(no subject)
Sunday:
Boulder.
I left my jacket on the bus, and hoped to hell it wasn't some kind of foreboding sign. I met the three men I'd be spending the next day crammed into a car with. To my relief, it was not the VW Jetta I'd previously assumed we'd be driving. Four people crammed into a car that small for more than twenty minutes? No.
We pile in, Grateful Dead playing some song I can sing along to, and after twenty minutes on the road, smoke pot. I don't usually smoke, but figure What the hell. It might make the time go by faster.
Wyoming.
You know that phrase, "the middle of nowhere"? That's Wyoming. Seriously, you haven't seen nowhere until you've seen the plains of Wyoming. Endless fields the color of dust, separated by tiny, decrepit wood-and-wire fences to keep out cattle that you rarely see, huge jagged mountains in the distance that never get any closer.
We smoked more pot, then stopped in a gas station in the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming. The guy could have been an extra in Brokeback mountain, or one of a million westerns. Tall and lanky, thinning dark hair clinging to his neck, cowboy shirt, big belt buckle, boots, the works. He's polite and suspicious to the four stoned college students invading his tiny convenience store for gas and jerky, trail mix, and chocolate.
When we leave, rumbling over the cattle grid on the store's driveway, I try to imagine these plains covered by buffalo. I become melancholy, then eat my jerky and pass out.
I wake up again in another gas station. This man is friendlier, smiling at these aliens from Planet Boulder. The bathroom has two signs; one says Lady Truckers Shower Free!. The other is framed by rough, dark wood and curly-cued barb wire, and has this inscription;
Now we're known as friendly folks 'round these parts, yes sir, and we sure do like to keep our bathrooms clean. And we don't take kindly to yellow-bellied folks coming in and messing up our clean bathrooms, so if'n you may be one of these kind of vermin, you better know that we'll come gunning for ya.
Or something like that.
Utah.
Is weirdly green, soft grassy mountains interrupted by random jagged outcrops of red sandstone. The kind of place you'd imagine strange mythical adventures taking place in. And then there's the salt flats. I took it to be some kind of strange pollution but was corrected by my geology major at CU driver.
We smoked more pot. I don't remember much about Utah, except that we stopped in some weird Taco-Bell travel center and encountered the fattest child I've ever seen.
Idaho.
We listened to the twenty-five minute song, "Alice's Restaurant." Once was more than enough, and let me tell you, I would have killed someone had I not been so sedated by the scenery and the nicotine and THC in my system.
The hills were green, rolling like tidal waves stopped before the crest, and really friggin boring after a while. The sunset, either because we were driving west at 85 miles an hour or because we were so far north, took about an hour. Which was cool.
Monday:
Oregon.
Our first encounter past the state line is in a gas station (the only place we've yet to interact with other humans), where a woman comes out and tells us that all gas stations in Oregon are full-service. The three guys seem to think this is an amazing deal and launch into a boring conversation about the decline of service in the last twenty years, the kind of conversations you'd expect from fat Republicans two or three times their age.
I buy more cookies, and watch a huge moon rise towards the north.
I am woken to be told that we're stopping for a nap. It's freezing, but the three guys are sleeping outside. I am given a coat as a blanket (I left mine on the bus, remember?) and curl up on the front seat as they lay out sleeping bags on the ground. The sky is dark, and the moon is blocked by the mountains that surround our stopping place.
Four hours later, we're on the road again. We stop for breakfast in a town where time stopped around 1976. I use the bathroom; the toilet is teal and there's an ashtray next to the toilet roll. The only modern thing is the diner's prices.
Washington.
We're all asleep (except the driver, thankfully) for the momentous crossing of the Columbia river. We decide to take the scenic route near Mount Rainier. Which, by the way, is friggin huge. Like, gigantic. You know that part in the Fellowship of the Rings when they're in the mountains and all those black birds come and the Gandalf says "We'll have to take the pass of Caradhras!" and everyone gets this look on their face like, "Oh shit, this is so going to become the sequel of the Donner Party."
Mt Rainier is like that mountain, huge and hungry looking. The driver decides he's going to climb it. Whatever.
We get to Olympia, exchange good-bye pleasantries. Tyler, the guy from Naropa who joined us at the last minute, decides to stay in Olympia with me. We go out to dinner, eat amazing pasta, get some wine, talk to a strange man who's like a caricature of the Southern African-American Blues Player, drink the wine and smoke pot on this crazy, going-nowhere railroad track that's covered in yellow flowers, and talk about life, sex, and all that other stuff. Then we get ice cream and chocolate chip cookies and eat it in his tent. Smoke some more pot. Then I go to bed, and this morning he departed for Alaska. Weird.
I am now nursing my pot hangover, and looking forward to spending the day doing nothing much at all. I might go see Romeo and Juliet (the play) tonight. And eat some fish. That's it for plans.
Then tomorrow is the academic fair at Evergreen, the Thursday is taking a train to San Francisco, then Friday and Saturday are hanging out with August, and Sunday is getting back to Boulder. Somehow.