Letter from Utah: Part 1 of 12

In the coming weeks, I'm going to post my ramblings about my vacation in Utah. You can download the entire essay by clicking here, or you can read the serial installments as they appear. This segment is part 1 of 12.

Letter from Utah

It is November. My boyfriend and I are flying to Utah for a week; to hike, to drive, see the earth. “Why there?” everyone says. This is the reaction I get the most—New Yorkers, pressed to find a reason to visit the Beehive State generally fail. I suspect they see it as an arid amalgam of bad food, prohibition and Mormonism, whatever that is. We had plans to go to Paris—in the way that you have plans to go everywhere at some point in your life, “Let’s go there, someday,” you say to each other. But, frankly, the idea was too much—fighting the language, navigating another city, another transit system, ordering food in restaurants. For some reason, the idea of wandering the halls of the Louvre gives me the creeps. I wanted a different kind of trip. I wanted something ambling, something with lots of sky and long stretches of road. I tell everyone who asks, “I need to see the horizon all around me.”

My anxiety—and there is always anxiety—is focused on whether I have the correct equipment. In the weeks before the trip, I become obsessed with specialized gear, reading website reviews, and browsing hiker’s message boards looking for answers, advice, perhaps for warnings. I go to buy shoes. “Light hiking, or just for regular wear?” asks the salesman. “As for clothes,” he continues, “get some layers with good wicking properties.” A list of items tumbles out of his mouth, and I listen, try things on, and come away with nothing. Should I get pants that zip off into shorts? Somehow clothing that transforms appeals to me—that I might be prepared for whatever we encounter. “Oh,” someone says, “start thinking about getting a vehicle that can take the mountains.”

A car runs into our livery cab on the way to the airport; the driver had fallen asleep. Fortunately, no one is hurt. The car is not damaged. We continue on, crisis averted.

Well, I think, there’s one down.

“Group effort, guys,” says the man sitting next to me on the plane. He pulls the Sky Magazine from the seat pocket and begins the crossword, passing the crinkled pages across the seats. “Group effort,” he repeats. I want him to go away. “Hiking? For a week?” He takes in the information, then says to Kip: “You must not be married. Your wife certainly wouldn’t let you go hiking for a week with your buddy.” I wonder if this is the sort of reaction we’ll get all over Utah. I wonder if people will recognize us as lovers. I avoid all questions about what I do for a living. Kip, ever kind, ever even, has to talk briefly about his line of work—children’s toys and television programming. “I build houses,” the guy says, “I take houses that have been converted into multi-family two-bedrooms and convert them back into single family townhomes. You know, luxury living.” New York City is facing a catastrophic affordable housing crisis, and here is this guy, who doesn’t even live in New York—he lives with his family in California and commutes back and forth—housing rich people on the Upper East Side. He keeps talking, manages to say to Kip: “Wow, you must be old.” It occurs to me that he is, in many ways, my exact opposite. I thumb through the seat pocket, to make sure there’s a barf bag.