Shaking Down Sugartown

[NOTE: This report was written yesterday but, due to unforeseen primative technological conditions, was not filed until this evening.]

I-70 West
In transit from Green River, Utah to Las Vegas, Nevada

Slap-happy and on the road again, freshly escaped from a furnace of a hotel in Utah... more milk and honey... very possibly, but it just might be sour and covered with weird African bees... the Great Divide disappoints, maybe Carhenge was better?... terrorizing the natives...

The night before we left for the trip, we watched a DVD of the Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense" at Jon's house. "Same as it ever was," David Byrne sang and slapped his forehead with his palm, over and over again. Once in a lifetime, indeed.

This has become something of a mutant rallying cry for the trip. Floating in a chilly pool, toasted and twisted, at a ghetto-ass motel in Green River, Utah (the only vacant rooms for over 100 miles) with kids about one step away from playing Frogball lounging on the patio. Well, how did I get here? Slap!.

***
In the morning, we set out from Denver and headed off for Boulder, about 40 minutes outside the city.

A few years ago, I would've thought Boulder to be Sugartown, Mecca in the mountains. From the couple of hours we spent there, it seemed to be where tour goes when there's no tour. Dreadies wandered down the street, looking purposeful, perhaps more at home than Shakedown. We had lunch at a wonderfully tasty dive called the Sink, where Phish, moe., Widespread Panic, Spearhead, Weird Al, and the Dead all had a place on the jukebox.

Everything has some grim reality just underneath it, though. What is Boulder's? Where is the end of this trip? Mobius strips don't exist in nature, even real ones have to have a piece of Scotch tape on them somewhere. That's not a reason not to consider moving someplace, though, but it is something to consider. The more light there is, the deeper the shadows -- David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" would be an extreme example, an idyllic little town punctuated by angry ghosts, murders, and heinous incest.

We wandered into Naropa University (formerly the Naropa Institute), the only accredited Buddhist academic institution in the country and happened onto a tour. In the fall, I'll be entering my senior year of college. After that, grad school is certainly an option, and Naropa seems to offer a damn fine writing program. The school, like the town, seemed bucolic -- a peaceful academy nestled in the mountains. The descriptions that the tour guide gave of the place also sounded interesting -- a sensible mixture of contemplation and a serious devotion to learning.

The school seemed like an institution that sticks heartily by its ethics, which is obviously something to be admired. At the same time, those ethics seem themselves to be guided by an almost New Age kind of mysticism which may or may not actually add up to anything deeper. Slap! For some it might. A hint of unsure cynicism permeated the tour guide's voice over the course of circumnavigation around the compact campus. He didn't seem hugely confident in the balance between spiritualism and the development of writing as a highly personalized craft. Writing is not always based in logic, but that doesn't mean it's based in mysticism either.

This seems like the most basic kind of tension in Boulder -- the equilibrium between the way society and an alternative to it. The question of how much must be taken from a traditional structure in order to still survive. Whether or not this is actually embodied in Boulder or even a real issue is, of course, something that I have no clue about. I spent four hours in the place. Who knows?

***
Driving through Rocky Mountain National Park, we stopped at a small mountain lake with a small trail leading off behind it. We pulled the car over in a parking lot next to a restroom shack. On the way from the car to the bathroom, we passed a little placard, next to which a yellow line was painted across part of the sidewalk. "The Great Divide," the sign read, along with a geological description of what, precisely, that meant.

The sight of the Great Divide was wholly unimpressive. For something with so much poetic significance behind it, just to see a yellow line in parking lot was kind of a letdown. Of course, I had no idea we would even be crossing it, so it was a bit of a surprise when we found it. Nonetheless, I can file my brief encounter with it under the same theory/practice debate that the Carhenge discussion tended towards. Are all the symbolic qualities embodied by the reality of the Great Divide really expressed in the thing itself? Of course not. Slap!

There's a whole lot of metaphoric wisdom in the idea of a particular point where water flows towards the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Pacific on the other. In practice, it's just not that impressive. At least not in Rocky Mountain National Park. The concept of a huge placed, just stinkin' overloaded with emotional resonance, is something that is high in truth value, perhaps, but low in actual fact. It's truth exists in a kind of nether world that encircles reality.

***
As the sun set over the Rockies, we unfortunately missed the transition from mountains to desert, which we hoped to observe. Having been reared on Bugs Bunny cartoons (among other things), I was never quite sure how to visualize the end of a mountain range. Instead, the darkness set in just as the road began to straighten out from tricky passes and tunnels through hillsides.

Eventually, it unwound into a flat ribbon, turning gracefully occasionally, that seemed to float like a bridge in the darkness. We had no idea what was around us, just that it was moving very fast. The road was smooth, and the car hugged it tightly with the aide of the high-octane gas we treated her to. When we tumbled out at a gas station on the fringe of the state, I felt almost landsick. I stumbled around almost drunkenly, giggling.

"Get ahold of yourself," Jon snarled. "Good God, we're in a public place, man."

"Bugs," I snorted, restless and slap-happy. "All over the windshield and headlights. Look at the fuckers: they've dented the goddamn license plate."

"Language!" he snapped. "And, and anyway, those aren't dents," he said, picking one of flies the wings. "So don't you worry your pretty little head." He patted me.

"Careful," I hissed. "You're drawing attention to us. You don't want to... draw attention."

Just then, a Camero pilled up, as gleaming as our car was coated in insect juice. A kid - no more than 16 or 17 - hopped out of the driver's seat; his hair greased back, earring shining, on top of the world. Four moderately attractive, quite scantily clad, girls followed after him, nearly swooning.

"Is the price of love in western Colorado?" I muttered. "Male with a Camero?"

 "Just don't think about it," Jon instructed, tying his shoe on the bumper.

I tried to place the greaser and his giggling groupies out of my mind using the super-secret manta. "Jacquesderridajacquesderridajacquesderrida..." I repeated to myself until I had once again achieved clarity. "DINNER!" I proclaimed, thrusting my hand skyward, pointer finger an exclamation point. Slap!

Jon grabbed it and put it down. "Remember what I said?" he inquired. The girls turned to look at us. I smiled stupidly before slanting my eyes and gnashing my teeth. Jon placed his arms around me and led me towards the truck stop.

"Excuse my friend," he called out to the girls. "He's been driving for 19 hours and his tapeworm is acting up again."

"Nonsense," I called, twisting free of his grip. "Thadeous is perfectly under control."

"The hell you talking about?" Jon breathed as we entered the restaurant.

"Just wanted to give them a good scare," I explained. "If I didn't, no one else might..."

Same as it ever was.

Jesse Jarnow can be reached at jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu or by his homepage. Previous tour journals are located here.