Today’s audio update: Christian Kallen describes a Twilight Zone-like vision in the middle of the Utah desert.
The day is a woman who loves you. Open.
Deer drink close to the road and magpies
Spray from your car. Miles from any town
Your radio comes in strong, unlikely
Mozart from Belgrade.
—from Driving Montana, by Richard Hugo
I’ve grown to admire and respect the men and women who people the unlikely all-you-can-eat, big-hair towns that mushroom from under their own smog of despondency above the sagebrush flats out west. The residents of these small towns (populations range from under 200 to 5,000) stare down the prospect of a long, blowing-sideways winter and the knowledge of their own isolation with a kind of stubborn, determined good cheer. They support each other and their communities because if they don’t no one else will, and they don’t live here because they have to, they live here to get as far away as they can from people like the rest of us.
The highways that connect these scattershot settlements are relentless swaths of black Tarmac slicing through pale green-yellow desert (“What fresh desert is this?” I ask Christian, as miles swallow themselves meaninglessly under our tires), and the only things preventing us from driving maniacally off onto the landscape and into the seemingly endless horizon are rumble strips and what is left (and it’s only Day 5) of our ever-diminishing sense of who we used to be before we were followers of the “Outlaw Trail.” Or, as Christian (in what he claims to be a Freudian slip) has started to call it, the “Outlaw Trial.”
We leave Rawlins, Wyo., and head for Vernal, Utah (via Tipton—an easily missed coaling station, famous as the site of a train robbery committed by Cassidy’s Wild Bunch on Aug. 29, 1900). Vernal, sunk down into a valley at the end of the aptly named Flaming Gorge, seems, like many of the other towns we have driven through, to be an accident of civilization rather than a deliberate act of residence. And to a certain extent, this is true: Towns in the West sprang up along the Union Pacific Railway line as convenient coaling stations or they formed (in this high desert) near rivers and springs and in the middle of cattle country or they were built on the dreams of prospecting potential.
Fifty miles northeast of Vernal by road (or horse trail) is another of the hide-outs used by the Wild Bunch. Brown’s Park can be accessed by the little-used Crouse Canyon Road. For a moment, the sagebrush-dusted slopes give way to a canyon of such beauty that I regret having used up all my superlatives for earlier parts of the trip. A creek nestles itself into autumn-burnt foliage, steep mountain-lion country rears above us. Christian takes advantage of my momentarily stunned wonder to scamper up high for photographs while I treat myself to a lunch of scrapings (Heineken and pistachios—needs must) from the back of the SUV, to which I have attached an unprintable epitaph on account of its gas consumption. I perch on a rock near the creek to attempt to write into poetry the landscape around us.
Brown’s Park is the kindest terrain we’ve covered yet. Tucked up on the Green River, it is the sort of place that, had it not been protected by its isolation, would now be dotted with multimillion-dollar homes (eight bathrooms and all-you-can-watch big-screen TV). Instead it is, much as it was a hundred years ago, an out-of-the-way spread covering the three meeting corners of Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado.
Sundance is rumored to have come out here to recover from heartbreak after his lover, Etta Place, decided to stay in town and teach or whatever it was that she did. Butch said about Etta, “She was a decent housekeeper, but at heart she was a whore.” Christian and I stop at the old Jarvie Ranch, a station that served as ferry, post office, and general store for the haphazard residents of Brown’s Park until John Jarvie’s murder by vagrants in 1910. The Green River rolls lazy and fat here, a relief of green spreads from the old cabin down to the river’s banks. Ducks startle up and swing in an arc above the water before resettling in the reeds.
It is an effort to get back into the car and start the five-hour journey to Green River and Moab, where we will try and find the third and final hide-out on our journey, the enticingly named Robber’s Roost.
Check back tomorrow for the next Outlaw Trail dispatch from the water-forsaken Moab and Robber’s Roost.
