and spent the night in a little RV park outside of Paisley, OR.  Paisley is not much of a town but has a yearly mosquito festival that brings in the tourists from as far away as Valley Falls and Summer Lake.  The RV park was cheap at $10 a night, had full hookups and a turn of the century (20^th not 21^st) hot spring swimming pool.  It had seen better days but was reasonably clean and being it was late October we had the place to ourselves.  In the pool that evening one thing led to another so that both Judy and I will always think of that place with fond memories.  The next AM just before sun up and outside having a morning cigar, I was serenaded by coyotes which invisibly surrounded the park.  Each was letting their cohorts know where and who they were as each had a different howl.  After breakfast we went in for a final dip in the pool but found, unfortunately, that we did not have it to ourselves.  We put on our swimsuits in disappointed silence which did not last long as we had left them out to dry the previous night and the temperature had been in the teens.  We have driven by the same RV park several times since that initial trip.  RV park has upgraded since our $10 a night visit.  It’s now $50 a night and they have cabins for rent at $125 a night.  Time marches on, but not always for the better.

We were nearing the end of our vacation trek and the MSP seemed to still be running well.   Judy, on the other hand, almost got me killed.  We were just north of Paisley near Summer Lake.  It was deer hunting season and we had seen deer everywhere.  Even saw a few bedded down with a herd of cattle probably for camouflage.  Just past the Summer Lake Forest Service Ranger station was a car pulled off to the side of the highway with the door open.  Three intrepid hunters were stalking through the sage bush just a few yards off the highway.  Half squatted down with their guns swinging in arcs from side to side.  Just then one of them stopped and popped his head up over the top of the sage bush like a prairie dog peeking out of his hole to see if the hawk had left.  Judy riding shotgun started to giggle at these Rambo’s then yells 

“Run! Bambi Run!”  

She had forgotten her window was open.  Three guns swung 180 degrees all pointing at the MSP as I floored the gas in the ol’ gal.  To this day Judy loves to tell that story complete with the crouching and gun swinging visuals.  Personally I think having three high powered rifles pointed at you simultaneously by three novice and probably hung over idiots is not that funny.  Fortunately I had underwear on so that my Uncle Bob impersonation went unnoticed and I would appreciate it if you would not tell her about that part of the adventure.  

Judy and I had always wanted to camp on the Great Salt Lake.  When I was a kid, I was told that you could not drown in Salt Lake because the water was so salty that it held you up armpit high.  Not being the world’s greatest swimmer, I always wanted to try it.  Although I had passed by Salt Lake many times as a kid to visit my dad’s family in Kansas, we had never stopped to check it out.  Although this was not as high on my bucket list as the great snake pit quest, I had never forgotten those childhood images of happy, smiling Mormons floating in the vast blue waters of Salt Lake,  laughing because even if they tried they could not drown.  Judy had seen the same photograph in her youth as well and even though she was an excellent swimmer, she thought it would be great fun to swim there.  

Even though we lived on the Oregon Coast neither of us have been swimming in the ocean.  First, the waters of the open Pacific Coast are far too cold to swim without a wetsuit, and neither of us had one of those.  Not only are they really expensive, they show every ounce of fat and one never knows when whaling will become legal again.  The second reason that Judy will never swim in the ocean was that I made the mistake of taking her to see “Jaws”.  Even though that was 40+ years ago, she has refused to go more than knee deep in the Pacific ever since.   But as Salt Lake is not noted for fish populations of any size, she thought it would probably be safe.

So it was with great excitement that we drove our class C RV (MSP) out onto Antelope Island which is connected by a causeway to the lakeshore.  As October is the off season we got to camp anywhere we wanted. We camped in the group campground which had nobody in it but ourselves.  The stars that night were spectacular as we opened a bottle of wine while sitting outside in the warm evening air with the lights of Salt Lake City on the far horizon.  The next day we walked down to the lake to check out the swimming spots.

It took us about half an hour from the campsite to finally make it to the lakes shore over the rocks and through the brush.  The closer we got to the water the more bugs there were.  The waters edge was awash with their live and dead bodies.  The lake itself was covered with the same.  This reality was a far cry from being pristine and swim beckoning as I remembered it from the smiling-laughing-floating Mormon photo.  Maybe I had misinterpreted the photo.  They may have been floating, but they could not have been laughing, more likely they were screaming or dead.  No fucking way was I getting into that water.  I would rather drown.  It was just at that moment that I thought I saw something out in the lake.  Though my binoculars I could barely make out three intrepid individuals who had waded out in an attempt to get to water that was deep enough to swim in.  A half mile out and they were only in knee deep water and they were still heading out.  Judy and I just looked at each other in total disillusionment.  But we had come this far and could not leave without doing something.  Both of us gingerly removed our shoes and socks and stuck our big toes into the lake then rapidly removed them before too many bugs attacked, and quickly went back to the MSP to shower.  That night we spent another glorious evening under the stars drinking much more wine than the previous evening to toast our bravery.  

One of the items we had added to our list after the City of Rocks was a side trip to find out more about the Mormon pioneers.  We asked some of the park personnel on Antelope Island where they would go if they wanted to learn more about them.  To a woman they all directed us to the Daughters of Utah Pioneer Memorial Museum in Salt Lake City.  After a bit of searching we finally found it.  The exterior of the building held promise.  It was old, always a good sign for a historical museum.  It was three stories with a basement, meaning that it could hold lots of interesting and educational shit.  It had the word “pioneer” in its name and was in Salt Lake City, the Mormon capital of the world, and we both wanted to learn more about Mormon pioneers.  The word “Daughter” was a little disconcerting to me as I was more into the guns, grizzly bears and Indian massacre stuff, but Judy was enthralled so I pretended to be okay with it.

We entered the museum with our hearts beating rapidly in our chests/breasts which is how it should be as it would be a bit odd to have them beating anywhere else, but we were excited.  I even perked up a bit from the “daughter” downer as the museum was free.  What could be better?  Okay it could have been a free air museum with spitfires and ME 109’s but I am trying to branch out from my WWII history fetish.

The first thing we saw was a huge piano.  Not the upright sort either but a type of piano known as a “square grand”.  It was heavy and imposing and the sign said it had been donated by some dude I had never heard of and had come across the great expanse of America by ox cart.  Wow!   Some Mormon had transported this massive musical instrument all the way by wagon to Salt Lake City using only an ox!  Man-o-man he must have really loved his bitches to do that for them.  But that was not all; there were several other pianos in the museum just like that one, all with neat little cards stating the same thing but with different donors.  I had no idea that Mormon pioneers were so musical.  Lightweight fiddles, banjos, and mouth organs I could understand, but square grand pianos?  If the Mormons could bring all this stuff into the west why didn’t the rest of the pioneers do the same?  All that Judy’s wagon train pioneer family has to show for their great trek to the Oregon country is a dilapidated rocking chair that was carried across the plains for use by her great-great-grandmother who was 69 at the time and possibly one of the oldest women or men to do the trail.  Judy’s great-great-grandmother was supposed to ride in the back of the prairie schooner while sitting on that chair.  Which naturally being a relative of my wife’s, she refused to do so and walked the whole way.  I can just imagine her final deathbed words: 

 “I hiked all the way across this country behind a Conestoga and all I got to show for it was a damn chair!”  

But getting back to the piano lesson if there is one to be learned.   Either the Mormons were much tougher than my wife’s ancestors (unlikely!) or the trek across the country was much easier than those old Jimmy Stewart movies have led me to believe.  As I have a hard time believing Jimmy Stewart could ever mislead the American movie going public, I am faced with a dilemma.  Then the answer hit me like a rock thrown from a sling by a bible character.  The Mormons did not bring those pianos across the Great Plains at all!  Stupid pioneers of other Christian sects did it for them, but when they got to the steep part of the trail they were too heavy to carry over so they dumped them and the Mormons picked them up, claiming that they had trucked them across all by themselves!

I wanted to go up to the curators of the museum and point this out to them and claim one of them for my wife’s family, as they are all music lovers, and likely had planned on coming back for anything that they had left behind on the trail.  One of those pianos was hers damn it and I wanted it back!  However, it then occurred to me that Judy’s great-great-grandmother would have probably carried one of those pianos on her back across the Rockies if she had really wanted it.  Years later I found out that they are pretty awful pianos anyway.  My brother-in-law bought a house where someone had left one.  It was going to cost him hundreds of dollars to have it tuned, if it could be tuned.  He tried to sell it as an antique, but nobody wanted it. He advertised it for free, no takers.  So he had to pay someone to have it hauled off. Apparently the room has been built around the piano as it would not fit through the door.   He had used fencing pliers to cut the strings and a Sawzall to cut out the harp and then partially demolish the rest of it.  So I guess that the final laugh was on the Mormons. Although one man’s junk is another man’s trash, the Mormons at least could get rid of their junk by donating it to a museum where they got their name mentioned as a donor.

It soon became apparent that donation cards were really what this museum was all about.  The historical value of the objects was not as important as who donated it.  Judy for example was all excited about viewing the quilts.  There were lots of them, too many of them in fact.  All were neatly folded down to the smallest volume possible so that all the donation cards could be viewed but the quilt could not.  This donation fetish carried over into every aspect of the museum.  There were several strange sewing machines each with a donor card.  But when Judy asked about how they worked she was told by a volunteer in the area to go to a library and look it up.  There was a sea shell collection from the South Seas.  Why was that in a Mormon Pioneer Museum at all?   There was a chair room with hundreds of chairs neatly placed next to each other like you were standing in the middle of a convention before the attendees showed up. No explanation as to what these were about, but each had its donor card attached.  

We had come looking for pioneer history.  The museum did have “pioneer” in its title.  But most of the exhibits of Mormon life were from the turn of the century.  There were several dioramas of parlors with Victorian furniture and mannequins dressed in fancy duds all of which seem to be donated by “the queen of Silver City”.  Excuse my impertinence but isn’t that a hooker’s name? There was a golden railroad spike in an armored glass case.  Was that one of the golden spikes that was used to lay track on the final railroad tie of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah?  Who knows!  And if it was, how did it get here?  What happened to the other spikes?  I went on the internet and found out that there had been four golden spikes and one is missing.  Was this the one and somebody just forgot to label it so it is lost to history?   There was a room that had some silkworm cocoons and a sign about the Mormon silk industry.  What Mormon silk industry?  When, where, how, what happened to it, or is it still there?   But the one exhibit that really got me the most is that every square inch of wall space was covered with pictures of pioneers from 1847 to May 10, 1869.  I figured that 1847 was probably the first wave of Mormon immigrants to Salt Lake City.  But why end it on May 10, 1869?  I had to go to the museums web site to have that one cleared up:

“A pioneer is an ancestor who came to the Utah Territory/State of Deseret; died crossing the plains; or was born in the Utah Territory/State of Deseret before May 10, 1869 and  the coming of the railroad. If your ancestor does not fit into this (sic) criteria, you will not have a history.”

So after May 10, 1869 you are a nobody?  And what to hell is the State of Deseret?

The pictures of these pioneers were austere; grumpy looking men with plain faced women who wore their hair in tight buns, sternly glowering at the camera.  I had had it.  

I yelled across the room to Judy “hey babe no wonder these guys had so many wives, these broads are so damn ugly!”

Judy grabbed me by the arm and marched me right out of the place past the open mouths of the volunteers and other visitors.  I could tell that she wasn’t really mad at me as it was my arm not by my ear or other handy appendage that she grabbed.  I have never again been to, nor likely will I ever visit a museum that was so badly curated.  Unless the curation has changed of the last decade or so this is not a place where non Mormon’s should go as it was clearly for those that already know the answers to their life’s questions.  But if you do decide to visit do me a big favor and ask one of the volunteers if the Queen of Silver City was a hooker and drop me a line with the answer. I think that information may have been censored from the internet.

PS: I copied the image off the internet from David Holt. Seems like we lost all of our museum photo. I tried to put this info under the picture but I am still learning how to use this tool.