The Uinta Basin

29 September 2008

The climb into Vernal proved taxing. Mostly because I let myself think I was close when I wasn't. On the way into town, KP and the fine folks at Red Rock Cycle trued my wheel for free, and gave me a pair of riding gloves to replace the pair I left on a gas station bathroom shelf, somewhere east of Duchesne.

In the past few years, Vernal has morphed from a sleepy town at the base of the Uintas to a booming oil and natural gas epicenter. It felt perhaps like Texas in the 1800's. Workers migrate in to supply labor, filling up the hotels during the week, and then flow back out of town on the weekend, as the supply of housing hasn't yet met the employment boom. Roughnecked and grizzled men fill the fields and the restaurants and ride the wave of money to its unclear destination. I was told that I could get hired on the spot as a roustabout on a drilling rig, by a fellow who was amply baffled that I was traveling across the country to work for a non-profit. Yet he also mentioned that there was no joy in the oil life, only money, and I have to suspect that the wave could crest at any moment and leave a trail of empty hotels and workers splayed out on the shore.

I rested in Vernal on Sunday, and Bob and Anne invited me for dinner. They live in a safe and gregarious neighborhood past some farmland south of town, which also brought to mind, in a very positive way, a nostalgia for some type of friendlier past. I played a little chess with their son Collin, and we shared a delicious dinner, largely harvested from Bob's garden. Bob and Anne seemed to balance each other perfectly in demeanor and the family seamlessly blended striving for excellence and being genuinely down-to-earth. I'd be greatly pleased to have such a family one day. After dinner, we went out to look at the bike and talk shop. We tried to get their son Christian to join me for the first 25 miles or so of the ride to Dinosaur. He politely declined. The neighbors walked by, parents, teenagers and toddlers, and we chatted for a while, including about how to get rid of the basketball-sized hornet's nest that was up 35 feet in Bob and Anne's tree. Bob grabbed his Schwinn and we strolled the neighborhood for a few minutes, saying hi to some neighbors, before I headed back past the farmlands to the north side of town, where Kyle and Derrick graciously put me up for the night.

The next morning, after breakfast at Betty's Cafe (a must visit), and recouping my strength a little more in Vernal, I met Gail, a rancher from Duchesne who supported his ranching by working in the oil fields. Which either means that Duchesne isn't really the place to run cattle, or that we have a long ways to grow in reprioritizing the economy to make farm practice viable. Probably both. At any rate, I then set off toward Colorado.

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