Our Lady of Perpetual Hell

Y’know, I’m almost positive I heard somebody use that phrase on one of the bible call-in shows that populate the radio dial in Cheyenne…  but surely I misheard.  It doesn’t seem like the kind of humour that would sit well with eastern Wyomingites (Wyomers?  hrm).

But I have adopted her as my patron saint.

Religious talk was pretty much all my brother-in-law Bob and I heard on the Penske rental truck’s radio while we sat, dejected, on I-80 late Monday afternoon–peering out at the "Road Closed" barricades ahead on the highway.  Up to that point, the trip had been smooth–we beat it outta the Salt Lake Valley in a Monday morning snowstorm (surely a neat little circle completed, since I’d arrived there back in 2000 in a black and thunderous August monsoon) but found clear skies once we had gotten up into the mountains, past Park City.  It got snowy again in Laramie, and things were occasionally a little dicey in the hills beyond there, but nothing serious.  ‘Til Cheyenne.

We turned around and headed west back to a truckstop, where we went in and got a map to see what our options (if any) were with I-80 closed.  Heard from the truckers there that I-80 had been closed since the day before.  Heard then, too, that I-70 (the other east-west highway, about a hundred miles south of I-80) was also in its second day of being closed.  Er.  Drat.  So we headed back further west (the direction felt so wrong, wrong, wrong!) to Cheyenne for the night.  The first hotel I checked was $94 a night for a single room.  That seemed a little, umm, steep for Cheyenne, y’know?  Went next door to the Guest Ranch Motel and it was $29.  That was more like it.  I took a cursory look at a room before okaying the place and was bemused to find a room that appeared to have remained unchanged since approximately 1959.  Like, the decor was older ‘n I am.  The washroom fixtures were that mustard yellow colour that, well, that you just don’t see much anymore.  ‘Cept in little old motels on US interstates, that is.  Dark faux-wood panelling floor to ceiling, 5-foot-long wedge-shaped plastic Jetsonsesque light (no bulb, alas!) along a formica shelf where the tv sat, round swag lamp dangling over tilting floors and, yeah, that mustard-coloured washroom.  I was wrong to assume that Bob’s room would be identical to mine–it was, in fact, completely different.  His was about the same size as mine, but it had three beds in it and considerably less "charm".  Not to mention less heat.  I lucked out.  Poor Bob. 

Despite the crappy room I’d gotten him, Bob insisted on taking me out for a nice dinner that night.  And we found a very good brewpub downtown where we had a tasty meal and friendly service.  A guy at the next table hung his cowboy hat on the back of one of the empty chairs at our table.  Yeah, folks in Cheyenne do wear cowboy hats.  Without a trace of irony.  No smirking.

We awoke Tuesday morning to find that record cold temperatures had made a chip in our windshield spread into a three-foot-long crack.  Glad I signed up for all the insurance on the rig.

I had called 1-888-WYO-ROAD to get the state road closures that morning and I-80 was, much to our chagrin, still closed for sections east of Cheyenne on through Nebraska.  However, I-70–heading east out of Denver to our south–had re-opened.  So.  Well, we didn’t have much choice, really.  The storm was a big blue blob on the Weather Channel’s map in between where we were and where we wanted to go.  So we hadda go around–down to Denver, catch I-70 there and head through eastern Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan (instead of Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, etc.).

Do you have any idea how wiiiiiiiiiide Kansas is?  Or, at least, how wiiiiiiiiiide it feels?  Good Lord, I thought we’d never get outta there.  And the monotonous landscape of western and central Kansas doesn’t help…  The only trees seemed to be where little communities huddled against the prairie wind.  And the only parts of those towns visible were the water towers, grain silos, and church steeples that stood out from the treetops.  I guess that might be a good indicator about what’s important to folks in Kansas.

A couple things I saw there have stayed with me… 

Remember those Burma Shave roadside signs?  Kansas had its own versions of that idea.  One series I saw was ads for local churches.  First sign:  Methodist.  Second:  Baptist.  Third?  ‘Drunkard Brethren Church’.  Bless me Father, I’ve found you at last!

Along the same lines, I saw a series of small maroon-coloured, hand-lettered signs for a roadside attraction that featured ‘The World’s Largest Prairie Dog!’, a ‘6-legged steer’, a ‘5-legged cow’ (which, really, was probably a bit of a letdown after seeing the steer), and where folks were invited to ‘pet the baby pigs’ and see rattlesnakes and skunks.  Not sure if anybody’d wanna pet those latter two, though…  if it was even an option, that is.  I don’t know if it was.  Bob refused to stop.  Harrumph.

In an attempt to make up for time lost when we had to stop earlier than planned in Cheyenne, we pushed all the way to Columbia–half-way through Missouri–that day.  I had what was probably my last good authentic Mexican meal there (since we can’t seem to get that here in Canada).  Enchiladas verdes–possibly my favourite dish.  Spicy enough to make my eyes water.  Mmm-mm.  After dinner, we found a motel.  This time, because we were both tired and because it was a chain motel, I didn’t go in and check the rooms.  Mistake.  Dated as the place in Cheyenne was, at least it was clean.  In this one, I found a long, straight hair in my tub and a disturbingly short, curly one on my toilet.  Umm, ick.  And it smelled funny in there…  Not funny-haha, either.  Funny-weird.  And somebody’d stolen the tv remote’s battery.  Oh man.  I’m just not interested in anything on tv enough to be willing to pad over in my socks (I mean, who the hell would take their socks off on that carpet?!) and change channels manually.  Pfffffft.  So I curled up in the paper-thin bedsheets with my portable dvd player and "Carnivale" disks and wished for some heat in the room.  Was pissed that this dump was more expensive than the previous place was.  Cried myself to sleep.  (Not really.  Just said for effect.)

Got up the next morning with the intention of making it all the way home that day.  Bob wanted to avoid Chicago, so we turned off I-70 at Effingham, IL (I was delighted at the idea of a place called "Effing"-something, natch), headed up through Illinois’ twin cities–the college town Urbana-Champaign, which actually looked kinda funky, believe it or not–and into Indiana, where we hung a right at Gary, put proverbial pedal to metal and bombed up through Michigan to the Canadian border at Port Huron/Sarnia.  Took about 15 minutes to get through the paperwork at Canadian Customs, happily surrendering my TN work permit and getting a big "RETURNED" stamped in my passport in its place, and pulled into the driveway here around 11pm Wednesday.

So.  Thanks to some excellent driving by Bob and a truck that didn’t complain at all over those 2,000 miles (300 of those extra because of our detour to I-70), we got home safe and sound.  But I’ll tellya–listening to AM/FM radio for three days was excruciating, and I’m not even including the religious stations we heard in Cheyenne.  It’s like the ’70s never left the midwest (because I wouldn’t let Bob listen to country stations–ye gods, no!).  I mean, we heard "The Stroke" not once, but twice.  I haven’t heard that song since high school!  And, y’know, it seems to me that whatever the hell happened to Billy Squier was probably deserved.

The new job in Chatham started five days later.  At least the drive is only 45 minutes and is in my parents’ coupe.  Beats a 16-foot truck equipped with only a radio.