We were two weeks exploring the vast geography of the American southwest. It’s not the first time. I’ve passed through some combination of Utah, Arizona and Nevada three times before – once on a 9000-mile three week family odyssey in 1988, once on a cross country jaunt in a grief-fueled fugue state in 1998, and once on my way out here for good in 2004. This was a COVID-delayed road trip, something we’d wanted to do for a while, a less expensive and easier-to-manage alternative to a big trip abroad that would preserve our flexibility to maybe meet up with friends later in the year. Of which.
We took the hybrid, not the EV. For good reason. There is a realistic ceiling on how far you can reasonably drive in a day and it’s around 400 miles or so. While the EV is a fine vehicle in its own right, its maximum range is about 270 miles, and that’s not freeway mileage either. Which means you have to be able to start from a full battery every morning, drive about three hours, and then be prepared to stop and power up to full again. I can’t see doing this kind of trip with an EV until charging is extremely fast and very ubiquitous – and in places that can only be very charitably described as purple, don’t hold your breath.
Honestly, I was expecting a lot more foolishness. I only saw maybe half a dozen Trump shrines, almost all along I-40 between San Bernardino and Kingman, in exactly the sort of meth-desert you’d expect to find the hardcore. Then again, Utah doesn’t seem like the kind of place that is all in on TFG anyway (I have my opinions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and they do not reflect well on my tolerance or equanimity, and I am working on that, but I will allow that they are not the Trumpy sort). In any event, we managed not to disappear into Ameristan for two weeks, and that’s not nothing.
The big mistake, though, was that I predictably overpacked. You have a little more wiggle room with a car – take the extra pair of shoes! You can have more than one ball cap! – but when I’m emptying the enormous duffle bag and finding things I forgot I packed, I clearly overpacked. I could have and should have cut my loadout in half and I would have been bang on perfect. As it is, I have once again managed to rack up several things that are 90% of what I need in a failed quest to find something 100% (in this case, the blue Uniqlo blazer from NYC eleven years ago that went missing. Would that I’d lost the white one instead.)
I was expecting more trouble from my bad shoulder with all the driving, but I think having a new mattress at home helped. There were also a couple of really nice beds. Then again, there were some very not nice beds, including one at a Best Western near Bryce Canyon that provided me arguably my worst night’s sleep in 40 years. After that, I almost felt entitled to the 60th floor of the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas with its cushy bed and whirlpool tub. But all that is neither here nor there: I survived two weeks on the road in better shape and at an older age than my parents handled that three weeks in 1988.
That’s another thing: that trip was two-thirds of my life ago, and I spent most of the trip playing classic alternative on SiriusXM that evoked memories of those long-ago days. And I remembered how I finished reading “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” the day before we reached Little Big Horn, and remembered how I got to be the way I am. That length of drive gives you too much time to reflect, something I’d forgotten in the last twenty years or so, and I don’t think I’ll be behind the wheel for more than three or four hours at most for the foreseeable future if I can help it. (Or wearing socks. It’s summer now.)
As for the trip itself, the two best parts were the train into and out of the Grand Canyon (if you’re not a hiker, the canyon itself is an overnight at the very most, and it could just about work as a day trip from Williams) and the experience of Zion. Springdale Utah is a delightful little tourist town of maybe 500 residents, amply equipped with everything you need to spend a day or two drinking craft beer and riding your e-bike up the canyon and back, and it’s like an alt-version of Yosemite Valley. Of everything we saw, it’s the one place that I immediately decided I would go back to no questions asked. Everything else was very nice – Moab, Bryce, the Grand Canyon itself – but is mostly meant for people with abs more washboard and calves more cantaloupe than I am ever again likely to possess. I am not a particularly outdoorsy person, and my idea of camping these days involves one of the wood cabins at Yosemite – or better yet, the Ahwanee.
To be honest, though, the best part of the trip was just being away for two weeks. Away from all the stuff of the last six months or so, able to call time out on a world where concrete goals seem to be turning into fizzled-out letdowns one after another. Of which, as I say, more later.