Phthursday Musings: Approaching Zion

Saturday, October 8, we departed Las Vegas. We had a Kia Forte, driving north on Interstate 15 with an ultimate destination of Springdale, Utah, the town at the entrance to Zion National Park.

None of us had ever been to Utah. I’d been to Arizona, but had never actually driven across the desert. The drive itself then was our entrance to a new terrain.

That terrain across the Nevada desert might accurately be described as stark or even bleak, but I think I might sum it up this way: it looked like a huge, bright, unfinished basement. Every so often there was some mechanical device or another, but clearly this basement wasn’t going to get finished, and wasn’t even going to be used much for storage.

Every so often there would be an exit, to a supposed destination like Byron, but there was no Byron in sight. This is not an exaggeration: they put in an exit to a town which was fully abandoned by 1949.

One exit had a gas station, and near there and in a couple other places I saw massive solar arrays. I wonder how much power they could generate.

Finally near the Arizona border is the town of Mesquite, Nevada. We actually saw a softball game going on at a field near the highway. (We couldn’t tell what size ball they might be using.) Mesquite reminded me a bit of northwest Indiana: a destination for Utahns who just want to find the absolute nearest casino, not unlike a destination for Illinoisans who go to Krazy Kaplan’s to stock up on M-80s.

I-15 through Arizona is fairly short. The northeastern half is scenic, where you drive through the Virgin River Canyon area. It is completely isolated from the rest of the state, an effective exclave. It must be an especially bizarre place to actually live.

To prove that the small man actually did set foot in Arizona, I photographed him outside a truck stop in Littlefield, which may well have been the only gas station in that entire corner of the state:

As soon as you cross over into Utah, the terrain changes, the overall feel changes. They know you’re there to be there, not merely to go through there, making Utah feel like an immediately inviting state. Which, from our experience, it is.

I made a Spotify playlist for the drive. I tried to pick things that were different types of “chill”, and which would satisfy all of the occupants of the car. At some point I was told there were too many keyboards. Apparently George Benson’s “Breezin’” is more of an ocean chill than desert chill.

There were two most correct inclusions on the playlist. The first was Little Feat’s “Willin’”, which is at literally a song about driving that general part of the country. (The only other reference I have ever found to Tonopah, Nevada was that week when it was briefly commented upon in Desert Solitaire.) I have more to say about this song, but another time.

The other was Giant Sand’s “Wind Blown Waltz”. Although Howe Gelb operates out of a different part of the desert (Tucson - hey, there’s “Willin’” again), I think he and his best known compatriots (Joey Burns and John Convertino, one time members of Giant Sand, best known for being the core of Calexico) tapped into something that to my ears has always been unique, mysterious, slightly inaccessible: a wistfulness with an attendant sense of grave spaciousness; a contented surrender to the vastness of both space and time. He can draw the sentiment out even when playing the song in a cluttered warehouse:

Springdale itself is a typical tiny tourist town: t-shirt shops, restaurants, places to buy rocks. There’s no secondary industry.

The night we arrived we were in the largest of the souvenir shops, which adjoined an ice cream parlor, which adjoined a performance space tucked into the back middle of the building. There was a lone sign directing people back to see some kind of performance - a free concert which we were able to wander into and out of.

The performance was a guy named Cole with an electric guitar and a sampler, who could play any song off of a list of a couple hundred. There were about seven other people in the room, a tall room with a long stage and stadium seating, a place which could host a play as well as a guitarist, with probably 300-400 seats available. In essence the gig seemed to be that if he could play a song you requested, and you put $5 into his jar for it, and this repeated 6 times an hour for 4 hours, he’d make $120, which would be juuuuust enough to justify his being there.

The gimmick was that to accompany himself, he’d record a loop of himself doind a human beatbox bit. It was kind of ridiculous, but I’ve got to admit, it was impressive too, because there were a lot of songs from a lot of genres on his list, and he seemed able to do them all well enough.

Neither wife nor child was comfortable enough actually asking him to play anything, so I did so on their behalf. She got “I’m On Fire”. He, for some reason, wanted to hear “I Believe I Can Fly”, but I wasn’t about to ask for that. I got him to accept “Radioactive”, figuring, when in Utah…

The highlight of the whole experience though was this older couple on the other side of the room. He kept talking about Rod Stewart. She asked about some song at one point and when Cole wasn’t quite sure what she meant, she sang it herself, like she was Judy Collins or something. After that, he talked more about Rod Stewart. They were a fascinating blend of arrogant and obnoxious, like they could have been guest stars on an episode of Parks and Recreation so delightfully malodorous that they had to be brought back in future episodes. My dear consort thoroughly loathed them, which made me feel like even more like I was in dry comedy.

We gave Cole $10.

I’ll muse on Zion National Park itself next week. I’m on the 11th full day of wearing a sling. I’m healing well, but no driving at least for now, and I’m avoiding typing with my left as well, so putting this together was a little slow going. Hopefully next week I’ll at least be back to normal typing, because I think I have a lot to write about rocks.