What if you had a zine event and no one came?
zine set up at SLC library, originally uploaded by artnoose.
So, Mary and I spent more or less all day in the conference room where our zine event was going to be. It was great--- we had our own space to collate, nap, hang out, write letters, even our own restroom.
Unfortunately no one came to our event. Well, that's not totally true. The librarian who was our contact person and another librarian came by. Oh, and someone came in looking for the Emily Dickenson event, and someone else came looking for the environmental sustainability meeting (we tried to convince her that our event was close enough and probably more enjoyable). So, we all just had a young adult fiction geek-out session, which is really quite a thing when half the people in the room are librarians. Mary and I each read a piece of writing and then we got taken out to Indian food, which was nice.
Our plan had been to get some of the mammoth stretch of the next day's drive to Omaha done at night, after the event. My hope was to get well into Wyoming during the night and just have Nebraska to contend with the following day. I took the night shift driving, and was immediately confronted with the epic mountains east of SLC. These mountains--- breathtaking during the day--- are quite difficult at night. Lots of steep grades both up and down, and trucks everywhere. The mountains continued on and on, and it was like driving a rollercoaster except with no track.
And the snow. Did I mention the snow? We hit a storm just outside of the city, definitely the worst snow I have ever driven through. As the snow worsened, we discussed our options. The less we drove that night, the more we'd have to drive the next day, which was already a lot. I was also concerned about stopping for the night and getting snowed in at some rest stop with a closed I-80. I thought that if the storm was moving east, we could maybe outrun it. At some point however, it was just too harrowing to continue. We decided to take our chances at a rest stop and hunker down for the night.
The wind was intense all night and it was pretty cold, even with both of us scrunched into the cab of the truck. Still, I got some sleep, and at the crack of dawn we got up to assess the situation. There was ice covering the inside and outside of the windows, but otherwise we seemed good to go. We scraped the windows and set off, Mary taking on the early shift of driving.
This turned out to be quite a feat. Although the highway wasn't closed, it probably should have been because we spent the first half of the day driving incredibly slow through the mountains of Utah and Wyoming. The roads were very icy, and every once in a while we'd see a crashed semi truck in the median--- sometimes turned around, sometimes jackknifed, sometimes crushed upside-down. The winds were also very heavy, whipping the truck around and blowing snow across the road in front of us--- sometimes like white stripes and other times like a heavy fog. Hats off to Mary because it took a lot of concentration to drive like 25 mph over ice much of the time. It took half the day just to get to Laramie, Wyoming (remember Matthew Shepard) which marked the near-end of the Rockies. I started driving and got a little taste of the ice-driving before we dropped down into Cheyenne and the subsequent plains.
Then came Nebraska, the antithesis of the driving Mary had been doing. No snow, clear skies, and flat. Hours and hours of flat. An entire state of flat. Rotations of oldies classics on AM radio. We stopped in North Platte to take pictures of the Buffalo Bill Cody statues and then continued on to Omaha, where our friend Diane is now living. We rolled into town a cool 16 hours after we had started driving. I took a shower and then surrendered to flannel sheets and slept for a long time.
