Snowville, Utah

I-80 in Wyoming











Oh the plains of Wyoming. The first time I ever came into the country known as Wyoming was on an epic journey to Washington with my friend Robin. It was my first trip west. West from Iowa. We had come through the sand hills and badlands and then into Wyoming on I-90. I felt fairly certain that, had I not had the acclimatizing step of having gone to college for a few years in Iowa’s tallgrass prairie, I might have totally lost it in the emptiness of this most empty state. It is perhaps worth noting that my car was not working well. It ran but did not start, this may have added to my apparent agoraphobia. We continued that trip without turning off the car, all the way to Washington.
Wyoming this time around, having just had a fairly substantial amount of snow, decided, it seems, to start the job of plowing but not complete it leaving large swathes of the interstate, sometimes one lane, sometimes both, with just enough snow to be compacted into glacial ice making passage nerve-wracking. (Some of this might have to do with the nature of snow in Wyoming to “blow” i.e. not stay put, but still, this is not a new problem and I think Wyoming could figure out a solution, perhaps more of those charming snow fences.)
At the Flying J near Rawlins where I stopped midday for fuel there was no need for a plow whatsoever The semis would just tamp it down into a slippery mess for free.
Just as you are leaving “the equality state” (so named as it was the first to give women the vote, that and they beat the shit out of the gays) it gets interesting, or, to put it another way, just as you enter Utah it gets interesting. I-84 follows a river through there huge soft shouldered glass blue (because of the snow) mountains into the valley of the Salt Lake at Ogden. I wonder, when Brigham Young finally made it to this valley, after all the bullshit he’d been through and declared “This is the place!” I wonder what he thought once he got down to the alkaline shores and first tasted it bitter brine. That must have been a bit of a bummer.
I’m in Snowville just a few miles south of Idaho. There is snow on the ground and the place is just barely a “ville.” A number of widely spread houses, many trailers, with large fenced in yards, everyone has horses and dogs. The only businesses in town are one place with initials for a name, function indeterminable, two diners, and the Flying J by the interstate, where I sit now and pen this missive to you.

One of Snowville's two Diners











Cattle Grate, Snowville, Utah