From the Drunk Driving Lane

We stop for breakfast at Bella’s in Wells, NV, once a favorite destination, as Bella also operates a legal house of ill-repute for long-distance truckers as well as the restaurant, and both were once featured in The Wall Street Journal. The waitress is carrying—a pistol in a holster on her hip—and is tattooed from wrists to biceps. Her voice sounds like bad coffee, the coffee not as good as we remembered, and the 3-egg omelet is now made of 2-eggs. The last straw: a wooly character with a long gray beard, dressed head to toe in camo, saying “God Bless America” on his way out the door.

 “That’s the way these people signal to one another” my partner says when I ask her later, somewhere near Wendover, “why did that man at Bella’s restaurant feel the need to say ‘God Bless America’? 

We leave Bella’s with two new heavy hearts, having tithed the waitress the requisite 10% to be donated to the Waitress Protection Program, knowing a stretch of road straight as a string will greet us once safely inside Utah—paved with Coleman Hawkins, Muddy Waters, Lucinda Williams, and Beethoven’s 9th.

Once again on I-80, traveling at 85mph, The Great Salt Lake looks like it’s still waiting for Joseph Smith to set sail from New York state with his Golden Plates, predestined to establish the now 360-member strong Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Arise, O Glorious Zion.

Coal train beside Interstate 80, near Toole, Utah, traveling to California. April 1, 2020.