Site Title

Far west freeway takes us through Nephi with 199 miles to go, 2 hours and 45 minutes.

“Back in the day, it was expensive for people to be guided city to city without the detail. Google had to catch up with the roadmaps. Pretty incredible how they did it all…” Jay trails off as I eye the rust and pale yellow expanses of field.

“We think we’re so clever, but we are just beginning!” he says as we come up on a crossroads leading to an industrial park.

Mountains act as our compass as we explore like Christopher Columbus.

“It would be so cool to take a trip through the galaxy, go explore like those little drone-orb things. To see how their plants grow—their weather. I’m sure the galaxy in its entirety is so beautiful,” Jay says.

The depth of his mind interests me equally.

We leave behind the small hills turning into yellow desert, like my dream the other night, and take a left to drive through Holden.

Jay’s detailed, descriptive ramblings entertain me with visualizations.

He asks if we can stop to grab more coffee. “We’ve been going two hours.”

The hills have grown, uprooted before our eyes into a majestic stretch of violet mountainside.

Behind us, the clouds are speckled away from the eastern mountain line with golden lining.

Jay notices a few black birds, calling them by their name: corvids.

A semi-truck blows back and forth, spraying us with dirt and pebbles.

“Big bird, big bird, big bird—he flew away.” Jay calls my attention back to the road as I jot notes into my phone.

It’s a quarter past six a.m., and the sun has just cracked, leaking its Sundays across the sky from its highest peak on the mountain bend to the east.

Jay notices cattle. I notice bales of hay that stand a few feet above the truck on the side of the highway.

The truck’s shadow bends back and forth on the sagebrush and bushes alongside the highway.

We wonder if my grandma is getting up by now, getting ready to have breakfast.

Probably smiling with sleepy eyes.

The starts of crops look like green Zen gardens.

Deer, antelope with black stripes on their faces.

“Birds in the road! Stay—ah!!!!” Jay exclaims as we come up to I-15 in half a mile.

Rain clouds up ahead and to the east.

A tinge of orange pops up in the landscape to the right, the rest fading.

The sun is soft today.

We are passing a reservation on the right.

I wonder what it looks like.

Through canyons of the peaks and onto plateaus, we come closer to our arrival,

passing rusty vintage trucks spread out like lawn ornaments.