Passing Through: An Existential Journey Across America's Outback

How did you arrive at the title, Passing Through?
It wasn't my original working title. It wasn't even the third or fourth. I was looking for something that would link all the disparate episodes-a common theme, so to speak. I toyed with A Road Runs Through It but finally settled on Passing Through because it sounded less derivative. I like it because it evokes the transitory nature of life as I have experienced it.

And about the subtitle, what do you mean by "existential journey?"
I don't know. "Existential" has the same number of syllables as "sentimental"-which I decided not to go with because "sentimental journey" sounds like a blatant rip-off of Doris Day.

Tell us about the American Outback. How is it different from the Australian Outback?
The Australian Outback is much bigger, and far less mountainous. That said, the two regions have much in common in that settlements are small, many miles apart, and populated by folks who seem to like it that way. I've yet to hear a native of rural Nevada complain about the isolation. Quite the opposite. By and large, denizens of America's Outback don't yearn for the big city.

What about you? Do you come from an urban environment?
Compared to what? Tuscarora? I grew up in a small mining town in eastern Utah, surrounded by hundreds of square miles of wide open country. Like Nevada, we had a lot of ghost towns in the vicinity and a colorful history. For example, Matt Warner, who once robbed banks with Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch, served a term as our town constable. Matt's daughter Joyce worked in the local library. How many librarians do you know who are descended from outlaw gun slingers?

Did you read a lot when you were young?
Unfortunately, no. I lost the first library book I ever checked out-I believe it was Horton Hears A Who. I never went back out of fear I'd be shot dead by Joyce Warner.

So tell us how you came to discover Nevada?
Nevada had already been discovered long before I came along, but it seldom intruded upon my consciousness. Oh, our family had driven through Las Vegas on the way to Disneyland in 1956, but all I remember from that trip was the oppressive heat of the Mojave Desert in July. The following year, I traveled across central Nevada with a group of Explorer Scouts. We were bound for Stead Air Force Base for a week of survival training. Along the way our old school bus broke down repeatedly, so we ended up pushing it for much of the way. For a long time afterward, I figured happiness was Nevada in my rear view mirror.

But you opinion has since changed.
Yes, it has. In 1969 I took a temporary job as a bookmobile librarian in Tooele County. That's when I became familiar with Utah's West Desert and also Wendover, which was the easternmost stop along my route.

What appealed to you about Wendover?
Just about everything. The fact the streets weren't neat and orderly like the ones in Utah. An absence of rules dictating when you can eat, what you can drink and what time you should be in bed. I saw little kids out peddling their tricycles at two a.m. Nobody seemed to know what time it was, nor did they care. And, of course, there was Wendover Will standing astride the border like the Colossus of Rhodes, waving his neon arms and smoking his neon cigarette. To pull into Wendover at night after driving across the Great Salt Desert-what used to be an ancient lake teeming with prehistoric fish lizards-and suddenly find yourself surrounded by neon lights and clanging slot machines-well, it's quite exhilarating!

Tell us about The Salt Flat News.
It was the brainchild of Richard Goldberger, who I met when I was living in a rooming house in Salt Lake City. At the time Richard was publishing a campus literary magazine called Pen Rejects. In order to have a poem published in Pen Rejects, it first had to be rejected by the University of Utah's official literary magazine, Pen. When Richard discovered my vast cache of rejection slips, he instantly recognized my potential. Then one day I invited him to ride out to Wendover with me in the bookmobile. He instantly fell in love with the place because it was the exact opposite of where he had grown up: Scarsdale, New York. When Goldberger discovered that Wendover had no newspaper, he said, "Let's publish one!" The Salt Flat News was patterned after The New York Daily News and sold for twenty-five cents a copy-except in New York, where it went for thirty.

Did the citizens of Wendover embrace the newspaper?
No. By and large, they hated it. For one thing, we didn't focus on local news. We concentrated on things that the average person never notices. In particular I remember a feature Goldberger wrote concerning a stray pig which had come to grief under questionable circumstances in the desert. "Porker Puzzles People," was the catchy headline.

So who did embrace the idea?
People who didn't live in Wendover. People who reside in large metropolitan areas. People who had grown weary of reading about political assassinations, social upheaval, and the ongoing nightmare in Vietnam. Basically, The Salt Flat News was a newspaper about nothing. However, the more time I spent wandering in the desert, the more I came to realize that there's a lot more out there than meets the eye.

For instance?
I hadn't realized that Wendover was once the site of a major U.S. Army Air Base. It's where the 509th Composite Bombing Group trained during World War II-including Colonel Paul Tibbetts and the crew of the Enola Gay. In 1970, all that remained was a long runway, an enormous parking apron, several hangars and barracks, and a firehouse staffed by a skeleton crew overseen by Fred Kenley.

Chief Kenley held the keys to buildings that had been locked since 1945. He could remember a time when the tarmac trembled from the roar of dozens of B-29 stratofortresses. He kindly gave me a tour of the base, including a nine-hole, grassless golf course on the salt flats where golfers would spray paint their golf balls black in order not to lose them.

So this was local news, wasn't it?
Yes and no. The locals didn't think it was such a big deal compared to basketball scores or town council meeting minutes-but I did. Fred Kenley was an eyewitness to what may have been the seminal event of the Twentieth Century, yet no one in town seemed to give a hoot. People were driving past on the highway, oblivious to the fact they were passing through history.

Hence the title of your book, Passing Through.
Well, yeah. It set me to thinking that a big problem with the Great Basin is that most visitors only catch fleeting glimpses of it through a tinted windshield. They are in motion, thinking mostly about how long it's going to be before they get to California and the Promised Land. Their greatest fear is that the car will break down and they'll be stranded out in the middle of nowhere.

And you don't worry about that?
It's actually my biggest worry, because I drive a 32-year old Volkswagen bus with well over two hundred thousand miles on the odometer. But I've learned to focus on things other than potential engine failure. It helps if you don't travel too fast or too far at a stretch. The slower you go, the more stops you make, the more you'll come to appreciate what's out there.

Do you have a favorite road?
I'm especially fond of U.S. 50, the so-called "loneliest road in America." I like it because there's little traffic and because it crosses the heartland of Nevada. It passes through places that once were major settlements but now are all but ghost towns. It's as if I'm exploring the ruins of a vanished civilization. Plus, I can drive as slowly as I want, and nobody honks at me.

But isn't it lonely?
Not at all. There are far lonelier roads in Nevada. Highway 6, for example. Highway 375, also known as the "Extraterrestrial Highway" is practically as lonely as space travel. Then there are the dirt roads. The Old Lincoln Highway across Utah's West Desert traverses one of America's largest expanses of uninhabited real estate. I've crossed it by VW van and also by motorbike-a 1967 Honda CL77, with extra gasoline cans strapped to the seat.

Your book seems to consist mostly of quotations. Why is that?
It's easier to let other people speak into a microphone than it is for me to write things down. I struggle with descriptive prose; I'm clueless when it comes to geology and the natural world. So I decided to focus on humanity instead. And what I've discovered is, wherever there are human beings, there are stories. Which was particularly true during the Nineteen Seventies, before satellites introduced television to the Outback. Nowadays wherever I go I see satellite dishes on rooftops, and I know that the people living underneath those rooftops will have less to say than they had before. It's sad. We're becoming couch potatoes, even in the boondocks. So I'm glad I discovered the Outback when I did, before "reality shows" turned reality into a joke.

Thank you, Richard Menzies.


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