My late-1997 trip came about this way.
My son, Liberty, and I both worked as technical writers at computer companies at the time, my son at CISCO systems and I at Sun Microsystems. By an odd coincidence, we were assigned by our employers to work in adjacent buildings in San Jose, even though both companies had offices in scores of buildings spread over the whole San Francisco Bay area.
And even though we were sharing an apartment, my twenty-seven-year-old son didn't want to commute with his fifty-two-year-old mother. Besides, he got to work much later in the day than I did. Once in a while, we would walk across the adjoining parking lot and get together for lunch. One day at lunch in the CISCO cafeteria, Liberty told me one of his coworkers was moving to Colorado and had asked if he would like to drive the wife’s Nissan Pathfinder SUV to their new home in Boulder. Liberty wasn't interested. But I was.
Because I had enough vacation time coming to me, I jumped at the chance to take another road trip, this time at no cost to me.
I got a late start the first day, so my first stop was at Hardman House, a tired, old hotel in Carson City, Nevada. My room decor's clashed with itself with a dissonant mix of colors, a blue-green carpet, beige walls with a yellowish cast to the beige, a white slip-covered armchair, a red couch, powder blue curtains. There was a small TV, which I didn't turn on. I left the next morning after picking up coffee and a hard-boiled egg and toasting a bagel at the sparse "continental breakfast" bar. I couldn't find any cream cheese or real butter, so I ate my bagel plain, and since I also couldn't find real cream or milk, only coffee "creamer" with its long list of additives and flavorings, I drank my coffee black, not my usual preference.
My next stop that afternoon was Fallon, Nevada, at the home of my work acquaintance, Ted. He lived in a double-wide manufactured home in a neighborhood crowded with the same type of houses and surrounded by little yards. Some nondescript plantings partially masked the painted aluminum panels that covered the wheels that made the homes at least theoretically "mobile."
Ted was a short stocky man. He introduced me to his short stocky black-haired wife, Betty, and they brought out four black ferrets for my admiration. Ferrets? I thought. What kind of pet is a ferret? Ted was proud of the size of his home, since it was so much bigger than what they could afford in the Bay area, so I tried to keep my opinions to myself. Honestly, I never like the proportions or the materials used in manufactured homes, even if they are tastefully decorated, as Ted's home was not. Four ferret cages were kept in a row on a table in the living room on the opposite wall from the couch, with some bedding and droppings fallen nearby on the floor.
Ted's way of adding a little luxury to his life was not my way; he spent money not on his home or its furnishings, but on his own private plane. Ted was a contractor, and he commuted to work mostly by air. He worked with my group in San José during the week, stayed in a rented room nearby in someone's home, then every Friday he drove 150 miles to Auburn CA, where he kept the plane, and he would then fly the plane the rest of the way home to Fallon. Then he would reverse the process on Sundays.
Back in San José, Ted had taken a liking to me for some reason, and he started hanging around the door of my office, usually trying to talk to me when I wanted to work. Then he started asking me out to lunch every once in a while. During our lunches at a country-themed hamburger place, I learned he had left his first wife and four children after he started an affair with the woman whom he later introduced to me as his wife in Fallon.
I didn't like his values, lack of intellectual or artistic interests, or his looks, although I would have not thought his looks important if we had anything more in common. I made no effort to be pleasing to him. I criticized him freely, and it seemed he didn't mind. I would steer our conversations to religion, so I learned that he was a fallen away Catholic who preferred the Orthodox faith, even though he didn't let his preference move him far enough to spending time worshiping God on Sunday at an Orthodox or any other service. I think he was drawn to Orthodoxy because he liked the Orthodox tolerance of divorce, which I'd never heard of before.
Ted told me that in the Orthodox denomination a divorced person could be "married" again, after a penitential service. He was pleased with himself that he had apologized to his first wife, who I pointed out was his only wife according to Catholic teachings. Nonetheless, he believed that since she had meekly accepted his apology that was good enough to make him right with God.
I retorted that what would make him right with God would be to break with the woman he'd been adulterous with and do everything in his power to restore his marriage with the wife he had divorced. And if she wouldn't take him back, he should live the rest of his life chastely in prayer and penance.
But what I said had no effect. Ted was quite content with the life he'd made for himself, with his airplane, and the ferrets, and the stocky, passionate, little woman waiting for him every weekend in Nevada.
Before I left, I told Ted I was interested in taking the much ballyhooed "Loneliest Road" across the rest of Nevada, but Ted deterred me. "What if your car broke down out there on that deserted highway? What would you do then?" So, on his advice, I took the more-traveled route, that time.
Late that same night, after hours driving east after dark on unlit Nevada roads, I decided to try to find a hotel at the West Wendover exit off highway 80. It was New Year’s Eve, 1997.
To my surprise, the lobby of the hotel where I first tried to get a room turned out to be part of a casino, and it was thronged with informally dressed mostly senior-citizens wearing little party hats and pastel-colored fake leis, drinking from plastic cups, and playing the slots. Amid the clanking, whirring, and dinging of the slot machines, a big TV was loudly playing a time-delayed replay of the Times Square countdown that had already happened three hours earlier. A net full of many-colored balloons hung from the ceiling, ready for midnight.
At the front desk, the clerk told me no rooms were available. So, I sought out the manager to see if he could find me something. He was balding and his pudgy, mustachioed face was flushed with excitement over the casino's big money-making night. He wore a dyed-turquoise carnation in the buttonhole of his ill-fitting tuxedo, and he was standing next to a much-younger blonde woman in a similarly ill-fitting turquoise sequined dress, who looked to be Mormon-raised-wholesome underneath her tacky-glam facade of big hair, false eyelashes, sparkly turquoise eye shadow, bright red lipstick, and liberally applied blush.
The manager assured me there were no rooms available there or anywhere else around either. After all, he told me proudly, his hotel had been booked solid since March.
Before I left the hotel, I detoured to the ladies’ room. As I walked by the TV, a giant white illuminated ball slid down a giant flagpole. Dick Clark’s time-delayed voice counted 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and shouted Happy New Year 1998! And fireworks exploded on the screen.
The drunken crowd in the Nevada casino joined their cheers and noisemakers to the drunken New Yorkers’ cheers and noisemakers from three hours earlier and from most of a continent away. The balloon net partly opened, a few balloons flew out. After a short but jerky hesitation, the net opened the rest of the way, and the remaining balloons slowly spilled out over the revelers at the slot machines. Just a bit anticlimactic, I thought.
Then my attention was caught by a bearded man wearing a white shirt, blue suspenders and a miniature top hat who looked to be in his forties. He wove through the crowd, enthusiastically blowing out a noisemaker and shouting Happy New Year. A woman probably twenty years his senior whose hair was an unnatural shade of bright red was standing next to a woman friend whose own head of pulled back grey hair was topped with a little silver crown, when the man in the little top hat stumbled by them. The redhead draped an arm on the younger man's shoulder, planted herself in front of him, looked deep into his eyes, and he willingly bent over her for a long kiss. Her friend looked on with a fixed smile and a look of faint sadness in her eyes behind her wire glasses.
Whatever turns you on, I silently told the couple. Ew, I silently told myself.
On my way back to the SUV, my attention was drawn by a revolving red light on top of an ambulance parked near the entrance. One of the elderly slots players was being loaded in on a stretcher. I said an Our Father and a Hail Mary for the poor guy. All that unaccustomed excitement must have gotten to him.
When I checked at a brand-new Day’s Inn a mile down the road, in spite of what the other hotel's manager had told me, rooms were available, albeit for three times the normal price. I had a brief conversation with the desk clerk, who told me the Day’s Inn was in the Utah side in the community of Wendover, and most of the casinos’ business in West Wendover on the Nevada side comes from Utah, where the vices for sale in Nevada are forbidden by law and frowned on in practice.
I was the only guest in the lobby. I told the clerk about the scene in the other hotel’s lobby, and he rather primly assured me I wouldn’t find casinos, or legal shady ladies for that matter, in the Utah-side hotels.
In my room, I scanned a brochure I’d picked up from a rack near the elevator, which listed events scheduled in greater Wendover, including performances by aging rock and pop stars, a ladies-only night advertised by a poster of four beefy shirtless men from Australia, and an adults’ only comedian.
Nothing for me here, but of course, I thought, and I opened my Liturgy of the Hours, to catch up with Evening Prayer and pray Night Prayer before I went to bed.
Before I fell asleep, I spent some time bemusedly thinking about my chance discovery that night.
What to me had been just a spot on the map turned out to be two cities that straddle the Nevada/Utah border, one thriving with tax revenues from legalized gambling and other vices, and the other barely holding on with few tax revenues for civic improvements. West Wendover seemed to me to be less of an actual place than an embodiment of the idea of escape—for the kinds of people who enjoy the kind of entertainment it offers.
Later I learned that casinos in that out-of-the-way spot draw tens of thousands who drive or bus sometimes hundreds of miles or even fly in on organized group excursions to party there. It’s the nearest gambling and show spot for millions, kind of a lower-down even tackier version of Reno, which is a lower-down version of Vegas.
It also struck me for the first time that I never before realized how many people were living their hidden lives on ranches and isolated homes that I never caught sight of and would never have suspected were there during the several times in my life when I was speeding through rural Nevada and Utah on my way to somewhere else.
At the hotel’s substantial free hot brunch the next morning, I had one of the most unusual conversations of my life, if I can call mostly listening to a one-sided monologue a conversation. It started when a woman about my age wearing jeans and a plaid shirt with long dyed-black permed hair started talking to me near the waffle station. She told me she and her husband (“That's him at that table near the window,” she said, and waved towards a nondescript man also wearing a plaid shirt and blue jeans, who was smoking a cigarette with a breakfast tray in front of him) live a trailer somewhere in the northwest side of Nevada, and they were on their way to Virginia. I didn’t catch what they did for a living.
Then she launched into a story of how her son had been badly injured in a motorcycle accident and what happened afterwards. While I listened, I nodded and showed the appropriate sympathy and wonder as required during pauses in the conversation. The list of her son’s injuries was extensive, but all I can remember is that his throat and esophagus had been ripped open, his spleen destroyed. “Oh, that’s terrible.”
Doctors did not have any hope he would survive. “That must have been hard to hear.” But, she told me, friends who trusted in the healing power of Jesus’ name put her son’s name on a telephone prayer chain. His throat and spleen and everything else that had been hurt had been miraculously healed. There was not even any scar tissue. The doctor who had seen him when he first came into the emergency room said it was a miracle. He’d never seen anything like it. “That’s amazing,” I said. “Thanks be to God.”
Then she told me she had sent her story to the 700 Club. The producers had called to talk with her on the phone, and then they had scheduled her for an appearance, and that’s why they were on their way to Virginia Beach, Virginia where the Christian Broadcasting Network TV studios are located. I began to suspect why she spoke that way; she was rehearsing her story while she reeled it off to me, whether she consciously knew it or not.
I didn’t know what to think of what she told me. She could have made up the whole thing, I guessed, maybe to try to launch from her 700 Club appearance to a slot on the evangelical speakers’ circuit. I knew from a few years of attending Bible-based denominations (on my journey back to the Catholic Church) that a lot of Protestant evangelical lay people make their living going around giving inspirational talks.
I believe in miracles and her son’s cure could have been a valid one, but I had a big question, more for God than for her. If what she said was true, why were the prayers by the hundreds on that prayer chain answered with such a miraculous recovery, when so many others’ similar prayers have not been answered with similar recoveries? Alas, that’s one of many questions I may never learn the answers to, until I get see God face to face.
As soon as I finished eating, I had to rush away. January 1st is a Holy Day of Obligation for Catholics. In a phone book in my room, I’d located a church in a town a little over an hour’s drive in the same direction I was going, where I could get to in time to attend Mass.
I drove on I80 past the white crusted Bonneville salt flats, which were glistening with a film of water that day.
In the small stucco church on a mound above a small town off the highway, the little congregation was mostly Mexican American, and the Mass was in Spanish. It was the 10th day of Christmas, and decorations were still up. After Mass, I joined others praying in front of larger-than-life-sized Christ Child statue in a manger to the right of the altar, which was surrounded by a semi-circle of strings of colored lights fanning down from the ceiling around His bed of hay, a charming though slightly garish way of honoring the birth of Christ that I’d never seen the like of before.
On my way out, I grabbed a cup of coffee and an elephant ear pastry (Orejas de Elefante) in the church hall, where no one seemed inclined to talk with me, then I continued on my drive east.
I visited two more acquaintances from work before I dropped the car off in Boulder. In Fort Collins, I met with Frank, a Harvard-educated programmer who contracted with my group. He and his work partner worked remotely from home and came to our office only once every couple of months.
Frank's wife, Joan, and their six-year-old son, Jasper, joined us at a brew pub in yuppified downtown Fort Collins. When Frank was off to the men's room at one point, and Jasper was out of sight under his chair, some twist in the conversation resulted in Joan confiding in me that Frank didn't want to get married and have a baby in the first place, but he finally caved in because she threatened to leave him.
After the baby turned out to be a non-stop screamer (maybe sensing the just under the surface seething hostility from his father and fear from his mother) and then his needing special help to learn anything because of an autism diagnosis, she tried for years but could not convince Frank to let her have a second child. Finally he told her that if they had another baby, they'd have to forego their buying the house she dreamed of. And she had given up and chosen the house.
A couple stopped by our table after Frank was seated again. Frank introduced them to me as his brother, Jerry and Jerry's second wife, May. Frank was avidly interested in his brother's wife, by the way he couldn't seem to keep his eyes off her. He quipped that his brother had traded up with May, she was such a babe. So alien to common decency it was, I thought, to state so clearly in front of one's cowed wife that a man might discard one wife like an old car and trade up to a better newer model!
That's not the worse comparison of a wife to a comfortable old car I'd heard from my coworkers. One man my son's age who I worked with said casually one day that he didn't see anything wrong with a married man cheating. "I love my wife, but when I'm traveling for work, there's nothing wrong with dating another woman," and he compared a woman bedded on a trip away from home to driving a rental car. Still get a bad taste in my mouth about the otherwise decent guy whenever I remember that.
We stopped by Frank and Joan's picturesque old house within walking distance of the brew pub, and they gave me a tour of all their artistically tasteful improvements, including a redecorated kitchen with a 1950s era O'Keefe and Merritt stove and matching refrigerator, gray-green and blue-painted cupboards with unmatched colored glass knobs picked up at antique stores, and a greenhouse window over the sink that looked out into the garden, with herbs and green and cobalt blue glass bottles placed in the window to catch and reflect the light.
That night I stayed in another co-worker's home in suburban neighborhood with Mike, a member of my work group who had begun working remotely that year. From the proceeds of their small home on a small lot in San Jose, he and his wife were able to buy a house in Monument, Colorado with thousands of square feet of interior space and a two-acre pine forest in the back yard. He had sent an email back to the Trusted Solaris group we worked for inviting people to come visit, so I took him up on his blanket invitation. Even though I sensed I was not exactly who he had hoped would come to see them, they were cordial and made me comfortable in one of their many guest rooms, and they let me take them out to breakfast at a big Western themed restaurant with a large gift shop attached the next day.
Mike was in his mid-thirties at the time. He had helped his wife, Sally, raise three teenagers from her first marriage, starting from when he was still almost a teenager himself. After Sally’s daughter gave them a grandchild, a boy named Trevor, Mike and Sally endured many medical adventures to try to get her fallopian tubes reconnected, and when they succeeded in getting her sterilization reversed, she gave birth to a son they named Devin.
They told me their grandchild Trevor used to call the younger Devin, "Uncle Baby."
When I remembered the trip later, I ruefully thought that all the couples I'd met on that trip could aptly quote Tom Hanks' line in the movie You’ve Got Mail: "We’re a modern American family."
Uncle-Baby Devin was two when I stayed with them, and a proud big brother to a new little girl, Salome, who was born the week before I came.
Sally and Mike had somehow managed to find the time to set up and decorate three trees with Hallmark collectible ornaments, between taking care of a 2-year-old, having a baby, nursing a newborn, and keeping up a large house. Sadly from my point of view, not a single Christmas ornament in their house had anything to do with Christ.
When I was raised, my family didn’t have any disposable income to speak of and almost everyone went to church once a week, and I’m still intrigued by the uses to which people put their money when they have it and also by the hobbies they spend their time on when they don't make the worship of God part of their lives. So, I idly tried to calculate the approximate cost of the decorations on the tree dedicated to Coke memorabilia in my bedroom. Let’s see, about a hundred collectible ornaments at maybe $7 a piece, plus maybe $100 for the artificial tree, and another fifty for lights. Eight hundred and fifty. dollars a tree. Not to mention the cost in hours accrued in putting it all up and putting it all away again.
For the next "holiday season," they planned to put up a fourth tree in another one of the guest bedrooms.
After I said goodbye to last modern American family I encountered on that trip, I continued from Monument to Boulder, where I dropped off the car, and then got a ride from the car's taciturn owner to the Denver airport. I have a random photo somewhere of the shadow of the airplane on the Great Salt Lake, which I took after a layover in Salt Lake City on the way back, and, of course, I still have these random memories of how other folks live, intermixed with glimpses of the tinselly things that offer them at least a momentary-if-illusory happiness in this mostly post-Christian world.
