Day 3 of US Road Trip: Green River, Utah

Jay cried out loud in his sleep. I reached for him, put my hand on his back until he quieted down. When everyone was awake, we lay in bed talking about dreams. I had not a memory of mine. Jay dreamed about being in a helicopter with our 4-year-old maverick. She was hanging off the helicopter, clutching at a railing, with a cable around her waist. The pilot was not worried, said kids did it all the time. Except in Jay’s dream, our kid and her cable unattached themselves from the helicopter and fell into the wind. Jay jumped out and grabbed her cable, pulled her toward him. In his dream, he hugged her to his belly, putting his back into the wind so he was facing the sky. He knew she would survive the fall if he used his body as a cushion.

My eyes filled with tears but I blinked them away. I kissed him slowly, felt the warmth of his lips, his breath against my face. This is my man. My baby’s daddy.

We packed up and got ready to go back on the road.

We gassed up at Friendly Fuels just before leaving Ely, Nevada. The owner gave us full service – pumped, cleaned our windows, and suggested we visit Lehman Caves in The Great Basin up ahead of us on Route 50. We rolled on and took his advice.

On our way we passed Horns A Plenty, this place that makes art and furniture out of antlers. They were closed, but we enjoyed looking at their gate.

We exited Route 50 to go to Lehman Caves. It was cold in there, about 50 degrees F. At some point our guide lit a candle and turned off his flashlight and the built-in bulb fixtures in the cave, just to show us what it would have been like for those exploring the cave before electricity was wired in. The darkness went forever. The cave seemed larger than it is when the lights were turned back on. It made me wish we were exploring the cave by candlelight.

I’ve been spelunking before, but I’ve never seen a cave as rich as this in stalactites, stalagmites, columns, shields, draperies and colorful “bacon.”

There was a big hall in Lehman Caves that was the site of a speakeasy back during the Prohibition days. It is the perfect temperature to store liquor! Back then the convenient entrance we came in through was not yet built. They would have had to climb in through the natural entrance to the cave, which was from above, with a 25 foot drop into the cave. These are dedicated party people!!! I imagined the band, carefully bringing their instruments down with ropes, and setting up in this great space. Then later on, people coming down on ropes, dressed in their 1930s finery, excited by the naughtiness of coming out to the caves for drink, dance and decadence.

If I was a cavewoman, I would hook up with the strongest caveman in town and get him to secure this cave as our home. We’d be the most stylish cave couple in the world.

We went back on the road from Lehman Caves and got lost. I thought I was finding my way back to Route 50 until we reached the border that divides Nevada and Utah. Where the hell were we? I backed into a shoulder to look at the map and instead saw an antelope.

“Elk!” I pointed outside Jay’s window.

Jay whipped out his video camera, “That’s an antelope.”

The antelope seemed just as curious about us as we were about him. He was a good 20 feet away from us, just standing there staring. He probably got bored quickly since we didn’t do anything but just sit there, so he bounded away from us deeper into the desert.

We found our way back to Route 50, said goodbye to Nevada and hello to Utah.

The mountains in Utah are very dramatic. Bright red swashes of iron in the rock. They don’t call it Painted Desert for nothing. The mesas are sheer cliffs jutting proudly out to the sky. We stopped at Devil’s Canyon to stretch our legs. It was late in the day. I was tired.

I told Jay we would spend the night at the next town after Devil’s Canyon. It turned out to be one more hour of driving, but what a sight!!! We wound our way around the most dramatic mountains in Utah.

We spent the night in the small town of Green River, Utah. The sky was on fire that night, a sunset just as dramatic as the mountains we saw.