Gentleman Buffalo

What's going on here?


That's me, bottom left. This is a screenshot from the film Gentleman Broncos. I was an extra in that there picture. See ^^ ? This isn't my first time as an extra. In the mid-'90s I spent an honest day working as an extra on the show Promised Land, but even though I got a close-up I didn't make the final cut. Also I got sunburned really badly. The sun is my enemy.

I filmed my Broncos role almost a year ago to the day. I was jobless so when the call went out from a friend-of-a-friend needing extras I jumped at the chance, even though it meant waking up before 1pm. It was a fun experience really. In this scene I'm reacting to Jemaine Clement. I really like that Jemaine. He wasn't there though, they filmed his scene the day before. Cinemagic, folks.

The movie came out last fall and though I was cautiously optimistic, it ended up being, um, kind of bad. Really bad. Pretty much the worst movie I've ever seen. To say nothing of anyone involved in the film, who I'm sure are all very nice people. But wow. I walked out of the theater feeling strange, almost sick. Still, on that day a year ago I got a free bottle of water, the fancy Hollywood stuff, and a crisp money bill. So you know, whatever.

I was scheduled to be there all day but the shoot only took about an hour. Since I was up so early and had nothing planned for the day, I decided to explore. I went north. I went west. Then I went north again. I got lost. It was grey and dark and snowing. I decided to drive to the Great Salt Lake and throw rocks into it. Strange thing is, even though the Great Salt Lake is really big, like, really big. I know in general where it is, but I've never really stood upon it's salty shores.

I felt like I was getting closer because suddenly there were no buildings. In fact there was nothing at all.


I guess I was in farm country? I don't know what they're farming out there but the air smelled like cow shit.

Quite by accident, I stumbled upon the Antelope Island Causeway, which probably would have been easy to find if I was actually looking for it. It was a nice surprise. I'd wanted to go there ever since I was a tyke but I've never made it out there.

At the entrance to the causeway a very rude park ranger told me the price was $12 per car which seemed like an awful lot. I told him I was but one man, and my car was small. I promised to take only pictures and leave only footprints, but he wouldn't budge. I figured it wasn't worth it and maybe I should come back some other time with a car full of all my rowdy friends. I turned around, but then remembered the Adventurer's Creed ("If you find something better to do, do that"), so I turned around again and paid the $12. The park ranger was pretty smug about this development. "I knew you'd come back," he said with a sinister tone.

I put on my trunks and couldn't wait to jump into the freezing, cloudy, rotten-egg smelling water, but my dreams were soon crushed.

The GSL is so big. So big I find it disturbing. I'm freaked out by vastness. Space, the ocean, the GSL. The lake is especially off-putting because at least with the ocean you know it's teeming with life. This thing is home to only brine shrimp, seagulls, and a monster with the body of a crocodile and the head of a horse.

I got out to take some pictures and the cold wind stung my face, attacking me with frozen salt. I felt unwelcome there.

The Wikipedia entry for Antelope Island doesn't want to discuss it, but the place is definitely haunted.

Maybe on a sunny summer day when it's filled with fit cyclists and friendly buffalo you get a different feeling, but on this day I was the only person on the whole island. Seriously I didn't see another human the whole time I was there.



This little snow-covered mountain was more impressive in real life. It was like, all 3-D n' shit.


The shores. Mud flats and marshes.

Over a hundred and sixty years ago some fool decided this would be a good place to live.

Well, I guess the whole Wasatch Front looked like that at the time, so it was as good a place as any. This fence surrounds the Fielding-Garr Ranch, the oldest Whitey made structure in all of Utah. It surrounds a natural spring and there's evidence that people have been springing around there for over 1,000 years.

It looked so inviting I had to go in for a closer look.

There's a storeroom full of original ranch stuff. It's spook in there, and colorless.

Whaaa!
Murder supplies!

It was really neat inside. I'm glad I had the place all to myself.



Though I question the placement of this "no trespassing" sign. I'm no rancher but I think it should be on the outside.

Unless the no trespassing mandate was limited to that particular area of the storeroom.

This truck was owned by Fielding Garr himself. Bought it in 1848 for only six Deseret Dollars.

I was alarmed by an otherwordly sound and turned to find a cage full of dragons!


Spooky swamp around the spring.


I crossed through it to get to another ranch building.

This building felt less like a museum than the storeroom and more just like an abandoned house.

I hate it when they tease us with unusable toilets.

Well of course it's not for "public" use, it's for private use. Toiletry tends to be a very private act.

The living area was set up to feel lived in. I keep repeating itself, but it was so eerie. On any other day it might have felt like a slice of the past but on that grey windy day it just felt apocalyptic, like The Road.


Some great family portraits in the living area.

The kids.
Mr. and Mrs.

The Victorian equivalent of the Farrah Fawcet poster.


When I'm in haunted buildings I always take pictures of mirrors, in case they turn out to be ghost mirrors.

What is that glowing thing appearing through the doorway? It could be a ghost, or it could be daylight. We'll never know.

This is the, uh, North or maybe East side of the island. Might be the west side. This picture was taken looking down from a hill. Doesn't give a good sense of scale as the shoreline was really far away from where I was.

The island is famous for it's buffalo (bison) population. A herd was herded to the island for protection when white folk was busy killing them all and the herd has thrived there ever since. I didn't see any though. I went to an area called the Buffalo Holding Pens, where I saw no buffalo. Again, I was completely alone but for the sound of wind and creaky fences creaking and clanging. No adult supervision at all. Surely there are park rangers there right? So weird.

Finally I was just overwhelmed by the weird feeling and I had to get off that island. This summer I want to go back and see it when it's maybe green and stuff.


Oh, I guess I did see one buffalo, I tried to photograph every part of it but failed. I don't know how the Native-Americans did it.

its name is my name

A few nights ago I was Googling my name which is, you know, the best possible use of my time. I found this:



It's a beer, an ale to be precise, named after me! How is this possible?

It's an Italian beer, and here's the story: so you've got these people called the Ligures or the Liguri, who lived in a land called Liguria, which is now Tuscany and a little bit of Southern France, Bavaria, and other dark and woodsy places. They were a barbarian people and were eventually soaked up by the Gauls and then the Romans. You know how that goes.

In a cup in a tomb of a Liguri king, they found traces of ale, and this beer is an attempt to recreate that recipe. Why is it called Bryton? Because that's what the Liguri called this beverage.

I've often wondered about the origin of my name, and though I don't think it's what my parents had in mind, guess it turns out I'm named after the world's oldest beer.

Seems like if there's a beer named after me, or vice versa or whatever, I should taste it. Very least, I should have a bottle to add to my collection of beer bottles (yes I collect beer bottles, which is one of the many things I may have to give up some day if I ever want to stop being a man-child). So I wrote to them to see if how I could possibly get my hands on some and they responded -

Dear Mr Bryton…I understand and appreciate your desire to taste the Bryton beer, the oldest beer in the world to have been brewed with flavorful hop. But without a US distributor it will not be easy to ship it over to you. This could then be a chance for you to make a good deal and become the US distributor of Bryton Beer.

I'm considering it. Might be hard work though and I don't really like filling out paperwork so probably not. But who knows? Maybe I could be the next great beer baron, like that tool in the Sam Adams commercials.

On the other hand, by becoming a distributor I might become associated with this guy, and I'm not sure that's something I want.

war of relocation

Let's go back out into the wasteland, eh? If you've been reading this blog for a while you've seen (and no doubt enjoyed) some of my "Adventure Days," little road trips I, along with various crew members, like to take to weird, interesting, historic, abandoned, etc. places within relatively close driving distance of the home office in Salt Lake. A region I've spent a lot of time in is the West Desert and Great Basin area to the Southwest of where I am right now. When I say "spent a lot of time" I mean, "have been out there three or four times." Nevertheless, I feel like if you needed a guide for an adventure of your own there's no one better than me.

On a recent Saturday I sure as heck needed to get away, and though I can't speak for my traveling companion Elin, I would have to assume she needed to get away as well. I was feeling antsy, the air in the valley had been unbreathable, I needed a reason to update this blog again, and some dudes were looking to wail on me so a road trip seemed prudent. We decided to go the Eureka-Delta route and see what we could see.

Eureka has been blogged about here before. We breezed right through it this time but I turned around and went to gasoline because I would have been really embarrassed if we ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere. This gas station is also a motel, but I kept poking around inside and couldn't figure out where the motel part of it would be.


The road from Santaquin (which is just off the main stretch) to Delta (nowhere near any sort of stretch) is a long one dotted with small loosely organized communities, tipped over sheds, and swampy woodland areas with dead twisted trees, beautiful in their astounding ugliness. Delta is an oasis, such as it is, floating out there in the desert. It exists mostly for it's noteworthy Alfalfa and concentrated Berilium.

We got into town and just bumped around a bit. We were on our way down one road when a barking dog chasing after two barking dogs in a truck changed our course.

When you're in small town and you see a goofy little dog chasing after two goofy big dogs, and those big dogs are in a slow moving pick-up, it's best to stop whatever you're doing and follow that scene. Because maybe that little dog is leading you to something interesting? Like this!

The ooooold schoolhouse.

The front door was locked but it seemed like something we should go inside. Luckily the back door was open. In fact the back door was missing.

It's normal for a school to have a toilet, but there was also a bathtub in their. It was filled with dirt.

Check out this awesome revolutionary wallpaper. Everything you need to know, right there.

The floorboards were creaky and covered in tetanus bearing nails, and there were dead birds everywhere. Not the most inviting of environments.

A ways out of town, down a lonely dirt road is an interesting site. It's guarded by this message on a rock, maybe a thousand years old. They think the message is from one tribe giving another tribe permission to hunt (on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and every other Wednesday)

Hiking! We headed up a mountain to get a look at a weird rock. The vastness of the scenery below was hard to comprehend. Aside from that poor excuse for a road there were no signs of human life, literally as far as the eye could see.


This here, is a big pile of rocks.

I'm just trying to give you a sense of atmosphere.

So get a load of this rock. It's called, appropriately, the Great Stone Face.

Whaaa! It looks exactly like Joseph Smith, the inventor of Utah!

The face was found by Mormon pioneers exploring the area in the 1800s. You can imagine their surprise. Got to admit, the resemblance is striking. I'd imagine that the Native cultures of centuries ago held a certain reverence for the rock as well.

So! Let's shift gears a little bit. Imagine you're just chillin' in the country you call home. You were born there and you've carved out a little niche for yourself and in your free time maybe you just like riding your bike around and playing baseball. Then the country your parents were born in go and bomb your new country, and you're like "Not cool, dudes!" but no one cares for your not-cool sentiments and they figure, well, despite your Schwinn and your baseball glove you're probably no different from the guys that bombed us. Why don't you come with us, they say. And then they put you on a truck and put you on a train and put you on a truck and drop you off in the Topaz Internment Camp.

Where the scenery is flat, the summers are hot and the winters are cold, and you're behind tall barbed wire fences watched by guards with machine guns. Kind of a bum deal yeah?

Topaz War Relocation Center covered 31 square miles and housed about 9000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans during WWII. An interesting tidbit from Wikipedia about the name:

Topaz was originally known as the Central Utah Relocation Center, but this name was abandoned when administrators realized that the acronym was naturally pronounced "Curse." The camp was then briefly named for the closest settlement, until nearby Mormon residents (with their own heritage of forced relocation) demanded that their town name not be associated with a "prison for the innocent." The final name, Topaz, came from a mountain which overlooks the camp from 9 miles (14.5 km) away.

The 442nd RCT of the 100th Battalion was a military unit made up entirely of Japanese-Americans and became the most highly decorated combat unit in the history of the U.S. Army. Many of the boys in the unit returned from the war and were sent straight back to Topaz. WTF?

There's not much of anything left out there, but the stillness of the air and the disinterested landscape gives off a real eerie feeling.

Don't try to step on those holes, you'll fall.

Shot and killed by the guards for standing too close to a fence.

Topaz.


Further reading: Topaz Museum.

Topaz was a long way from the town of Delta, through a gridwork of roads playing home to cluttered farms and fields of sagebrush. There's a post-apocalyptic feel to the place. Everything is feels recently abandoned, and even though there is evidence of mankind everywhere you can't help but feel isolated. To see what I mean, look at this house.

It just tipped right over! Why did it tip over? Why was it there in the first place? Why did the owner leave a perfectly good case of tampons and plastic cups sitting inside?


It feels like something out of Cormac McCarthy's the Road. Everything out there does. I wonder how long that tipped over house will be there. In fifty, a hundred years, will it have been cleared to make way for bright new houses and man-made lakes? Or will it's decay continue unchecked, a forgotten relic of a forgotten person, reclaimed by nature, as it will reclaim us all? Ah I'm freaking myself out.

Shortly after examining the house, we discover the fate of its owner. Quicksand.


It was time to go home, but one perilous obstacle stood between us and the highway. Desert Pirates!

These people were very clear about us keeping out of their stuff. They do not suffer trespassers lightly! And they fly the Jolly Roger so who knows what they're up to? Again, the questions plague me: why are those people out there? What are they hiding? Why are they so suspicious of me and my doubloons?

Well the good news we made it through sans incident.

When we got back to civilization Elin and I celebrated with some snacks. I had a Charleston Chew. I'm not sure what she had.