Highway 89 Revisited

I love road trips. I love watching other people go on road trips. (Seriously. I just watched an episode of Halt and Catch Fire during which people piled into a station wagon to drive to Las Vegas for a computer trade show, and the idea of eating sandwiches as the landscape speeds by filled me with joy.) And in this case, I loved reading Peter Fish’s drive from the top of the country to the Grand Canyon, along the continent-cleaving Highway 89. Wonder, connection, and wistfulness all leap from the pages, each making plenty of room for the other two.

I walk out into summer Salt Lake City, the sun polishing the stone spires of the Mormon temple. I am fond of the city. My parents—my adoptive parents, but I still stumble on that term—didn’t take to it. We moved here for my father’s career; he and my mother missed their beach-and-cocktail life in Southern California, to which we eventually returned. But I liked the hot summers and the snowy winters, the way the city pressed against the Wasatch Range. I liked Salt Lake’s sense of order, the granite weight of the church buildings, how Brigham Young had platted the city with Newtonian precision, centering it on Temple Square. It was the same impulse that led the church to chart every human being who ever lived, storing the records in the cloud and in a concrete vault in Little Cottonwood Canyon, said to be strong enough to survive a nuclear blast.