Best way to start off a vacation: do everything right in the days leading up to it — clear your workload so it isn’t dogging your every step, tidy up your place so it’s a welcome embrace when you return, eat right, sleep tight, and smile at anything that moves. That’s the ideal way to do it, and I managed to do about half of those things. I certainly haven’t slept much, or well, for days now, though the tradeoff is that I’m caught up on work and my place is spotless. (Whether this is a safe or acceptable tradeoff will be a conclusion I make when I’m driving through Wyoming at two a.m.; if I’m nodding and fading, then I’ve blown it.)

Anyway, it’s likely I won’t have access to the web for most, if not all, of my trip, so I’m compiling as I go.

DAY ONE
Friday, 9/2
Susan and I spent time together last night for the first time in a couple of weeks, and the last time for the next one. We may live nine hundred miles closer than we did last August, but there are still obstacles, like the fact that we’re both workaholics in denial, and gas costs more than rent these days. Yesterday marked the official one-year mark — not for Susan and I, but for my occupation of California; D. and I verbally renewed the contract a week or two back, but yesterday made it formal, what with the signing of the papers and all. (I have been itching to reflect on the last year, and all of the changes it has seen, but now’s not the time; this is supposed to be a vacation log, after all. Not that this excites any of you all that much, but. Rules are rules.)

Yes, so: back to it. Day one is underway with few hiccups. I prepared for a problem-free flight by wearing my favorite Achewood T-shirt, the one with it is impossible to have a good day stamped across the chest. It is my experience that when I wear this shirt, particularly on days when I expect to have a bad time of it, the opposite tends to happen. When you’re putting yourself at the mercy of customer service personnel, be they flight attendants or baristas, it doesn’t hurt to be wearing garments that say you’ve lost all faith in humanity. Some of them, however, haven’t (yet). And they consider it a personal challenge, your conversion. So after I stood in line at the Horizon Air counter for a half-hour, waiting for a small Canadian family to finish checking their eighteen bags and four boxes, the woman at the counter smiled wearily and said she’d like to trade shirts with me, and I grinned, and presto, we shared a secret: we were both expecting nothing good to happen, ever. Thus the most efficient and pleasant check-in, ever.

Then the old codger at the head of the security line chuckled at my shirt and said, “You probably love security checkpoints, don’t you.” And the security check took almost no time at all. And then when we boarded the plane, the flight attendant at the top of the ramp said, “My, my. You don’t believe that, do you?” I shrugged and looked noncommittal. A few minutes later she announced on the intercom that all passengers were on-board, and if we wanted to move around and occupy empty seats, we were free to. She added, “Somebody give the young man in the brown shirt the exit row. He looks like he could use it.” (I rated a mention ahead of the recently engaged tourists in the third row, whose well-wishing came as we taxiied into PDX.) And when I entered the terminal and called my mother and she said, “You’re already there? Your dad just left, he’s probably two hours away still,” it was easier to shrug it away. I went to a restaurant called Stbphadhbl’s and got a table for one, and as the hostess led me to a single table at the back of the restaurant, she said, “Impossible, huh?” and I said that I tended to have good days when I wore this, and she said, “A grumpy shirt! It’s a good idea.” And then I ordered a filet mignon, medium, and when it came shortly after, it was cooked to almost-perfection, and I spent most of my time waiting for Dad with a forkful of good steak, reading a good book.

Of course, all of that didn’t matter at all when I took a seat in the baggage claim and cracked open my laptop, expecting to find a wireless signal (after all, this is the age of technology-made-easy, no?) and the wireless icon popped up in my taskbar with a giant red X over it. This trip is going to suck.

DAY TWO
Saturday, 9/3. 1250 miles traveled.
Almost 24 full hours on the road. Am writing this from a hotel in Gillette, Wyoming. Splurged on a nice suite for the night, since we’ve saved an incredible amount of money on fuel costs. The Golf is consistently getting around 52mpg, and we’ve rarely dipped below 80mph (the major exception being the hour or so I spent negotiating the knotty mountain passes in Idaho — at least, I think there were mountains; I couldn’t see anything). Dad’s sleeping, and has been for most of the trip to date. After he picked me up from the Portland airport yesterday afternoon, I drove for about twelve straight hours, carrying us as far as Butte, Montana, before I couldn’t go any further. He drove, and I tried to sleep, but have you ever tried to sleep in the passenger seat of a VW Golf? It’s not possible. (Except for my dad, who can sleep anywhere, apparently.) We traded roles off and on for the next five hours; he’d drive and I’d inhabit a mostly restless state until he got tired, and then I’d drive while he slept some more. We finally stopped for breakfast around sunrise, about forty miles from Billings, and when we hit the road again, I had to call it a night. I woke up about two, maybe three hours later; it was eight-thirty a.m. and we were entering Sheridan, Wyoming. While I slept, Dad stopped for coffee once or twice, and to stretch his legs in a rest area. I was totally oblivious, and woke up absolutely refreshed. Which never happens, so I took advantage of it, and commandeered the wheel again. We landed in Gillette about three hours ago, and we’re recuperating from the drive in preparation for the screening tonight.

The screening is going to take place at a KOA RV park/campground that’s supposedly located on the exact site that the climax of Close Encounters was filmed on (though I’ve read that most of the final encounter scene was shot in an airplane hangar in … Oklahoma? I forget exactly where). (Post-screening update: The campground is located on the exact spot where the decontamination zone military personnel loaded Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon and pals into the helicopter for evacuation.) In any case, the show begins in about five-and-a-half hours, or just after sunset, whichever comes first. There are fifty miles of road left before we’ll be there.

Dad has been interrogating every person we meet along our trip: waitresses, gas station attendants, fast food employees. He tells them that we’re driving to Devil’s Tower, and do they know why? Most look at him like he’s crazy. They’re thinking: Devil’s what? This is Idaho, buddy. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. And finally they’ll say, no, sorry. And he’ll ask if they’ve ever seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And inevitably every person he has surveyed has answered no (with the exception of the desk clerk at the hotel we’re in, though she was excited to learn that the movie was being screened at the Tower tonight). He has of course concluded through this research that we are probably the only two people in the entire world who are going to show up at the screening tonight, much less who have actually seen or heard of the movie. I think he’s going to be taken aback. I am expecting crowds and crowds.

We have sleeping bags to spread on the ground, and collapsible camping chairs to recline in. No food, no drinks, but it sounds like cameras are no problem. You could care less, but I’ll snap a few photos if I can.

DAY THREE
Sunday, 9/4
This barely counts as day three. It’s one in the morning and I’m awake, though probably not for much longer. We have been driving for most of two days, and I have been floating along on perhaps five hours of mostly useless sleep. But the main event! Yesterday we found our way through fifty or sixty miles of back roads to Devil’s Tower, always expecting to see it appear around the next bend, or over the next rise, always incredulous when it didn’t. Dad kept saying, “This thing is supposed to be a quarter of a mile high. Maybe it’s hidden behind those clouds.” And when we finally stopped looking, it of course appeared, and it was insignificant and small, fringed to the west by other outcroppings that loomed over it, shapely and stocky in contrast to Devil’s narrowness. Still, we reached for our cameras. (Head over here to read a strangely similar report filed by AICN’s big redheaded dude — similar, that is, except that Dad and I didn’t cry when we saw the Tower. WTF?)

We arrived about ninety minutes before sunset and spotted the Alamo Drafthouse projector truck parked in a field across the street from the KOA site. It was immediately apparent that I had overestimated the potential attendees; the field was large enough to comfortably hold perhaps five hundred people. In the end, between 200-250 showed up. Dad and I parked our camping chairs in the center of the field, near the 20′x40′ inflatable movie screen that was slowly filling with air. Maybe two dozen people were milling around. We spotted people carrying coolers of food and drinks, and immediately regretted taking the web site’s warning against incoming food/drinks so seriously. There was a general store behind the field, and we wandered inside and discovered a snack bar with your typical summer junk food menu: hot dogs, fries, pizza slices, etc. We listened as someone tried to order a burger, and the elderly woman behind the counter said, “You can order it all you want, but I’m not gonna make it. I already shut off all the complicated machines. I want to see that movie they’re showing.” When we reached the front of the line she gave us a choice: “You can have fries, you can have a Polish sausage, or both.” We opted for both, and neither were particularly good. It is always smart to walk away from a person who is going to cook for you but really doesn’t want to at all.

Out in the field a Native American couple sang and cracked jokes into low-volume microphones. The crowd that had already arrived was facing the deflating movie screen, and the opening act was behind them, so nobody paid them much attention. The subject of concern was the movie screen, which had buckled and sagged and finally melted to the ground. And then suddenly it was fixed! The guy at the mic said, “Good news! They’ve found the hole and patched it, and they’re going to reinflate it right now.” And they began reinflating it, though we hadn’t seen anybody within fifteen yards of the screen, much less up close, looking for punctures.

The screening was missing a couple of key ingredients that the Roadshow site promised, namely ‘real aliens’ and ‘men in foil suits’. They made up for it, however, with a spirited mashed potato-sculpting contest. The first five people to charge the screen got to participate; two of the selected were children under the age of ten who had no idea what the contest was about, and just piled potatoes on top of potatoes. By the time the festivities were over, the sun had mostly disappeared, the stars were coming out, and so were the bugs and the bats. So they kicked off the show with a handful of vintage movie trailers, explaining that each occupied a niche similar to or shared a common cast/crew member with Close Encounters. First up was a trailer for a bad, bad sci-fi flick called Starship Invasions that was released in ‘77 as well. Everything that followed it was a trailer for old Spielberg flicks: Jaws, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Then the movie started, and it was immediately apparent that we were watching an unrestored print of the original theatrical release, and not the director’s cut that’s been much more widely available for the last decade or so. Some familiar scenes played a little shorter, and Spielberg’s original sampling of “When You Wish Upon a Star” was present in the final scene, but mostly it was obvious that this was old because it really was old, feathered with scratches and dust, and bisected and trisected and so forth with slim, wavering vertical lines. And it was a total joy to watch, to laugh at scenes that I haven’t laughed out loud at for years, caught up in the response of other big fans and plenty of first-timers. When the movie ended, everybody applauded and bundled themselves away to their cars and out of the cold, and we followed suit and disappeared into the night.

As I write this, I am preparing to catch four or five hours of sleep before we strike out for Washington. Was tonight worth the 2600 miles that we’ll have logged by the end of this road trip? I probably will never have again the opportunity to see such a longtime favorite movie on the big screen again, and certainly never with an audience so unabashedly adoring of it. You tell me.

DAY SIX
Wednesday, 9/7
I’m camped out in one of the ‘business centers’ (slang for ‘big room full of threadbare, thinly-cushioned chairs and carpet littered with dried-out sweet-and-sour chicken from Panda Express”), riding the wi-fi signal I wasn’t able to find on day one. My flight departs at two-twenty-five this afternoon. It’s ten-thirty a.m. When you fly into an airport two hours away from your chauffeur’s house, you’re sort of at the mercy of their schedule. Anyway, the trip is basically over; all that remains is a four-hour waiting period, and a two-hour flight. I am again wearing the impossible shirt, and it is again working its magic (exit row seat again, big perk of arriving five hours before your flight). I have basically nothing to do right now, so I’m wrapping this up (which arguably should’ve been done about a thousand or more words ago).

Dad and I made it back to Washington very late Sunday night, exhausted and depleted. I slept for almost ten hours. Liz had the holiday off of work, so on Monday we hit her new favorite theatre, a sixteen-screen monstrosity in Olympia. Despite my protests, we saw Red Eye. The movie was horrible, but hilarious, since we happened to get tickets to a screening for the hearing-impaired. Seeing captions like (Music playing) (Lisa shakes her booty) made the movie bearable. But it left a sour enough taste that we decided to see another movie post-haste. We hit the local grocery deli for a quick lunch, Liz stuffing a sub sandwich into her grandma-sized purse; an acne-ridden theatre employee in the checkout line chastised my sister for being so devious. Our second movie was The Constant Gardener, which was either great simply because it was following a movie so horrible, or great because it was great. Gardener came with the trailer for Brokeback Mountain attached, and the audience that had been laughing just minutes before at some other trailer was suddenly dark and threatened and murmuring. Behind us a pack of retirees complained bitterly about how disgusting this was, and continued chattering well into the feature. Liz stared daggers, I shushed them, and for twenty minutes everything was okay. Then they started chattering again in earnest, at full volume, and a bored seven-year-old girl to my right began sticking her feet to the floor and tearing them free repeatedly. I suspect the movie is even better when not viewed in a hostile environment.

Later I forced Liz to watch This is Spinal Tap. She loved it so much that it’s in my carry-on.

Tuesday: a big home-cooked meal at home with the folks and grandparents, followed by Ancient Game Night. My family’s usually pretty big into things like Trivial Pursuit and variations of rummy. But when I raided the game closet, I saw stacks of unplayed games growing skins of dust: Taboo, Yahtzee, National Geographic’s Mission: Survival, et cetera. I wiped the dust off of a game called Battle of the Sexes, something that apparently my parents had played once about eight years ago, and we played it through. The object: a team of men and a team of women ask each other opposite-gender-specific questions, and with every right answer you advance. Reach the opposite side of the board first, and you win. Dad and I beat Mom and Liz soundly. Liz began calling us queens. We played again, this time changing the rules and asking questions specific to gender. Many of the questions were about liquor. Dad and I won. Liz called us alcoholic queens.

That pretty much brings you up to speed. I’m still in the airport now, and this chair is slowly killing me. I can’t feel my back at all. I think that’s bad. Twenty yards before the security checkpoint is a barber shop that also performs manicures, amputations and … massage. Is it possible to kill three hours on a massage table? They’d have to pour me into a bucket when my time was up and buckle the container into my exit-row seat.

PHOTOS
Probably these won’t interest you much unless you’re a fellow Close Encounters fan or love really grainy, wobbly images taken with a camera that deserves retirement or have a particular fondness for lazy photo galleries, but:

Devil’s Tower
• First sighting of the tower
• First sighting, part two
• From the screening location
• Some guy shouted “Aliens landing on the Tower!”
• More from the screening location
• Dad shot a closeup

The screening
• Dad, wondering why he’s here
• Me, wondering why Dad’s here
• The Drafthouse’s projection truck
• Inflating the screen
• The crowd gathers
• Reinflating the screen
• The tater-sculpting contest

Vintage trailers
• Starship Invasions
• E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Jaws

Close Encounters captures
• “What are they doing here? Hey!”
• “Do you want to report a UFO?”
• Roy’s close encounter
• “This means something. This is important.”
• Roy and Jillian arrive at the Tower

Bad-angle dirty-car-window road trip shots
• Dad drove 600 miles…
• …I drove 2,000
• Randomness
• More randomness
• More randomness
• More randomness
• More randomness
• More randomness
• More randomness
• More randomness
• More randomness
• More randomness
• More randomness
• No more randomness

Camera phone goodness
Rather, camera phone badness. There is no good reason for these photos whatsoever.
• Waiting for the flight out of Santa Barbara
• Waiting for my ride in Portland
• Transportation of choice
• He just never stopped sleeping
• Wyoming roads, identical in both directions
• The Tower at magic hour
• Dad’s theory of franchise restaurant design overkill
• My sister seriously dislikes Spinal Tap

Wednesday, September 7, 2005   

the blog and design portfolio of Jason Gurley. (Learn more.) This site has been around since 1998; me, since 1978. In 2005 I drove 3,000 miles to see a movie. 2009 is pretty aimless so far, but I'm sure I'll get around to something sooner or later.

Subscribe to RSS feed

My Flickr photostream

My Twitter feed

exit music
waiting, seeing
that faint sensation of loss
kninja
the boondock skeins
how to be better
the chime-maker’s nemesis
some things change, some don’t, etc.
ohh hahh ohh hahh
damn you, molly
View complete archive

Lust, Caution
Double Indemnity
Iron Man
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
There Will Be Blood
Gone, Baby, Gone
Live Free or Die Hard
The Indian Runner
The Iron Giant
Contact
An Inconvenient Truth
X-Men: The Last Stand
Superman Returns
Enigma
Nobody's Fool
Look, Up in the Sky
Numb3rs
Mission: Impossible III
Heaven
The Abyss
The Constant Gardener
The Mosquito Coast
The Hustler
Limbo
Grizzly Man
The Verdict
Superman Returns
Elizabethtown
Battlestar Galactica
You Can Count on Me
Rolling Roadshow 2005
The American President
My DVD collection

01. dreaming of falling
02. marvelous descent
03. a conversation
04. the colors
05. huffnagle island
06. a hundred million
07. sixty-six stories
08. anyone earthbound
09. a girl named eleanor
10. a route obscure and lonely
11. a certain stillness
12. this is jack
13. wide flat lands
14. going home
15. girl unscrewed
16. slow rehabilitation
17. twenty-three stories
18. a far-off point
19. fifteen years quiet
20. a one-beer fella
21. luminescence
22. one-sided conversation
23. hearts big and stupid
24. nineteen seventy-eight
25. first light
26. a hundred years
27. too long to stop now
28. plainswept
29. a widower in training
30. spies and assets
31. thirty years and then some
32. leaping over couches
33. cricket song
34. eleanor's first kiss
35. like so much ballast
36. too much
37. the longest wait
38. the second ice storm
39. rocket summer
40. waiting
41. wax wings
42. breakup
43. tough beans
43. the heavy gray sea