Seriously, WHAT has happened to my country? I drove today from Laramie, through Salt Lake City, and into Wendover, Utah, where I will try and spend the night at a Best Western. All along Interstate 80, and I mean ALL ALONG the highway, I saw innumerable fruit juice bottles full of urine, no doubt tossed out the windows of passing road trains. Upon every strand of barbed wire, you cannot help but notice the ubiquitous plastic bag fluttering in the wind, looking like a tattered flag. And gone – almost completely gone – are the neat and tidy homesteads and farmhouses. What I saw and what I will no doubt see in my nightmares are endless graveyards of mobile homes.
Does anyone not have the time to have them towed away and disposed of? Hundreds of them through various places along Wyoming’s share of Interstate 80. And then there was the Denny’s in Rock Springs. A perfect example of how one can only hope to make a pig look better through the creative use of lipstick. The place was FILTHY. The Waitress was fat and sloppy and candidly, she smelled. I suppose I should not expect much from a Denny’s, but my hopes were raised when I noticed a landscaper putting down new ground cover. I was wrong. And I won’t go back.
Utah was a little better, but not by much. Utah suffers from another problem: Interstate 80 is simply crumbling away in many places as you emerge from the Wasatch Mountain pass. I mean, hey, do they not have the money for infrastructure? How embarrassing!
Outside of Salt Lake, to the west, as you cross that great causeway and the lake that is Salt Lake, I noticed that literally hundreds of telephone poles have been abandoned. HUNDREDS! Perhaps 25 miles of telephone poles just rotting away in the salt marsh. The wires have been cut and are wrapped around each pole, almost as if to say, “there, that’s good enough.” No one apparently cares enough to have them removed. But that is good lumber, is it not? And through many of them are the plastic bags I spoke of earlier. They are literally everywhere.
Or, maybe it’s just one bag following me?
Coming into Wendover my hopes were high that I would be enjoying a night’s stay at a clean Best Western Motor Lodge. Nope. The room stinks, the girl who checked me in was so large and so fashion-unaware, that her stomach was leaking out of her too-small-shirt and kept inadvertently opening the cash register drawer. Disgusting. And in the room, the soap dispenser doesn’t work. I asked for a bar of soap – nope – none of that. Fatty gave me an unopened dispenser re-fill bottle. Outside, the grounds are a complete mess. I doubt that anyone has raked leaves or mowed lawns since last year. Is there no pride?
Wendover will never be anyone’s idea of a nice little American town. On one side is Utah and no casinos. On the other side, the west side, is Nevada and the casinos. And everywhere is plastic grass and plastic bags fluttering in the wind. Kitsch – is that the word?
As I drove through the outskirts of Park City, Utah, I could see the building boom that has consumed what was once a sleepy little ski village. Thousands of homes have sprung up. And I doubt that not-one-of-them could be even remotely afforded by a middle-class couple. And way off in the distance are the abandoned mobile homes. And the fucking plastic bag.
A nation of contrasts and a nation of slobs.
