Red State Report

The headline in the local paper the day I arrived in Salt Lake City; "Utahans Still Stand Behind Trump."

The word, "still" was heartening.

Utah was my first Red State on a trip that started in San Francisco, moved on to Los Angeles, and then Las Vegas, Nevada.

I'd thought Nevada was a Red State but was corrected there by my nephew Preston who said the state went to Hillary and then Googled it to prove he was correct. Nevada is, apparently, like Oregon, an essentially Red State but with population concentrations (in Oregon's case, Portland and Eugene, in Nevada's, Las Vegas and Reno) that turn a Red State into a Blue State.

Honestly, I don't feel any different, yet, in a Red State than I once felt in a Blue State. The show must go on.

Good news: the Utah State Legislature recently voted to name The Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson's earth artwork on the Great Salt Lake, the official artwork of the State of Utah. Bad news: marijuana is not legal and every time the legislature gets close to making marijuana legal, at least for medicinal purposes, there's a cadre of Mormon legislators who vote it down, according to my daughter-in-law Tasha who lives in Salt Lake City with my son and is pregnant.

While traveling, alone and by car toward the ultimate destination of upstate Wyoming, intriguing new publishing proposals catch up to me unbidden, coming over the IFSF website from Red and Blue States across the nation. Here are a few:

1) Even Jesus Can't Get Past Immigration: the story of a American man of Mexican heritage, Jesus Nazaroth, who is denied entry to the US, despite having a US passport.

2) The Long Lost Notes of Lucretius: ancient manuscripts believed to have been written by the famed literary critic, whose essay "On the Sublime" remains a touchstone of lit theory.

3) Everything Happens in Small Meetings: an insider's guide to the reality that politics is essentially boring work, and that both policy and activation of policy is a matter of staying awake in warm rooms while drinking weak coffee.

4) Poetry from the Land of Science Fiction: a collection of experimental verse written by students at the University of Wyoming.

I'll be at the cabin in Wyoming, the Reddest of Red States, in a matter of days. The cabin's a wonderful place to read. It's so quiet there you can hear a falling star drop.