City on a hill

I left Grand Junction this morning without it leaving much of an impression on me. Not that I didn't try to have an adventure! -- but adventures are harder to come by on Sundays, and Grand Junction's museums and wineries aren't really my scene anyway. I settled for the Trail Through Time, just west along the interstate. The trail winds through the hills beside a mesa on the high scrubland, showcasing classical Wild West terrain to great effect, and runs past many dramatic rock formations, some with dinosaur and plant fossils embedded in them. Courtesy of the trail, I had an invigorating and nearly solo morning constitutional, then set out for Salt Lake City.

Utah's cliffs and plateaus would have seemed breathtaking back in Kansas, but seemed gentle and a little boring after yesterday's Rocky Mountain passage. They were a welcome reprieve from the constantly-one-second-away-from-death peaks of Colorado. (Though there was some snow on the road at one point!!!) To pass the time while driving I listened to an audiobook version of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," courtesy of Wiley. Audiobooks are much better than music as a way to kill time; they hold your attention and let your muscle memory deal with the road. Outliers is pretty good. It's a lot like The Tipping Point in that it's a book-length elaboration of a single self-evident sentence, in this case "even for the talented, success relies on being in the right place at the right time." But also like The Tipping Point, the case studies Gladwell uses to make his (foregone-conclusion) argument are fascinating in themselves. It might be better to think of Gladwell as a talented essayist who organizes his monographs around central themes rather than the social visionary he presents himself as.

But you're not here for my literary criticism, are you? Outliers was just a means to Salt Lake City. I exited the interstate at a randomly selected mile marker within the city and began exploring downtown. I soon found myself driving up a steep grade and staring directly at the Utah State Capitol, an architecturally gorgeous building very much modeled after the U.S. Capitol in Washington. I couldn't go inside because it was Sunday -- go figure -- but I got a couple pictures, plus a pamphlet about Temple Square from the tourist information center across the street. Temple Square is Salt Lake City's Loop -- a block of buildings with names at the heart of downtown. But where the Chicago Loop is very commercial, Temple Square beams Mormonism. Its centerpiece is Salt Lake Temple, which unfortunately I couldn't visit due to construction -- it figures that the one building you'd expect to be open on a Sunday was closed for a different reason! I did, however, sit in a pew inside the Salt Lake Tabernacle and snapped photos of its organ, one of the twenty biggest in the world. Just sitting in that building is a remarkable experience; the tabernacle seems bizarrely full of space for its size even though it isn't as lofty as one expects from a religious structure.

Once I was done wandering around Temple Square I got back in the car and headed for Red Iguana. This Mexican restaurant shows up in all the travel guides as a culinary center of the city. It's a pretty large place with lots of parking, yet still has a hole-in-the-wall atmosphere that makes you feel cared for even as you're stuffed into the dining rooms with a few dozen other parties. (At 4:50 it was already on a 45-minute wait! I read some Neverwhere until my name was called.) I ordered a pork shank that was served in a thick, savory sauce made from a couple different kinds of chili. It was pretty good -- which if you know how I generally feel about Mexican food you will understand is high praise!

Of course, food tastes better when you're in a good mood. I was, and still am! Salt Lake City is unflaggingly welcoming; I haven't met a person here yet who seemed jaded or standoffish. The camera around my neck earned me welcomes here rather than the benign contempt I get in other areas. The city is also very easy to navigate, either on foot or by car. This place and Eustis are the two cities I've seen so far this trip where I might actually like to live -- though every city without exception has been fun to pass through!

Tomorrow I'll tour the Great Salt Lake, then set off for the little-known town of Winnemucca, Nevada, my last waypoint before my San Francisco terminus. As usual, I don't know what to expect from Winnemucca. Making up your adventures as you go along is fun!

The minor fall, the major lift

I talked yesterday about coping mechanisms, and I left one out: music! You can't have a road trip without music. It's a contradiction in terms. So I'm left with the pleasant chore of assembling a list of road songs and love songs from my collection of music. My collection is deep but not broad; I've got everything Suzanne Vega ever sang and a lot of Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon, but ask me to cue up some AC/DC or Hootie and the Blowfish (or for that matter to name any song either band ever produced) and I'll come up empty. Fortunately, Vega, Cohen, and Simon all sing a lot of love songs, and Simon in particular has a lot of songs that intertwine travel and love -- Hearts and Bones, Train in the Distance, the Myth of Fingerprints, Homeward Bound, and Slip Slidin' Away all occur to me without consulting a playlist. (They are all also absolutely first-class songs, with the possible exception of Homeward Bound, which is second-class but catchy and charismatic.)

As I may have mentioned, I don't have a lot of experience of music, but I'm pretty sure you could listen to every platinum record the RIAA ever certified and not do better than Leonard Cohen for the sheer quantity of soulful, lyrical ballads about the melancholy aspects of love. Here I have to consult a playlist just to narrow it down. You have the complexity and rawness of Hallelujah alongside the simple, imagistic, sad velvet of Alexandra Leaving. You have the surreal yet eviscerating pathos of One of Us Cannot Be Wrong alongside the very concrete and oddly refreshing memoir of Chelsea Hotel #2. Not a lot of road songs, though, just love songs. Where Paul Simon treks through Africa to get ideas for his music, you can tell Cohen is a homebody; even his songs about freedom don't usually invoke the imagery of travel.

Suzanne Vega's love songs are maybe a hair less complex than Cohen's but more varied. For all his permutations of flatware and condiments, at times you get the sense Cohen is serving you basically the same steak in nine out of ten of his songs. I've never felt that way about Vega. Her songs have a higher standard deviation of subject and significance and resonance. So you get some songs that are perfect road/love songs (Ludlow Street, Calypso, Penitent, World Before Columbus, and In Liverpool leap to mind, each a five-star song, the latter three almost celestial in their beauty) along with a bunch of songs that I really honestly dislike quite a lot and have nothing to do with my themes.

And then there are the few outliers, the songs by other artists I've been accidentally exposed to. Everything off Anjani Thomas's album is a love song ranging from listenable to almost pull-off-the-highway-till-your-eyes-clear in quality. A couple Feist songs here for letting the mind drift, a few Liz Phair songs there for grit, and in case I get bored of the singer-songwriter stuff I have a little Tokio Hotel and Evanescence and Vertical Horizon (not to mention the entire soundtrack of Avenue Q) to provide a change of pace.

So let me put the question to you, if you're reading this: what's your favorite song that integrates themes of travel and love?