LIVE FROM THE HILLS: On The Road Again

Late one night last June, I sat outside the Ute Hostel in Salt Lake City. I didn’t know anything about the Winter Olympics.

I hadn’t heard the ceremonies would begin on Feb. 8, nor that 3.5 billion people were expected to watch on their televisions. Nobody had told me about the scandalous bribery and deceit that brought the Olympics to Utah in the first place. And during that night in the summer, nobody knew that a $300 million security budget would be necessary, or that more than 7,000 soldiers, federal agents and police officers would be coming to town in just eight months.

All I knew was I’d been on the road for a couple of weeks now, and I was quickly approaching the midpoint of a brutal 10,000 mile road odyssey across the country. Some international festival of snow hounds was the last thing on my mind.

Josh, Joe and I had left Massachusetts early one morning and driven straight to South Dakota. It took a while. After surviving some bad rains in the Badlands, we coasted through Montana and Wyoming, driving through the Crow Nation, sleeping miles away from anybody in Yellowstone, hearing demonic howls at night and warnings of Grizzly problems in the day.

The night before SLC, we had slept out a night of rain somewhere in the wilds of southern Idaho. When the soggy morning finally dawned, we were speeding down Route 15, a direct shot south, and we hit Utah within a couple of hours.

Joe and I drove, as always. Josh sat in the back seat with his sunglasses on, looking like a runaway Hollywood star. We chauffeured his lazy bones halfway around the country because he admitted to falling asleep at the wheel before we even reached South Dakota. “I woke up in the other lane,” he said. We told him he couldn’t drive any more.

Josh is one of those characters that believes any medical emergency can be solved with a blowtorch, saucepan, pint of JD and a Rolling Stones album. So am I, for that matter. But he’s dangerous. The SLC locals called him Grizzly Adams, and I tried to hang out with Joe as much as possible, not realizing that Joe himself would succumb to a bitter, desert-induced madness about a week later on the outskirts of Blythe, Calif. They were a dangerous crew. Dangerous like force-feeding PCP to a bull-moose or like people who idolize Chuck Bukowski. Dangerous like a slit Achilles tendon. They had lost their minds.

But in SLC, they were in good company.

Out on the residential streets, local teenagers were screaming from their muscle cars, throwing beer cans at each other and chasing girls around. After revving their engines for us, they stumbled over, yelling about how they were off to spend “a night in the hills.”

“There’ll be plenty of doss up there,” said one, pointing to the surrounding mounts with a lustful grin on his face. “You should come.” What the hell is doss? I wondered. Where are these kids’ parents? And where in God’s name did I lose my left shoe?

SLC is a fun town, but deadly weird. I kept flashing back to the first person we met there. It was noontime and the sun was unbearable. We needed water and a bathroom, but all we found was some bum who kept telling us, wild-eyed, “The Mormons run everything here, goddamn Mormons run everything.”

Christ, I’d thought. I’m hallucinating. Damn this sun. My blood is too thick for this type of heat.

But the man was real. And what’s more, he was right. The Mormons in Salt Lake City run everything, or at least their rules do. “Why the hell would you come here?” one of the kids blurted out to me, his arm around his friend’s lopsided sister. “I mean, me, I can’t wait to get out of here. SLC sucks.”

He was right, of course. Salt Lake City can be incredibly frustrating and enormously alien to any sane foreigner.

For one, SLC’s street system is like a giant, confusing, exitless maze. Half the time, streets have names, half the time, numbers. Throw in a $341 million Olympic-inspired rapid transit system that forbids left turns in the heart of the city, and you have a problem. Even in the dead of night, SLC was unnavigatable and dangerous.

“You’re turning into oncoming traffic,” a man named John kept yelling, as I drove him to the package store. “Shut your mouth,” I replied. “You’re speaking nonsense. I know what I’m doing.”

John just didn’t see the big picture. I felt bad for him. He was a good guy, just a little shaken up. We’d met him at the hostel and he kept ranting about “going to Portland for the fireworks” and “driving to Wyoming tomorrow for a keg.”

My mind wandered from his constant monologue to all the poor bastard pilgrims who must’ve jumped for joy at the sight of Great Salt Lake. They probably ran from their caravans to the edge of the murky water, only to realize after a gulp that the water was foul and poisonous and disgusting. The jewel of Utah is a treacherous, sunbaked pit of water that’s saltier than the Atlantic.

And just like the Salt Lake offered no respite for the thirst-driven sojourner, Salt Lake City will give little comfort for the road-weary foreigner who wants to kick back with a beer. John’s rantings about driving to Wyoming for a keg weren’t as farfetched as I’d originally thought — Utah’s eclectic and illogical liquor laws sometime make a hundred-mile trip necessary.

The state claims it does not “promote” the use of alcohol, yet it owns all 37 major liquor stores. To drink in a bar, you must obtain an official membership. Order a drink from that bar, and it’ll have less liquor in it than anywhere else in States — no more than an ounce, compared to the typical ounce-and-a-half, even two. While you can purchase a double-shot drink, the bartender can’t offer it.

Halfway through last year, restaurants were still forbidden from even offering a wine list, and you couldn’t drink there anyhow, unless you also had the “intention” to eat.

Don’t get me started about the beer. A package store, of course, is the only place you can buy “heavy” beer, i.e. beer with an alcohol content of over 3.2 percent. You can get the heavy stuff at bars too, but make sure you order that heavy hitter before midnight; after then they only serve that 3.2 percent foolishness, like Avalanche, a Colorado-based brew more reminiscent of Polar Springs than Budweiser.

We left the next day, afraid of the trouble that would ensue if we didn’t. We fled back to Wyoming, recovered our wits and drove the long way around SLC. Within a few days, we were back in reality. If that’s what you call Las Vegas.