scattered town to the next, creeping across a landscape like Neptune. For long, empty hours your one goal in life is to get to Dry Gulch or Cactus City or wherever. You sit there watching the highway endlessly unfurl and the odometer advancing with the speed of centuries and all you think about is getting to Dry Gulch and hoping by some miracle it will have a McDonald's or at least a coffee shop. And when at last you get there, all there is is a two- pump gas station and a stall with an old Indian woman selling Navajo trinkets and you realize that you have to start the process all over again with another impossibly isolated hamlet with a depressingly unpromising name: Coma, Doldrum, Dry Well, Sunstroke.
The distances are almost inconceivable. There is often thirty miles between houses and a hundred miles or more between towns. What would it take to make you live in a place where you had to drive seventy-five miles just to buy a pair of shoes-and even then they would look as if they came from a funeral home? The answer to my question, of course, is that not many people do want to live in such a place, except for Indians, who were never given much choice. I was now driving across the largest Indian reservation in America-a Navajo reservation stretching for 150 miles from north to south and Z00 miles from east to west-and most of the few cars along the highway were driven by Indians. Almost without exception these were big old Detroit cars in dreadful condition, with all the trim gone or flopping loosely, and with at least one mismatched door and important-looking pieces hanging from the undercarriage, clattering on the highway, shooting out sparks or dense smoke.
They never seemed to be able to get over about forty miles an hour, but they were always difficult to pass because of the way they drifted around on the highway.
Occasionally they would drift far off to the right, sometimes even kicking up desert dust, and I would shoot past. Always it was the same sight: a car packed with Indian men and boys and a driver drunk beyond repair, sitting there with a wet-dream look on his face-the look of a man who is only barely conscious but having a splendid time nonetheless.
At Page, Arizona, home of the Glen Canyon Dam, I passed into Utah and almost immediately the landscape improved. The hills grew purplish and red and the desert took on a blush of color. After a few miles, the sagebrush thickened and the hills became darker and more angular. It all looked oddly familiar. Then I consulted my Mobil guidebook and discovered that this was where all the Hollywood Westerns were made. More than a hundred film and television companies had used Kanab, the next town down the road, as their headquarters for location shooting.
This excited me, and when I got to Kanab, I stopped and went into a cafe to see if I could find out more. A voice from the back called out that she would be just a minute, so I had a look at the menu on the wall. It was the strangest menu I had ever seen. It was full of foods I had never heard of: potato logs ('small, medium and family size'), cheese sticks for 89 cents, pizza pockets for $1.39, Oreo shakes for $1.25. The special offer was '8oz log, roll and slaw, $7.49.' I decided I would have coffee. After a moment the woman who ran the cafe came out wiping her hands on a towel. She told me some of the films and TV shows that had been shot around Kanab: Duel at Diablo, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 'My Friend Flicka,' 'The Rifleman,' some Clint Eastwood movies.
I asked her whether any Hollywood stars ever came in for some potato logs or cheese sticks. She shook her head wistfully and said no. Somehow this didn't altogether surprise me.
I spent the night at Cedar City and in the morning drove to Bryce Canyon National Park, which was invisible on account of fog and snow, and then, in a surly mood, to Zion National Park, where it was like summer. This was very odd because the two parks are only about forty miles apart, and yet they seemed to inhabit different continents as far as the weather went. If I live forever I will not begin to understand the weather of the West.
Zion was incredibly beautiful. Whereas at the Grand Canyon you are on the top looking down, at Zion you are at the bottom looking up. It is just a long, lush canyon, dense with cottonwood trees along the valley floor, hemmed in by towering copper-colored walls of rock-the sort of dark, forbidding valley you would expect to pass through in a hunt for the lost city of gold. Here and there long, thin waterfalls emerged from the rock face and fell a thousand feet or more down to the valley, where the water collected in pools or tumbled onward into the swirling Virgin River. At the far end of the valley the high walls squeezed together until they were only yards apart. In the damp shade, plants grew out of cracks in the rock, giving the whole the appearance of hanging gardens. It was very picturesque and exotic.
The sheer walls on either side looked as if they might rain boulders at any moment-and indeed they sometimes do. Halfway along the path the little river was suddenly littered with rocks, some of them the size of houses. A sign said that on July 16, 1981, more than 15,000 tons of rock fell i,ooo feet into the river here, but it didn't say whether there were any people squashed beneath them. I daresay there were. Even now in April there were scores of people all along the path; in July there must have been hundreds. At least a couple of them must have got caught. When the rocks came tumbling down, there would be no place to run.
I was standing there reflecting on this melancholy thought when I became aware of a vaguely irritating whirring noise beside me. It was a man with a camcorder, taking footage of the rocks. It was one of the early, primitive models, so he had all kinds of power packs and auxiliary paraphernalia strapped to his body, and the camera itself was enormous. It must be like going on vacation with your vacuum cleaner. Anyway, it served him right. My first rule of consumerism is never buy anything you can't make your children carry. The man looked exhausted, but of course having spent a ridiculously inflated sum to buy the camera he was now determined to film everything that passed before his eyes, even at the risk of acquiring a hernia (and when that happened he would of course get his wife to film the operation).
I can never understand these people who rush to buy new gadgets; surely they must see that they are going to look like idiots in about a year when the manufacturers come up with tiny lightweight versions of the same thing at half the price. Like the people who paid $200 for the first pocket calculators and then a few months later they were being given away at gas stations. Or the people who bought the first color televisions.
One of our neighbors, Mr. Sheitelbaum, bought a color TV in 1958 when there were only about two color programs a month. We used to peek through his window when we knew one was coming on, and it was always the same-people with orange faces and clothes that kept changing hue. Mr.
Sheitelbaum kept bobbing up to fiddle with the many little knobs with which the thing was equipped while his wife shouted encouragement from across the room.
For a few moments the color would be pretty fair-not accurate exactly, but not too disturbing-and then just as Mr. Sheitelbaum placed his butt back on the sofa it would all go haywire and we would have green horses and red clouds, and he'd be back at the control panel again. It was hopeless. But having spent such a huge amount of money on this thing, Mr. Sheitelbaum would never give up on it, and for the next fifteen years whenever you walked past his living room window you would see him fiddling with the controls and muttering.
In the late afternoon, I drove on to St. George, a small city not far from the state line. I got a room in the Oasis Motel and dined at Dick's Cafe. Afterwards, I went for a stroll. St. George had a nice old-town feel about it, though in fact most of the buildings were new except for the Gaiety Movie Theater ALL SEATS $2) and Dixie Drugstore next door. The drugstore was closed, but I was brought up short by the sight of a soda fountain inside, a real marble- topped soda fountain with twirly stools and straws in paper wrappers-the sort in which you tear off one end and then blow, sending the wrapper on a graceful trajectory into the cosmetics department.
