Part 1: Getting here from there
In those days, autumn would announce its arrival in Los Angeles with a slight shift toward the red in the photo-chemical sunsets along with the sound of the Dodgers folding early. Those who didn’t keep tabs on the electromagnetic spectrum and the National League West standings probably never noticed.
Actually, the main reason we sensed the subtle change in the season that mid-September of 1970 probably had as much to do with summer-long plans to move to Jackson Hole for a winter of skiing than either the spectacle of burning daylight or the inability of our Bums to turn a timely double-play.
For some reason, we just couldn’t pull the trigger as far as getting out of Dodge in a timely manner. Our first attempt came about during a day spent rotating between the various free-beer pavilions at Busch Gardens. It turned out that a couple of friends who accompanied us on this particular inspection tour owned a hauling trailer and when they offered to take a load of our possessions as far as Park City, we jumped at the chance.
A few days later found the four of us out in the Mojave Desert creeping up that 11-mile stretch known as the “Baker Grade” pulling a crammed-full trailer toward 4,000-foot Halloran Summit.
The drive train for the vintage International Harvester Scout, however, decided it had had enough at about the 10-mile mark and a tow truck from the summit service station came to the rescue.
Once the offending part had been removed, it was decided that hitchhiking with it to a dealership in Vegas would come under the heading of “men’s work.” To this day I’m still not all that sure if the womenfolk ever noticed the brand-new red convertible with the top down and the non-vintage blonde at the wheel pulling over to pick us up.
The good news was that the dealer indeed had the right part in stock. The bad news was, however, that the expenditure for said part plus the subsequent labor costs to reinstall it back at Halloran Summit swallowed the trip budget whole. Slinking back into the L.A. basin with barely enough cash for 25-cents-per-gallon gas and the occasional “road coke,” we pondered and plotted anew.
A few factors converged to aid me in almost killing the lot of us on our next attempt to get a load of furnishings to Park City, not the least of which was a quite imprudent decision on my part, once we had borrowed the father-in-law’s pickup, to shorten the timeframe involved.
With fuel so cheap, I reasoned, why not leave L.A. with a topped-off 55-gallon drum bound and lashed to the bed of the truck and, whenever the gauge dipped toward “E,” just pull over and siphon off a quantity sufficient to solve the tank’s current deficiency.
This was back before the Interstate Highway folk had blasted their way through the Virgin River Gorge. The route from Mesquite to St. George then included a jaunt up and over the Beaver Dam Mountains through Shivwits and Santa Clara. It would be along this twisting-and-turning two-lane that the error of my ways became apparent.
With the fuel gauge pegged toward the negative, I found a somewhat-wide spot along the road in which to pull over and, demonstrating minimal siphoning skills, gargle some gas. Eventually, through blind luck and atmospheric pressure, enough of the liquid in question was drawn from one container to the other.
Then, with that quite distasteful chore out of the way and rolling down the road once again, time began to quickly collapse in on itself. Out of nowhere, a semi-truck filled the rear-view mirror as it bore down with horn a-blaring upon the pickup and its 55-gallon bomb.
Obviously, by locating another wide spot a few terror-filled-miles down the road, we were able to escape a fiery oblivion and now, forty years later almost to the day, my pulse rate has more or less returned to normal. A few months later, in Park City, I would read Richard Matheson’s short story “Duel” in Playboy magazine and, once Steven Spielberg adapted it for his first film, relived the harrowing story on screen.
The trip to Jackson Hole and on to Old Faithful in Yellowstone proved most enjoyable as a vacation trip but we never found a proper place into which to move. All along our default had been Park City and that’s where we ended up. For what we encountered in that quaint old mining town, see next week’s column.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.