Letter from Utah: Part 2 of 12

This post is part 2 in a series of 12. You can download the entire essay by clicking here, or you can read the serial installments as they appear.

Our rental car is a hybrid, the Toyota Prius—it’s quiet, eerily and beautifully quiet, and drives smooth, easy. The guy who fills out the paperwork goes through that seemingly-informal, but ultimately awkward walk around the vehicle with us to determine what flaws the previous renter might have added. The Prius has a video monitor in the dash, which acts as the audio/climate and battery interface. It shows you how much charge the battery has, whether you’re using the engine, or the electric motor. As you drive, green and orange arrows flash in all directions over the tiny mock-up of the car on the screen. I become obsessed with the electric reserve, demanding that it be full at all times—like it’s my cell phone—and I worry that, if it dies, the car will just stop. “Look it’s going up,” I say to Kip. Or “Look, it’s running out.”

“What if it runs out?” I say.

“Then it will just turn into a regular car,” he says.

The rental car guy recommends a Mexican restaurant, The Red Iguana. “Not much on atmosphere, but the food is good. Try the shrimp enchiladas.” I’m not sure if Mexican food is what I want to eat after five hours on an airplane enjoying a ‘group effort’ crossword, but we go anyway. Turns out, it’s a lively, colorful little place (full of atmosphere if you ask me) on the west end of town, and has been named, by everyone you can think of who gives out food awards—Zagat, CitySearch, magazine after magazine—the best Mexican in the entire state. The food is fantastic, the salsa unearthly fresh and flavorful, zapping your mouth in all different directions. Kip has a fresh salmon burrito, and I have a plateful of what I can only describe as Mexican ravioli, tiny pressed dumplings filled with meat and cheese. We eat a mound of guacamole and baskets of housemade tortilla chips. We vow to return there on our way out of town.

We drive north about forty minutes, to Antelope Island, a national park famous for its herd of some 500 bison, introduced there in 1893. The island is surrounded by the Great Salt Lake, which is the leftovers of Lake Bonneville, a giant body of water that covered most of the state millions of years ago. There, we hike out to the edge of the water, take pictures to prove that it exists, and perhaps to prove that we exist, or at least that we existed there. I want taste the water, and I do. It is salty, like the sea, but it is flatter, the flavor is all concentrated in the front of your mouth, on the end of your tongue.

Back in Salt Lake City, the hotel’s website promises “well-appointed guest rooms” and “spectacular views of the city and mountains.” It is only half right, but that’s okay. I don’t care about hotels one way or another—though this trip will challenge that. We nap, thumb through the guidebook, and I trace my finger along the roads in the atlas, which stretch out into the open country, connecting one tiny town to the next—Spanish Fork, East Carbon, Green River, and Moab—our loose plan for the next day.

For dinner we fumble our way through the downtown grid and end up, quite haphazardly, at an Italian restaurant that specializes in family-style dishes. We order the house specialty: pork chops with blueberries, balsamic, red wine and hazelnuts, along with an excellent warm spinach and goat cheese salad. The ridiculous portions arrive—though we have ordered the ‘small’ versions of each—and immediately I become my mother, aghast at the amount of food on the plate. Something shifts inside you as you age—at some point all you can talk about is how absurdly large the portions are, at any restaurant, wherever you are. “Oh, that’s just outrageous,” I hear myself saying. Have I reached this point already?

I eat myself sick and groan all the way back to the hotel.