Yesterday after the conference finished up for the afternoon I was going to head over to the sand dunes, but instead ended up in the old part of Rock Springs. I will say I have a much more favorable impression of the place now than I ever had. Like a lot of Western towns, Rock Springs still has many of its original buildings from the late eighteenth and early twentieth century. Likewise there are some big old trees (which still lean northward from the wind) and a lot of pointless roads that show that it is an unreformed frontier town. The newer part of Rock Springs is really a rural sprawl nightmare--junk business and lots of asphalt with cars everwhere. One would hope that an older part of town can survive, since it adds so much to the character and community. If you wander around the West you will find some towns that seems like they just stepped out of the 19th century only they don't have horses. Old Rock Springs seems a bit like that.

Rock Springs is a hard place. The wind is hard. The light is hard. The landscape is hard. Consequently, I think the people are made hard by it all. The light is stark and bright, reflecting on the roan hills, splotched off-white. The wind is incessant. Stunted trees bend northward as if to find shelter from it. The cliffs are sharp, but seem to be on the edge of decay. People smile, but there faces are cracked, and there is a weariness in the eyes. They work hard in this hard place. Mostly they are miners or riggers. Its not uncommon to see people bandaged driving around town.

There is a starkness here that when you get up on a hill and look out over it, still seems harsh, but seems right. It makes one honest, I think, to live in such a hard land. You can't lie to yourself and hide all the scars and garbage under greenery.

I'm told there is a large population of wild horses out in the cliffs. Liviging things are harder to extinguish than one would think.

All my bags are packed
I'm ready to go
I'm standin' here outside your door
I hate to wake you up to say goodbye
But the dawn is breakin'
It's early morn
The conference's waitin'
Its blowin' his horn
Already I'm so lonesome
I could die
So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you'll wait for me
Hold me like you'll never let me go
'cause I'm leavin' in a Mitsubishi
Don't know when I'll be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go

Ok this was much funnier when I sang it one fine morning a few years ago when Mary was off for one of her adventures with the Park Service in her Ford Escort. You can't imagine how funny "'cause I'm leavin' in a Ford Escort" is at 5:00 am. It scans much better than Mitsubishi. We both split our sides laughing. And then she left, and I had that suitably modified stupid John Denver song to cheer me up.

Sing it. You'll see.

Well since they fucked up, I can write about the Cubs. Now that was a game and a half, and that Sosa homerun ranks right up there with Gibson's homer way back when that won the game for the Dodgers, but I really don't understand why the Cubs decided to pull Farnsworth when he was pretty much the only picther they had striking anyone out--only to be replaced by a pitcher who threw every ball the Marlins wanted to see. Well baseball is a great game for comebacks, so we'll see what happens to the Cubs. Yeah yeah yeah, I know--its just a game, but there is something that pumps the adrenaline about the crack of a homerun off the bat. Homeruns really do sound differently, you know--especially in stereophonic, hypermagnetic, subwofferized surround sound.

Now I'm not going to jinx the other team by writing about them.

So, here is the chamber of commerce page for Rock Springs: http://rockspringswyoming.net/ . Please examine it and find me things to take pictures of. I will be happy to oblige.

And now from the annals of the maniacally obsessed in Utah we find http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,515036962,00.html . Udink.Udink. We had a family in my home town named Cundick. Cordelia tells me about a person she knows whose last name is Hyman. What about Hancock? Cunningham? No vanity plate for any of them! At this rate, Lucy from I Love Lucy fame would have a hell of a time being proud of her family (or stage) name in Utah.(And yes I do find it amusing that the D-News is so uptight that they don't even give the definition of dink that the DMV seems so offended by.) This scores at least an 8 as an example of severe, blue-ball level uptightedness.

The sunrise this morning was vague in color. There were streaks of kerosene orange clouds hovering above the outline of the mountains. I sat on the train thinking of love. Now I'm not, of course, talking of generic "love" of mankind in general, but the regular, old-fashioned, love between two people who find each other irresistible, and really think that there is something impossibly irreplaceable about the other. Now I am not a naïve person. I have been through the love ringer enough to be worn out like a over-used wash rag. I've been in love and I've faked being in love. I've thought I was in love when I was just fooling myself because it felt like the right thing to do. I've also been in the skeptical situation of mutually proclaiming not to believe in love, and have talked to many many folks who really don't believe even in the concept. This morning something wants me to say bullshit to them and to myself and to those who are going to comment here that it is sheer folly to believe in love. There is something about me that wants to be a Romantic, you see. Something that really wants to think that love might actually work. That fights with the cynical me, of course. It's a fun battle.

Ah but what the hell. One can keep plugging along. When all else fails, I can also opt for the loveless barren marriage my sister-in-law continually suggests. "You know if you went to church you could be married in six months," she once told me. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed.

This morning I got the idea to plan a train trip for Fall break next week. When I was in college I took the train all the way to the Virginia. That took at least two days, but was quite the adventure. In those days they had a club car and there were always friendly folks to talk to and hear their stories. I wrote a lot about it at the time, since it reminded me a lot of passages in Twain--a sort of real Americana experience.