Town and Hearth > Trip Report

I took a road trip with my mom the summer of 2001 to visit the spot that I long ago pinpointed as The Town's location. This trip account is mostly taken from my diary of the trip, with some comments thrown in later.

Day 1: Thursday, July 12, 2001

We drove for more than 6 hours today. We stopped for lunch in Auburn, CA. We ended up in the old town, where there was a really cool sandwich place nestled in the back of an alley of stores, right by a creek. I tried to drive over the Sierras some, but it wasn't very fun because I was always having to push the car into a lower gear and was kind of shy about doing that at the time.

We ran into parking lot traffic near the Nevada border. We thought it was because of a checkpoint ahead, but it turned out that there was no such thing in that direction. The traffic was due to road construction. At that point, we started listening to a book on tape, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. It was a little slow to get into and I don't know if I would have kept reading if it hadn't been so easy to just pop the tape in and listen.

We stopped for the night in Winnemucca, about half way through Nevada. There was a carnival outside our motel room, so for part of the evening there was a lot of screaming going on. I wandered over there, but all the rides were very expensive, so I didn't go on any. Dinner was in a Chinese restaurant, the only good one that we would eat in for the entire trip. We had to specially ask for no MSG in the food.

Middle American quote overheard in the restaurant: "If you don't stop crying I'm going to whoop your ass!"

Day 2: Friday, July 13

We meditated in the library in Twin Falls, Idaho. It was a wonderful new library with three floors. Twin Falls is a nice looking city. Then, it was on to Pocatello, ID. We had an awful time finding a place to eat dinner. It was all diners and hamburger joints. Finally we found this chain restaurant called Schlotzky's Deli. We had a Chinese chicken salad, a mini pizza, and some really good lemonade.

After dinner we went into a ShopKo to look for ear plugs (Mom had snored the night before for some strange reason). They had a sale on Janis Joplin action figures. Mom got one for Dad as a trip souvenir. There were also "Yellow Submarine" figures but we decided not to get them in the end.

Day 3: Saturday, July 14

We got into Jackson Hole, Wyoming and arrived at Judy Raymond's new house. She wasn't there. We'd called her earlier and she'd said that she and some friends were going boating, so we expected her back sometime that afternoon. We waited. They don't lock their house because they're way out in the middle of nowhere, so fortunately we didn't have to wait outside. It was, however, extremely boring. I read Madeline L'Engal's A Wrinkle in Time in one sitting, and then had to amuse myself with a bird watching book until around 8:00 pm when Judy, her husband Victor, and her friends finally showed up with pizza. It was delicious. It was Victor's birthday, so we had a little party and some other friends came over. I sang a few of my songs for them. We slept in the guest cabin, which was made out of logs.

Day 4: Sunday, July 15

Officially, we did not go anywhere today, but in fact we drove through Grand Teton National Park and looked at the mountains and lakes. Mom got really blissed out by looking at the Tetons towering into the fog. Our original plan was to go boating, but it was threatening thunder and lighting, so we just toured the park.

Afterwards, we went into downtown Jackson Hole, which is the most insane tourist town you ever saw. There was a Ripley's Believe-it-or-Not museum that charged $7 admission, so I'm not exactly sure what was actually inside. There was an art fair in the park, which wanted $1. It did, however, say "donation," so we snuck in. It was kind of interesting, but all very expensive. There was a hunting trophy of a jackalope, which I thought was kind of funny. Jackalopes are mythological rabbits that have antlers. The only place you actually see them are on trophies, obviously.

We spent a second night in Judy's guest cabin.

Day 5: Monday, July 16

We drove through Yellowstone, which was incredibly cool. We arrived at the Old Faithful site about 15 minutes before the geyser was scheduled to erupt. So, we got lunch, sat down to eat, and it went off. It really wasn't that spectacular, but for almost no waiting it was worth seeing. If we'd had to wait the full 80 minutes of its cycle, we would have bailed out and drove on.

Farther down the road was the Midway Geyser Basin, which was truly amazing. There was a geyser that was incredibly irregular, but would have scalded us all to death had it gone off. The basin consisted of two pits of water that constantly boiled and put off tons of steam. It made me think of The Mists of Avalon. The water ran down crevices in the rock and into a regular river. There was a lot of something in the water that turned the rock bright yellow.

In Yellowstone, when there's an animal by the side of the road, everyone stops. The road becomes a parking lot. We saw bison, a moose, and numerous other small game. We drove out of Yellowstone thinking it was a short ways more up to Red Lodge, Montana.

BOY WERE WE WRONG. There's a road that has been named one of the most scenic drives in America. It took us across this 11,000 foot mountain pass, always at the edge of a cliff. It was so lonely, and only occasionally did we see another car. It was not like on the open highways of Nevada that have few cars but are main thoroughfares. This road was so isolated. We climbed higher and higher. Mom was driving, but in a way it was scarier to be the passenger. Our car is not the peppiest in the world, and for miles and hours we climbed. It was getting very late in the day, and I was worried that night would fall before we cleared the cliff-side hairpin turns. We had not eaten dinner yet, and as for bathrooms, we were about ready to look for a friendly rock. We stopped to stretch at one point on a ridge. Below us, you could see the entire valley stretched out like a painting of an idyllic fairy tale land. It was quite cold even in the middle of summer. Just before the steep drop down into the valley floor, there were bathrooms. It was the most convenient placement of portables I've ever seen in my life.

We pulled into the motel in Red Lodge at 9:00 o'clock, not having eaten dinner. We'd been driving since 10:00 am that morning. The 60 mile pass had taken us three hours. Everyone was so friendly and understanding; they said most people who come over the pass are actually upset afterwards. We ate dinner in a cozy grill. It was a California-style restaurant, plus cowboys.

Our motel was the first on the trip to have a hot tub, so even though I was really tired, I had to take advantage of it. We got to bed by 11:00, I think.

Day 6: Tuesday, July 17

This was the big day. We visited Winnett and The Town. Winnett actually looks quite a bit like The Town in the way that the buildings are kind of generic looking but different from each other. It makes Winnett sort of 'perfect' looking, unlike a lot of little towns that have old west or gold mining themes for the sake of tourists (I'm thinking of Jackson Hole). Winnett doesn't look like a tourist spot. The landscape around Winnett and The Town is exactly as I imagined it— little rolling hills with the occasional small cliff. I must have been channeling the topography ever since I created The Town because normally I would think it very illogical to have cliffs in a generally flat area. It all seemed very familiar in general, and I found myself ready to stroll into the Kozy Korner Cafe like I'd been a patron for years.

We ate lunch in the Kozy Korner and then drove north to locate The Town. I found a spot 21.2 miles from Winnett that is nearly perfect. It had a "Chopoff Hill" (that wasn't exactly chopped off but pretty good), the beginning of the lake that was no doubt enlarged by the Nelson sisters, and a little creek that in wintertime would probably be big enough for Theresa Taylor to fall into and get pulled into other realms.

I buried my action figure Larry Alexander under what Mom and I dubbed "Frog Rock"— an interesting yellow moss-covered rock on Chopoff Hill. The burial went perfectly; no crazed landowner came at us with a rifle telling us to get the hell off his property. The dirt was very workable, but it should compact and harden over time to protect the jars that I buried Larry in. I placed two flat rock slabs on top of the grave for a little extra protection. I realized afterward that I didn't actually make sure the jars were tight, nor did I seal them with tape as I'd intended to do. Oh well. It's double-jarred, so it should last the 17 years or so until I come to dig it up.

I took tons and tons of pictures. Some were to document what The Town really looks like and some were to help me find the spot on the ground again in 2018.

See many pictures of The Town
See many pictures of Winnett

Day 7: Wednesday, July 18

We didn't do much except drive to Twin Forks, Montana. There were a lot of cute bunnies hopping around outside the motel. Apparently someone used to raise them, got tired of it, and let them go. Then they multiplied like... well, rabbits.

Day 8: Thursday, July 19

Today we went to Lewis and Clark Caves, our last real stop on our trip. The caves were really cool, except that in the early days of the tours, the guide encouraged the visitors to break off stalactite souvenirs, telling them that they'd grow back in a couple of years. Only a few have begun to grow back at all after almost a century. Our guide used the phrase "you guys" compulsively. At one point, she turned off all the lights and told a story about a man who once got caught in the cave for two days with no light. He was temporarily blind when they found him, and he thought that there were bugs, bats, and snakes crawling all over him— even when they brought him out of the cave. In fact, bats are the only one of those three animals that live in the caverns, and they mostly keep to themselves in the uppermost room near the entrance.

Day 9: Friday, July 20

A very exciting day of driving and listening to The Left Hand of Darkness. We got very involved in it towards the end, and we were thinking about the difficulties of making a movie out of it, given that everyone except the main character is androgynous. It would probably have to be animated. That would be very cool. It was a wonderful book, and it inspired me to read some of LeGuin's other books— Rocannon's World and a few of the stories from The Wind's Twelve Quarters (including a companion short story to Left Hand of Darkness, about how King Argaven actually studied at an Ekumennical school in order to restore her brain to normal after tampering).

Day 10: Saturday, July 21

Reno, Nevada. We went out to dinner with Ed Morgan, a friend of my parents.' I saw him last when I was about eight and he gave me a bunch of Sunday School books.

I had a mega-brainstorm while meditating. Over the past few months I've taken up the hobby of building 1/12 scale (dollhouse size) wheelchairs. I want to be a rehab engineer, and this is one of the ways I vent my design energy. Anyway, I had a brainstorm of how to make a really streamlined semi-sports chair resembling a Quickie Triumph or an Action A-4. Since this day, I've successfully built this chair. It's quite incredible looking, and it works better than any other chair I've built. It utilizes a new kind of sheet metal axle plate that works very much like a full-sized one.

Day 11: Sunday, July 22

We drove home! It was so nice to be back in the world of good Chinese restaurants.