March 23. Book Cliffs/Colorado/David Foster Wallace

I left Castle Valley at the crack of 10, heading east. Highway 50 is pretty much I-70 now until the Westwater Exit, just west of the Colorado Border. I didn’t realize it last November when Terry and Louis and I took a drive to the proposed Tar Sand site in the Book Cliffs that the Seep Ridge Road through the Book Cliffs starts with a turn off of Highway 50. We wanted to see what the 'first' project to extract oil from Tar Sands looked like, what a tribe of young people had sacrificed their freedom to protest. 

The Seep Ridge Road is spectacular as it traverses some of the wildest landscape I've seen. Up through a twisting canyon, the conifers getting larger the farther we went. On top, the road twisted along a ridge top as we dodged huge piles of horse shit the wild horse studs use to mark their territories. Herds of elk played in the tall sage like barrel racers. Eagles soared. There had to have been mountain lions nearby. First we saw the silver gleam of the sun bouncing off of the new fence surrounding the project. Then, miraculous in its abruptness, the dirt road stopped and the blackest, newest three lane highway I've ever seen started. The map shows it all the way to Vernal. Two years ago, I was eating breakfast with a well known conservationist from Denver. "You're spending a lot of time in Utah these days", I said. "Don't you know," she said, "everything bad starts in Utah." I thought about that and then I thought about the possibility that everything bad that starts in Utah, starts on Utah Trust Lands. (SITLA--School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration. They get away with murder beneath the banner of "it's for the school children".). Yes, the company (the same Canadian company reeking havoc in Alberta) came to SITLA to begin its project because their paper work is less complicated (their environmental standards are more lax) than the BLM. This is just one example. It could be that those young protesters were onto something: the biggest environmental difference one could make would be to nip the disastrous SITLA projects in the bud. 

Book Cliffs looking east near the Colorado Border

Highway 50 is pocked with holes and the desert is biting away at its edges and I wondered how long before it would completely disappear. At one point I swear there was no pavement left, only dirt and some cheap road base someone had spread around. Then, miraculously, the road resurrected. Right at the Colorado border. Recently paved. New yellow lines down the center, white lines along the sides. This seemed to correspond with the ranches I saw, and the cows and cattle auction site, and the machinery (working as opposed to rusting). 

Then into Fruita. 

The town has obviously embraced mountain biking as a key to their economic development. I remember back a few years when Moab thought they were losing biking customers to Fruita. This makes me wonder about Fruita town meetings. Are they like one recently held in Moab wherein those who were there to support conservation based on the fact that outdoor recreation is Moab's new economy, were lambasted by old-line Moabites who were sick of newbies coming in and changing their lives. So many of our problems, I believe, are based on the battle between those who see change and adaptation as natural and necessary and those who with the last strength they have are hanging onto a past that is no longer relevant. I imagine there are those two sides in Fruita, as well. At least they have a mountain biker on the town grain elevator to show some balance.

I made a long stop in Grand Junction to find the gizmo that would allow me to listen to what's on my new I-phone through my car's speakers. Three stops were required to finally get it right. I realized that much of the shopping we do when we go to Grand Junction is along Highway 50. (Hell, the Mesa Mall is on Highway 50!). Now I can listen to all 65 hours of Infinite Jest without the pain of head phones. 

Weird that I wrote about Miller's idea of "autobiographical novel" because that is exactly (I believe) what Wallace wrote. Otherwise, how could he make addiction and suicide and that early scene where Hal, the protagonist, is being scrutinized by the high school admissions people? I'm glad I read Every Love Story is a Ghost Story --his biography, first. There's an amazing scene in Jest (I heard it as I left Pueblo, the sky darkened by clouds beneath which an peach-colored sun set formed on the horizon) in which a young woman is talking with a psychiatrist after she has attempted suicide. "Why?" he asked, "do you want to hurt yourself?" "I don't want to hurt myself," she says. "I want to kill myself." She continues to describe the pain she feels..."you've had a stomach ache, haven't you, where you just want to vomit up everything to get some relief? (I'm paraphrasing here) "Well, it's as if every one of my cells has that kind of ache which they all need to vomit out the pain but they can't."  I don't believe someone who had not experienced that could have written it. 

I made a quick detour to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park Visitor's Center. I can't believe that there's a National Park this close to home, that I've never been to. I stopped at one spectacular overlook and was amazed by what I saw. 

I’ll definitely be back here.

I passed through many small Colorado towns--Salida, Royal Gorge, Canon City. They're all transitioning to recreation. If I saw one more sign advertising "Zip Lines" I would have gone nuts. Zip lines and river trips ('walk-ins welcome' like barber shops.) All evidence I believe of two things: more tourists feeling the (unconscious?) need to experience the wild world; and entreprenuers who don't really understand the wild world creating products from it. (I'm aware of my bias showing here. )

Canon City, I read, is the home to ten prisons, including one for the worst of the worst. Not sorry I missed that. 

Enough. I'll leave now, headed for Kansas today. I think I'll stop in Dodge City. Isn't Boot Hill there?