We left the beer in the fridge.
The beer was crisp and hoppy with a rich, fall flavor. The soap was “French milled” and chalky, falling apart and smelled like stale fat. The soap, we remembered to steal. The beer… we forgot to remove from the mini-fridge in the motel room. I’m not sure that was such a fair trade.
This is rather the essence of Rock Springs, WY. It’s kind of like an unwashed armpit, a poor-urban sprawl of a town full of trailers and dusty depression. Jonmikel almost got a job there, but thank god for the Federal Government, their incestuous bureaucracy, and their odd habit of rethinking funding and districts. JM tried to sell the town and the job to me with a cheap Victorian home and the Flaming Gorge. It didn’t work, but had he gotten the job, I suppose I would have pretended for a time.
So begins our road trip, by leaving our beer in the fridge of a run-down, sad Days Inn in Rock Springs. Thread-bare rooms, lead paint chips on the floor. A breakfast of cheap, gas station pastries, screaming children and mothers who were too tired to care. But we had to make it to Moab.
Once we escaped the endless openness of southeastern Wyoming and into the curves and mountains and canyons of Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area, the high plains seemed ages away. Pinon pines replaced scrubby sage, crumbling desert replaced by the deep greens of a reservoir oasis. We slip from the unwelcoming into boater’s paradise, a dammed Eden no doubt built on the ruins of ruins.
But a pretty little pocket of beauty in the Armpit of Wyoming, nonetheless.
No comments:
Post a Comment