Travels With David, pt. II

June 14, 2001: Steamboat Springs, CO - Yellowstone, WY

Proust's Remembrance of Things Past was the topic of discussion as we pulled out of Steamboat Springs, Colorado at 10 AM on a cloudy, raw Thursday morning. David is taking a course at the University of Chicago next quarter that requires him to have read at least Volume 1 of Proust's tome by the beginning of the class -- and according to his calculation, it requires that he read 45.9 pages every day between now and the end of the summer. I must admit that I never read the book (it was probably covered in one day in our Humanities I course at MIT, and I probably slept through the whole thing), but according to David, a major theme in the first chapter or two is the nature of memory. I gather that Proust felt that there was no such thing as memory, per se, and that what we commonly think of as a memory of some event is triggered by a particular smell, or sound, or sight.

It makes sense to me, but the converse of Proust's theory is a problem: if there's no special smell or sound or sight to use as a trigger, does that mean there's no memory? Here we are on US Highway 40, heading west toward the small towns of Milner, Hayden, and Craig -- and I know that I traveled this road as a young boy in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but I have no memory of it whatsoever. Our family drove periodically from Denver to a small mining camp outside Vernal, Utah to visit my grandparents -- and since there were no Interstates in those days, highway 40 was the main road. I remember Loveland Pass, east of Vail, from those days; we inevitably got stuck in snowstorms and freak blizzards, and Dad made a spectacle of cursing and yelling as he dragged the tire chains out of the trunk and put them onto the car. But I have no memory whatsoever of Steamboat Springs, nor of the stretch of road David and I are now traversing some 50 years later. Maybe the problem was that I was cooped up in a car, and didn't have a chance to hear or smell anything outside; or maybe I was sleeping in the back seat.

Well, memory or no memory, we pull into a gas station in Craig at 11 AM to fill up the tank and get a cup of coffee at the Go-Fer Food outlet. The price of premium unleaded gas is hovering around $2.00 a gallon out here, David picks out a donut and some hot chocolate, and observes that stores and gas stations in the west don't offer hot tea as an option. I can't think of anything intelligent to say, and I'm busy focusing on the details of navigation: turn right on Yampa Avenue in downtown Craig, and head out of town on Colorado state highway 131, enroute to Wyoming. The next 40 miles are virtually devoid of civilization: no towns, no stores, no gas stations, hardly any homes or ranches. Low sagebrush on both sides of the road. It's pleasant, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's beautiful, or even pretty. In any case, we cross the border into Wyoming at 11:48 AM at the tiny village of Baggs, and continue heading north.

Meanwhile, David realizes that the first hour of the trip has transpired without any music playing. Heresy! So part of the ritual of stopping in Craig involved his filling the CD-cassette rack while I filled the gas tank; and as we roll northward through the final stretch of Colorado and on into Wyoming, the first selection is Patsy Cline's Greatest Hits. Nice music, mostly from the 1950s and 60s. Proust would be proud; though it's been decades since I've heard any of the songs, they bring back memories of my teenage years in Omaha and East Northport, New York. I'm pretty sure I was focusing on Elvis and the Everly Brothers and other such groups at the time, but I'm pretty sure that Patsy Cline was a favorite of my parents during that era.

David and I struggle for words to describe the landscape during the 50 miles between the border town of Baggs and the intersection with Interstate 80 at Creston Junction. It's not meadows or pastures that we're driving through, and even though we're at an altitude of about 6,000 feet, I wouldn't describe it as mesas either. David suggests that "steppes" might be appropriate; as Anne Dybsetter suggests in a brief commentary about the same area, maybe "plateau" would be better. In any case, we're surrounded on both sides by low sagebrush that stretches off into the distance as far as the eye can see. Occasionally there are ridges of some kind of soft stone; never having had a course on geology, I can't tell if it's sandstone or something else ... but all the rocks and ridges are a fairly bland, tan color.

By now, Patsy Cline has run out of heartaches and laments about unfaithful lovers, lost dreams, and other tragedies. David switches to the next CD, the first of a two-volume set from Billy Bragg & Wilco entitled Mermaid Avenue. I've never heard of it before, but David explains that Woody Guthrie left behind lots of lyrics and poems when he died, and that Bragg & Wilco (whoever they might be) decided to put them to music. It's basically 1930's-style country music, with political overtones -- after all Guthrie was railing about the injustices of crooked politicians and fascists ("All you fascists are about to lose," is a refrain in one song).

As we pull onto Interstate 80, snow barriers are visible along several stretches of the road, as the CD player switches to an album called Va Va Voom, by Cinerama. David hasn't seen such things before, and while my explanation makes sense to him, I can tell that he's having trouble visualizing the huge drifts of snow that can be piled up by the winter winds that howl across the Plains during a winter blizzard. By the time we've finished discussing all of this, we've reached the little town of Wamsutter, which advertises that it has restaurants available for hungry travelers. The plural of "restaurant" is barely justified in this case: Wamsutter appears to have a population of 240 people, a couple of stray dogs, and exactly two restaurants. We pick the Broadway Cafe, on the theory that anything on Broadway has got to be better than anything not on Broadway ... but the aforementioned cafe is at the end of a dirt road, and it's a pitiful excuse for a restaurant. David agonizes over the choice between "hamburger" and "hot hamburger" (we decided that "hamburger" was probably safer, and didn't even bother inquiring what evil things are done to create the "hot" variant); I stick with a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, and we're out the door in 15 minutes.

Before continuing our journey, David reshuffles the CD music selection; and the first album of the afternoon is Mermaid Avenue, Volume II from Billy Bragg & Wilco. More political country music, based on Woody Guthrie's lyrics, as we roll along Interstate 80 toward Rock Springs. I'm not an expert on such things -- hell, I hadn't even heard any of this music an hour ago, and I still don't know who "Wilco" is -- but my humble opinion is that Volume Two is definitely better than the first volume. Someone named Natalie Merchant puts in a guest appearance on one of the tracks; I'm hoping that David will announce that he has an entire album of her songs tomorrow or the next day ...

One of the interesting sights along the way -- which, in fact, we first began to see along the northward stretch from Baggs -- is an occasional oil well, working away in isolation. At least, I think they're oil wells; with one or two exceptions, they don't have the familiar "rocker arms" that we tend to see in places like Texas and California. Instead, there's a boxlike structure that creates the impression that it's pumping something out of the ground, and there are always two holding tanks right next to it. All three units are painted an unassuming tan color, and several of them have a solar panel array that presumably provides electric power to the mechanism.

Some highway construction forces us to pull over and drive on the shoulder for a while, and that requires us to cross over the strip of serrated asphalt "rumble strips" that serves to warn drivers that they're drifting off the main part of the road. It's deliberate this time, of course, and we know what we're doing; but I remark to David that whoever invented the concept should get a Nobel Prize. "A real Nobel Prize?" he asks dubiously (maybe that should be Dubyaishly, in honor of current politics). "How about a Nobel Prize for highway ideas?" Well, maybe, but I think it's a first class idea: after all, it requires no elaborate signs or explanation: the mere presence of the rumble strip, and the rat-a-tat-tat rumbling bump that it causes when you cross over it, is enough to immediately alert a driver that he's about to go into the ditch.

This in turn leads to a discussion about similarly simple, useful ideas that have appeared, from time to time. The paper clip, for example, is a work of amazing simplicity and (in my humble opinion) awesome genius. But as it turns out, the paper clip did not just spring into existence, fully formed, as a result of a single inspiration by some lone inventor. If you're interested in such things (how could you not be interested in such things?), take a look at The Evolution of Useful Things, by Henry Petroski (Vantage, 1994). No, I didn't bring the book along on the trip; it's just one of those little bits of trivia that happens to stick in my mind. And there's another bit of trivia that David and I struggle with: both of us remember a science-fiction short story about a helpful race of aliens, sent to Earth to help nudge the bumbling, incompetent race of humans along. Not with miracles or big inventions, but with little things that they quietly and anonymously introduce into the marketplace. Little things like the zipper, and the paper clip, and perhaps even the serrated edge along the highways. But neither David nor I can remember when the story appeared, or who the author was; if you happen to remember this particular bit of trivia, please send me an email to let us know.

But I digress ... we've now reached Rock Springs, and it's time to turn north onto highway 191 for a long drive through sparsely populated and relatively uninteresting countryside. We're accompanied by the music of the High Llamas' album, Santa Barbara as we roll past mile after mile of low sagebrush and an occasional outcropping of rock. The music is okay, but not my favorite of the day's offerings; I ask David if there are any low llamas, and he looks at me quizzically. But it makes sense to me: why bother qualifying the name llama if there aren't different categories? I remind David that earlier in the day, we drove past a llama ranch (or, in any case, a gaggle of llamas in a large fenced-in area), and they didn't appear "high" or "low," or even "short" or "tall." He continues to look at me quizzically, and I decide that the politic thing to do is shut up and listen to the music. We pass an occasional group of small antelope deer out on the steppes, and at one point, a double line of humongous power lines appears from over a ridge, marches north along with us, crosses the road to our left, and then disappears off into the distance. From whence did these power lines come? Where are they going to? I suppose that we could stop at the next town and ask someone, but it doesn't seem worth the effort -- just another one of those small mysteries that one encounters on a long cross-country drive.

The next town turns out to be Farson, with a population of about 150 people. The Wind River Range of the Bridger-Teton mountains is now visible, far off in the distance; Jackson Hole is still 136 miles away. We stop at what appears to be the one and only gas station in town (which also doubles as the grocery store, and probably the post office, movie theater, town hall, and funeral parlor, too, from what I can see) to fill up on gas and grab some snacks. We switch driving positions again, and head north for what we assume will be a two-hour dash up to the Jackson resort area at the southern entrance to the Grand Teton national park area. It's now a little past 3 PM, and I'm hoping that we'll reach Yellowstone Park by 6:30 or so, which should be enough for one day's driving ...

Meanwhile, the music has changed again: we're now listening to Nick Drake's album, Five Leaves Left. I remark to David that it's one of the nicer albums he's played for me during the day, and I can see that he's pleased; indeed, he tells me that he brought two or three additional Nick Drake albums to play later on the trip, because he figured it was the kind of music I would like. Two or three more albums? I've never heard of the singer, but he has so many albums -- a dozen or more, when I made a quick check on Amazon -- that David has to think carefully about which ones to bring. But the brief conversation also illustrates an interesting point about the role of music in the life of teens and twenty-somethings: it's so important that one has to think carefully about which albums to bring on a long trip like this, and in what sequence to play them. Not only that, a thoughtful person chooses carefully not only the music that he likes, but also the music that he hopes his traveling companion will at least tolerate, if not actually enjoy. It's a small, but very generous, act of sharing and companionship, and one that I appreciate.

Actually, it's more than just a small effort: David briefly plays a few cuts from an album called The Gap, by a strange group called Joan of Arc. It's an interlude, he says, more for amusement than anything else. From somewhere in his backpack, he fishes out a music review column called "Justify Your Existence" that he has carefully cut out from the May 26, 1999 issue of The Onion, in which the band explains that it has carefully created music that will unite humanity, and bring everyone together, by the simple expedient of annoying them with 9-minute songs that consist largely of the sound of glass breaking. I'm impressed and touched that he has gone to the trouble of bringing the music review for me to read (alas, I can't find it on The Onion's web site,but maybe I didn't look hard enough), but I'm also relieved when he switches the music back to Nick Drake.

Indeed, the vast majority of David's selections have been quite enjoyable indeed; I'm not sure how many of them I'll actually buy from Amazon (though, as you can see, I've tracked them all down) ... but it has created its own memories for the trip. Proust would be proud: for months or years into the future, I'm sure I'll begin twitching with reminiscences from our drive through Wyoming whenever I hear the High Llamas howl and warble, and whenever I hear the quiet, pleasant songs of Nick Drake.

About 50 miles south of Jackson, we cross a range of the "real" Teton mountains, and the scenery changes abruptly to the Colorado-style panorama of snow-covered peaks, lush mountain meadows, and serene stands of birch and aspen up on the sides of the hills. The road winds and curves in tortuous loops, and on two occasions we have to stop to wait for construction crews to orchestrate the passage of traffic along a stretch of one-way roads, while they work to repair washed-out bridges another damage from last winter's storms. Such construction delays are thankfully infrequent, but nevertheless familiar by now; what makes these two unusual is that the construction crew has even installed an elaborate system of traffic stop-lights to impress upon the oncoming traffic that they really, really need to stop. And just in case anyone is thinking of doing anything illegal, a big sign by the side of the road reminds us, as we sit waiting for the traffic light to change, that we are obliged to carry "legal loads only." Duh! If we were carrying an illegal load, do the construction crews actually think we would turn around and drive back the other way?

As we pull into Jackson, the music changes once again: now we're listening to the "murder" CD from the trilogy of Love, God, and Murder from Johnny Cash. As I recall, David gave this set of CD's to me as a Christmas present; I listened to the "Love" and "God" CD's, but didn't make it as far as "Murder," so this is new music. David points out to me that the live audiences that one hears clapping and cheering throughout several of the songs are actually prison audiences, before whom Cash performed his music. We listen to Cash's musical stories about cowboys and rustlers, aggrieved lovers who shot the only woman they loved when they discovered that the aforesaid woman was cheating on them; and we listen to a mournful song about poor Joe Bean, hung on his 20th birthday for a murder he didn't even commit. We stop briefly at a McDonald's in town for a refreshing McFlurry ice cream float (yes, Lord, I've sinned: it's not on my diet, but I haven't had anything since that miserable sandwich in Wamsutter hours ago, and the McFlurry was sooooo good!), and head north out of town. (Rumor has it that there are some people on this planet who don't know what a McFlurry is. The mind boggles.)

And some five miles north of Jackson, we come to a stretch of highway that looks like it's right out of a painting: this is the Grand Tetons, rearing up majestically into the sky, covered with fresh snow. It more than compensates for the relatively boring stretch of roads that we've covered all during the day. I pull over by the side of the road to take some pictures, while David fiddles with the music again; now we're listening to The Handsome Family's album In The Air. It's nice music, sort of a combination of country and folk, but I'm focused so heavily on the incredible scenery that I don't pay too much attention to the music. Mile after mile, the stretch of mountains continues: carved by glaciers in the last Ice Age (when was that? 10,000 years ago? As I recall, it was relatively recent, geologically speaking), the peaks are sharp and jagged, and the sunlight bounces off the snow on the top of the peaks. David is impressed, too, but when I ask what he regards as the most memorable part of the 800+ miles that we've driven thus far, he says it was the experience of driving through heavy snowfall in Colorado yesterday. Well, that was interesting; but for me, it's the Tetons. I don't know how much longer they'll remain in relatively pristine form, before someone decides to build a Starbuck's coffee shop and a bunch of billboards up on the tops of the mountain; but if I were you, I'd make sure I get out here and take a look at this scenery before it all gets overrun.

We move into the Grand Teton National Park a little past 6:30, which requires the payment of an annoying $20 entrance fee. I had assumed that it would only be another couple miles before we reached the end of our day's journey, but it takes another full hour of driving through winding mountain roads at an altitude of roughly 8,000 feet before we reach the entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Meanwhile, David manages to find time to squeeze in two more albums: The Go-Betweens' 16 Lover's Lane, and Lemonheads' It's a Shame About Ray. I think I'm suffering sensory overload at this point; it's interesting music, but I have to admit that Lemonheads will have to find a way to survive economically without my buying one of their albums.

Finally, we reach Grant's Village, a couple miles down the road from the West Thumb entrance to the main area of Yellowstone. Thankfully, there is one hotel in the village, and we manage to get the last room in the joint. The room has no television, which David interprets as being roughly equivalent to the room having no oxygen. But it does have a telephone, with a detachable RJ-11 phone jack, which means that I can connect to the Internet. That's my form of oxygen, so I'm all set for the night. David sighs, and pulls out his copy of Remembrance of Things Past. And thus the day ends pretty much the way it began. Proust rules.

All in all, it was a very good day. Thanks, David.

Continue with pt. III of this series ...