Breakfast at the Exit Cafe by Wayne Grady

Author:Wayne Grady [Grady, Wayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: BIO026000, cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Published: 2010-09-17T14:00:00+00:00

MOUNDED snow covers the road, but the day is fine, not too cold. We are in the mood to appreciate subtle positives. We take it easy, mindful of our crumpled Echo, reassuring ourselves at frequent intervals that the car is good. The road is good. We’re good, really good.

We stop at the crest of Boulder Mountain, the highest treed plateau in North America, according to the sign. Why on earth did we imagine there wouldn’t be snow? I aim the camera at the view and take a mini-movie: there is no other way to capture the panorama of gullies and gulches that stretches, snow-scarred, in every direction. A person could disappear here.

The road heads down the mountain in a series of loops and twirls at impossible angles; then we’re climbing again, and before we realize it, we’re on the Devil’s Backbone, a thin spine of shoulderless road with long, sharp drops on either side.

“Look at that view!” Wayne exclaims.

“Uh-huh,” I say, my eyes fixed straight ahead, my foot pumping invisible brake pedals.

“Do you want to stop and take a picture?” he says.

I shake my head. “Uh-uh.”

Beyond the knife-edge, the road winds down among the trees. I breathe a little easier. Broadsiding a pine seems preferable to ending up as rubble at the bottom of a cliff.

“Looks like the worst is behind us,” I say gamely.

Then the snow hits. For two hours we drive in silence through the eastern tract of the Dixie National Forest. The road has been recently plowed and sanded, though the sand is soon submerged in a trackless swath that plunges and swoops around fenceless curves, the only barrier a few tall, red-tipped extensions on skinny posts, scant warning that the road stops and thin air begins.

“They must get a lot of snow here,” Wayne comments wryly.

I don’t answer. I’m listening to the engine, which is labouring up the inclines. We are barely making thirty kilometres an hour. The sky has lowered until it seems to press against our foreheads. We meet a truck, then an hour later, another, just the three of us on this road: an old man who grips the wheel furiously, three young boys in cowboy hats waving, and the two of us, ashen-faced tourists in our summer wear. The others are heading for Escalante. Nobody is travelling our way.

We pass the Escalante Petrified Forest. We pass the Anasazi Indian Village near Boulder, where the mail was still delivered by mule until the 1970s. We make it through a length of road I don’t tell Wayne about. It is marked on the map in pink: Closed in Winter.

We have no interest in the sights—Mesa Verde, the Arches—I just want to get to a city where there are mechanics, car rental companies, good hotels, and at least one fine restaurant, in that order. If that makes us seem fickle, we don’t care. There’s a throughway farther north, but north seems like a bad idea. We need to get out of the mountains, into the desert again.

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