I started this trip wondering what I should do with my life, so if you’re wondering about that for yourself, maybe you could help me out and read on, text me later with some suggestions.

My itinerary? Head to three canyons I’d read about on Wikipedia: Unaweep in western Colorado, and Ruby and Westwater in Utah just over the state line. I’ve written now for over half my life, starting out writing science fiction that ended so unformed it was adolescent fiction. I remember clacking away on my old Mac in my little two room law office in the Dearborn Street Canyon in downtown Chicago, writing between appointments. As an eye doctor, Arthur Conan Doyle did that between patients. I’d hoped at one time that my work would take off the way his did. So, the question, what should I do with my life, really reads: should I continue to spend an inordinate amount of time doing something that does not pay money, and that no one really reads? Maybe I should’ve been an opthamologist.

Someone wise once wrote that if you want to write, you need to (1) have something to say, and (2) know how to say it. I used to take for granted that I had something to say, but believed that my non-publishing disorder came from the fact that I could use some help in finding out how to say it. After nearly three decades without a Pulitzer, I wondered whether I even had something to say. (self-pity).

I drove north in my 6-cylinder Silverado with the 6-foot bed and the beat-up old Skamper riding its 100,000-mile back. The plastic, red light covers had gone missing from the left side, betraying tiny, naked bulbs. The right front corner of the camper sported broken bones from a fight with the drive-up teller canopy at the Bank of the San Juans. I’d treated the fracture with marine caulk, per a suggestion. It looked like a smashed jelly donut.

I passed Egnar, which is Range spelled backwards. I sailed through the loneliness of Disappointment Valley, with only a cowboy trailer on either end of its approach, guarded by sweeping, high hills. I saw the signs for Uravan, uranium and vanadium combined, I surmised. After all, this land has long been known for the radioaddictive metals men once extracted from its toothy jaws. Either that or someone named the town for an old Volkswagen minibus and thought Euro was spelt Ura.

I landed in Gateway, a town at the junction of towering redwall canyons. This was where the famous Unaweep Canyon was supposed to be. Maybe I was in it. Gateway wasn’t really a town, more of a pass-through with a gas station. Yet some exo-race of disappeared beings had decided to land a craft a square mile or so in size in the middle of town. The ship’s hull was made of adobe-hued townhomes two stories in height. The whole sprawling structure seemed vacant like a ghost city. I passed by its great unconformity in some amazement. Where had the extinct crew of this strange ship disappeared to?

I drank some gas and pumped in some coffee and asked the chatty cashier at Gateway’s sole gas station if there was any place around to camp. My DeLorme Atlas showed that Unaweep, though studded with redwalled beauty, had little National Forest access. The friendly woman said there was no camping up the road, but plenty of spots down by the Dolores River which I’d just crossed on my way into town. Camping, she said, was next to the townhome/condo mothership of extraterrestrial provenance.

I crossed back over the river and followed her most excellent directions down a road along the river’s bank. The whole area, canopied with cottonwoods, had the feel of a nascent golf course. To this day, I believe there was a golf course under construction down there somewhere, next to the condo-ship. Or maybe it’s just Nevada and Arizona that always feel that way.

PRIVATE PROPERTY yelling at me, posted all over on gravel side roads. A UPS truck clattered up the road, adding to my suspicion that I’d just entered the subdivision of Cotton Oak Ridge Meadow Canyon Buttes. I lost an extendable side mirror in all the excitement of looking for those 18 holes. The high walls of Unaweep Canyon lost their appeal, and their majesty, in this timeshare necropolis. Gateway: just another name for somebody trying to make a buck. Another town trying to be something that it wasn’t. Another humble placename in the stage of ruining itself and all that surrounded it. Think Moab, Durango, Sedona, Taos: just one each in the Four Corner states. In the attempt at giving some people jobs in exchange for granting other people access to majesty for money, majesty became belittled, and was itself no more. I had to get the fuck out.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within