August Sweeps - Day 566

It's hard to do everything, kids.

I should know, I do hardly ANYTHING, and yet I find it hard to write and exercise and blog every day.  Take now, for instance. Hope you don't mind if this one is a few days late.

Today was the one day during Big Anklevich's visit that we could get together.  We had several possibilities of things we could do (from making a video to seeing a movie, from going to an amusement park to recording a final Dunesteef episode), but there wasn't time for all of them . . . there was barely time for one.

We did get lunch together, and later went to the same Denny's we used to hit after a movie every couple of months.  But the majority of the day was going to the Bonneville Salt Flats.

It had been one of my goals for the year, and I had wanted to go last year when my family visited the Great Salt Lake, but I had never been.  In fact, I didn't realize that it was right on the Nevada/Utah border, and a journey of hundreds of miles.  Whoops.

I found my "Late Night with David Letterman" t-shirt, which I hadn't worn since the two of us last went on a road trip (it's a vintage shirt, and won't survive continued machine washes), and picked Big up in the morning, trying to fit him in my overstuffed-with-junk car.  He's here to drop his daughter off at college, but had been too busy to get together until today.  

It was good to see Big Anklevich again.  But wow, I have not written today, and I really want to just call a time-out and say, "I'll write tomorrow, okay?  I'll hit the library until they kick me out.  Just give me a break right now?"

But I can write, say, 100 words, can't I?  That I can do, then I'll go to sleep (I was going to set my alarm to wake me up early tomorrow, but hey, if I do 100 words, then maybe I'll let myself sleep an extra half hour to reward myself.  Why not?).

Sit-ups Today: 111
Sit-ups In August: 2154

It was much farther to get there than I expected it to be, but at least I got to hang out with my friend again.  This will probably be the last time I see him before one of us is eaten by rodents, but even a full day was asking too much, apparently.*

There were some tourists there, though not too many (plenty of places to park, and lots of space to take pictures without another soul in them . . . but still enough folks around to ask one of them to take our picture).  We parked, I dumped out what was left of my water from home in the drinking fountain, only to discover that it wasn't turned on.

There was a young woman with blue hair playing the guitar and singing, hoping to cash in on those high tourist dollars, and because I no longer live in the big city, I hadn't seen somebody doing that in years.

Big and I walked out onto the ice.  Now, I know it's not ice, but it sure looked like it, even to the point of there being parts that were cracking, and bits where you could see through it to the ground below.  The further out you went, though, the thicker the ice was (someone had dug a hole with a shovel at some point, and hadn't found the earth beneath the salt).

The sun heated everything up, and before too long, both Big and I were sunburned from the reflected light off the salt.  Even worse was trying to keep your eyes open (without sunglasses) for a photo.  Even worse was, I lost an arm-wrestling contest to a thirteen year old . . . at my own grandmother's funeral.  The hits just keep on coming, kids.

I guess I had considered the Salt Flats to be kind of a sacred place, but I don't know what I was expecting.  It's certainly a strange place--a long flat area in the desert with no life, only salt, as far as the eye can see.

All in all, I'd say it was the most alien place I've ever been.  Though I can't imagine what would be number two on my list.

Push-ups Today: 70

Push-ups In August: 2448

We walked a ways out on the saltfield (whatever you call it), trying to take pictures with the little Hot Wheels AT-AT and AT-ST that I'd brought, making them look in scale with us (it never really worked, mostly because you had to put the camera on the ground, and you couldn't see through the viewfinder to take the picture because it was so bright--you just had to take a picture, look at it, then try to reframe for the next one.

I cannot adequately convey how bright it was.  Sometimes in winter, you'll get a little snowblind, with all this sunlight reflecting off snow and making it hard to see, but this was unlike what I'd experienced before, so white in every direction that you literally couldn't keep your eyes open for more than a second or two before they'd tear up and close on their own.**

After a while, we did walk back, admiring three or four cars that were driving around on the saltfield, and wondering if it would damage my little Toyota to go out on it.

Turns out, it was quite easy to get out there, and there was even a road of sorts--just a section where the salt had been "paved" down in a straight line for several miles.  We went out there, and found a mound of salt, like a wall of plowed snow, and an entire second section of flat salt, on the other side of which was the Bonneville Raceway section of the . . . park?  Would you call it a park?

There were other vehicles out there, some doing donuts, some with trailers and campers, one guy had laid out a blanket and was sunbathing there in only shorts, and there was a stretch where people were driving as fast as they could, which looked so strange from our vantage point, because the heat reflected off the ground made it look like every truck, car, motorcycle, and train had no wheels, but were hovering like Luke's landspeeder in the distance.

At one point, miles away from anything--you could literally go out there far enough to no longer see people in any direction, if you wanted to--the CHECK ENGINE light came on on my dashboard.  There was a good second or two there where I thought, "Oh no.  I've damaged my car somehow, it's gonna break down, and we're gonna be stuck out here."

And I had dumped out my water.

I didn't any anything to Big, though, because he's got enough problems, what with the man-eating rats he's got waiting for him in Texas.  However, I did discover on the drive home, that the bastards at the oil change place had set that up so that it would come on the second I'd reached the number they'd designated on the odometer.  

Anyway, I parked the car and we got out.

There was a little pond of semi-opaque water in the break in the wall, and it was impossible to tell how deep it was.  We tossed in big rock-sized chunks of salt in there and watched them either sink or dissolve.  A family was there, having fun climbing and enjoying a picnic, told us a truck had tried to drive through it, and it was two or three feet deep in one section, and the driver was lucky to have gotten through it.

After a while, we got back in the car, and drove all the way back to the main road, impressed by all the white, but not really sure what else to do out there.

And Big needed a drink, so we went back the way we'd come.

We talked quite a bit, and admired the scenery, which was really cool (there's long stretches of ocean-like desert out there, and enterprising people had put out markers and decorations, including one making it look like a sea monster was emerging from the "water," and one with a shark doing the same thing.  I was driving, so I couldn't get a picture of it.

I wondered what would happen if you crashed your car out there, and Big said that he used to do stories on the news about truck drivers who fell asleep on that long stretch of road.  And within minutes of him saying that, we passed by a semi truck that had gone off the road and was half-submerged in the mud right alongside Interstate I-80.  Cops were there, and a big tow machine was hooking up its winch and cable to pull the semi out.

There's not much more to say about our day.  Big had to get back home (his daughter, it turned out, could move into her new apartment/dorm today instead of Monday, so hey, free labor, if Big could get down there), but I dragged my feet, and when we finally got to his sister's house (where his family was staying), they had all left already, so the two of us hung out in the front yard until he couldn't stand it anymore.

We had planned on doing a number of things during his visit here.  But we did manage one.  And not a bad one.

Words Today: 377
Words In August: 13,344

*Even so, I get that I'm not his family and that I am seen as the enemy, which, in most respects, I am.  So what can you do?

**Big had forgotten to bring sunglasses, so we'd stopped at the dollar store to get him a cheap pair, and that was probably the best single dollar investment since Charlie Bucket bought those Wonka bars in the book.  Even WITH sunglasses on, I got a headache pretty quickly, and there was some minor sunburning with the reflected light from below, just from what little time we were out on the sno--er, salt.