Chapter 1
Chris
Right away you knew
it was a front for something. I’m rumbling and coughing off the lonely tributary
of a winding highway into the unplowed environs of a boarded up gas station.
No, it’s half-boarded, in a sort of we’re-not-open-but-we could-be-tomorrow-or-later-or-just-we-didn’t-finish-breakfast-yet
kind of way. Passing under the typical petrol station shelter, the rig sighs to
neutral and I roll it in next to an old Pontiac,
which is covered with two inches of new powder at this point.
The main door
creaks that way you expect a small town filling station’s door to sound—fast
and high, like it’s been opened hundreds of times before by strangers keen on a
warm welcome. And so but already there’s too many people in here for the lack
of cars, striding tangentially of each other for definite purposes unapparent
to me. I stomp my boots off.
The tangential
paths lead my eyes to incongruous corners of a haphazard room, a main desk
behind a snapping fireplace which itself bisects a strange assembly of
overstuffed faux-leather chairs that face nothing in particular. A dim lunch
counter is obscured by department store racks of t-shirts off to my right,
circuitous shelves of dry goods are brightly illumined beyond a massive pegboard,
and a forgotten hallway holds forgotten Native American paraphernalia that some
tourist thought about buying once just to bide their time and to pretend they
had done something with their day by looking at these wall hung objects of
insistent value—20% OFF!—but then they touched their chin and no, but turned on
their heels as if to be sure to have appeared thorough in their browsing and
then sighed and dropped their arms and look up with their eyebrows
demonstrating their satisfaction at being assured they did not in
fact find the Native American art piece for which they were somehow
specifically searching. Anyway, so they buy two cookies and look around for the
bathroom without making a big show of looking for the bathroom, hoping to
communicate that sort of well I didn’t come in to just use the bathroom but you
know if my eyes pass over one then yeah sure I might as well pop in and use it
ok sure oh yeah there it is huh ok I guess I’ll pop in.
So I do just that
and make a confident nod to someone who’s just appeared behind this main desk
busying themselves within unseen work but also half-undistractedly standing at
servant-attention, and with the pace of my walk I try to indicate hi yes just
heading to the bathroom the location of which I have indeed ascertained right
over here, but all I really say is ‘hey.’
So but I’m in there,
and I feel like I should hurry it up so I can quickly reemerge and explain my
presence to whoever feels the need to tend to it, the presence, and I’m
wondering what this whole operation could be a front for, but mostly I’m
wondering if there’s wireless. And as I’m wondering all of this, I happen to
notice that woah this bathroom was really gerry-rigged in here, the slate of
the sink having been cut by a masonry saw just so the door of the stall will
fit and close, and in the meantime, my hands and fingers have already removed
my phone from the left pants pocket and touched all the appropriate places on
the touchscreen to ascertain the ever-important wireless situation.
And now I think of
this joke from an Asian comedian I heard where he goes to China and he’s hoping
to see an Americatown neighborhood where there’s lots of overweight white
people yammering in loud English dipping things in ketchup and ranch and
looking for free wireless. But so either way I’ve got my heart set on coffee
and maybe a baked good of some kind, but is this the kind of place where I can
sort of camp out for a good bit of the day I wonder—and that’s how this day got
started anyway.
The afternoon
before I had emerged finally from the Southern limits of Utah, driving with great purpose out of the
Navajo Cliffs of Zion across some vast and unexpected pastureland but it looks
like windblown desert to me. There’s a gathering late-winter storm, or I don’t
know maybe it’s a dissipating storm I’m bad at that game, and I’m glad to feel
alone, no big towns up ahead and I’m wanting/hoping to just be able to drive
for a few hours, though I don’t want to get to the Grand Canyon just yet.
Weirdly I’m emerging from the desert, thinning traffic, but the road is rising
and winding until I have sweeping views of the red cliffs north of me, so I
play the trumpet amidst some trees until the wind has numbed my hands.
Back in the car and
there’s the reluctant feeling again, where I want to delay the inevitable (it
now being dusk) where I have to put this land literally behind me and head
south, and so but I’m finding myself in this forest now, the road all to myself
and the snow-covered ground has this inviting quality to it, like this R.
Frostian peaceful abyss and so I think yeah I’ll camp here and I leave the rig
and start walking deeper into the forest. And so I’m gently squinting against
the cold of sundown hands in pockets and realize that I’ve passed beyond the
inviting threshold I had first noticed from the road and into a lost sun-starved
heavy darkness. So sudden was the change (or the realization) that I’m spooked
and I retrace my steps to the car and set up a tent for the night, looking
forward to some morning coffee at this half-abandoned looking place lored for
it’s baked goods, which is okay with me.
It’s all quickly
falling snow in the morning and again there is this ominous current humming under
the pace of white flakes that’s just a little too brisk for R.F.’s New England daydreams. So zip to it packing up the gear
and I’m in the car rumbling in reverse back towards the road, trying to ignore
that heaviness from deep in the trees.
I’m reckless now
throwing the wheel around without really first cleaning off the rear window,
and not wanting to lose momentum I gas myself right out of last night’s tire
tracks into a foot of snow.
Someone answers the
phone at the inn after one ring and it’s bizarre because it’s one ring but they
also sound sort of absent or distracted like they were expecting me to call but
oh-yeah-here-he-is-yep-we’re-here, ‘hello, Jacob Lake Inn.’ And so I’m thumbing
a tourist mag I picked up two days ago about AZ all Jan Brewer smiling and
bathrobes overlooking resort pools and hot air balloons, and in the sideview
here comes exactly the kind of rusting-out pickup I want to see.
Out pops a pair of
cute furry boots from the passenger door, and so I’m surprised to see this
young couple commanding the machine, but sure yeah I’m all apologies for my
laziness about my driving which is how I decide to characterize what is mostly
just stupidity. But nevermind oh, Alaska cool yeah this and that Alaska and
it’s all fine and we get the chain on the front and yank the rig around a bit,
punish her because of something I did, and I pet her and apologize as usual.
But so she’s riding
okay now just happy to be free and I’m back on the highway easing her up the
blacktop on brown slush barely getting her to 25 mph, and okay here it is the
gas station/garage with this fabled inn beyond it. Throwing down to second gear,
I realize the whole deal is set back in that same ominous shadow, somehow the
sun is bright white in the snowing late am, and yet this place is sort of
forlornly offset from the road like it’s a part of the depths of the trees
beyond it.
The white pickup
truck somehow disappears down an unseen road and I’m left to park near a massive
pile of stacked firewood and these snow-blanketed cars.
And anyway so out I
come from the bathroom and I make a big show of drying off my hands on the
front of my filthy trousers, loosening my scarf to simply hanging position, and
one girl takes up sentry at the lunch counter in the distance to accommodate my
overtures of is-there-any-hot-coffee-kicking around-heh--g’mornin’. I
seat myself at one of the dark red revolving stools watching the sides of other
faces dart past rhythmically, pushing in and out of two stainless steel doors
with porthole-style glass leading to what one would presume to be the kitchen.
The pace is steady without being frantic, much like the snow outside which
seems to be neither relenting nor increasing.
Realizing I have no where to be any time soon or any sense of where that
nowhere is, I make a motion to seat myself across the store/restaurant/lobby at
the silent, lit fireplace, and the coffee attendee, after checking to be sure
yes in fact all of the other stools have remained empty in the past six minutes,
she follows me to the fire, somehow casual about matching the rhythmic step of
the interweaving colleagues.
I soon learn that
the whole staff 1) attends, used to attend, or will attend a university in
Idaho associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, 2) did
not necessarily know each other prior to their work here in middle of nowhere
Northern AZ, 3) cannot or choose not to explain just why the owners of such an
establishment would chose to hire, feed, and house a small battalion of young
Mormons to operate said establishment, and 4) do not have any immediately
apparent duties but are nonetheless busy and endlessly performing them.
Entertaining some
meandering questions concerning LDS that I find myself suddenly and vocally curious
about, various staff members pause at various angles to face me and chime in to
answer my questions, but as I turn my head to hear the response of one, staff
member that is, another will somehow seamlessly return to the invisible path
from which they had briefly stepped, purposefully returning to a mysterious and
one might imagine calmly and mechanically executed task.
Massive
stove-length logs appear from outside my periphery during this time,
maintaining a pleasant fire as I drain numerous cups of coffee. Each time I
lift the cup, I somehow subconsciously move the (clearly) extraneous saucer,
only to observe myself religiously and subconsciously returning the cup to its
saucer, lest I place the cup somewhere else (such as on the carpeted floor
where I am sitting/leaning/lying) and render the saucer observably pointless.
Now and then, staff
members will depart from the fire’s vicinity where I have set myself,
announcing nonchalantly specific tasks they must go perform. The staff announce
them, I mean. “Turning on the fryer for lunch” and “making the buns” are
mentioned passively and in a tone that implies that any lack of understanding
on my part should be simply attributed to my mere unfamiliarity with the
natural and expected duties of any staff member of the JLI. Other staff members
lackadaisically attend to me who has now resituated himself at the lunch
counter, wondering what rooms might exist beyond the walls of the immediately
observable polygon in which I find myself. Meanwhile, further staff members
arrive or rather return from unspecified places in unseen vehicles, and one
quickly re-exits in order to operate a backhoe for the purpose of plowing the
seemingly unnecessarily large parking lot.
I fetch my empty
water jugs, and as one girl fills them, I remark at the surreality of the
place, its isolation, its mysteriously numerous staff, and its incongruent
preparedness for large crowds of customers who do not in fact seem soon to
visit, nor are there sign of them having visited any time recently. I receive
politely chuckled affirmations of these observations, but can garner no further
explanation.
‘It was really
strange…’ I sort of trail off.
‘On 89A, you said?’
he asks, his eyebrows denting the flesh between them.
‘Yeah, after you
leave Fredonia and you’re heading towards Flag here.”
He gives the
overturned glass a quick glance and then sets it down next to the others,
throwing the towel over his shoulder.
‘Before Marble Canyon,’
I add, lifing my stout.
‘Mel, you ever
heard of a place called Jacob’s Lake Inn?”
Mel slides his
empty forward as the bartender starts opening another one.
‘Jac-OB Lake,’
I quickly interject.
‘Sure, yeah,
there’s an old gas station there, and a roadhouse, you kind of pass it on your
left right where it hits 67.’
‘This guy’s saying he
had coffee at the roadhouse there.’
Not in the last
twenty years you didn’t,’ he says turning to me. ‘That place hasn’t been open
since the Stateys found out about the Dungeon.’
I inhale to ask
what that’s all about, but I’m cut off by some loud commotion outside. My
old Trooper’s spouting flames three times its height, the Alaskan plates blown
clean off by the explosion.
_______
