Beehived: Part 1

The Summer is over. Or will be, soon. I don't know what the calendar says, but I've always felt that Summer runs from the first baseball game to the last. Okay maybe I haven't always felt that. But I'm declaring it now, this idea I had eighteen seconds ago when I started writing this post.

This has been one of the best summers I've ever had. Maybe the very best. Which is good, because it could have been awful. I've had some moments of darkness (suffocating darkness) but those moments were smited (not a word) by plenty of nice life affirming experiences, and I didn't even need to eat my way through Italy or pray all over India or love the crap out of Bali. Except for a Northwesterly interlude I just bumped around Utah. I took a lot of pictures and I'm going to go through them all and write about the happenings that happened, bookended by a couple of old ballgames.

This was mid-April. Summer's Eve. (I don't get it).


This was yesterday, my last game of the season.


Now let's get to everything in between.

The day after the home opener was the Scofield Adventure.

I've already written about that but here's an American Flag from that day.

FACT: if I see an American Flag flapping against the sky, I will stop to take a picture of it. I have dozens of pictures exactly like this. When I'm taking these picture I don't think I realize that they're redundant. I think "Well there's a striking image. I should preserve it for the historical record."

I searched this blog for the word "Taggarts" and came up empty. I'm amazed that I haven't mentioned Taggarts before. It's a restaurant called Taggarts in a town called Taggarts where the only thing in the town is the restaurant the town is named for. It's sits in the shade in a little bowl in the mountains, across the highway from the Ogden River.

You bet I threw rocks into that river. I threw rocks across that river. I threw rocks into the air and watched them descend as if pulled by gravity into that river.


We'll come back to Taggarts later.

Plans to open May with a camping trip were thwarted by unruly weather systems so a trip to Tooele was opted for instead, by way of Magna.

Magna is Magna. This fact cannot be called into question. But it has a cool old Main Street. I love an old Main Street.


Tooele is one of three places I claim as my ancestral homelands (trivia contest: name the other two!) Tooele County is a wasteland. Vast emptiness, salt, skulls, nuclear waste, toxic dirt. It's one of my favorite places to go. I like to drive out there and get hopelessly lost in the sagebrush canyons, driving down the long straight stretches of road unsure of where they lead. I always come back from Tooele wanderings freshly inspired.

Tooele City has grown up a lot since I was a kid. Not in a good way. It's a magnet for McMansions and McBig Box stores. But the old part is still there. Like this place where we stopped for breakfast, the seafoamiest place I've ever been in.

I worked for The Ritz-Carlton for six years. It was exactly like this.


I bet so many miners have been stabbed in this hotel.


Wandered into one of the few open businesses, a store that sells weird random crap. Like these super-gay things aimed at children.


So of course I bought that postcard of Namor. I also bought a Tiny John Adams and a Tiny John F. Kennedy. I didn't even know they made Tiny Presidents but now I want to collect them all.

Eventually I hung Namor up in the Podcast Room. Oh, did you know I do a weekly comic book podcast? Well I do. It's way nerdy. Deal with it.


Here's one of those canyons I like to get lost in. I believe this is actually the Old Lincoln Highway.

The road fed us into Skull Valley, through something called Terra and past the Dugway Proving Grounds (top secret UFO research facility).


Long road, past this murder house...

...took us to Iosepa (right).


Iosepa is a foreign word meaning "I bet these Hawaiians would like living in a treeless desert with terrible summers and worse winters."

The settlement lasted from 1889-1917. Not much left of it now, but the scent of Poi still hangs in the air.


On the way back home, spotted this sign under an overpass.


This interests me because of this AWARD WINNING FILM I made a few years ago.

Untitled from Bryton Sampson on Vimeo.

You don't actually have to watch it, just know that it exists.




(end part 1)