Desert to Mountains

There is a kind of memory that is in your being. I’ve forgotten what it is called, but it is deeper within you than memories like what you had for breakfast or where you went to high school. It is something that you are born with. Studies have shown that a child can hold the effects of a trauma that her mother suffered even before becoming pregnant. The child cannot remember it in the way we think of memory, but it is internalized within the child.

In a way, it is this kind of memory that makes many of us feel comfort seeing a farm, with its barn and silo and house and fields. It calls back to something in our heritage – assuming we come from an agrarian society. I sometimes think of this when I think of the Trail of Tears – how the Seminoles were forced from where they had lived for millennia, and relocated to Oklahoma, a place with an environment completely unlike Florida.

Anyway, I thought of this again yesterday morning when I woke up in Wells, Nevada. There is something in me – a soul-deep memory? – that is pulled to the high desert, with a particular shade of green and golden brown and blue in a light that can be unlike sunlight at lower elevations. I saw it in Wyoming and yesterday morning in Nevada, but I don’t see it in all high deserts. Sometimes the vegetation isn’t quite right, or the land isn’t open enough. I don’t know what it is. There’s nothing in my heritage to explain that pull I feel on my heart, but it’s almost a visceral reaction. 

Andrea suggested perhaps I was a cowgirl in a previous life. I guess that’s as good of an explanation as any other.

Yesterday was a long day. We got a late start and lost an hour crossing into Mountain Time at the Utah border. It’s right about the border that we hit the western edge of the Great Salt Desert. The road is straight and flat for mile after mile after mile. I noticed tire tracks in the salt beside the road, and about 20 miles later saw a policeman standing on the shoulder talking to  a man standing beside his pickup that was mired axle-deep in the salt. It looked like a little joy ride gone wrong.

We also passed what looked to be a 1970s Plymouth that had been stripped and painted camouflage on a trailer pulled by a pickup with Wyoming plates. There must be a story that goes with that.

As those were the main features of that part of the trip, believe me when I say that that road is boring.

Then it was on to the Salt Lake City freeways. We might have been in the Bay Area, with miles of fast and heavy traffic, six lanes wide. Heading south out of the city, gradually it became five lanes, then four. By the time we got down to two lanes going south, the traffic was light enough that there was some space in front of us and behind.

Then we took a road neither of us had been on before – a two-lane from Nephi to Salina, where we finally stopped for the night. It had been a hard day of driving, with the last portion in and out of more rain squalls.

Salina is a small town. Other than Denny’s and fast food, there appeared to be only two alternatives for a meal. We chose the Mexican restaurant next to the motel. It was Saturday night in Utah, and the place was packed with large families with lots and lots of kids.

Returning to the motel, the sky gave us a present.

This morning we had breakfast at Mom’s, the other restaurant in town. Evidently Mom’s had been on that corner since the 1920s. Sunday morning was relatively quiet. And then we headed east again, to Green River and then Moab, where we had lunch.

Moab is an interesting place, with lots of people fixated on hiking and biking and four-wheeling over the rocks. There were lots of 20- and 30-somethings looking fit and weathered. Salina folk looked more like ranch people. It was quite a contrast between those who work outside and those who play outside.

Never liking to return on the same road, we left Moab on a state highway that threads its way through the canyon cut by the Colorado River, with sometimes just the width of the narrow two-lane between the river and the cliffs. I love the red rock of that area, but it doesn’t pull on me the way the high desert can.

Tonight we are in Rifle, Colorado, elevation 5,300 feet. It’s about the same elevation as Salina, but the two towns are very different. Here we are on the western edge of the Rocky Mountains, and the town looks buffed, waiting for flatlanders who come to spend some time in the mountains. 

And tonight we are doing laundry.