Chapter41 – From Las Vegas to Salt Lake
Stepping down from the bus, I was bathed in colored lights.
The landscape was as bright as daylight, yet so artificial I could not mistake
it for anything but night. The few hours ride had left me stiff, as if I had
not fully recovered from the original trip west, despite weeks hiding out in
East L.A.
Until then, I had forgotten the gritty details of bus
travel, the pained muscles cramped from the limited space between each seat,
the sweaty trousers sticking to the skin.
L.A. and its unnatural warmth had made me forget the season,
but the cool wind working its way through the lighted canyons of Las Vegas from
the desert beyond, quickly reminded me of how under-dressed I was for early
December. Cold still ruled in
most of the country and I shivered, hurrying behind the rest of the retreating
passengers for the sanctuary of the bus station.
This, unlike the Greyhound bus terminal up the block, seemed
dark in contrast to the surroundings, a small pit of dimness that relieved me a
little after the assault of brightness from the other buildings. Inside --
despite the glitter of the town -- looked and smelled the same, that dingy
sense of temporary hold over and contained cigarette smoke of every terminal I
had visited from New York to Los Angeles. In it, the scent of human despair
seemed best defined, and perhaps, here, the feeling was even more appropriate
than in other places. While the terminals in small towns had had their share of
people seeking escape, no crowd seemed more desperate to leave than those I
then encountered, hollowed faces of people who had gambled their lives in the
casinos and lost, and now had to pick up the threads of what remained, moving
on to that harsher reality where jobs supplied their needs rather than luck of
the draw or the spin of a wheel.
To one side of the small room sat two old ladies on a wooden
bench, each with grey hair bundled behind their heads, each carrying a large
bag that they used for purses. Both seemed remarkably weary, and cringed each
time they eyed the slot machines doing duty near the ticket counter -- machines
determined to squeeze the last coins from the passengers as they boarded buses
to escape.
Several young men -- my age, I suppose -- had a similar
look, though seemed not to notice the slot machines at all, their faces stained
with the expression of losing I would see a year later when I toured the
casinos, boys who had likely driven here in high hopes of becoming high rollers
and had drained not only their wallets, but whatever other resources they had
available, turning over the keys to their car at the local used car dealer --
who spent much time purchasing used vehicles as he did selling them, making
more cash out of each transition that 99 percent of the gamblers did on the
roll of the dice.
Of course, the bus station had another kind, a slick-haired
type of character, who never took losing to heart, wearing the same silk shirt
and the same polished shoes for his three or four day stay, shrugging off the
loss of his stake with the certainty that he would raise another bundle of
bucks to make this trip again, thinking that lady luck might look on him with
more favor next time. This kind was on a perpetual high, and didn't think so
much in terms of winning, as being part of the game. His kind loved the thrill
of being in the game, of pulling something off at great risk -- grinning about
the outcome no matter which way things turned out.
The urge to try the slot machines flowed over me, as if
someone had salted the tiled floor with a substance designed to draw people
like me along. I felt in my pocket for
loose change, and then popped them into the one armed bandit, yanking down the
lever the way I had seen people do in countless movies.
The ticket clerk announced over the PA system that our bus
was now loading, and I rushed back, climbing into my seat again, still dazzled
by the lights, yet puzzled by the counter man's talk. A year or so later, I
would think of his lesson again when I did more than merely pass through Las
Vegas on my way some place else, when I dabbled with gambling with the intent
to win.
As I sat, the change jangled in my pocket, and I felt smug
and weary, and slipped into a dose disturbed only by the rumble of the starting
bus and the movement that sent it back onto the road, the bright artificial
daylight faded behind us as we headed north along Route 15.
I napped long enough to miss the border crossing, though
vaguely recalled passing the oddly lighted fields of the Nellis Air Force base.
Actually, the bus crossed into Arizona first, then into Utah, slicing off a
corner of Arizona well above Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon, though the
remarkable painted features of the landscape had been blotted out by dark, and
the memory of their passing was like that of fitful dream.
This part of journey would have not brought us close to the
more interesting parts of Utah in any case, clinging to the western most slope
of what geologists called the Colorado Plateau, riding along its western flank
paralleling it nearly the who way to Salt Lake City. Later, making our way east
again towards Colorado, we would hug its northern edge. Had I been awake enough
during this ride out of Las Vegas, I might have seen signs for Bryce Canyon or
Kodachrome Basin, but the first time I stirred we passed Apex, Nevada and signs
for Garnet, and then next time a bump woke me, we had just passed Glendale on
our ways towards Riverside. Someone mumbled something about Lost City, but I
saw no signs for that.
We had apparently crossed into Arizona at Mesquite during
one of my nodding and passed north of Mount Bangs -- invisible in the dark had
I been awake -- passed through Little Field and crossed into Utah near a small
town of Atkinville, the southern suburb (if you could call such a remote place
that) of St. George. St. George was large enough a town to have its own
municipal airport.
Although I didn't know it until reading about the area much
later, we were traveling along the shores of what had once been a great inland
sea. National Geographic, several years earlier, called this sea
"Bonneville," and claimed it was a gigantic body of water once
covering much of Western Utah, parts of Nevada and Idaho as well -- equal to
about the size of Lake Michigan, many miles east of us. While that sea reached
depths of 1,000 feet, as the temperature grew hotter and the region more arid,
the sea began to evaporate, leaving only the Great Salk Lake as its next of
kin, a lake that rarely reached deeper than 50 feet.
What the dark didn't hide, distance did, and as with my
initial trip into LA. along the southern route, we missed the truly interesting
part of the state, that southeastern corner people sometimes called Canyon
Country. In fact, the highway we took north towards Salt Lake City seemed to be
a conduit for civilization as town's crowded its sides as if it was a river,
and during my wakeful moments I took note of the road signs Middleton,
Washington, Harrisburg Junction, Pintura. Cedar City, like St. George, had its
own airport, though I saw nothing of the airport and only dark glimpses of the
street as we passed through. I nodded and woke again long enough to spot a sign
for Cove Fort, then fell asleep until Fillmore and another small airport there.
I missed the rest of the trip north, waking abruptly at dawn
from a deep sleep I didn't believe I could get on a bus, staring out the window
as Salt Lake City appeared out of the mist. This last a gentle rain I had not
expected to find in a city located in the heart of a dessert. In fact, in the
fog of waking, I actually sat up with a start, thinking I had returned to
Paterson, since many of the buildings resembled those in eastern city's legal
district, bearing that same turn-of-century design typical of stores constructed
at the end of the Victorian era. With the rain, the distant details faded so
that the mountains the stood to one side of the city could have been the low
hills of Paterson's Watcung Mountains, instead of the sharp arm of the Rockies
making their way south from Canada.
The city, I would later learn, had a population in decline,
175,000 lived inside its bowl-like boundaries, many of whom did not live up to
the financial expectations the founders had presumed when coming here. Poverty
was rampant and would grow worse. Even the go-go dancers, who plied their trade
within sight of the sacred domes of the Mormon temple, earned less than minimum
wage. I also learned later that blacks -- although a significant enough part of
the population -- were viewed as much as subhuman here as places from which
they had migrated in the deep south.
Salt Lake City -- once known as The Great Salt Lake City --
was incorporated in 1847, and when Utah became a state in 1851, it became the
state capital. The city rested on the side of the Jordan River near the Great
Salt Lake. The nearby mountains were of the Wasatch range. By far the largest
city in the state, its fame, however, centered around its being the world
headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints -- more
commonly known as the Mormons. The city also served as a hub for farm products
produced in fields heavily irrigated, and it saw shipments of silver, led,
copper zinc, and hosted other industries. Because of the mist hovering over the
city at our arrival, I did not see the most prominent feature of the city, the
gigantic temple built on Temp Square at the precise center of the city.
Salt Lake City had the good fortune of rising from the
dessert at an opportune time, becoming an oasis for travelers drawn west by the
California gold rush. After 1849, the city became a central supply point for
overland travel to California and was connected with the first transcontinental
railroad by a line built in 1869 by Brigham Young to Ogden.
Salt Lake City, however, was an economic contradiction,
thick with neighborhoods that oozed wealth, such as Arlington Hills, near the
east side of the town district where the town's older upper crust made their
homes. Although still in ruins when I arrived in December, 1970s, the Avenues,
towards the southside of the temple would become the destination for newer
wealth, those not quite snobby enough to live in Arlington Hills. The working
class, just rich enough to own homes thanks to GI benefits after World War Two,
lived slightly further to the east in an area called Canyon Rim. The oldest,
and perhaps, the most legitimate neighborhood in Salt Lake City was that of
Capital Hill with its steep streets and buildings thick with the Victorian
taste for Greek Revival, Queen Anne and Victorian classics. This area started
up in the 1950s and served as a high brow destination until the Great
Depression brought many of its population to their knees. After World War II,
few vets had patience or desire to make the necessary repair and it became a eloquent
slum, where the town's few hippies and the more numerous prostitutes set up
shop.
Few moments struck me so eerily as when the bus brought us
within view of the Mormon Temple, its spires rising out of the rainy mist as if
indeed the seat of heaven on earth.
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