Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Salt Lake

Salt Lake City, UT - 2 October

Down in Utah the guys and I dig a city called Salt Lake
It's got the grooviest kids, that's why we never grow tired of Salt Lake
And the way the kids talk so cool is an out of sight thing
And the number one radio station makes the town really swing, yeah
Salt Lake City - we'll be coming soon

Brian Wilson wrote these lyrics for the 1965 Beach Boys album Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!), which is more famous for including well-known classics like California Girls and Let Him Run Wild than it is for hymns of praise to a city that's most famous for being synonymous with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.. It's an infectious tune with a thumpingly good backing track, so I wasn't too surprised when it popped into my head earlier today as I bumbled along I-15. I haven't been able to verify Brian's claim yet, but will have a look around town sometime in the next day or two and will report back on its level of out-of-sightness and on how cool the kids talk. From what I can work out the number one radio station's the venerable KSL, which dates back to 1922. Nowadays it's a talk radio station, and was hosting an enthusiastic discussion about Mormon woman writers as I was driving into town. The other Salt Lake station I listened to on the way up was the local NPR station, which was broadcasting the insufferably twee Prairie Home Companion. I guess that whether either of these make the town really swing or not is a matter of opinion.

Most of the rest of today was taken up with getting here. Sometimes I forget just how big the USA is, and today was one of those days which reminds me of just how big even one state is. I-70 cuts through some very empty landscapes - there's basically nothing out there in the east and south-east of the state. It's a fantastic, desolate lunar landscape, hot and empty. For a lot of the journey the only man-made object visible from the road is the Union Pacific Railroad.

The railway was, of course, there a long time before the road was. It's astonishing to realise that when the railway was built there was basically nothing there (other than the Native Americans who were one of the major casualties of the expansion west), and marvel at the logistical, human and engineering feats needed to build railways across America in the nineteenth century. Men with shovels and pickaxes worked in intense heat and freezing snow, in an unremittingly harsh environment. Simply keeping them all fed must have been a major logistical exercise - while the sections of line which had been built could be used to bring supplies, it all still points to a massive undertaking. Having seen the type of terrain which the railway was driven though only reinforced my amazement at the scale of such projects. I must do the cross-country rail journey one day..

The countryside gets a bit more populated along US-6 as it cuts up the Price River valley, and then after joining I-15 the road enters urban Utah proper as it rounds the Utah Lake past Provo. The Salt Lake City area is a large, sprawling American city (the Great Salt Lake itself is to the northwest), divided into various satellite towns as well as the city itself. The whole area's streets are numbered on a huge grid system that provides Cartesian coordinates for anywhere in the greater SLC area, based around axes with the origin at Temple Square. This is a usefully functional system, as you can immediately tell where, say, 150 W 4500 S is located. My personal view is that it would be clearer to express the above location as (150,-4500), but that might be just a bit too nerdy.

Posted by mpk at October 3, 2005 4:36 AM