The Ghost of the Howard Johnson Rides Again

Jackson Hole is a valley in Wyoming. Jackson is the resort town within it. The river that runs through it all is the Snake and it is a lovely one: a thick rush of water that eventually empties into the Columbia River, and from there into the Pacific at Portland, Oregon. In spite of legend, Dick Cheney did not grow up here. Casper, Wyoming will have to answer for that.

Jackson itself is, unfortunately, a self-caricature of a western town. Hosting so many festivals must have gone to its head, because it looks remarkably like Walt Disney's Pioneer Village. I've never seen so much log cabin construction and cattle-brand signage in one place. You apparently can't even serve sushi here unless you do so with stump seating, a ten-gallon hat, and a friendly "Howdy, pardner, we just done rustled up some fresh toro. What'll it be?"

Still, we have found something good. We are currently lodged in a delightful old motor hotel, the Virginian. If you've never stayed in an old American motel, this is the 70s revisited: a one-story, drive-up affair with paneled rooms, a cocktail lounge, and a steak house. Even the blue, threadbare carpet speaks to the era where Howard Johnson made a name for himself (and taught the world to love pistachio ice cream).

We have the pleasure of this symbol of Americana because of a rainstorm last night. Normally we prefer to camp, but it's now raining steadily. Last night we put up with it. But though our sleeping bags held, water seeped into everything else, destroying two good books and making it tough to cook dinner. Still, Nicole and I managed to create an interesting hot wine drink (see comments for a recipe), and get some sleep. Unfortunately we woke in a driving rainstorm that steadily worsened to snow as the day went by.

Now, we are thinking of heading over to the cocktail lounge and reliving my parents' heyday in the late 60s and early 70s. Actually, if we were reliving that particular heyday with painstaking accuracy, we'd probably be smuggling in our own gin in Mason jars, but that's another story.

Oregon or Bust

We've been trying find a way to sum up the exceedingly good-natured town of Montpelier, Idaho. We could say that Butch Cassidy once robbed the local bank here, and they put up a plaque for him. That gets near to the point, but the story that ends this post may better explain it better.

Montpelier is a renamed town. Originally, it was Clover Creek, best known in American history as the halfway point of the Oregon Trail. This trail was a highway of Conestoga wagons, especially during the early 1850s, when the US government offered 320 acres to any married couple who would settle in the Willamette Valley. There, you could, according to government propaganda, fish with a bucket and grow pumpkins as big as barns. Thousands of people took them up on it. And you think our government lies to us today.

Nowadays, there is a curious museum there, the National Oregon-California Trail Center. It recreates the entire experience of the Oregon Trail through a group of actor-volunteers, who guide you from Missouri to Clover Creek. You are picked up by a "wagonmaster" who takes you to a gunsmith, a general store—all in remarkable condition--and then loads you in a bumpy Conastoga that takes you to Idaho. There, a blacksmith and his wife greet you. And no matter what you say, the actors never break character.

"Have you seen any animals," the blacksmith's wife asks as soon as you're settled on a stump.

In our case, there was some silence, then an English woman in our party raised her hand. "We saw some caribou," she said.

The caribou, incidentally, is an animal that never leaves Canada without having been shot and stuffed beforehand.

"Must have been a powerful adventurous caribou," says the blacksmith.

Montpelier is a farming town mostly; it's hard to know how it can produce enough un-self-conscious people to man such a museum. In any case, their efforts are infectious, because by the time we reached the end of the tour, they gathered us all around and asked us to raise our fists and shout "Oregon or Bust!" I'm afraid we might have.

Straight as General Pace's Army

From Ely, we've taken Route 50, the so-called loneliest highway in the US. It is nearly 100 miles between towns and there are few gas stations. Cars are rare enough that we wave to each other as we pass.

I'm working, and Nicole's driving. But it's hurting our relationship. In many places, the road only curves slightly every 50 miles or so. Not surprisingly, it's putting her to sleep. So whenever she starts snoring too loudly, I give her a gentle shove. I know it's boring, but she could be a little more considerate. After all, I'm trying to work.

The town that Wal-Mart forgot

Little Ely, Nevada has a proud boast: it is 200 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart, or as the locals like to say, 398 miles round trip. That's a seven hour drive to get cheap Chinese-made applicances. It's actually a rather nice place, 6500 feet above sea level and with 4000 residents, the vast majority of whom live in manufactured houses. Though the "mobile home," as these are mistakenly named, have a trashy reputation in the US, when they are properly kept up, there is something nice about seeing them framed against a mountain. They seem to say, "Look, I'm only here for a while, don't worry."

By contrast, when you build a tract home, you first haul in bulldozers and scrape a square mile of land flat, eliminating all the natural contours and vegetation. Then you ludicrously bring in a pile of new dirt and construct new hills and new ponds. And in a final act of riony , you give it a natural-sounding name like "Forest Hills" or "Crystal Lake."

The double wide manufactured home, perched precariously on its house jacks, is less intrusive and more comforting.

Empty, Nevada

We just left Tonopah, Nevada, population 2000. A relic of the state's silver mining boom, it has a casino and several hotels, but its most notable characteristic is that it is the capital of Nye County. And what a county. On either side of this extensive metropolis (which lacks a supermarket), the roads stretch out across a sagebrush desert for 100 miles in every direction before they actually reach a settlement with enough people to field a baseball team. School buses comprise a large percentage of the vehicles you pass on these roads. They shuttle along, collecting lonely children from isolated farms or, worse, houses which seem to have no purpose other than to serve as a backdrop for an extensive collection of rusty cars and appliances.

But it's not entirely alone. Tonopah has a small, non-commercial airport. A quick check of my laptop revealed that the entire town seems to be connected by free, overlapping wireless networks. It's the other townlets in the county that you have to wonder about.

Gas is $3.61 per gallon. Though beautiful in a lunar sort of way, the landscape here could only make a geologist excited, and the geologist would have to be pretty excitable in the first place.

(For those checking our trip progress, we drove north from Ridgecrest, CA along 395 to Bishop, and then took Route 6. This is the little known Grand Army of the Republic Highway, one of the longest roadways in the United States. It ends some 3200 miles later in Provincetown, Massachusetts at the tip of Cape Cod.)

Departure

Today, at 9:30, after two days of feverish organization, we set off in a car packed with only the barest essentials: 14 changes of clothes, a crate of cooking implements, a tent, two pop-up chairs with cupholders, a quart of homemade salsa, an inflatable mattress with cigarette-lighter operated pump, a side of beef, three pounds of pasta, 16 gigabytes of camera storage, 4 DV tapes, a two burner stove, a backup stove, 4 lamps, 20 books, 40 AA batteries, 3 gallons of water, four bags of Nicole's homemade buttermilk ranch crackers, our passports in case we need to come into the country and don't have tuberculosis, two coats, two pairs of gloves, a 300 volt AC car adapter, two laptop computers, a Samsonite video camera tripod, a lightweight titanium "hiker'" tripod, a Blackberry, cell phones, bug spray, sunscreen, a double size bottle of Tabasco sauce, 15 packets of Taco Bell hot sauce, running shoes, and 144 other items which are too many to catalog.

I think the earliest pioneers of the Old West would have admired our restraint. The image was taken from my front yard in Ridgecrest, CA. With luck, we will not see it again for three weeks.

A note about truth

About 35 minutes from my home town, there is a small canyon, lined with eroded walls, deep red sandstone, and such a generally Martian aspect that it has substituted for the Red Planet in a number of bad Hollywood movies. Its name is Red Rock Canyon.

The canyon is picturesque and somewhat out of the way. As a result, when western travel magazines run out of donkey festivals, chili cookoffs, and second-rate rodeos to write about, they send their reporters out to Red Rock Canyon. The reporters, quite sensibly, don't bother to go.

How do I know this? Because somewhere in every article they write, there is an passage that goes something like the following:

"Next to my boot, about a foot away, coiled and ready to strike, was a small sidewinder rattlesnake. Should I have been worried? Cautiously, I stepped back and said to myself that I'd have to be more careful. This was the Mojave Desert after all."

First point. If you ever find yourself within one foot of a small sidewinder rattlesnake, you should be worried. The bites are horrifically painful. The idea that so many reporters could have come away unharmed from so many close encounters with these snakes is a stretch. An article in that case would have sounded like this.

"Next to my boot, about a foot away, coiled and ready to strike, was a small sidewinder rattlesnake. It struck. My foot turned black and swelled up like a basketball. I nearly passed out from the pain and began to hallucinate. Luckily a ranger found me convulsed on the ground and foaming at the mouth. He administered some antivenom. I lived, but I now have no feeling in my ankle and I walk with a cane. I should have been more careful. This was the Mojave Desert after all."

Second point. I have been to Red Rock Canyon 40 times, hiked around plenty, and have never seen a rattlesnake. There are plenty of places to see them; that particular park is not one of them. It's too public, and they're too shy.

So what really happened? The reporters, on their way north, presumably noticed that if you take a right instead of a left at Kramer Junction, they could go to Las Vegas instead of Red Rock Canyon. Once there, while closely watching their investment in a certain horse in the sixth race, they may have popped on the Internet and downloaded a few stories about the canyon. Those stories all contain a fictional account of an encounter with a snake, and all for the same reason.

It's not their fault. Trips are actually long monotonous things interspersed with a few sights. Nothing ever happens on them. To make a story about one any good, the teller must depart from the truth considerably. So, as this trip progresses, if I happen to mention in passing that we took a shower under Old Faithful or fought off a rabid raccoon with a cast iron frying pan, don't take offense.