A Lap Around America

by Shawn Inmon

  Me? I am a skeptic in all things I do not see with my own eyes. Yes, I’m one of those people. I slept like a baby. Considering how truly awful the mattress was, I would still say it was among the best night’s sleep I had on the whole trip.

  Day Six

  One of the things we wanted to do from the road was send postcards to our grandkids from each state. That led to this conversation with the nice lady behind the counter at The Clown Motel:

  Me: “I’ll take these six postcards.”

  She: “That’s one dollar, please.”

  Me: “Wait, I have six of them, and they are 50 cents each.” (I hold out three dollars to her.)

  She: “I’m overstocked on them and want to get rid of some of them.”

  Me: “Yes, but I was already going to buy these six. Here’s my three dollars.”

  She: Reaches out, takes one dollar bill, and says, “Thank you.”

  Just when you think every person in the world is out to shake you down for your last buck, things like this happen.

  Before we left Tonopah, we visited the ostensibly haunted cemetery next door. First, I want to say that this was the first of many cemeteries we were planning to visit on the trip. Dawn loves cemeteries. It doesn’t matter who is buried there; she wants to stop and wander through. She likes the way she can find stories in almost every one. One thing we’ve noticed over our years of cemetery-peeping is that if the wife in a long-married couple dies first, the husband usually follows soon after. If the husband dies first, the wife often lives many years afterward. I guess that says something about what each of us brings to the relationship.

  The Tonopah Cemetery is creepy. It looks exactly like what a Hollywood set builder would design if the project was a horror movie set in the Old West. There’s no grass at all, just dirt and dust, with the occasional patch of weeds. The graves are all marked by fist-sized stones in the shape of a burial plot. The vast majority of the headstones aren’t stone at all, but wood.

  The cemetery told us a story: Tonopah has suffered. First, there was a mining disaster in February 1911, when seventeen men lost their lives. There was also something called the Tonopah Plague, which in 1902 killed a good portion of the populace.

  The cemetery hasn’t had any additions in over a century now, and it looks as though anyone who had relatives there has either died or fled to greener pastures. There didn’t seem to be a lot of upkeep. The few stone markers or statues were in terrible disrepair, leaning one direction or another, or simply cracking apart.

  We walked around the cemetery for an hour, covering ourselves in a fine layer of Tonopah dust, hoping the plague that had once visited the town was long gone.

  As we drove out of Tonopah, we had to decide whether we wanted to drive farther south on Highway 395, or continue east on Highway 6. I’d read about a town that had a collection of bottle houses (literally, houses made out of old bottles) to our south, and I wanted to see that. However, if we went that direction, it was inevitable that we would have to head to Las Vegas as well.

  Dawn and I have no objections at all to Vegas. In fact, we’ve gone at least once a year since we’ve been together. But this trip was to be about new experiences, discovering places we’ve never seen. We’d never seen eastern Nevada, so that’s where we headed.

  After a few hours, we turned south eventually on Highway 373, quaintly known as the Extraterrestrial Highway. We had seen eastern Nevada. So much so, we felt no need to see any more. And yet, eastern Nevada still came.

  It was just like one of the old Road Runner cartoons, in which Wile E. Coyote chases the roadrunner at top speed, while the same background whizzes by, over and over. That, in a nutshell, is eastern Nevada, in our experience.

  The Extraterrestrial Highway was dubbed that because it skirts around Nellis Air Force Base, which includes the notorious Area 51. According to legend, Area 51 is where the government keeps all the little green men (or gray men, if you prefer) captured from alien crash sites. There are several reported UFO sightings in the area each week. Again, I am a skeptic but always glad to be proven wrong.

  Calling the deserted stretch of road the Extraterrestrial Highway is excellent marketing on the part of the State of Nevada. If the state hadn’t been so clever, I might have driven another road and seen something other than unbroken desert and the occasional Joshua tree.

  By the way, thanks to a sign placed by the helpful State of Nevada’s Department of something or other, I learned a lot about the Joshua tree. For instance, that it’s not just the namesake of a great album by U2. I learned that Joshua trees and yucca moths are in a symbiotic relationship. The yucca moth is perfectly suited to pollinate the Joshua tree, which it does by laying its eggs inside the flower and accidentally spreading pollen around. Meanwhile, its offspring will eat some of the tree’s seeds to survive infancy. Neither would survive without the other. It’s absolutely stunning how nature evolves in this way.

  My main complaint with the Extraterrestrial Highway was that it wasn’t crammed with tourist traps every few blocks, selling tchotchkes, postcards, and other useless memorabilia at incredible markups. We did finally come to a building that looked like an old army surplus warehouse. It was completely mundane, aside from the thirty-foot-tall statue of an extraterrestrial that stood in front of it. We stopped both there and down the road and satisfied our tourist lust by buying all sorts of embarrassing alien knickknacks. We even bought something called Alien Jerky, so I can settle the age-old debate. ET does not taste like chicken. It tastes just like regular old beef jerky.

  Leaving the Extraterrestrial Highway, we turned east on Highway 93 toward Caliente, one of my favorite names for a town so far. I speak no Spanish, but I remember seeing signs at Seattle Mariner games that said Edgar es Caliente, speaking of our great hitter, Edgar Martinez. Whatever that meant, I was sure it was something good.

  From Caliente, we turned north toward Pioche, which turned out to be the highlight of our day. If you’re like me, you may never have heard of Pioche, but don’t let that stop you from visiting some time.

  Pioche is what they call a “living ghost town.” In other words, it ain’t what it once was, but it’s still kickin’. There was a time when Pioche was a going concern. At one time, its population was more than 10,000. Today, about 900 people call it home.

  It’s been said that in the mid-nineteenth century it was the meanest, baddest town in all of the West. At least one website says 72 people died and were buried in Pioche’s Boot Hill before anyone had a chance to die of natural causes. That’s a tough town.

  They buried all the bad men in one section of the cemetery, then fenced them off so their remains wouldn’t infect the good name of the righteous townspeople of Pioche. Their version of Boot Hill was one of the top three cemeteries we would see on the whole trip. There are normal, sedate cemeteries elsewhere in Pioche, with elegant tombstones, graceful carved angels, and lovely sentiments carved into granite, but we loved the rough-and-tumble Boot Hill.

  The bad-man section has plain wooden markers that say things like “Shot by Sheriff 5 times,” or “Killed in a dispute over a dog.” My favorite was: “Shot by a coward as he staked his claim before anyone could find out his name.” Kind of gives you the flavor of what it was like to live in a gold-rush town in the 1860s.

  We stopped in at the Lincoln County Museum just before it closed. The displays were haphazard, disorganized, and fun to look at. Browsing through the heaps of memorabilia, it occurred to me that it resembled the inside of my mind: lots of stacks, no organization, but you never know where you’re going to find something cool.

  Our last stop in Pioche was at the Million Dollar Courthouse. We drove right past it at first, because it certainly doesn’t look like a million-dollar anything. It is a decaying old brick structure that is a testament to greed and mismanagement. The courthouse was originally built in 1872 at a cost of $72,000. That was a lot at the time. However, as things often go with bureaucracies, it got worse. The original c
ontract to build it was broken, and the county ended up farming out various jobs to different contractors at a much higher cost. The county issued a bond, but at about that time the local mining industry took a nosedive—and there went the county’s tax base. The Nevada Legislature stepped in next, because things always improve when you get congressmen involved, right? The upshot was that the final bill for the courthouse ended up at more than a million dollars, back when that was still real money. Here’s the kicker: When the debt was finally paid off, in 1938, the building was deemed unsafe, so they built a new courthouse across town.

  It’s done pretty well for a building that was thought to be unsafe more than seventy-five years ago. It’s still standing, mute testimony to what happens when you set out to get something done by a committee.

  Leaving Pioche, we got on Highway 56 and crossed over into Utah. I was feeling a little bad about making Dawn stay in The Clown Motel the night before, so I searched ahead for a nice place to stay, and found one in Cedar City, Utah. The Abbey Inn calls itself a motel, but it was several cuts above where we had been staying of late. From the time we walked into the lobby until we checked out the next morning, we felt welcomed, pampered, and cared about. Staying in southwestern Utah? The Abbey Inn gets two big thumbs up from us.

  Day Seven

  I need to start with an apology to all of Utah. I am really, sincerely sorry. I’ve been making fun of Utah for most of my adult life, saying it was the most boring state in the union. I shake my head at myself. How could I have been so dumb? I based this opinion on several drives from Arizona to Washington over the years. I made those drives by hopping on I-15 somewhere south of Utah and never getting off until I was well north of the state line.

  I did 80 mph the whole way and never got off the interstate for anything other than gas and grub. That is no way to see a state. I know that, but I made my shallow judgments anyway. Thus, the apology. Mea culpa.

  I have grown to love Utah now. It is a state so full of spectacular landscapes and natural phenomena that only a complete dunderhead like yours truly would dismiss it out of hand.

  We started our day by regretfully leaving behind the Abbey Inn, with its friendly personnel, huge indoor pool, and wonderful free breakfast—not just a bag of English muffins and some honey-like product dubbed a continental breakfast. We wished there was some way we could bundle it all up and take it with us.

  Our first adventure in Utah was Cedar Breaks National Monument. You might ask, Shawn, what the heck is the difference between a national park and a national monument?

  Excellent question!

  Basically, a national park has a variety of focal points, and generally speaking covers more land. A national monument, on the other hand, focuses more single-mindedly on one thing and can cover much less acreage. Here’s the easy way to think about it: Yellowstone is a national park. Devils Tower (as seen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind) is a national monument.

  The road from Cedar City up, and I do mean up, to Cedar Breaks is magnificent on its own. It twists and winds and has plenty of places to stop and look out over vast expanses of ridiculously photogenic scenery. All those times I stuck to I-15 I saw nothing but desert. Climbing up to Cedar Breaks, we saw thousands of acres of forests, albeit a different kind of forest than we were used to in Washington.

  When we rolled up to the information center for Cedar Breaks, I realized just how far we had climbed. We were more than 10,000 feet above sea level. I saw some European tourists roll out of their rental car dressed as though prepared for an assault on Everest—bundled up like Randy in A Christmas Story. I briefly wondered if I had badly miscalculated my own wardrobe for the day, which consisted of jeans and a t-shirt. The temperatures were in the mid-50s, though, so I managed just fine. I think they might have just been a little on the “over-prepared” side.

  Cedar Breaks is focused on a huge natural amphitheater. To my eye, it looked a bit like Crater Lake, minus the lake. That it’s not filled with water means you can see Mother Nature’s handiwork on the sides of the cliffs, which more than makes up for the missing lake.

  We got lucky on our very first viewpoint. In addition to a stomach-churning drop down into the amphitheater below, we saw a furry creature just ahead, sunning itself on a rock.

  “Oh, look,” I said to Dawn. “It’s a yellow-bellied marmot, genus and species Marmota flaviventris.”

  Okay, okay. That’s not what I said at all. What I really said was: “What the heck is that?” We didn’t find out what he was until we got back to the information center and found a stuffed version. He was adorable—perched comfortably on a rock, facing certain death with any misstep. He was not concerned. He posed for us for quite some time, then confidently disappeared into the abyss below.

  Marmota flaviventris, but you knew that

  Again like Crater Lake, Cedar Breaks has a road around this dramatic hole in the ground that you can drive in a circle, enjoying different perspectives. After finishing the loop, we descended by way of the same road we had come up. Along the way, I tried to plan the rest of our day. So far, I had relied almost exclusively on my trusty paper maps and atlas, using GPS only at the very end.

  Today, I decided to experiment. I wanted to visit Arches National Park the next day, an incredibly popular tourist destination, so I called ahead to reserve a room at a little motel in Moab, just south of the park. That left us the rest of the day to work our way there, while catching as many of the sights as we could. I punched into the GPS what I thought would be a good first stop, folded my maps and just followed blindly.

  En route, we took little side trips. We drove through Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park and stopped at an area where you can look out at the blowing dunes, which are, indeed, coral pink. Off to the left was a little trail promising an easy half-mile hike with lots of informative signs along the way.

  “C’mon, it’s only half a mile. How bad can it be?”

  This sentence is proof that I have still not learned when it would be better to keep my mouth shut.

  With some trepidation, Dawn agreed, and we set off. The first thing we noticed was that the sand was not just pink, but also incredibly powdery. It was like trying to walk on talcum powder. That was bad enough on the semi-level path, but when we got out into that place that pilots like to call the point of no return, we discovered that walking through entire dunes made up of the stuff was nearly impossible.

  I looked at my beautiful bride—red-faced, huffing as though she might pass out at any moment.

  “Shawn?”

  “Yes, dearest?” I’ve often found that an innocent demeanor is the best response, especially when I can’t think of anything else.

  “The next time you get the harebrained idea to take a two-month trip that involves hiking, let’s not sit on the couch and eat snacks for the previous year.”

  “But doesn’t a snack sound good right about now?”

  “Throwing up sounds good right about now.”

  I’m happy to report we both survived the half-mile hike, which Dawn swore was mismarked and was actually a two-day, ten-mile hike over treacherous terrain.

  We continued to follow the GPS instructions, maps tucked securely under my seat. That led us right past the Best Friends Animal Society shelter. Since Dawn loves animals more than anything besides our children and grandchildren (yes, I know which side of the line I occupy) we swung in to take a look.

  Unfortunately it was too late in the day to catch a full tour, but we did have a chance to look around the facility a bit, then drive through the grounds. Best Friends is a no-kill sanctuary of hundreds of acres that saves horses, pigs, dogs, cats, birds—whatever needs saving. If you spend five minutes with any of the volunteers, you’ll know that they do the work out of love for everything that walks on four legs. There is a pet cemetery on the property that moved Dawn to tears while we walked through it. My steely reserve got me through, but I did catch a bit of dust in my eye a few times.

  When we left B
est Friends, I noticed it was getting to be late afternoon.

  “Shouldn’t we be getting to the next national park?” Dawn asked.

  A reasonable question. One any navigator should be able to answer. I checked the GPS, pulled the state map of Utah out and mumbled to myself for several long minutes. I realized that I must have plugged the wrong destination in to the GPS, and we had spent the entire afternoon driving in exactly the opposite direction from where we wanted to be.

  “Baby,” I said, “I’ve got good news and bad news.” I’ve played this game too many times with Dawn, though, and it seems to have lost a bit of its charm with her.

  “What’s the good news?”

  “The good news is, we got to see an entire section of Utah that we were going to miss.”

  “So, you’re saying we’re lost.”

  “Yep!”

  “How lost?”

  “Well, we have a reservation to stay in Moab and …” I did a little measuring with my finger on the map, “we’re about 300 miles away from there.”

  “It’s 5 o’clock, and we’ve got to drive 300 more miles before we can sleep tonight.”

  “Your grasp of the situation is unerring.”

  “Unlike your navigating.”

  I hate it when she uses facts against me.

  We turned around and spent hours going backwards over the same ground we had just covered. If we wanted to get to Moab at any reasonable hour, we would have to use 1-70 for at least part of the trip.

  When we left our little back road for the I-70 on-ramp, it was a shock. The speed limit, which for us had been 45 mph all day, was suddenly 80 mph. It was getting dark. I-70 through this part of Utah is a little quirky. The speed limit changes from 80 mph down to 55 mph to go through bends, then pops straight back again. After a few of these ups and downs, Dawn pulled across the rumble strip onto the shoulder, and looked at me.