Crumbs in my 'Stache: Carrion, my wayward son

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

By Ben Cannon

With gas prices sky high, is the Great American Road trip on its deathbed, if not already dead?

That’s something I have pondered lately, having read a recent essay or two predicting the death of the long distance road trip, the Post War cultural phenomenon ushered in with the help of Kerouac and Cassidy, among others. Ferrying themselves back and forth across the United States in old borrowed and stolen cars, those counterculture pioneers helped romanticize the process of personal, cultural and geographical exploration ‘on the road.’

Yet the opportunities to experience continent-crossing rivers of pavement are becoming available to fewer and fewer with geo-politics forcing the price of fuel higher than a lewd 1960s-era poet stuck in the maddening euphoria of a Benzedrine binge.
Nevertheless, if it’s not dead yet, the road trip has at least been shortened, and most of us, for now, can still afford to drive to Salt Lake City. So, impractical as it may seem for a single overnighter, Stan Detry and I schlepped our weekend-weary bodies into a mid-size pick-up and hit the road.

Filling up on gas in Victor, I had my first meal of the day - an overcooked corndog from the Phillips 66. Why, you may ask yourself, would I ever eat a corndog from a gas station? Because I am a man of the people, and American roadside dining for the traveler on the go often yields few options but fast food and greasy, often regrettable gas station eats.

On the way home from Salt Lake City the following day, we decided to take an alternate, more scenic route. Rolling along the sun washed country of northeastern Utah and western Wyoming, between the grassy buttes northeast of Evanston, we prepared ourselves to find some down home culinary fixings alongside the rural mineral development occurring in Lincoln and Sublette Counties.

Thinking of barbeque, we pulled a U-turn in Big Piney, only to find that Bign’s Smokehouse is closed on Sundays (further research revealed Bign’s is more of a jerky and smoke pit catering joint, so we probably wouldn’t have been able to find any plate-style meats and beans there, anyway).

In Daniel, at the Daniel Store, Stan asked for an order of fried gizzards.
“Fried gizzards?” said the woman, shaking her head. “If we have any left.” Her tone suggested there had been a run on gizzards earlier in the day, when anyone who knew anything knew gizzards were to be eaten before a certain time on Sundays.
Sure enough, there were enough fried gizzards left to overfill a paper basket.

But maybe we did try to eat them too late in the day. That could explain why the chitinous plates in the gizzards, similar to little teeth, didn’t seem to want to break down all in our mouths all the way. Forcing down the first few, we spit out the rest, laughing at the unpleasantness of the experience.

Ah, but what a time: to venture, if only briefly, from this idyllic valley through a corner of the vast West and taste roadside America.

Dropping down over the Bondurant Rim, a striking transition from high desert to leafier Alpine terrain, we veered into the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem – home.

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Crumbs in my 'Stache: Carrion, my wayward son | Planet JH News Article: Restaurants And Dining

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