Pointed Somewhere to the Southeast

 I left the house at 5am yesterday morning not knowing where I would sleep that night. The decision would partially make itself at the whim of customer schedules, but also by how much time I had free and how early I wanted to get up the next day. It’s more common than not to take customers to dinner, which only leaves time to phone-in for bedtime routine at home before going to bed myself. 

   The day’s result was much like any other day of making calls. One of the two appointments at {{13}} fell through, which gave me some extra time to stop at the rest stop on the way to Idaho Falls to look around. It had a bunch of trails among the lava flows that I thought might look neat in the light of the setting sun, so I thought I might come back. That might still happen, just not on this trip. I finished just after four o’clock with no obligations for the evening. This was my first time in Idaho Falls (I'm sure I've been through before, but likely in the back seat of the station wagon or van) and it is a much more interesting place on the surface than Burley, so I decided an early start the next day was worth the drive in the morning. 

   My first impulse was to search for bookstores, which I discovered were plentiful for a town that size. I planned out all my stops over an early dinner of baked ziti, and received my digital key for the hotel as I signed the check. Not wanting to traipse around town in steel-toe boots and FR clothing, I ran over to change. 

   So there I stood in the spartan room, stress-free and wearing comfortable garb, looking at Apple Maps to decide on my first stop. Bookstores or Craters of the Moon. I chose Craters.

Looking at distances on a map of a place you've never been can be deceiving. From my hotel to the visitor center for Craters of the Moon National Monument would take about an hour and forty minutes. There was no way I could make it there before the visitor center closed, but if I left right away, there would be plenty of daylight left for me to see some highlights. 

   Even if I had not already scoped the place out on the map the previous night and driven to the area without a plan, the road signs listing it would have been enough to draw me there. I fully cast aside my bookstore plan and hit the road, stopping only to top off the gas tank and pick up a few more bottles of water. One might think that I would hesitate to do more driving, having already been in the car for four hours, but I was thrilled at the freedom. 

   Highway 26 soon took me out of town and into the open countryside, injecting a sense of excitement and adventure into the air. I switched from listening to Bag of Bones by Stephen King to my Auralis playlist, a massive ongoing collection of my favorite songs from the past 16 years and cranked up the volume. 

   I see that drive now as a montage of the mind, with so many details set against a backdrop of music. In the near distance were two very tall bluffs, which I assume are volcanic but could be mistaken. One topped with a ridiculous array of communication antennae, likely from Idaho National Lab. The vegetation was much like the rest of the region, scrubby sage, juniper, and grasses, but mainly flat broken only by the Sawtooth Range and aforementioned volcanic bluffs in the distance. 

   I'd read about and done business with the INL for over a decade, but never seen it. My vision was much different from the reality. I expected something like a cross between the Pentagon and an oil refinery, so what I didn’t expect was to pass a large monument saying "Now Entering INL" and that it would take nearly ten minutes to drive through it. I passed several campus areas, each isolated from one another and filled with towers, buildings, and oddly shaped structures. Each was too far away to get a good look, but I can now better see why that place generates the amount of business it does. 

   I passed the turnoff for the EBR-1 Atomic Museum, which I will need to hit on another trip when time allows. After that was Arco, which was like being on an old movie set. There was a park with the top of a submarine with the call numbers 666 painted on it. Instead of an old town exuding neglect like I expected, Arco had an endearing aura about it. I passed a dead tavern that beckoned me to buy it, quit my job, and move there to be the proprietor, cheerfully wearing an apron and polishing glassware. I turned off the main drag and passed a boarded-up building with a neat 1950s style sign that said Golden West Cafe. Soon afterward was an abandoned gas station with pumps labeled United Oil. It looked to be from the same era as the café. 

   I’ll need to stop in Arco again on my next trip through, possibly next week, since I need to be at {{8}} on Friday morning. I need to take some photos of this once bustling place, founded on the edge of the nuclear power revolution, now past its prime, but still clinging to the spirit of ingenuity. On the way out of town I passed an airstrip that evoked memories of summer vacations in Seattle where we would camp on the abandoned airstrips and stomp through abandoned train tunnels in the Cascades. I didn’t expect to leave Arco and start into the foothills of the small mountain range I’d seen in the distance earlier; its small peaks still capped with snow.

   Craters of the Moon National Monument must have been created with the intent of providing a place of pilgrimage for creative souls who thrive on the boundary between beauty and wrath. It’s a stark place where the land is formed from fields of volcanic rock that cover the ground like boiling black heads of broccoli. I’m sure that for people in Hawaii or Iceland, this might not seem like a big deal, but for a Utah suburbanite, the heat and violence that created that place were far from my normal experience and would have been awe-inspiring to behold. 

   There was a scenic overlook that must have been spectacular, but a car was already parked there, so I decided to hit that another time. The Visitor Center parking lot was empty, so I pulled in and parked in the middle to pull up a map of the park. I was staring at the SOS no service on my phone in dismay when my front right parking sensor started beeping. It stopped right as I reached for the button that disables it. I got out to check what was there, which was nothing. A slight breeze was blowing, however, so I figured it must have been the wind on the sensor. The signs over by the entrance had a map on the side, so I snapped a picture. 

   One person online recommended hiking Inferno Cone if you have limited time available. The booth at the park entrance was expectedly unmanned, so I paid my $20 entrance fee at the kiosk, where the mailbox thing was filled with maps. I took two. Inferno Cone is aptly named. You go around a corner and are confronted by a giant black cone rising into the air. There is a small parking lot, a few info signs, and a brief boardwalk with a warning sign about how steep the trail is to the top, how strenuous the climb is and that the trail may be unmaintained. I wouldn't really call it a trail. More like a section in the middle of the cone where many feet had trodden nearly straight up. 

   The sign wasn't joking about the climb. By the time I reached the top, my legs burned and I was wheezing. It wasn't straight up, but nearly so. One side of the top of the cone was barren like the approach side, but the other had low scrubby brush and grass struggling to survive. But the most surprising thing at the top was a single pine tree clinging to the edge of the hill, bent over like the wind was trying to blow it down. The view of the landscape was stunning, and I'm looking forward to processing my photos. I'd started with a telephoto on my camera, so I reached into my pocket to pull out the lens cap to swap it out. When I pulled it out, the pen-like multi-tool in my pocket fell on the ground.

   I bought a ton of these things to give out at trade shows. As far as gimmicks go, it is clever that the cap is a stylus, which you can pull off to get a ballpoint pen. If you unscrew the top, you have a screwdriver with a removable flat-head and Phillips bit. The other end of it is a small compass that flips up to reveal a bright flashlight. I usually carry one in my pocket to give to customers but forgot to do so that morning. 

   I picked it up but stopped before putting it back in my pocket because the compass was spinning back and forth. Then as I focused on it, the spinning stopped. Basalt is high in iron, and I was standing on an imperial shit ton of it. But it wasn't pointing north. The wind picked up just then, so I didn’t pause further, but it seemed like it was pointed somewhere to the southeast. The wind had been blowing this whole time, but what picked up then was on a whole new level. 

   I gave up any thoughts of getting more artsy photos and headed back down. I’m no expert on wind speed, but for {{18}}, 25 mph is the max, and I at least know how that feels. So, at the top of Inferno Cone, it must have been somewhere between forty and fifty miles per hour. I did pull out my phone to snap a selfie for the family, and my shirt was billowing like a balloon and my cheeks flapped like something out of a cartoon. The wind calmed down in the mountain's shadow, but it was still fierce enough that I retreated to the truck. 

   My next and last stop was the splatter cone. I didn't know what to expect, only that someone on Reddit said these were the two stops to make if you were limited on time. Some kind of interesting volcanic splatter formation was what I expected to see, but what I saw was much cooler. 

   My whole life I've been fascinated by enclosed spaces. There is a photo of me somewhere in a family album that shows me inside a small cupboard with the biggest grin on my face. In junior high drama class, I once was locked inside a coffin to torment me, but their plan backfired. Five years later, {{6}} said that coffin was still on the stage with my dark poem still written on the fabric of the lid; written blindly in the dark. I wish I knew what that poem said now. 

   Just writing about this made me turn on my favorite album of all time: the 1990 masterpiece of dark ambience by Brian (Lustmord) Williams: Heresy. He recorded it in caves, mines and other underground places, which is fitting to describe the gaping black maw that greeted me at the top of the splatter cone. The sun was sinking below the horizon, casting an orange glow across the roiling black landscape, and I saw in my mind with the wind and fire, the violence of the park’s formation. 

   The top of the crater was cordoned off by a hefty iron grate, whose shadow on the far side appeared like a row of tall figures holding hands. A primal, visceral part of me wanted to climb down into that pit as deep as I could go and lurk in the darkness channeling my inner Sméagol. That feeling stayed with me on the long drive back in the dark, forcing me to turn off any music or book and sit with that meditative sensation. I credit this with saving me from certain death where I might have run into a handful of antelope standing on the road. I fell asleep that night with a feeling of reverence towards that barren, blasted place, knowing I needed to go back.