Before breakfast at Little America on our seventh day on the road, I decided that the people who would profit most from this trip — even if the wagon’s engine exploded in the parking lot that morning — were Iggy’s two boys. He didn’t pass on a single souvenir-buying opportunity. A fat crimson pen with the words LINCOLN, NEBRASKA printed on it; a tan stone of fossilized coral from Lake Michigan; chocolate Ohio buckeyes; and a trove of other priceless keepsakes were stashed in a large, white plastic shopping bag in the back of the Mercedes.
For him, the booty in Little America’s small gift shop by the registration desk was too tempting to ignore. I followed Iggy into the shop and was immediately overpowered by the smell of leather — presumably drifting from the vests draped on a rack in the middle of the room. A woman sat behind the cash register, too absorbed in the front page of the newspaper to pay us any notice.
For a moment, I considered grabbing a candle or a handcrafted piece of Native American jewelry for my kids. Was I being a lousy dad for not buying a load of junk? Put down the bracelet. Don’t let Iggy’s compulsive shopping sway you, I stopped myself. Iggy browsed the cowboy hats and flannel shirts, and stopped at a set of horse-head figurines. Watching him carefully examine each item to figure out which would look best atop whose dresser was too painful, so I told him I’d grab a table in the coffee shop and wait for him there.
The coffee shop turned out to be a bit of a jolt to my eastern sensibilities. The hostess walked me past the lunch counter to a high-backed burgundy-colored leather booth seat in a dimly lit dining area that was anything but feng shui. No bright lighting or colors, no mirrors, and no soft, curving furniture or open space for chi to flow. Above me on the wall hung Western-scene paintings of cowboys; prairies; and particularly unnerving, angry, rabid wolves looking ready to jump off the canvas and attack. Nothing even remotely organic found its way onto the coffee-stained menu, and I half-wondered if I was supposed to go out and round up the pig for my bacon. I sat there, sensing the wolves watching me as I took sips from the hot cocoa I had ordered, for about ten minutes before Iggy arrived. I didn’t even bother asking what he bought.
Our waitress appeared as soon as his rear end hit the leather. She was dark-haired and middle-aged, and her presence matched her booming voice. “What’ll it be, gentlemen?”
Iggy, who’s not much of a breakfast eater, ordered wholewheat toast. I asked for two eggs scrambled, with bacon and orange juice.
“That it?” she asked.
“One more thing,” Iggy said. “We’re from Vermont, and we’re going to California in a car that runs on used fryer oil we get from restaurant Dumpsters.”
“Well, yabba dabba doo for you,” she said, practically holding back a yawn, as if she heard the same line every morning.
“Could you ask the manager if we can look at your oil?” he said.
“I suppose so.” She shrugged, turning toward the kitchen to place our order.
I looked at Iggy. “You really think the grease is good here?”
“Probably not. But it’s worth a try,” he said. “We get one more big score, and we’re almost set.”
By the time the waitress gave us the manager’s answer, I was polishing off my last piece of bacon.
“We can’t help you on the oil. Some company already pays to take it off our hands. Sorry about that,” she said in a flat tone, not sorry at all. She handed us our check, but before we could even say thanks, she was gone, pouring coffee at another table.
I picked up the piece of paper. “I didn’t want their oil, anyway. You know, if I were a bitter man, I’d leave a lousy tip.”
“You are a bitter man.”
We pulled out of Little America that morning and the sun beaming through the wagon’s windows kept us warm despite the chilly outdoor air. Our moods were nearly as bright as the cloudless sky, even though the specter of spending the afternoon hunting for oil loomed. The previous day’s wind had died, and we were driving downhill, which improved our fuel mileage and eased the burden on the diesel engine.
Outside, the scenery broadened, revealing towns to our left deposited into deep, tree-filled valleys carved beneath the Unita Mountains. Somewhere about fifteen miles from the Utah border, we spotted a cluster of twenty-nine wind turbines.
“It’s funny how some of the biggest Republican states have some of the biggest wind projects,” Iggy said, both hands gripping the wheel.
“I bet it’s from all the undeveloped land in places like here. And I bet Republican states have less red tape.”
Juxtaposing Wyoming’s modern push for wind energy is the old-school mining community of Kemmerer, not far north of our position at that moment. Coal still provides 40 percent of the world’s electricity — compared with 0.4 percent for wind — and its consumption produces 40 percent of the carbon dioxide released into our atmosphere. Kemmerer was built by a coal company in 1890 to house its workers, and James Cash “J.C.” Penney opened his first retail store there in 1902 to give miners and their families a place to shop. In 1950 Kemmerer became home to the world’s largest open-pit coal mine, employing a process that removes four to five tons of soil and rock for every one ton of coal. The operation, still running, is now owned by Chevron Corporation, and won’t be leaving soon. Geologists believe five hundred million tons of coal still lie beneath Kemmerer’s rugged surroundings, waiting to be extracted.
The wind farm began to fade from the rear window, and on the radio Men at Work sang about a “land down under.” Before the trip, Iggy’s concern for the environment barely stretched past the abstract notions that pollution is bad for the earth, recycling is good, and that global warming didn’t exist. But now he was at least contemplating the issues and considering his own stake in the climate crisis. He had spent more time than I did roaming the tents at the fair in Fort Collins, picking up literature on the hydrogen-powered Hummer on display and speaking to exhibitors showing off home solar packages and mini–wind turbines. Not to say that he had been converted. I didn’t expect him to sell his thirty-foot powerboat with the fifty-gallon gas tank anytime soon.
I turned down the stereo. “You ever wonder why there isn’t a bigger sense of urgency to getting off fossil fuels?”
“Not really,” he said. “We’ll get a solution. Humans adapt.”
“There’s that hubris again,” I said.
“You don’t think so?” he asked.
I replied that I didn’t know, but we shouldn’t assume that we’ll be able to find some quick fix if the climate reaches crisis stage, and then told him about Easter Island — the ultimate in cautionary tales about resources, war, and near extinction. I had been assigned to go there a couple of years earlier for an in-flight magazine for private jets (evidence that I, too, can be part of the problem). Easter Island is the planet’s remotest piece of land, jutting dramatically above the surface of the South Pacific, about two thousand miles west of Chile and thirteen hundred miles east of Pitcairn Island. The three thousand or so people who live there call it Rapa Nui — and most of them are descendants of the original Polynesians who researchers believe arrived there on outrigger canoes sometime around the fourth century AD. How anyone could possibly have found this fourteen-by-seven-mile arrowhead of volcanic rock in the deepest part of nowhere on earth is a marvel. But they did, and at that time the island was lush with palm forests.
Rapa Nui is no typical tropical paradise. It’s void of the sandy beaches that would attract honeymooners. There are no hidden waterfalls — or even rivers or potable lakes — on it, either. And the Pacific nearly always seems angry at it, constantly pounding its shores. Yet for the first several centuries after the Polynesian settlers arrived, they flourished. Their numbers grew to at least seven thousand and by some estimates more than twenty thousand. Clans were formed, each claiming different sections of the island as their own. The nuts from the palm trees and the abundance of birds and marine life kept them well fed. Technology advanced to the point that artisans started carving giant, elaborate stone statues weighing as much as fifty tons and moving them as far as ten miles from the central quarry. The size of these dark, phallus-shaped shrines, called moai, with human faces, became equated with wealth and power. The bigger the moai, the richer the person. More than two hundred were completed and hundreds more still lie half-buried and unfinished in the quarry, like crooked tombstones in an ancient graveyard.
To transport the moai, rope and lumber was needed, so trees were cleared. Resources began to dwindle. During the fifteenth century, the palms disappeared altogether. In turn, the topsoil eroded, the people couldn’t build canoes for fishing or fire for cooking food. Bloody wars erupted over what few resources remained. A new religion was formed. When Europeans reached Rapa Nui in 1722, the population had dwindled to two thousand or so. Humanity had survived, but organized society was replaced by warrior rule. The people even lost the ability to decipher their own ornate written language. The island’s exact history is still being researched, hypothesized, and uncovered — and environmentalists who cite it are often accused of twisting the facts to fit their arguments — but this was the basic, unfiltered story told to me by locals.
“Imagine cutting down that last tree,” Iggy said.
“The guy probably said, ‘Man, just get me through today. I need to keep my family warm tonight.’ If Easter Island is humanity placed in a vacuum, it’s a stark view.”
“That gets back to what I said about Nature.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Too many people were living on the island. They stopped living in harmony with Nature. So Nature did some population control,” he said.
“But the people cut down the trees.”
“No. Nature stopped providing for them. We agree that it’s hubris to think humanity has control over Nature, right?” he asked.
“More or less,” I replied.
“Okay, then when humanity takes an action that alters the delicate balance of things, like cutting down so many trees, then Nature reacts.” According to his view, Nature stopped supplying sustenance for the people on Easter Island. “People can only control what they do, not what Nature does.”
Then I began to understand the point Iggy had been trying to make about climate change a few days earlier but couldn’t quite articulate. “So with your cockeyed reasoning, you’re saying that humans can’t be warming the earth, because we have no control over Nature. Instead, Nature is warming the earth because we’re disrupting the delicate balance of things.”
“Right!” Iggy said, his eyes wide. “Like when I get a fever. It’s from my immune system fighting an infection or a virus upsetting the delicate balance inside my body.”
“So global warming is really Nature’s immune system, creating a fever to kill off the infection, which is us?” I asked.
“Yes!”
“You’re making this up on the fly, aren’t you?”
“Yes I am,” he said.
I told him he wasn’t the first person to think this way. James Lovelock, a physician, chemist, biophysicist, and former NASA scientist, speculates that the planet acts like a giant organism. As the atmosphere constantly changes, so do the earth’s ecosystems, in order to maintain life — the same way the human body’s internal systems are constantly adjusting to keep it alive. He calls this the gaia theory. Since we’re upsetting the equilibrium so dramatically, the earth is suffering from a high fever. Lovelock basically says that we have no more precise control over the environment than a group of cells might over an organism, but we can certainly throw it out of whack. The climate situation has become so dire, he believes, that nuclear energy is the only viable short-term solution for slashing our carbon footprint.
While Iggy and I talked, I noticed the soil reddening and turning less rocky, and occasional tufts of brown grass appearing in splotches. We were still dropping in elevation as we drove deeper into Utah, the interstate following a chain of narrow canyons carved by fast-moving creeks. We passed the Echo Reservoir, formed by the Echo Dam, and reached the town of Coalville, where a bug splatted on the windshield for the first time since eastern Nebraska. Tidy neighborhoods appeared, where kids played tag in grassy front yards shaded by fruit trees. We saw sheep and cows grazing on green plots, and flyfishermen, casting lines in a broad, glassy river.
Soon after, the engine growled, signaling that we were climbing again, into the Wasatch Mountains. Not far from the apex, the interstate curved and we spied Park City, only thirty-five miles east of Salt Lake City and perched beneath a set of long, steep ski slopes. Once a rough-and-tumble, saloon-filled mining camp, it’s now an upscale recreation getaway famed for the driest, fluffiest snow in the world — and for the many celebrities who come to ski on it. The previous day’s storm had draped the town with two or three inches of the white stuff. Our conversation here turned from climate change to an even more pressing matter: finding a pit stop.
I needed to use the bathroom and Iggy wanted to resupply on vitamin water, so we pulled off the highway into a gas station by a broad, seemingly brand-new strip mall and parked on the edge of the side lot.
“See that?” Iggy said, looking straight through the windshield at a black fifty-five-gallon oil drum. It sat behind a Mexican restaurant called Loco Lizard in the adjacent strip mall. We jumped out of the car and trudged in our sneakers through the snow-covered grass separating parking areas. Iggy brushed the ice shards off the drum’s lid and opened. It was two-thirds full of amber, chunk-free oil. No way! That worked out to maybe 700 or 800 miles of fuel, and a mere 750 miles separated us from Berkeley and the BioFuel Oasis. It can’t be this easy. Or could this be the good karma payback for the dog peeing on my leg? I punched at the side of the drum with my right palm. The liquid inside jiggled like water, despite the frigid temperature. Jackpot! Time to act.
Without saying a word, I hiked up my low-riding blue jeans and marched to the restaurant’s front door with Iggy trailing behind me. Oh Loco Lizard, there will always be a place for you in my heart. Your luscious chicken mole enchiladas, slow simmered to perfection; your mouth-watering Mayan pork chops; those tamales, made fresh daily. How do you keep your prices so low? Your restrooms so clean? If only I had brought the family along. My little ones would have gone crazy for those ever-popular kidsadillas and lizard legs.
Loco Lizard’s personable manager had never heard of a car fueled by fry grease but was eager to learn more, and after I obliged him he gladly allowed us to raid his oil bin. Iggy drove the Mercedes behind the restaurant and we quickly set up the pumping equipment. While we worked, the chef stepped out the back door to watch, utterly fascinated. Speaking in a soft accent, he fired question after question at us. By now, Iggy and I had shed our self-consciousness about approaching restaurants for their grease and being observed as we filtered. If the chef was willing to stand in the cold to talk to us, we were pleased for the company. Within sixteen minutes, our job was complete. We had filtered close to forty gallons, leaving us set for fuel for the rest of the trip — if the car could survive the long desert crossing and then the climb over the Sierras on the way to Berkeley.
We sped out of Park City whooping and hollering out the open windows on I-80’s steep, curving descent to Salt Lake City — though the car’s brakes weren’t quite as happy. The highway plateaued at the base of the Wastach Mountains, entering the city limits. I watched the concrete-and-glass NBA arena come and go, then the six gray quartz spires of the Mormon Temple peeking between the downtown office towers, then the airliners circling over the busy airport runway. From there, we skirted the southern edge of the seventy-five-mile-long shallow pan of salt water called Great Salt Lake. Somewhere on the far opposite shore — well beyond our vision — lay the spot where, in 1869, the final spike was driven into the Transcontinental Railroad, officially connecting the East to the West.
The wagon had just rumbled past the beach and long, boat-filled marina in the Great Salt Lake State Park when our attention was suddenly diverted to the sound of a motorcycle in the passing lane. A man wearing a green army helmet with no earflaps, leather pants, and a leather bomber jacket was riding alongside us, matching our speed and waving his right hand forward, as if he wanted us to speed up and follow. His thick sideburns and goatee made him look straight out of the sixties or seventies, but his bike was timeless. It was a chopper, definitely custom built, with nearly everything chrome — the spokes, exhaust pipes, tall seat-back frame, and forehead-high handlebars. I made eye contact with him, at least I think, through his aviator glasses, and then he immediately rocketed forward.
Iggy told me to press the gas, but we didn’t come close to catching the chopper, which vanished into the shimmering distance. About twenty miles down the highway, as the Great Salt Lake Desert’s chalky flats enveloped us, we had largely forgotten about our strange encounter when we spotted the man again — stopped and waiting in the breakdown lane. We passed him and he gunned the engine, catching up to us within seconds — then once again riding alongside and waving us ahead.
“Does he want to tell us something?” I asked Iggy. We had no idea, though we knew it had something to do with the grease. There’s no way a motorcyclist could miss the exhaust’s distinctive smell, and there would be no other reason for him to single us out. He didn’t seem menacing, and if there had been a place to stop along the barren pavement we would have. So I turned to him, raised my hands, and shrugged (while cradling wheel with my thighs), to signal that I didn’t understand. He rocketed ahead and vanished for a second time.
The chopper appeared again about ten minutes later, and the man gave us the same mysterious hand signs. I responded with a shrug. He then lingered a few seconds longer beside the wagon, his aviator glasses aimed straight at Iggy and me, and slowly extended his right arm until the elbow was straight, then dramatically raised his right thumb.
“Thumbs up!” I said in an excited voice and looked at Iggy, who was smiling. When I looked back out my side window, the chopper was gone. We could hear its engine whine as it picked up speed and shot into the distance a final time.
“He gave us the thumbs-up!” I said, and Iggy nodded. For whatever reason, we were proud to earn the chopper man’s approval, to be acknowledged as fellow road-bound free spirits. We suddenly felt like we were Fonda and Hopper, on the road discovering America — minus the hookers and acid trips. We rode in satisfied silence for the next half hour or so, until somewhere around the Bonneville Salt Flats in the Great Salt Lake Desert, Iggy grabbed the atlas stashed behind the driver’s seat. “This time tomorrow, we’ll be at the Oasis. Women in jumpsuits will be knocking on the window and saying, ‘Would you like some oil?’ “
“Almost too good to be true,” I said. Only a few lacy strands of cloud interrupted the blue sky above us. When H. Nelson Jackson entered the final leg of his journey, he had become a national celebrity. He cruised across New York State with astounding speed, entering Manhattan in the early morning hours victorious. Iggy and I didn’t care about adoring crowds — although they would have been nice. We just wanted to get to the finish line. Many miles of sandy real estate still separated us from our destination, though. “Where should we stop tonight?” I asked. “Reno’s too far, but let’s get through as much of Nevada as we can.”
Iggy jabbed his finger into the map. “I know where we’re going: Lovelock.”
“Lovelock,” I repeated. A town a hundred miles from the California line that shares the name of the gaia theory creator.
“This is some kind of sign,” Iggy said. “We have to stop there.”
“Agreed.”
As motorists drive west on I-80 across the desert flats of Utah, the Pequop Mountains first appear as tiny red embers on the horizon. They grow steadily, but too gradual to notice, until they fill the backdrop by the Nevada border. Just before the highway starts to scale them, a six-story-tall, cigarette-smoking, gun-toting neon-lit cowboy appears, standing over a cluster of sparkling hotels and casinos. This is West Wendover, population forty-seven hundred, and the easiest gambling spot to reach from Salt Lake City. I pressed the gas pedal, resisting the temptation to take a break at the blackjack tables, and we continued on the highway through the mountains and into the deep western desert. We refueled and switched drivers later in Elko, a watering stop on the Humboldt River for travelers since the early 1840s.
“Hubris,” Iggy blurted, somewhere between Battle Mountain and Winnemucca.
I lowered Bob Dylan’s voice, wheezing through the stereo speakers. “What now?”
“Nevada is hubris personified. Look at Las Vegas. The fastest-growing city in the country, and it’s in the middle of the desert. Giant casinos, big pools of water in front of them. It can’t be sustained.”
“The water problem in the West is scary,” I said.
“Did you know that you can own a piece of property but not own the water under it here?” he asked.
“Vaguely.” Then I dished some trivia of my own. “Did you know that the Colorado River isn’t really a river?”
“How so?”
“A river is something that empties into a lake or the ocean. But the Colorado doesn’t reach the Pacific anymore. It gets so used up that it dries out somewhere in Mexico.”
“Overdevelopment,” Iggy said. Yet another Wal-Mart truck passed to our left. “They don’t help,” Iggy said, pointing at it.
“You don’t beat out Exxon-Mobil as the biggest corporation in the world if you’re a charity,” I said. It’s a line I’ve often used. “I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way. They’re getting greener, but I’m skeptical.”
“That’s your next errand. Find out how they’re getting greener.”
I nodded and turned up Bob Dylan. We forged onward, hoping to reach Lovelock before sunset.