other blogging poets write of their travels in terms of poetry readings attended/participated in. that don't seem my doorway. I hadn't/didn't travel much till I married Beth. who was raised in Nevada mainly, and conceives distance differently than I do. people in the Boston area regard wetern Massachusetts not just as another state, but one immensely difficult to reach (a 2 hour drive). for Beth, a 2 hour drive is what you might do for a cup of good coffee (Beth's excitement was palpable when she espied a Starbucks somewhere near Orem, Utah on saturday. I'm less infatuated with coffee, but I recognize dreck, which seems the norm in a great patch of this country). the space of the western states really astonishes me. Olson writes of an extent, but Dorn conceives a different perspective on that. so that I think it right to add that perspective in reading Olson. Olson read about the west, Dorn lived it. so we flew west last monday, arriving late in SLC. there is a reason why we didn't go directly to Reno by plane, but it's too hard to explain. I read the Evans-Wentz edition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, possibly the earliest English translation of that text, on the flight. that and a book about the Tibetan Book of the Dead are all I read on the trip. I woke wide awake the next day, went down to the lobby, where one desk person sat on a couch watching tv. the other was at his post and sprung up with polite surprise: good morning sir! the clock read 4:00, ie 4 hours after I went to sleep. but I didn't turn around right away, I went outside and wandered some, as if I had a purpose. eventually I went back to bed, then arose at a more sensible time, to sit in the lobby, listen to Fox News (did you know Michael Jackson killed a girl in Aruba?) and wrote. I wrote in a not quite pocket-sized journal I got at Barnes & Noble. my young friend Isaac saw me with it once, and got himself one just like it. I brought my computer but wasn't interested in using it on this trip. a journey thru hellzapoppin winds, rain and snow to Sparks. Beth's sister put us up at the Nuggest in Sparks, a bigass casino/hotel. we weren't there to gamble, nor were we funded for it, so we only gave a modest tribute to the great God of Gambling. I wandered around inside and out then found a place to sit and write. it was too rainy to take the camera outside. most times we went out (something the casino does everything it can to keep you from doing), I brought the camera. scenic pictures, family pictures, and pictures of interesting trees or whatever, all mixed up. I feel either intrusive or geeky taking pictures of people so I tend to take more pictures of manhole covers than the sort of thing you might share wih relatives. on friday we drove to Boise. in Nevada, I kept missing pictures of dust devils, small ephemeral cyclonic pillars of dust. they'd fizzle out by the time I got the camera out or even just on. I couldn't get an effective picture of a rainbow sort of thing that we saw in Oregon. it was this short spectrum right at the horizon between 2 hills. likewise a full rainbow just didn't show up properly in the pictures I took. let alone the golden eagle on a fence post, the dead antelope in the road, and so on, all passed before I could ready the camera. each morning I'd sit in the lobby where we stayed and wrote. final stop was Orem, just down the road apiece from SLC. Orem/Provo are hip zesty towns, owing a lot to Brigham Young University sitting there at the foot of the mountains. plus the influx of skiers and tourists. how astounding to see these snow covered mountains so close by. SLC is a vast perplexing mess of rectilinear streets and solid values. a little too solid, if you know what I mean. I stayed in SLC for a while years ago. looking for rentals, you would see the notation: no coffee drinkers. I imagine such injunctions are no longer legal, but the spirit of them remains. don't you be starting up with your sinful ways. SLC is bizarre anyway. imagine coming to the valley in the day, a desert, a huge unpotable lake, salt flats and alkali, and think: here's where we shall settle and multiply. well, they done it. which means that on sundays, almost no restaurants are open. saturday night, Orem is a-bustle, sunday no stores and very few restaurants will take your fare. it's not the lack of service but the fundamentalist imperative beneath it that makes the area unwholesome to me. but it is awful beautiful. we killed time before our flight by driving thru Provo Canyon. probably the best photographic subject of the trip, but I had neglected to charge my batteries. and was, after all, a mite tired of taking pictures. anyway, you tend to get the feeling you haven't experienced something if you didn't get a pic, so I was happy to crane my neck sans camera. so that's my trip, somewhat.