stationery destinations: Wrecks of WY

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

What we don't know is coming — around, from or to; all never too far away — taking us whichever direction where, waiting then or perhaps yet currently there, a subconscious simmer boils down to a why of no matter but an apparent residue that blends into the improvised pattern of tendencies holding perpetual lead racing to another flowering explosion of dawn shooting towards darkening shower of nightfall again clutched in the workaday mystery of wringing hands until somehow liberated to finally be able to just let it all go off on its own, in our own way — or so it’s wished in thoughtfully silent soliloquy circles personally brushing off this-&-thats under cover of breath which merely set us back long enough to guess at what seems to be on the run, chasing after what we’ve nearly escaped: some situation lived again in review; marching on, humming a familiar dirge out of time-en masse until the din levels outwards to a smear of fugitive memoriam oppositely flooding back, reaching into the vast likeness of, say, an alluvial fan whose imprint spreads beautifully self-evident above all when it’s done with itself & everything buried beneath.

This is what enduringly happens:

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.

I crawled free to eventually open up again, but, drained from the incident, took an impulsive exit to a monochrome ribbon that unrolled to a tip sharply pointing a way out that disappeared at a summit outside the downtown of a small map-dot at the corner of the flyover border where three motels lied aligned in vacancy on a business route as if alighted in order of rate: weekly, nightly & corporate.

—The weekly Hillcrest: a motor court single-level three-sided square horseshoe of rooms that began with a connected bar for checking in & then slurringly out, & ended up with a single-slot payphone pedestal shroud, limp cord receiver removed. Short-legged grills sporadically loitered on the walkway between open-doorway figures leaning with fisted cans & pinched smokes, neither in nor out, just watching.

—The nightly Super 8: a two-story with three tiers of possibilities built up from a basement econo-pit of muffled TVs mumbling as if struggling under a dank pillow, rising to an auto-club family-chatter ground-level middle stratum decorated with spent delivery feedbags, & topped off with the smoking floor perfumed ashtray corridor of secondary gray air. The lobby front door pulled to a night window before another to the reception area & small side-room containing empty two-tops & a kitchen counter housing an all-hours industrial coffee urn.

—The corporate Best Western experience kicked off with a covered check-in-parking-only runner leading towards motion-sensor swish-sliding glass doors that automatically welcomed to a lobby with pleather couch televised news-&-weather muzak loops. A hallway intersection beyond offered a left turn to a fitness room, indoor pool & still-water hot tub with stagnant foam formations cooly drifting like spumous ghost ships. A right direction was lined with empty-desked event-planning administrative offices & vacant meeting rooms. The middle passage centered with two one-stop elevators (one out of order) guarded by brass roll-bar carpeted luggage carts parked chaotically as if left confused with small tires swiveled beneath in all directions except straight ahead which opened to a steakhouse saloon with wide-screened sports roundups.

The attached lounge/restaurant, called Legal Tender, themed cocktails after gangster legends such as Lucky Luciano, Al Capone or Bonnie & Clyde (though B & C have their own individual drinks & not one as a couple, which itself is criminal because they seemed so in love).

All three properties appeared like wallflower greeters as I topped the incline to witness their lights arise right, then left, then back across the business route. The second of the trio, the Super 8, was decided on that night as the neutral stronghold, set opposite-side between the two other lodgings with accommodating bars, to advance & return on expedition, crossing the two-lane as if a dead river demarcation.

I remember pulling into the motel lot thinking that it must be getting darker now over that median chassis debris field from before, surely surrounded at this point with sputtering flares molting shadows of ash that, in the morning, would memorialize the incident by giving the ending away without the unfolding story.

To dilute the scene from inside the chained-door nightly rate single I’d secured, a plastic liter of spirit splashed over cubes coughed from the sub-level ice machine directly across the hall that growled intermittently as if talking in its sleep, but the jagged edge of the day’s incident failed to be planed with prologue bracers, swallowing me back out — there where other accidents awaited as debris themselves, derelict in the divide, temporarily safe between unavoidable destinations speeding in opposite directions, arriving anyplace to caress the cold shock of acceptance that, with a little more bad timing, occurrences indiscriminately turn. Thus, with the remnants of the vision embedded like shards of glass, off I went to wash them down:

Within the sanctuary of Hillcrest, its residents jovially threw back decoctions of refuge as if a nightly celebration rooted in survival, refilled with tenderness by hog tees scissored into tanks simpering lines of carved parenthesis echoing unimpressed lip-glossed free-pours, pulling up the lower shelf selection of good-enough to the clicking eightball breaks sorely refreshing just another game & getting down with a few quarters more of classic choruses that universally salve the present by way of the past:

illustrated that night with an old boy in a western snap who was gifted another birthday shot after a server with nail art talons stretched her cutup knit like a net over the elder's hairless head, his face emerging red from a braless valley, laughing until choking up that it was “worth waiting seventy-five years” just for that moment while a few onlookers cheered & tumblers were lifted, emptied & slammed to the wooden median where rescue was steadily coming because the worst surely hadn't happened again yet, though the sound of a crash never really goes away altogether for those symbols which/whom lie ahead of that ultimately open-ended taper of the vanishing point, left living through most everything to inexplicably emerge more alive, to find ourselves, unto this or any other day, still within a why, amazed at the chance perseverances mapped out as timing, myth or other legend that fails to explain or not what we don’t know must be coming from somewhere &’ll probably be fine . . . from or to . . . not too far . . . anytime soon now, anyway . . .

Meanwhile, back at the Super 8, the desk clerk handed over my room key & credit card & watched as I went to the minivan — its smirk lost to the darkness. Across the street, Hillcrest was unlit & silent as if satisfied enough being merely another memory. I looked into the lit-up lobby — the clerk was no longer watching, but at the coffee urn, checking for something under its lid. Instead of taking my things to my basement room, I slipped away, walked across the dead river to the Legal Tender & ordered the usual — whichever fugitive was on special.

. . . this particular journey continues in hierograms . . .

. . . OR, you can read the next in this staggered series: stationery destinations: Montana rock hound . . .