stationery destinations: Wrecks of WY

. . . continued from stationery destinations: Bakersfield . . .

9/19/19 amiably arrived to introduce itself as not just another fleeting date of well-meaning makeshift symbols oddly balanced against themselves:

A curtain crevice beam of mid-morning awakened me early enough in a Boulder CO budget room to just lie there for a while contemplating nothing predictable but inertia, innocently beginning with a false-start beeline to reboot the new day at a lobby-side inclusive buffet to find a single biscuit left out like an arid orphan & an attendant ask for more breakfast gravy whose existing state of milk-like traces were left around the edges of its chafing dish to resemble a timeshare resort playa surrounding a mummified ladle scabbed in off-white, promising what had once been — Expectaltee: gravid, laden.

Checkout time found the minivan faced with its skid plate hanging from one side, coming off as an unsatisfied semi-tilde smirk that I respectfully understood so well I left town with one myself under paint chip remnants of a high altitude nosebleed, first north then west, to a next-to-last minute stop at an interstate billboard-driven Rock Springs WY auto dealership after five hours of fixation to plea this particular underlying concern which seemed over the years to always pop up or out primarily somewhere within the Badlands or Great Plains — a reoccurring phenomenon I’ve tried to elucidate as a regionally coincidental merger of indomitable wind & free-spirited allowance of expanding speed limits, though also turning up to the same degree when slowing down through curvy drop-off Bitterroot or Sawtooth routes, reappearing randomly any which way like some multi-terrain hallowed curse.

Now here, though, the service agent maintained "your skid plate is damaged but okay enough" to keep going. I didn't let on how I respectively identified with the sketchy part itself as I was led through the garage to assemble under a lift where a mechanic additionally pointed out a leak "from somewhere" that couldn’t be serviced with just an hour left until closing but was "probably fine" to drive the remaining seven thousand miles to some wherever-else but the here-&-now he nonspecifically recommended I wander back off into.

I spent an inconclusive hour & a half chewing on “probably” to land arbitrarily at an Evanston WY Super 8 I recognized immediately as a flashback stay — across the street from a halfway hovel crash-&-dive combo called Hillcrest I’d stumbled into some years before.

As I handed over my credit card, I recounted the prior event to the desk clerk who replied “Yeah, that was a bad place,” updating that “luckily” the bar was now closed down & the rooms were rehabbed into soberly rented studios.

I remembered it being a lifesaver of a night, but went ahead with the check-in anyway.

That former 8/5/5 off-day syllabus had planned on a loose drive to somewhere farther past the late afternoon, but light-heavy brake traffic amassed on the four-lane from wreckage in the median, strewn so recently that no sirens or flashes had yet arrived for flat shapes lying still on the gouged turf with crouched figures leaning over them looking around with open mouths a few feet away from body pieces of overturned chassis lightly smoking as if exhausted & finally at rest in the weakening heat, turning the skin of passing drivers suddenly cold witnessing the newborn aftermath, slowing to parade speed, captured by the spectacle.