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Day 1 |
Probing America: High Tech on Back Roads Day Fourteen Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Little America, Wyoming July 8, 1992
If you know of Little America, no description is necessary. Just an explanation of why we would spend the night here. If you don't, then it is worth a line or two. Most of Wyoming is a huge collection of nothing. More people live in the city limits of Portland, than the whole of Wyoming. There are only 3 or 4 towns on the over 300 miles of highway US 80. Due to the immense landscape, it is awesome, sometimes overwhelming. Other than that, nothing. Little American is about 60 miles from the Western border. It consists of a 180 room motel, restaurant, enormous parking area, trucker's service center, garage, and gift shop. Nothing else, absolutely nothing but high desert. One of the crew stopped here over 30 years ago, when it was a small motel and café. There are many desert areas in this country, and some as uninhabited as this, but this is the only oasis of its type of which we know. Why would we spend a night here? One troop declared she had it with 500 mile days and set a 300-mile limit. That, as such things sometime happen, was Little America.
The room ain't bad. Sort of a semi-suite looking out over the desert. Clean, large, huge screen TV, and green wall paper featuring huge red, orange yellow, and blue flowers. Psychedelic, some might say. The only drawback is the phones are hard wired, thus making e-mail from the computer impossible. The desk clerk said that every phone in all of Little America is hard wired. Never a team to walk away from a challenge, we began stalking the property, sneaking glances at phone outlets. All in the main structures were hard wired. But, clear at the other end, in the trucker's center, we discovered what we knew had to be. A bank of about 10 phones, all wired with jacks. Electronic communication has become part of a long haul trucker's stock in trade, even if the desk clerk didn't know it. The Center manager said to comeback after 7:00 PM and no problem. Some miscellaneous observations before giving up the keyboard. We find Asian service workers in every town, no matter how small (the towns, not the Asians). Come back in two years, they'll be managers, in four, proprietors. There is even an oriental foods grocery in Cheyenne. Wild Bill Hickock would not have liked that. The rental truck of choice is Ryder. The trails of the past, i.e., Oregon, Mormon, cattle, oxbow, all come together near Cheyenne, or so the people who cardiograph the maps would have you believe. It rained a good part of the afternoon, which allowed us to recall and experience again one of the most frightening of all highway horrors: a semi passing at over 70 mph, with its last 8 wheels producing a back splash, which for perhaps 4 seconds blocks all view of the road. Oh, you've been there too. One must learn to take quicker showers or all the material for the day has been used, so to speak. There is an understatement on the accommodations. We have a SUITE here with floor to ceiling windows on two walls complete with a small balcony; gaudy, but nice for a night, colonial-style furniture in the living room; and a curtain separating the king-size bed from the tv area. And all this for $60. In London it would cost $500 (if you could even find it), and if one can forget there is no access to anything here, it is a pleasant evening. The statements made about the vast emptiness of Wyoming are both relative and true. To a prospector or surveyor it is a probably a joy to view. To riders of the purple sage, it is not. The only exception we experienced today was Laramie, home of the University of Wyoming. The town, and that is what it is, is 20,000 people and the students add another 10,000. The campus is lovely, with all of the major buildings finished in a handsome pinkish color sandstone. We journeyed into the big geology museum on campus and saw the area's treasure which is a tyrannosaurs rex dinosaur which was found while doing what Wyoming does for a living these days, viz, extracting something from the earth, in this case oil. Our 5-year-old neighbor, who is definitely into dinosaurs, will get the museum's prize t-shirt. We saw a sign just outside Cheyenne today that said 1216.4 miles to Jubitz Truck Stop in Portland. We have seen a couple more updates during the day. Jubitz is taking a lesson from the Wall Drug Store. The sign reminds us that the journey is beginning to wind down. This trip has combined so much (family, nostalgia, growing up friends, current friends, technology, writing, and shared experiences of the troopers), it is hard to decide what is the highpoint. But certainly one of the major high points has been the ability to share this trip with you on e-mail. It has made for an experience that we shall never forget. The thrill of getting up in the morning and downloading a message from New Zealand responding to what we had written the night before, is in the category of magic. But just as magical were messages from Denver, Chicago, Tucson, Eugene, and Sydney. This is The New Village and almost competes with being around the family kitchen table in Ocoya on the July 4th. For many of us in today's world, this is as good as it gets. Thanks for being a part of it. |
