This creation was, firstly, a result of having to pee really bad as I drove through Utah at 80 miles per hour. The parts of Utah that are not Salt Lake City, Provo, or St. George, are just Nothing. The absolute most magical type of dusty Nothing. The type of Nothing that warrants signage like NO SERVICES NEXT 100 MILES. Which translates to GET GAS NOW if you're smart.
No services? No problem. I prefer a land pee over a nasty truck stop pee any day of the week. But there weren't even any exits to land pee on at this part of the drive. Just all highway and dinosaur bones and no turnoffs. And it's straight up unsafe to whiz on the side of the highway when people are whipping by at an average of 92 miles per hour.
Finally, I spotted an exit in one mile. Thank god because this point I was sitting on my hand and had unbuttoned my jeans to relieve the pee pressure. I always do this. Sign said: Yellowcat: NO SERVICES. No worries. In fact, we (my dog and I) were so in the middle of Utah Nothing that I knew it'd be the type of exit where there's just an immediate cattle-guard to cross onto a gravel road to Nowhere. I was correct. Upon taking the exit we were greeted by the sign that said NO STATE MAINTENANCE BEYOND THIS POINT. Ideal for me, if you know me at all. The peace and solitude isn't even verbally describable if you've never encountered it (I know my whole responsibility as a writer is to attempt to describe it for that very reason so maybe I'll get to that obligation later in the post). I crossed the cattle guard and listened to semis fly by behind me. It reminded me of:
...being young enough that my mom thought it was cool to tell me that Interstate 80 never ceased to have cars on it. It was never "closed," "empty," or "off," like a shopping mall might be. This was a crazy concept to a kid my age, whatever age this would have been. What! NEVER? What about on Christmas? As a child with my suburban Chicago worldview (read: small), you think everything stops at least on Christmas while Santa flies around the globe. Then she reminded me it's even busier on Christmas when people are traveling to go see family. Toddler mind blown.
Well Utah's i-70 highway almost proved her wrong. It almost was fully empty, off. Every couple minutes we may hear one semi go by.
Off every American highway exit, there is a certain radius within which an incredibly depressing amount of trash accumulates. You don't have to be a trucker or a vanlifer to notice this, but I became exceptionally aware of the Truth and Consistency of this phenomenon as a vanlifer myself. It was exemplary at this exit. Even with its cattle guard and NO SERVICES, the trash radius persists with a vengeance. I eventually parked in a spot between a mattress (of fucking COURSE there's a mattress) and a pile of tires (this is incredibly common in the American S/SW as tire disposal and recycling is apparently expensive and cumbersome) that seemed to mark a "spot." Funny how our brains will do that. Oh, a tire pile to the right and a mattress to my left, ah yes "spot." I get out and let the dog run free. We begin walking.
Surrounding the mattress and tire pile was then a smattering of mica-made-by-glass-bottles. How nice it'd be if the mica were real flecks of metallics and not glimmering trash that slices my dog's paws. What is it with people and smashing glass bottles? How much traffic does this exit even get per year dude? No WAY enough to create THIS MUCH GLASS GLITTER!? How is there this much in a place with one semi passing every 4 minutes?? And it's all alcohol bottles? Are people out here, in the true middle of Nowhere, just getting... drunk? It's so perplexing to me. And then beyond the tires, mattress, and glass you'll then see a circumference of things that are even more confusing to find this far out. A... VCR? Five baby shoes, none in a proper pair, and at least one snowboot? A cardboard box that certainly isn't new because that Pepsi logo is 4 versions old, and though the weathering should have it much more disintegrated by now it's still somewhat preserved? It's like a sad, capitalistic, economic Museum of American (im)morals all splayed out and exemplified right here on the side of the highway. And Mother Nature's left collecting all these broken parts and doing her best to decompose and repurpose their energy.
Next in the trash radius (the dog and I are still walking), off any American highway exit and thus in this one, is a perimeter of toilet paper/paper towels/Dunkin Donuts napkin wads. Here, obviously, people are relieving themselves. While this is a result of long stretches of highway with NO SERVICES, it's also a result of really lazy people and poor planning, unfortunately. We hurry through this part because it's gross, to be frank. Even the dog walks more gingerly and tip-toes quickly through this part with me. We hold our breath. But then! Then we reach the threshold. We are:
off the highway
over the cattle guard
down the NO STATE MAINTENANCE road
parked between the mattress and tire pile
across the bed of glass
through the waste and excremental perimeter
and into the Open
The dog and I walk further and further, the wind gets colder and bolder. There's lots of burro poop so I'm sure to scan the horizon so I'll see them before the dog does. I don't need a dog v. burro fight out here.
There's a strip of green shrubs in the distance so I know there's a dried creek bed or something. I was right. Mars and I walk the creek bed for a while, enjoying it's perfect depth to block us from the whipping wind. The desert dirt cracks below my feet much like how snow pack crunches, though opposite ends of the spectrum. I love when things are so vastly different they actually start to expose similarities.
I lose sight of Mars so I spend some time trying not to grow panicky and await his return as I call out to him. He does return. I tell him to please not go too far around the bends or up over the banks without telling me first. I always wonder if the tags on his collar bother his hypersonic ears as they dangle, but I don't put a silicone border on them because I like how they make a bell for me to hear him out in the distance.
I sit, Mars returns and sits next to me. We listen to the wind for a long while. We feel it change directions very abruptly. I hold my breath to tune in a bit further and confirm. It certainly changed. My hair stops whipping across my face and is instead now flung behind my ears, out of my eyes. I take a huge deep breath in and let the wind whip down into lungs and redirect within me accordingly, just as it does across the land. And my capillaries and trillions of cells lined right up to listen to this new direction just as the dust and tumbleweeds and birds and bunnies do on the land. No questions asked. We do as the wind tells us.
The shift was so clear as it swept through my lungscape. I hadn't even asked for it—usually my shifts come after requesting the change. In fact, for the prior 5 weeks, I'd been stewing in dread over this trek back to Vegas. And dreading a trek is not very Me at all. But for the fourth time in two years I was making this westward haul, alone, yet again, from Chicago to the Mojave Des
ert Basin. As I drove across the heartland—Illinois, Iowa, across Nebraska and it's bluffed borders—I felt so drained. This is usually a drive that makes me feel very alive and inspired. But I had been home in the Midwest for the month of August and (to my surprise) felt sad to
be leaving it's dewy, hydrating plains, back to the land of barren unforgivingness and sad, shriveled up lake beds. I was coming back to a place where my last relationship was decomposing. What was even left for me out here in the literal godforsaken desert? Me, a winter lover, heading back to Vegas where I lived to be with a man I was, well, no longer with.
But upon sensing the change in the wind's direction, I felt all these forlorn feelings completely whisked away. I instantaneously felt that inspiration and invigoration this Westward drive typically provides me. It flooded in and a few tears snuck out. Happy ones. Mars stayed right over my shoulder, certainly sensing this shift we were all sharing. I smiled really big and took another huge breath. Things got quieter and louder all at once.
Supplemental messages and guidance also come in from a huge, full sun and its crepuscular rays at this time of the Wind Shift. The dog and I both stick our noses up a bit and gather as much information as we can about this moment.
Eventually, I settle into the new sense of lightness and recalibration on WTF I'm doing on this drive YET AGAIN. I can't say WHAT the reason was but I had been gifted the feeling that we were STILL ON TRACK. If you live this way, you know how tangible, valuable, and real that knowing is. I kept saying thank you over and over again. I prop up my phone and play around a bit with some Live Photos. I take a bunch so I can compile something later (like this post, as we've discovered. When I am out playing in such a way I only know it's what I should be doing in that moment., I don't envision what it will become. This is my signature cart before the horse creative process). I like my outfit, and I like how I feel in that moment. I figure that's always a really good time to capture feelings in photo, video, or words.
I now better understand why I love a place with a cattle guard and No Services. A place with No State Maintenance really quite quickly and inconspicuously invites you into a lovely place with no need for any mental state maintenance either. Out here my mind naturally quiets to the same level as the surrounding landscape, which is that Loud Quiet. And in finally ceasing to think about what it is I need or should do, I am gifted precisely that direction. Instead of sitting crosslegged with my hands in mudras, trying to watch the thoughts drift by, they just do. On the wind.
If this were a more well-written entry, you wouldn't need me to spell out the parallel between No State Maintenance and no mental state maintenance. If I explain every symbol in my writing this way, no AP English teachers will ever be able to have you write an essay describing how you discovered this yourself. And the smartest way to make someone else feel smart is to know exactly what you want them to glean from something, yet leave them feeling they came upon this realization on their own accord.
I'm sure you did.
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