Original Nauvoo Temple Sunstone
Part 12
Further along, near Mitchellville, two, three, four other cars are off the road, flipped on their sides, or…one other again on its roof. This time, however, yellow police tape girdles them indicating, we assume, that they have been cleared of their occupants. We creep along, the anxiety of the morning building from mile marker to mile marker. It is New Year’s Eve day. The last day in the year of our Buddah/Allah/Elohim Lord 2010. The last day of the first decade of the 21st millennium and it feels like things couldn’t get any worse. No change of clothes (or precious few that, even still, we have to wash out in the regulation plastic sink of an EconoLodge every night), a car that will run forever—thanks to the Japanese—but is likely to have its thin hide run over by a sliding Ford Tahoe or Cadillac Escalade–bad talk radio and not a Starbucks in sight.
But passing through Des Moines, it does get worse.
We are drawn to a sudden stop behind a massive 18-wheeler. It’s like having a firewall in front of you with nothing but a phone number to call if we don’t like someone’s driving, and mud flaps with the ubiquitous, silver silhouette of Sister Big Boobs. Cars to the left continue on, but the sign we’ve just passed says that I-80 is veering to the right. Okay. We can wait this out. It might even turn out to be a reprieve from all the slip-sliding away. I can see that the man-boy is back to peering through his John Lennon book, and I almost ask him what’s going on in Liverpool, or have the Fab Four moved on to Hamburg, but the silence among us three, our little family—we are a family, aren’t we?—is calming, and I decide against it. We turn off the car. The sound of engine brakes rumble toward us from the traffic in the left lane. It has warmed up some outside. The sun is even peering through the shattered light of this winter day, this end of the year day. I imagine what it would be like out of here, trudging in warm boots through the Great Plains of the mid-west. Wondering at birds which find life in the barren trees and the grasses now brittle in the winter sunlight, fading like an afterthought.
I am less and less sentimental these days about my pioneer ancestry, but I cannot think of Iowa, let alone sit in it as I am now, without remembering the little nipple of land that juts into the Mississippi south of here, near the Missouri border. The little nipple of land that was, that is Nauvoo, Illinois. It was from this Mormon spot, which in 1844 had a larger population than Chicago, that my people set off across the frozen river and into Iowa to escape what had turned out to be relentless pogroms from nearby Missourian “mobocrats” and, later, from their Illinoisan brethren. They set out in January in long strings of wagons, leaving most of their belongings, their farms, some of their kin in “The City Beautiful” set on a bluff surrounded by what had once been swamps. And some of them remember looking back over their collective shoulder to see their nearly completed temple of white limestone torched, black smoke rising to the sound of wagon wheels over frozen soil.
This trail is south of I-80 but merges somewhere with it in these corn and soybean fields west of here, and as I sit behind our firewall truck in Des Moines, that is where my mind goes, as it is often wont to do despite my best efforts. I shouldn’t complain about our trek. The first wagon train carrying Brigham Young and 140+ other Latter-day Saints spent 120 days on the trail west. The average distance traveled was eight and a half miles per day.
Like I said: I shouldn’t complain. But…of course I will. It’s the most American thing I can think of doing these days.
We move forward. Then stop again. When we get to the junction overpass of I-35, we see a semi—cab and trailer—lying on its side. It appears that as it shuttled down the graded up-ramp of the northbound route it lost its footing. Now it nests in a snow bank as if a giant hand had come out of the sky and gently tipped it over, like a tired toddler, into rest—Whumph! We crawl along, then stop for five, ten minutes at a time in the far right lane. Cheryl is visibly rattled but elevating it through at least three levels of forced cognition: enumerating the harsh details of the scene to me and the man-boy, calculating the time being lost and philosophizing on the broader picture of interstate travel.
Eventually, she picks up the burrito—her phone inconveniently buried in a coat pocket—and calls the dog sitter. This is where she puts on her best face, as cars crawl past us on the left, the windows steamed from the inside, collecting ice on the outside. I’m alternately shifting from drive to park to keep things moving. The man-boy has again discovered the charms of this morning’s USA Today as an alternative to Lennon.
On the phone, C. explains to Kate our predicament in calm, measured tones that belie her perilous state of mind. We are way-laid by ice.
We are witness to repeated road trauma.
We are half a day behind schedule.
We won’t be retuning to Salt Lake City until Jan. 2.
“How is Jiggs?…The cat?…Has Maxine been by? Don’t pay her any mind if she does; she’s already called to tell us that she hasn’t seen you walk the dog the entire time we’ve been gone…Yes…she’s the one. The one who went to Palm Desert for Christmas and, no, when I asked her how long she’d been home before she noticed you hadn’t been walking Jiggs, she said one day.”
More laughter. Release.
“Exactly. How does she know who hasn’t been walking the dog all week if she’s only been home for one day?”
“Un-fucking-believable.”
“Well…thank you so much Kate. Do raid the refrigerator and don’t feel like you have to be nailed to the house.”
The House. Cheryl longs for her house. And so do I, if I’m honest. Not the house, really, but my life…no, my security. My sense of order…you know, the routine that I wanted so badly to interrupt with a “much-needed” vacation. There’s my work at the nonprofit located in the old Del Rey grocery store in the Marmalade District just west of the Capitol Building. There’s the Republican Irish pub where on occasion Cheryl and I will meet up after work to sit at the State’s longest bar—over 70 feet–under the watchful, John Lennon-spectacled eyes of James Joyce, in a hat. There’s our neighborhood with crazy Maxine and Ivo, the art films screened at the Tower at the center of our neighborhood that sits at the junction of 9th South and 9th East.
Liberty Park. The blue and green backdrop of the Wasatch Range to the east. We miss it all.
We finally arrive at the point of Interstate trouble. Three cars have plowed off the curving ramp that continues as I-80. They’ve bee-lined as if on an imaginary track, straight, into the graded hollow under the overpass, two others, one backwards, pushed off to the right—plowed into the snow and dirt, shocking in their incongruity, after all this road is by definition a steady flow of forward-facing and speeding vehicles, a veritable river of wheels, barreling over the earth in a fashion that makes us oblivious to that earth. If not for these three wanton cars covered as they are with snow, ice and mud, their tracks soft, obscenely inappropriate in this hyper-ordered world.
Interstate Eighty is closed.
Interstate Eighty is closed.
