We pulled into the fuel megaplex in Snowville, Utah sighing with relief, and filled the SUV and the five-gallon emergency gas can.
Celebrating our victorious overcoming of the hundred-and-ten mile backcountry road, we had lunch at Molly’s, the only restaurant in town. The fifties-styled diner was decorated with deer heads and cowboy arcana. Red leatherette booths and padded swivel stools faced a resin-topped bar embedded with glitter. In the bathroom, the toilet paper hung on an antler nailed to the wall.
For some reason, there wasn’t a person over twenty working in the place. The staff included a fresh-faced teenage cook and a bouncy ponytailed waitress who took forever to make us a chocolate malt, which we shared as a reward for surviving the ordeal.
Restored with fuel and food, we pulled into a tiny postal building. I mailed a letter to my writer friend Holly Robinson; they would postmark it, and when she finally got the missive, the envelope would document our visit.
Somehow that felt important. Snowville, Utah, existed, and we’d been there.
Hopped up on chocolate malt, we charted a new course on Highway 84, a major thoroughfare, heading for a park called Walcott Lake in Idaho.
Unfortunately, 84 was also narrow and choked with big trucks going at high speeds. Gusts of fifty-to-sixty mph wind hit us so that our entire rig swerved and shimmied. Staying in our lane was a struggle, and if it was for us, it was for the semi trucks—a scary thought.
Several long, white-knuckled hours later we found our turnoff, crossing the state line into Idaho. We were glad to exit Highway 84 and head for Walcott State Park alongside the mighty Snake River.
The high point of the challenging day was when we turned into the park and were able to dump after four days, something that people who don’t trailer may not be aware of.
To deal with onboard waste, you pull into a dump station (which only some parks have) and use a long, wide, accordion-like flexible tube to empty the septic into a sewer outlet. Mike and I usually share in the unpleasantness; I keep the flexible waste hose pointed down and held into the septic dump outlet with my foot, while Mike pulls the levers under the trailer to let the refuse out.
The levers must be operated in a particular order: first, you pull the dark lever to release the ‘black water,’ which is code for the contents of the toilet. Once that’s emptied, you pull the lever for the gray water, which is effluvia from the sinks and shower. The idea is that the gray water semi-washes out the tube from the black water, but that’s not enough to clean it, of course. Mike then hoses out the interior of the pipe, and when he’s satisfied, the big slinky-like thing has to be compressed and stowed back on board. On our rig, the corrugated tube slides into the hollow back bumper. Sometimes it goes in neatly and easily, others it seems to fight like a jack-in-the-box refusing to be contained.
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