Road-Tripping In Satan's Microwave

As I watched our television being loaded into the back of my sister's father's best friend's truck I realized that my days of using the coffee table as a surfboard were over…

The year was 1993 and my sister and I were now the only kids still living at home.  My oldest brother had moved out shortly after returning from Desert Storm and the other brother had gone away to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil for a two-year religious mission.  It was the dead middle of summer in northern Utah, around June or July though I forget the precise month.  I was ten years old and my sister was fourteen, both of us would be having our birthdays later in the fall.  Somewhere among the lectures, seminars, and meetings that my parents attended for people who were wary of Big Brother and all of the strange happenings of the government, my dad had befriended a man named Dave Seich and had arranged the private purchase of some land in a tiny town called Virgin, Utah just outside of Zion National Park in the southwestern corner of the state.  The full plot was 2.5 acres but my dad would be purchasing 1.5 while Dave would retain the remaining acre for himself.

Like us, Dave also had a home in northern Utah as well.  We visited it once before the plans to move were set in motion – it was a large geodesic home with dome shaped walls like someone had flipped a giant bowl upside down and turned it into a house.  SpongeBob would have loved it.  Dave had several kids of his own, though most of them were much older than my sister and I and most were boys – I believe there were seven though I could be mistaken as I don't recall ever meeting any of them formally.  Dave and my father were friends so when Dave suggested that they conduct the sale privately without involving any realty agents or title companies my dad went along with the plan.  Some kind of payment arrangement was made but I was never privy to the fine details of it.  I just know that it involved a large up-front payment.  We sold our home in Roy and began packing up everything that we owned into a collection of boxes, plastic tubs, and brand-new plastic trash cans.

My sister's dad supplied a massive trailer, commonly hauled by semi-trucks but he'd modified it so that it could be hitched to, and towed by a pick-up truck.  He also supplied a 60's model Chevy pick-up that would have been a real head-turner with some proper restoration work but, as it was, looked like something you might see on an episode of Swamp People.  My mother's Monte Carlo had been impounded by the Roy City police department because my dad had been caught driving it without a license … well, I say he'd been caught but that isn't really very accurate.  My dad had gotten angry with the local police over some unknown thing so one day he jumped in my mother's car and went looking for police officers.  Don't go getting the wrong idea here, he wasn't hunting them or anything.  Hell, he wasn't even armed.  But go looking he did and he didn't have to look far because he found two cop cars parked side-by-side in the church parking lot, facing opposite directions so that the officers could talk to one another without getting out of their vehicles or shouting across their passenger seats.  My dad pulled up to them in the parking lot, got out of the car, put his hands in the air and said something to the effect of 'Here I am, arrest me' so they did … and they impounded the car.

It's not like they'd been looking for him, he had no warrants and we'd not moved or gone into hiding at all.  Had they actually wanted to arrest him they could have easily come by the house and simply knocked on the door – but when a man says the words 'arrest me' to a police officer it seems like it would be remiss for the officer to not at least try to find out what it is that the person seems to think they've done to warrant an arrest.  In my dad's case, the crime was driving without a license.  He'd begun the process of becoming a sovereign citizen and one thing sovereigns cannot do is obtain a driver's license – at least, not a government issued license.  There is another kind of document that is recognized inside the US and that is an international driver's permit or IDP.  It's the reason that tourists visiting from other countries can legally rent cars and drive themselves around while they're here in the US.  My dad did have an IDP on him that he'd purchased at one of the expos that we went to but what he didn't know – because information wasn't as readily available then like it is now, thanks to Google – is that he'd most likely fallen victim to an IDP scam.  A real IDP is a small booklet, bearing the official seal of AAA, that you obtain by applying for it, taking a series of tests, and providing valid proof of identity.  If pulled over in a foreign country the IDP should be presented along with your valid driver's license from your home country, as the IDP on its own is insufficient.  What my dad had was a piece of plastic that looked very similar to an ordinary state-issued ID, bearing his photograph and general identification information such as his name, but it never expired and it was as worthless as the UFO driver's licenses that you can purchase at gas stations near Area 51 and in most Las Vegas gift shops.

Nonetheless, my dad had fallen for the seller's song and dance that the international driver's license was a way for sovereign citizens to continue using vehicles on US roads with impunity.  In hindsight, maybe the reason he went looking for cops that day was because he wanted to test it out to see if it worked.  It didn't.  Without a valid form of photo identification to go with it, even a real IDP can lead to arrest because it can be seen as a driver's intent to hide their identity and we now live in a country where anonymity is a crime punishable by law.  The funny thing – and by funny, I mean funny-ironic, not funny-haha – is that my ex-husband was pulled over and arrested on multiple occasions for driving without a license.  Not because he was a conspiracy theorist or sovereign citizen but because he was a loser who valued drugs more than things like paying his car insurance or appearing in court.  I know of at least 4 arrests in my current home county alone (and several other warrants for his arrest in other states) and none of them involved impounding the car that he was driving, which was never his own because the bank had long since repoed it when they first found out that he'd let his insurance terminate.  In my dad's case, they impounded the Monte and we never saw it again which was something my mother never fully got over and brought up in arguments for many years to follow.

In any case, that was my dad's last arrest in Roy, to my knowledge, and the plans to move had begun not long after.  Moving, of course, means packing up all of one's worldly possessions into moving vans or trucks to get them from the old house to the new but, in our case, we had no new house to go to.  My dad had purchased a plot of land, not a house.  As a design engineer with extensive experience in structural and architectural design, he and my mother had collaborated to draw up the blue prints for our very own geodesic home, but rather than one large dome like Dave Seich lived in, it would be three smaller structures connected to one another via hallways.  The plan was that we would live in the family camper – the same one that I described from our trips to Montana in a previous chapter – while building our new home ourselves.  We'd built the cabin ourselves, or most of it anyway, so this really didn't seem like that daunting of a task, to be honest.  My parents had estimated 2-3 months tops before it would be completed and liveable and we would be resuming mostly normal lives.

Of course, no one wants to rent a U-Haul for 2-3 months which meant that we would need to find a more permanent home for all of our belongings than simple moving vans, but there was far too much to practically depend on storage units either.  This was where the large semi-trailer came into play.  We loaded it up with nearly every last piece of what we couldn't take with us in the camper or fit in the back of the second pick-up and there it would stay, parked on the property where we could keep an eye on it, until we were ready to move everything into our new home.  It held our sofas, beds, the majority of our clothes, food storage, toys, my brother's IBM computer and other electronics … everything.  It had solid walls and a door but no roof so industrial tarps were tied across the top to keep everything from getting wet or sun-baked, but even with it packed skillfully to the brim like an epic 3D jigsaw puzzle, we were still going to have to do some downsizing.  Part of downsizing involved my father's decision to sell our family-room TV which we'd had for as long as I could to remember.  It wasn't just a TV.  It was a wall-sized entertainment center – the crème de le crème of its time.  It was two levels with the actual TV screen in the center of the bottom level and yellow speaker panels that were just as big as the screen itself on either side.  On the second level were 4 cabinets that contained our collection of VHS tapes in one, the Nintendo (NES) and all of the games for it in another, a radio in the third, and a record player in the fourth.  I was the most upset about losing the record player.

The NES and movies would be coming with us as they weren't actually built-into the cabinets, but the record player and the radio were both part of the TV set and could not be removed.  I had 2 Beach Boys records, one of which I'd probably claimed away from my father and the other I'd found in an empty field behind our house.  Both were scratched and skipped a lot but I didn't care.  I'd loved the Beach Boys since I'd been in diapers and I knew every word to every song on both sides of both records by heart … I even had the skips memorized and incorporated them accordingly while singing along.  Whenever my parents weren't home and my siblings were in good enough moods not to yell at me for it, I would turn the volume up all the way on that record player and blast some Surfin' USA loud enough for half the block to hear.  I would then proceed to dance around the basement, leaping from the sofa to the coffee table like I was mounting a magically self-stabilizing surfboard from the back of a Jet ski and ride those imaginary waves right into Help Me Rhonda bliss.  I idolized those damn California Girls for being the prettiest girls in the world and got seasick aboard the Sloop John B.  I owned a fictional 409 and sat In My Room dreaming about picking up the Good Vibrations down in Kokomo someday … and then it was gone.

There was one Beach Boys song on those two records that I never liked.  My dad had this habit, whenever he was in a particularly good or silly mood, of singing songs and replacing the occasional word or name here and there.  In my case this often led to him singing 'Lynsee, Lynsee left me alone … hurts so bad, hurts so bad' and it would make me so sad because he sounded so heartbroken even though I would often be standing right there next to him saying 'Here I am, daddy'.  Now hearing him singing bits of his favorite songs and replacing the words is one of the things that I miss about him that most ... and a habit that I apparently picked up and often do with my husband's name or the names of our dogs.  When I watched that TV set and record player and those enormous speakers being loaded into the truck of an almost-stranger, never to be seen again, I finally knew how Brian Wilson and Mike Love must have felt when they wrote the song Wendy.  I was utterly devastated.  It was the only thing about the move that I wasn't happy about.  My best friends had promised to write to me for the rest of our lives and visit as often as possible, my parents had promised us that we could get horses once we were settled, and my dad had even told me that I could change my name if I wanted to, since no one in our new home would know my real name.  He didn’t know it at the time, but I had every intention of taking him up on that and already had my brand new name picked out and ready to roll off my tongue with practiced ease but I would be losing my record player and that broke my tiny ten year old heart.

Nevertheless, with or without the record player, the day eventually came and we said one last goodbye to our beautiful 2-story family home on the corner with the big wrap-around front yard and the three-level back yard with its dual patios, grape vines, raspberry bushes, and apple trees.  We'd made some incredible memories in that house.  Every holiday my mother treated the big picture window on the front of the house like our own personal Macy's display featuring my dad's hand-painted pumpkins for Halloween, or his hand-painted ceramic eggs for Easter, or a big flocked Christmas tree with twinkling lights and antique wooden decorations peppered intermittently by little satin bows and big silk balls all in a lovely dark country blue color with a big angel dressed in a silver flowy gown on the top.  She would spend weeks baking cookies, German Stollen bread, and pies and set them out on decorative trays and multi-tiered silver serving platters along with various kinds of homemade fudges, chocolate dipped pretzels sprinkled with crushed candy cane pieces, and even homemade black licorice drops.

In the winter my sister and I would put the hose at the top of the staircase that led from the first patio down to the second and would leave it running on low so that when we woke up the following morning the stairs would have been transformed into a steep sheet of ice like a bobsled run that extended along the length of the second patio and ended where the snow began on the grassy slope that led down to the third level.  My friend Cameron would come over and we would use our inflatable river tubes to sled down the stairs, ricochet off the back of the house, careen across the second patio and just before we came to a stop we would hit that slope and pick up speed again just before jumping off the low retaining wall comprised of railroad ties to eventually be stopped by bouncing off the bottom fence where the grapevines were hibernating and then we would grab the sled and race back up to the top to do it all over again.

In the summer we would convert that same slope into a giant slip-n-slide with trash bags, a hose, and a few drops of dish soap.  At the time I remember thinking I was going to miss that house and the many ways that it could be transformed into a playground but, little did I know, that we were moving to a much bigger and more interesting type of playground – a place where my back-yard adventures would seem tame by comparison.

The camper was placed in the back of my dad's truck and my sister and I were loaded into it for the ride along with Patch, the family Dalmatian, while my mom would ride in the cab with my dad.  The camper didn't have AC, of course, but it didn't really seem like it would be necessary at the time.  It had plenty of windows on all sides so as long as there was good airflow, it didn't really get very hot back there on any of our trips to Montana.  My dad and my sister's dad had already gone down to the property at some point previously with the trailers and anything else that would fit loaded into the trucks and left it all behind, so the only thing left to do was to close up the doors on our house and leave town once and for all.  I want to say that we were somewhere in the vicinity of Beaver, Utah by the time my sister and I realized that we were driving into Satan's personal microwave.  Even with the windows wide open, we were sweating buckets and there wasn't a cool space to ride in the entire camper because when you're traveling 75 miles per hour on the freeway in the desert, even the wind is hot.

We'd started the journey with coloring books, my Gameboy, and various other ways to keep ourselves entertained for 5-7 hours but when the temperature started rising, everything was abandoned in favor of looking out the windows and complaining to one another about the heat.  We'd lived in the city.  Despite our summers in Montana we were still, very much, city kids.  We'd seen wilderness before, of course, but it had involved trees and greenery, and beautiful purple mountains.  As we looked out the windows on the way to our new home we became poignantly aware that there are other types of wilderness in this world that are very, very different from what we were expecting.  Endless oceans of sparse sagebrush, brown foxtails, half-dead tumbleweeds, and bright coral sand that ended against enormously jagged, angry looking, rust colored monstrosities.  The towns that we passed boasted their gas stations and McDonalds locations like they were prized possessions; an official stamp that separated the really Podunk towns from the only mostly Podunk towns.

Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, I can tell you that the average temperature for Roy, Utah was 81 degrees Fahrenheit in July of 1993.  We considered that hot, of course, but it was also what we were used to.  We were snow-bunnies mostly, quite as fond of digging tunnel-forts into the large mounds of snow left behind by the snowplows in our caul de sac as we were of taking a summer swim in the indoor pool at our local rec center.  In southwestern Utah where we would be moving to, it was 102 degrees and snow was more of an anomaly than an expectation.  By the time we pulled into the lone Walmart in all of Washington County my sister and I were pretty sure that we were going to die, and I don't think Patch, the dog, was very keen on the heat either.  My dad had parked the camper at the very back of the parking lot, about as far away from the doors to the Walmart, and the other cars, as possible.  When my parents finally opened the door to the camper to let us out, the three of us – sister, dog, and I – spilled from the opening like giant puddles of desperate, miserable goo longing for a real breeze or perhaps even some air conditioning.  It was time for rude awakening number two.  The instant that our feet touched the ground we realized that we'd made a grave mistake.

You see, in the desert it's not just the air that's hot – the ground gets hot too … very hot.  So hot, in fact that we could literally feel the black top burning the bottoms of our feet through the soles of our thin slip-on jelly shoes.  The poor dog got the worst of it, considering he didn't even have shoes to protect him.  He bolted for the shadow being cast by the building like someone had lit his tail on fire and my sister and I bolted after him until the three of us were huddled in a sliver of shade together, panting, and ruing everything about this new place.

You might be wondering why, in the chapter title, I referred to southern Utah as Satan's microwave and not something more common like Hell's Kitchen (which is a very real city in the state of New York) and the answer is simple: the sun.  The thing about life in the desert is that it's not just the heat that will get you – the sun itself seems to have a special kind of amplified power here that you just don't get in cooler places like northern Utah.  It's brighter and it will burn you faster, blind you worse, and assault you from all sides with a surreal intensity.  I've never been one for the Flat Earth Movement but if there was ever a Conical-Shaped Earth movement I think I might be inclined to consider it so long as Washington County in Utah were named as the point nearest the sun in July of 1993.

Hell.  Pure, unadulterated, what-have-we-gotten-ourselves-into, is-it-too-late-to-ask-one-of-our-aunts-to-adopt-us, people-can't-possibly-live-here, this-might-actually-qualify-as-child-abuse, HELL!  When the Walmart excursion had ended, none of us wanted to get back inside the camper but we did it anyway because we'd not been given much of a choice.  We still had another hour or so to drive before we would make it to 'the property' – as we would eventually come to call it – and so we did as we were told.  But that hour stretched into two hours and three and before we knew it, it was dark outside and we were looking out the windows at the miniature sprawl of Saint George, Utah.

We'd gotten ourselves – mom, dad, sister, dog, and I – utterly and hopelessly lost.