I Visited Your Hometown

How Grand Were My Tetons? Or, Adventures in the Mountain West in the twilight of the American experience.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since I founded FilmDrunk in 2007. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

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Vince Mancini

Sorry, I couldn’t resist that joke.

The #Content Report is on the road this week, and I mean mostly literally on the road. The family and I are taking the scenic route up to see my in-laws in Montana, which took us across the East of California, across Nevada, through a tiny sliver of Arizona, and all the way up through Utah along the way. I’d driven to Utah from San Diego before but never from Fresno, a slightly different route which took us across a weirdly picturesque but sadly short sliver of foothills between Bakersfield and the Mojave Desert.

Our first pit stop was in Tehachapi, the first leg of the mostly featureless slog across the Mojave with its eerie airplane boneyard, and through all the dusty towns with names like Boron and Barstow (sometimes you can tell how much a town sucks just from the name - see also Sulphurdale. Being named after a mineral is usually a tell). I have a personal theory that desert people are uniquely strange, and every other patron in the Tehachapi McDonalds at 9am seemed to confirm this. There was the guy in the very tall military-inspired cap by the door, openly leering. Then a tweeky looking older guy jingling his pockets while I used the ice dispenser, clearly not fast enough for his liking. And a Zach Galifianakis character with a round belly, big red beard, red white and blue buckethead hat and gold sunglasses indoors who looked like flakiest link of a pot smuggling operation (a fatter version of Steve Zahn in Out of Sight comes to mind). It was every flavor of yokel! Not even out of the state and already I felt like we were getting a full compliment of Americana.

Gradually we made our way into Utah, or as I like to call it, the dirt booger state. It’s so dry and dusty there that the contents of my nasal cavities inevitably come to mirror the rugged sandstone formations in miniature, craggy little stalactites that periodically break off and block the upper passages of my nostrils causing a sneezing fit. Hey, it passes the time. Thanks to attending a decade plus of Sundance festivals I’ve spent probably more time in Utah than any state I haven’t lived in (CA and New York) but southern Utah was almost entirely new. We stayed our first night in the Virgin River valley just outside of Zion national park where I took the picture up top.

My conception of national parks was mostly formed from growing on the doorstep of Yosemite, such that anywhere that doesn’t look like the Sierra Nevadas feels special and exotic. The carved sandstone canyons and mesas of Zion, covered in dirt and bushy scrub and dominated by the negative spaces where ancient rivers and glaciers subtracted Earth certainly fit the bill. The colors of the canyon rims and their tumorous cliff sides change throughout the day with every new position of the sun. Probably those rich, ruddy hues would be even more spectacular-looking to someone whose cones aren’t genetically inferior at detecting shades of red like mine.

They say that when you have a toddler you don’t really go on vacation, you just parent in different locations. On a five-day road trip with an 11-year-old and an almost three-year-old, my wife and I naturally experienced plenty that would confirm this. As a toddler father, I vacillate about 12 times daily between heart-exploding gratitude to the universe and wondering if there’s a place you can drop off kids and leave them until they turn 5 or 6.

Obviously we weren’t going to attempt any hard hikes with a toddler, but even so he drove my wife crazy clinging to her and refusing to walk (or be carried by anyone else, for instance me) for the entirety of the river walk to The Narrows (which we weren’t attempting, just walking up to the entrance of). That one was kind of a bust, but at least it was relatively cool thanks to the sun not having yet climbed above the canyon tops. I say “we” even though my wife planned this entire thing, my personal combination of procastination and improvisational nature not lending themselves well to itinerary creation.

Cranky toddler not pictured.

On our way out we attempted the Canyon Overlook Trail, which was also short enough for a toddler but steeper and with much more challenging terrain. Challenging enough that we figured it’d be best for me to carry him strapped to my back on our special backpack the whole way. It worked decently well at first. He had a great view, and other hikers we passed said things like “that looks like a great way to travel!” “Hey, bud, got another seat for me?”

Then things shifted, as they often do, about a third of the way into the hike. He got sweaty and hot (it got up to 109 that day) and naturally decided that he’d like to be less close to his hot, sweaty dad. And so he started shrieking LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT!

Only I couldn’t, because the trail was only a few feet wide, usually next to sheer drops off the side of the canyon, and had zero places where it seemed safe to take off a giant backpack and unbuckle a furious toddler. The kid is nothing if not willful and persistent. He kept that up for most of the trail. And so I spent most of the hike trying to keep steady with my tandem partner flailing around on my back and sometimes trying knock my hat off. Apologies to everyone else on the trail who came to see the majestic stillness of nature and got a screaming toddler instead. Beautiful country though.

He turned sweet again as soon as we got back to the car (as they always seem to do, probably an evolutionary thing to minimize infanticide), and he and my 11-year-old stepson played their favorite new game — in which they get their faces almost nose to nose, and say back and forth, in their sweetest child voices, “Hello, Bozo!”

My stepson probably picked this up from a show or game or YouTube video, or from a friend who picked it up from one of those. I’m blissfully unaware of whatever it is and so choose to believe it’s their original, genius linguistic invention. (Another example: when my son had barely turned two I called him a fartknocker, and he threw back, “I’m not a fartknocker, I’m a poop knocker!”)

It’s been pretty touch and go with the toddler lately, on account of he recently learned to climb out of his crib. Which means he never makes it all the way through the night anymore like he always used to without climbing into our bed at four or five am and squirming his tiny heart’s content. We converted his crib into a toddler bed, and ever since I’ve been wondering whether maybe higher crib walls would’ve been the better play.

That happened about six days before we left. Not the greatest timing before a five-day off-site. It takes him longer to get to sleep, but he hasn’t been so bad. The second or third night, he apparently had a dream that my wife fell off the bed and shattered. He woke up in the middle of the night trying to lift the covers, saying he wanted to see where she was broken.

On the way north from Zion we stopped in Parowan, my favorite kind of tiny town, with mature-tree lined streets that seem to extend out into the horizon, one of those places that looks like they just sort of airdropped a quaint little village onto a patch of stunning scenery (Redding, CA is sort of like this, where you can see the horizon in every direction). Quiet and isolated, it’s one of those places that still looks mostly like it probably did when people were still hitching up their horses along the storefronts. Kind of adorable and creepy in equal measure. As my wife said, “this is the kind of town you see in a documentary about some kids who disappeared.”

The first few people we said hello to on the street, including one lady on crutches we held the door for coming out of the diner, just ignored us completely without even making eye contact, as if they weren’t allowed to acknowledge outsiders. (Maybe it’s the correct play; the other people on the canyon trail could certainly attest to us being annoying).

The little diner was perfect though. I ordered a “country steak and eggs,” which turned out to be chicken fried steak and eggs, and I wasn’t mad about it. I could rhapsodize chicken fried steak and eggs with hashbrowns and English muffin at a middle-of-nowhere diner the way English people rhapsodize the “full English breakfast.” We really did used to be a proper country.

Parowan apparently also has petroglyphs dating from 750-1250 AD, and preserved dinosaur footprints. Among other facts, I learned from Wikipedia that it’s the home town of Ryan Tripp, the Guinness World Record holder from 1998-2000 for the world's longest ride on a lawnmower. Even though the article commemorating it says he’s from Beaver. Classic small-town indignity.

somewhere in southern Utah

There was another family with couple of teenagers out by the pool at our hotel near Zion. I couldn’t tell what language they were speaking, which sounded sort of like German, but not quite. Maybe Scandinavian, but not sing songy enough. Eventually one of them pulled out a book and I could see that it was Dutch. On the way back to our room we passed a different family, and within two or three words out of their mouths I instantly realized “oh, THAT’S German.”

You can’t really mistake German for anything else. It’s like what the Supreme Court said about obscenity: you know it when you hear it.

Somewhere between southern and north central Utah, you transition from the sandstone cliffs and river-carved canyons of Southern Utah to the Rocky Mountains of Northern Utah. Seeing the Rocky Mountains is kind of like hearing German. You recognize them instantly. Oh yeah, those are the Rockies.

The Sierras make a slow transition, from valley floor to rolling foothills, to tightly-clustered, tree-packed mountains. The Rockies just sort of screech up to the sky out of nowhere. The landscape becomes so colossal in scale that it’s impossible not to think of in pre-civilization terms, glaciers scraping across the ground and tectonic plates smashing into one another and wedging solid Earth up into the clear blue sky.

We visited to the Salt Lake City Aquarium, stopped in a pretty town called Ogden, made our way into Idaho. Idaho is like a more verdant version of Northern Utah, with the same screeching mountain backdrops, only foregrounded by emerald pasture land instead of dry scrub, almost like the English countryside or an Irish pastoral with a fake-looking mountain backdrop. It’s hard to imagine many scenes more beautiful. It’s amazing how few movies there are shot in the Mountain West. Napoleon Dynamite is one of the few, and while it certainly invented a certain kind of cinematic comedy language, it probably doesn’t get enough credit for just being a fairly accurate Utah/Idaho slice of life. Sun-drenched, dusty, Tina! Come get some ham! The pace of the jokes feels like a slow walk through a field. Staring off at the mountains, wondering if you could throw a football over them. It’s kind of a road-trip comedy without a road trip.

We stopped in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Drove through the Grant Teton National Park hoping to see some of the local megafauna (moose, bears) but were mostly shut out aside from one big elk munching grass right next to the road. The Tetons themselves lived up to the name.

Grand Teton is nearly contiguous with Yellowstone, our third National Park in as many days. We drove through the western half, again hoping we’d be able to see some moose or elk or bison. The local celebrities. We were saving our stop for Old Faithful, the internationally famous punctual geyser. We saw our first bison, just munching his way through the Old Faithful parking lot, almost like they paid him to be there.

There’s something patently comical about 300 people from all over the world sitting around patiently staring at a hole in the ground, waiting for super-heated water to shoot out of it. What is it they say? A watched pot never boils? Exception that proves the rule, I guess.

Comical, but also life affirming. Because as I’ve aged into an adult man, I find that driving 1,100 miles with a wife, an 11-year-old, and a toddler to watch water shoot out of the ground turns out to be one of the best ways to spend one’s time. My son held onto my index finger for part of the walk over to the geyser viewing stand — something I love that he’s already aging out of — and my stepson bragged about how he’d predicted that we’d see our first bison when we stopped for the geyser because he’d seen it in a book (it’s true, he really did predict it).

We stood around for five, ten, 15 minutes, watching the geyser steam and bubble but not erupt while Japanese tourists passed by holding golf umbrellas and Germans chattered in their somehow formal informal wear (Germans have a way of making any outfit look like a uniform). The toddler started to get antsy. The tweenager started to get antsy. “I want to get in the car,” the toddler pleaded. We have a TV in the back with a DVD player, and he’d watched “Minions” (Despicable Me 3) at least five times all the way through already. I still haven’t actually seen it all the way through myself, but Trey Parker’s voice work is inspired.

My wife and I made a deal to set a cell phone timer for 10 more minutes, and if the geyser hadn’t geyser’d by then, we’d go. She was just punching in the numbers when a water spout started shooting 40 or 50 feet into the air. Oohs and ahhs and achs and ayes echoed throughout the viewing stand. It just kept erupting. We took videos and selfies. My son started shouting “I don’t like it!” (He had the same reaction to fireworks and teppenyaki).

My son fuckin’ hates geysers.

Summer in America. It’s been a good trip.