August 20th
(Day 4 Pueblo to Rawlins, WY.)
 |
| (c) Google |
We woke up at City Market, Rawlins, in our little camper van. We’d nearly reached our destination, and we were a day early. We went to the MacDonald’s for breakfast, and this time I learned how to actually connect to to the wifi. You have to agree to their terms on the website; it doesn’t automatically connect your phone. Aha! This was useful as phone service is pretty spotty in some of these areas. GPS mostly works, but at times even that gave up. My location history is filled with crazy zig-zags, as the phone nails down some spots and the time I was present there, and then draws straight lines between them. Sometimes mobile data was non-existent and sometimes I was passed over to a local carrier, one that STB hasn’t browbeaten into submission, and might therefore be subject to charges. Phone charges are something that send me through the roof, so I was anxious to avoid this. I don’t know why this is the case but it is; it’s possible my mother was frightened by a wild phone bill when she was pregnant with me.
We got back on the road towards Riverton, Wy.
Slowly, road signs made me aware that we were on some sort of ancestral trail, possibly involving Mormons and Donner Parties. For example, we came across Split Rock, which was described as a beacon, if a stone can be a beacon, to travelers heading west.
Pic: Split Rock, taken from entirely the wrong angle so it doesn’t adequately show how it was visible from great distances.
Slowly, road signs made me aware that we were on some sort of ancestral trail, possibly involving Mormons and Donner Parties. For example, we came across Split Rock, which was described as a beacon, if a stone can be a beacon, to travelers heading west.
 |
| Split Rock, seen from an unimpressive angle |
 |
| Officially sanctioned angle to image Split Rock |
Looking it up, it appeared we were on the Oregon Trail, and let me tell you it sounds to be an easier trek in an RV in August 2017 than it does with mules in 1860. We are apparently in Sweetwater Valley (an exception to the trend of calling places Gangrene Gulch and the like), which has three markers, Independence Rock, Devil’s Gate and Split Rock. Wait, Split Rock is a highly visible notch in the Rattlesnake Range, so we haven’t abandoned normal place names entirely.
 |
| Ice Slough |
Also in traily news, we came across the Ice Slough, where settlers found they could mine ice until August, though the sign said whatever strange characteristic had led to its insulating properties had been lost and it was mostly ice-free in summer these days. Here we saw our first pronghorns and if you strain your eyes you can see them in the photograph too.
 |
| These roadside signs helped me understand there was some history here. |
 |
| There are pronghorns in this photo of the Ice Slough. |
Also stopped at this historic marker were a young couple who had run out of gas the previous day and had had to wait for four hours for the AAA to arrive. I checked my phone – no service. If we ran out of gas here, there’s a chance we couldn’t even call AAA. How did the Mormons manage without Triple-A? It’s a mystery lost to the wagon ruts of time.
It was a three hour drive from there to Riverton, Wy., in the path of totality. We parked at Walmart at 10:12 in the morning and went to Wendy’s for wifi and a very nice burger. Back at the Walmart we scoped out the territory. RVs were beginning to arrive and take up positions in our part of the parking lot, but it was nowhere near crowded. We went for a walk and realized that there was no-one at the back (possibly due to the black clouds of mosquitos in the strip of wetland there) and only a couple of other vehicles on the other side of the Walmart – the side facing the morning sun. We changed positions to the quiet side. We already had plenty of food from the City Market and STB produced from somewhere several packets of Indian snacks. (Not American Indian, Indian-American; we’d gassed-up at a few Sikh-run gas stations so I guess he’d explored the racks there.) In the Walmart we bought mosquito repellent and a folding chair inside the store. (STB, naturally, already had a folding chair from his apartment.)
 |
| RVs at Riverton Walmart |
26-27 RVs begin to arrive at Riverton. You can see this isn’t exactly going to be packed.
In fact, now’s a good time to mention that I might never get over the wonder of a Walmart’s interior. When I first came to the States, some thirty years ago, the supermarkets were like Aladdin’s Cave to me. I’d never seen such wonders piled so high. And I’d been living in London. My wide eyes narrowed over the years, to the extent that if I couldn’t find at least five different kinds of mayo on a supermarket shelf I’d be perversely miffed, or if one of the hundreds of shiny apples had a tiny bruise I’d give a sniff of disdain. But for various reasons, I’d never been to a Walmart. (STB says I did once, but I don’t believe him.) The utter joy and amazement I first had when I encountered a dollar store – a million things! Each for a dollar! – and the hours of delighted aisle-wandering I’d done scoping out Big Lots’ vast piles of random stuff the first time I encountered one were as nothing to these, my first few trips into a Walmart. Similar t shirts to my Target $6 ones were $3, and similar price differentials were to be seen throughout a store that sold everything, from babies’ bibs to ammo and from big TVs through tents and bicycles to lip balm. Yes, I know how they do it – by underpaying the help at home and abroad – and I won’t be going there again unless I have an RV to stock, but they really are quite fantastic.
Fully stocked, and fed at the Subway (sandwiches not transport) that also lurked inside the Walmart, we went back to our parking spot to find it was filling up. Several people had brought RVs, which makes sense since that’s the Walmart thing, but several others were in cars with tents. An enormous number of people piled out of the car beside our vehicle and struck a tent, or does that mean taking one down, I forget. It hasn’t changed since I was forced to do it as a kid, with guy wires and tent pegs and hollow metal poles that have to be fitted inside each other in a precise order in the dark while being bitten by mosquitoes. Having put up the tent, they sat down to relax in their folding chairs and the sprinklers started up.
For we had all forgotten that this wasn’t a campground. It was an eight-foot wide strip of grass with trees on it belonging to Walmart and merely there to provide a barrier between the road and the parking lot. It hadn’t really been designed for tents. People ran around putting tarps and upturned buckets over sprinklers to protect their tents and the sprinklers fought back by staying on for a solid hour. In So Cal they don’t do that, but I guess Riverton has water…in fact it’s in the name. Apparently Riverton was settled by Whites because it had so many rivers it was a major source of beavers. (I’m guessing for felt for cowboy hats. Not because they’re little cuties.) At least, that’s what the guy in the next door RV told me and he looked like he’d know that sort of thing. It’s certainly a very big Anglo town in what is otherwise a very brown Indian Reservation. (It’s Wind River, home to Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapahoe.)
After everybody had dried off, and in some cases told their stories (most stories seemed to involve them living in Orange County, CA at some time in the past, even the lady who was originally from Korea), we went to bed. Although the setting up had been more like an eighties Stonehenge festival (or an early Glastonbury) than anything I’ve ever experienced since, this didn’t carry over into the night. Absolutely nobody played loud music, suddenly revealed they were Burning Man aficionados, formed a drum circle or even sat around a fire smoking vast clouds of dope. (Perhaps because we were in a Walmart parking lot, come to think of it.)
I woke up around six in the morning with flickering red and blue lights beaming through the tiny window. I tried to look around and could only make out a few cars with emergency lights, but as I watched more police cars appeared, followed by a fire truck and some more official-looking emergency vehicles and a tow truck. I tried to make STB wake up and look out of his window, which was on the business side. “No, let’s not draw attention to ourselves,” he said. After a few minutes it sounded like everybody on the grass was up but no busts were in progress. I looked out and people were piling something up on the grass. All I could think of (it was after all six thirty in the morning) was somebody must be building a mobile command post. But later it became clear. The next-door neighbor but one had set up on the grass but left their vehicle on the road rather than in the parking lot. Someone had driven along the road in the night, ran into it and wrecked it. Despite the truck being totaled, the crash hadn’t woken anybody up – everyone I spoke to was mystified by the incident. The pile was the contents of the truck, which had been towed. The erstwhile drivers of the vehicle were on their phones arranging loaners.
And that’s how the Total Eclipse day dawned.
No comments:
Post a Comment