The North Coast Hiawatha
The backyards and alleyways crawled by in slow motion as the train pulled out of Minneapolis, westbound. Something naked, indecent about these frozen yards, the incandescent windows with women arguing inside, the dead light of three-thirty on a northern evening. Abandoned swingsets, lawnmowers under snow.
Then the light of day went out and the windows got black and the boy went looking for the bar car. He was only twenty but legal. Actually nobody cared. Certainly not this bartender with his knowing curious glance, dusting the bottles with a rag.
Got Bud, he said, Miller, Schlitz, Grain Belt, you ever try a Grain Belt?
Is it any good?
Beer’s beer to me. People say there’s a difference.
I’ll have a Grain Belt then, the boy said, and paid for his beer, then sat in the corner of the bar car trying to see anything out the window: snow, maybe, or some kind of mist, …
Front Porch
County Highway is a publication devoted above all else to the American variant of the English language, which is a storehouse of descriptions and solutions to the unique set of difficulties and opportunities presented to us when we are born onto this continent. American English, which evolved to describe our relation to this place, and to allow speakers to communicate and trade, is flexible and blunt, with a wildly democratic approach towards sentence structure and the vernacular. It is capable of absorbing a wide range of influences from other places, at an angle of radical exuberance.
Imagining that American English is inherently sunny or optimistic or simple-minded is a beginner’s mistake. Raymond Chandler is as cynical as any Viennese, just as Quentin Tarantino is as violent as Sergio Leone, and Cormac McCarthy is indebted to the Greeks. Yet their delight in mayhem, combined …
The Temple of the Morons
A weird military authority requisitions the Great Salt Lake Basin.
Toxic dust, man camps, and gay bars to flourish in Mormon Country.
Democracy is canceled by the need to build giant data centers that will allow the Chinese to control our iPhones.
Standing on a northern shore of the Great Salt Lake, not a human in sight, no cellular service, at the crossroads of unmarked dirt roads, I am awed by the beauty of the landscape. Like most people raised in the region, I was a latecomer to appreciating the lake. A giant trash pond unfit for recreation; polluted by industry; filled with brine flies, an inescapable sulfur smell, and giant swarms of bizarre migratory birds. Today, it’s dying, while industry and its toadies in the Utah legislature attempt to scrape every last penny out of the land. What would Brigham Young have thought of this brand of ruthless Mammonism? I turned in my Latter-day Saints membership card while still in middle school, but I doubt that the legendary prophet who led the Mormon exodus to the Great Basin would approve of what the Utah legislature has in mind for Zion.
The desert ground where I stand is a rarely trafficked …
