Bob Bell's Letter From America - Hitch-Hiking to Wyoming 1980
June 1980 Going North …
After a huge breakfast and fond farewells to Marie, Jeannie and the others, Jerry and I climbed into his pick-up, with ladders strapped to the rack, and tools and sawhorses in the back, and left Provo on 189, driving through farmlands with the ever-present mountains looming either side. Jerry had worked all around this area on construction jobs, and as we drove he pointed out houses he had framed, roofs repaired, decks installed, kitchens remodelled, where the good hardware stores were. For, as he pointed out, when doing a job there was always something, a tool, nails, screws, fittings or some damn thing you found you were lacking and had to get, pronto, to finish the job, so a working knowledge of hardware stores and lumber yards was essential.
He talked about the various customers he had worked for, and how some knew exactly what they wanted, and others could never make up their minds, could never decide just how to resolve some design issue or other, and he’d laugh and say: “Sheeit, them folks I jest have to leave alone for a week or two - I cain’t be standing’ around twiddling’ my thumbs while they just be thinkin. If I leave ‘em alone in their unfinished kitchen for a few days, they seem to make up they damn minds pretty quickly after all,” and he giggled, I guess, at the memories of some of them.
Passed Orem, Heber City and then climbed to Park City, that hip and popular ski town, high up where the air is thin and you feel like you have some kind of mild hangover, and are overtaken by an indefinable languor. And then down and down past Snyderville and onto Interstate 80, eastbound and up over Silver Summit, through Wanship, Hoytsville, Coalville, Echo, Emory, Wahsatch and finally Evanston, our destination.
He pulled off the highway and drove a few blocks through town, and then turned right to where route 80 started. “There you go, Bob, that’s the road to Jackson. It’s about three hundred miles from here so if you’re lucky, you could make it tonight. Good luck my friend, it’s been fun talking with you and hanging the last couple of days. I sure hope I make it to England one of these days,” he said, as I climbed down to the sidewalk, bag on my shoulder and a new and pristine sign in my hand, and then with a wave and a honk, he turned his truck around and was gone.
So this was Wyoming. Evanston sat right in the southwestern corner of the state and came into being through that wanderlust that is so much a part of America’s psyche. Jerry had told me the town was founded during the construction of Union Pacific Railroad and how by the late 1860’s it had become a railroad refuelling station due to the water from the Bear River and vast timber reserves and coal mined thereabouts, all fuel for the steam age. So much of the railroads through the west were built by Chinese labour, and Evanston used to boast a China Town of sorts, although most of the Chinese had disappeared by the 1930s.
But not all roads through Evanston were made of steel. One of the very earliest transcontinental automobile routes, the Lincoln Highway, built in 1913, aided in putting this little town on the map. Running from Times Square in New York City clean through to Lincoln Square in San Francisco, the Lincoln Highway was that three thousand mile ribbon over which rolled the dreams and aspirations of thousands, moving west for land, for hope, for renewal, for love, adventure, excitement or just because they could just not stop wandering, not resist the siren call of whatever it was that lay just beyond the next horizon, a restlessness that gnawed at their souls, worried their minds and beckoned them on and on on and on. And whatever it was that did lay just over the horizon was never quite what they wanted, or had imagined or desired, and so on to the next and the next, until some indefinable quality said: “Stop! This is it.” And they went no further.
Others ventured west not simply in search of better things but rather to escape situations of horror and terror - bad families, violence, crimes committed and crimes avoided, now left behind in that great forgetting, that great relinquishing of the past. Go west, go west, and go west they did. And of course, as the years went by, they realised that there was no forgetting, no wiping the memories away and that indeed, the very opposite thing happened, and just as in Macbeth, those accursed spots remained, shaping their agonies, guilts and night-time shudders.
As I stood on my corner, waiting for a ride, I wondered just how many people had passed through this town. Certainly today, with the Interstate the number would be in the countless millions. Millions of souls, millions of stories, all told with humour and pride, others with sadness and regret and most with resignation, a realisation that changing circumstances didn’t change themselves, didn’t cleanse their souls. Ah shit, who really knew? All this was idle-waiting-for-a-ride roadside speculation. It was a fact that countless souls had passed that way, and a certainty that some were happy and some were sad. Guess one would have to peer deep into the Akashic Records to sort it all out, and that would take an eternity, although by the way things were going so far, I just might get at least half the job done before I got a fucking ride.
Traffic was slow. Slow enough that I could get a good look at each driver as he or she went by, and then try to guess their occupation, their temperament and their stories. The guy in the dog collar in the big blue Buick was easy … obviously a man of the church, but what kind of church? One of those serious hallowed tip-toe around the cloisters kind of Protestant joints, or a big singing pop type Spanish church, with lines out the door on Sunday mornings, entire families in attendance, from babes in shawled arms to scrawny wrinkled black-clad old grannies and everyone in-between? Pretty sure it would not have been a hallelujah amen shouting black church simply because this guy was white, and didn’t look he’d ever really gotten down in his life. And I hadn’t seen one black person since I hit town anyway. Maybe one of those only in America big TV religious operations, with sobbing pastors - every tear shed a dollar earned. Fact was, as Jerry had said that Evanston was home to just nine or ten thousand people, it was unlikely to boast any kind of super mega commercial type church. More likely the guy was just a regular old cleric who did his best to ease his people’s psychic pain all the while attempting to ignore the very real physical pain in his lower back and trying not to question his own faith and all the time wondering about just what it was that got him into all this to start with.
A pick up went by, two Mexicans sitting up front, and a Labrador in the back. Music wafted through the open passenger window and the dog’s tongue hung, red, in the wind, his tail wagging slowly, and the truck passed, its rusty tailgate held shut with orange rope, the frayed end swinging in time with the dog’s tail. It was early afternoon, and I figured they were on their way back to work after lunching at one of the little food stands I had passed down the road. I wished I could have been on that long bench seat with them, listening to the cadences of their speech, the way they rolled their ‘r’s, the musical phrasing and tones of their voices. Damn … I could listen forever to the way some of these people spoke, the Mexicans, the African-Americans and the long and soft drawls of those who lived in the south. I felt like an English actor in an American movie who had never seen the script; all was improvised with the plot unfolding as time unraveled and the scenes were constantly changed.
A big yellow Bluebird bus went by, the kind used by schools and churches. On the side was painted ‘Christians for Jesus’ which seemed a bit superfluous - wouldn’t it be obvious that if you were a Christian, you would be for Jesus? Why not just save paint and write ‘Christians’? I held out my hand but I guess they must have used up their charity quota already as they didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow down. The seats were full of short-haired men and be-hatted women. They all looked depressingly respectable. At the back some kids had their noses pressed against the glass - they waved at me and I waved back, and then they were gone, ensconced in their fervour and ecstasy, dreaming of Jesus. Traffic came in little waves, three or four cars or trucks, and then a gap, a wait, and then a couple more cars. Dusty black Buicks, battered Oldsmobiles, Chevy pick-ups driven by men in hats, sometimes a rifle slung on the rack behind the seat. These folks were probably ranchers or at least folk who lived way out of town. Their trucks were covered in out of town dust, the paint dulled by abrasive desert winds, the drivers tanned by those same winds.
Finally, an old Ford saloon pulled over and a lean man who looked to be in his late thirties beckoned me into the passenger seat. “Bin there long?” He asked, and I nodded, laughing. “Too long!” “Yeah, that’s the way it is sometimes. Thing is, there is a lot of local traffic out here, and folks think there is no point in just giving a fellow a ride for a couple of miles, and I guess they are right. Though often-times it jest helps to get to another spot. Some spots seem to have a curse on ‘em…”
And he was right - he obviously had done his share of hitching over the years. We traded stories, and he told how he hustled here and there, working on oil fields, then going to different cities tending bars. Said he could never stay in one place too long, but there was always a hustle to be made, always a way to score some dough. At one point he looked sideways at me and returned to his hustle theme. “Ya know, you can always hustle some guys. You know it don’t mean you are queer or anything, but sure is a quick way to make some dough, keep ya goin’ ya know.”
I couldn’t really tell if he was just laying on me some world-weary advice or was actually coming on to me. He had a coldness about him, an insularity and I was uneasy, didn’t know how to read him. I didn’t want to tell him that I was in no need of immediate funds, which would have been one way of telling him I had money, but didn’t want to pretend I was broke which might lead to… Well, who knew what?
So we travelled on, the conversation becoming a ping pong match of opinions offered, suggestions countered, until I eventually had to execute the coup de grace, a fast just over the net shot to the corner of the table, emphasising I wasn’t in that market to buy or sell, but if others wanted to do that, well, that was just fine by me - but in my case, my own very particular case - it wasn’t a game that interested me, and so we went on to talk of other things. But the undercurrent remained and I was glad to get out, a hundred miles or so closer to Jackson.
The road to where I was standing had started in Wyoming as Route 89, crossed over into Utah where it became 16, and then back into Wyoming, reverting to 89 again. Route 30 joined shortly after the road had reentered Wyoming and the two routes shared the same roadway until 30 finally veered off west into Idaho, brushing the northern tip of Bear Lake. That was where the hustler was headed, on his way to Boise. I was left in Wyoming, just a few feet from the Idaho line, in high desert adjoining the Wyoming Range, a long line of mountains that stretched for the sky at over 11,000 feet at the highest peak. There was nothing there. Nothing. No dwellings, no friendly little store, not even a ruined barn. It was high country, cloudy and getting cold, and I started to walk along the side of the road. Traffic passed by intermittently, nary an acknowledgment from flinty-eyed drivers, nary a smile or a sign that he or she was going to turn off in a mile or so. And as I discovered while I walked, if they had made that sign they would have been lying, because there was nowhere to turn off anyway, which in my spurned bitterness made me hope that they had pangs of guilt after leaving me there, out in the cold and wind. Unsuccessful hitch-hiking, it has to be said, does bring out one’s worst side. Continual disappointments stir up a hatred and antagonism towards motorists, and the world at large after an hour or two. I found my self pulling faces at the backs of cars as they sped away from, giving them the two-fingered English fuck you sign, which if they saw it at all, and probably didn’t, imagined it was the peace sign. In my state of mind, it was the war sign. I pulled my coat from my bag, and wrapped it around me, and continued walking.
For a few miles the road straddled the state-line, and I walked on, my left foot in Idaho, and my right in Wyoming, Where was I? An interesting geographical conundrum, but one which rapidly lost its intrigue and mild humorous sparkle. I knew where I was alright, on a lonesome road with what looked like bad weather approaching. Finally, after about five miles I arrived in Geneva - population of around 100. Whoop-de-do. The only store there was the Post Office, which fortunately sold a few more things than stamps. But not much more. After reading a couple of pamphlets talking up the history of the place - founded by Swiss immigrants (surprise, surprise) - I bought water, bread and two cans of sardines, and wandered back out on the road out of town looking for a place suitable for high dining. Scrubby pastures lined either side of the road, which soon turned to sage. Tired of walking and very hungry, I sat down by the edge of the road, leaning against a telephone pole, and dined on sardine sandwiches, chewing them slowly and savouring every mouthful, luxuriously washing them down with Adam’s ale.
Despite the cold, my good humour returned. The evening was calling to night, and the shadows lengthened as night answered the summons. I wandered a little further up the road, searching for a safe and out of the way place to roll out my old down sleeping bag, and hopefully sleep the night away and wake to a new day, a day that would get me to Jackson and then some. Looming through the gloom was what looked like a shed or small barn, and I made for it, climbing a barbed wire fence and walking through scrub to get there.
It was really too dark to check it out properly, but I could make out a stack of bales that smelled like old hay, musty and sour. Certainly room enough to be able to stretch out and lie down.
Wriggled into my bag, removing only my shoes. It was cold, really cold. Through the open end of the barn I watched the sky rapidly darkening. No moon tonight, and the clouds had given way to a clear night sky, thousands and thousands of stars bearing witness to eternity, glowing, flickering, luminous in the American night, an occasional long streak of brilliance as a meteor burned its way to the horizon. The glimmering and glistening, the lustre, the iridescent splendour of it all, the heavenly blaze was the evening sermon, the reminder that my hitch-hiking troubles were really way beyond insignificance, my journeying meant nothing, absolutely nothing at all, there was nothing to worry about, nada.
Calmed by such cosmic comfort, I drifted into a long and deep sleep.
