The Patio Drive-In: Blanding, UT

Scenes from Spring Break

 


Burgers First…
We decide to begin, rather than end, our adventure with the “eats”; to shore ourselves up against the exertion to come; to set off into the wilds with bellys (hopefully) full of Trifecta. And because in Blanding, if you’re hungry, there is little else to eat but burgers, fries, and shakes, we decide on the burgers, fries and shakes at “The Patio”.
  Just inside the door, we are met by a wall sized map of the world, stuck full of pins marking the countries that guests have traveled from. There have been burger enthusiasts from China, the Sudan, Germany (lots; too many to accommodate all the pins), Cote D’Ivoire, Iran…and on and on.  Next to the map is a huge laminated poster with the shiny figure of a smiling dude on a bike above a partially filled-in pie chart, colored with red permanent marker. I ask the cashier and am told that the dude is their manager who’s riding in a fundraiser race that weekend, cycling from Blanding south to Bluff.  I can, if I want, donate money to the cause—which cause exactly, I’m not sure. I’m sure she told me, but as she is talking, a waitress passes a raspberry shake and onion rings under my nose and I get a little distracted.
The entrance to the Patio is draped with a massive banner proclaiming that this is the home of the “Big B!”: signature 1/2lb. patty with all the fixens, topped with special sauce (this usually means fry sauce, which is fine with me) on a sesame seed bun. Standing at the counter, I can see that the “Big B” sandwich is just the beginning. Behind the counter is a laminated sign with several sections. Each section is labeled with a header and divided into little boxes.  Reading the headers, I learn that in addition to the “Big B,” the Patio offers a double, triple and quadruple “B.” The sections are divided by sandwich and the boxes are filled with the names of people who have managed to down one or more of these sandwiches.  The double is no big deal. Lots of people have managed a double. The triple is apparently not worth competing for because it seems that if you’re in this tournament, you’re in for the gold. Under the “Quad,” ( I can’t help but laugh and think of the Mormon slang for their holy books: the Book of Mormon, Bible, Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price=a Quad), fourteen hearty souls have their names written—wait, nope…one guy has his name three times. I wonder how “hearty” he is now?           

 We order, (just a regular B for me, thanks…maybe after the trip…) and have a seat in a miniature red plastic booth beneath shelves filled with random stuff meant to recall some broadly defined olden days: Betty Boop lunch box, a hand mixer, small records of Elvis and the Beatles, a bunch of license plates. When the food arrives we are more than pleased. I, in fact am shocked and awed as I lift my toasted sesame seed bun and discover a drive-in burger joint miracle: Romaine lettuce. Romaine lettuce! on my burger! And Bermuda Onions! Thick and zesty and flavorful (as opposed to white, filler onions).  The patty is flame broiled and, I am assured by employees, made from locally raised beefs. Man. A total treasure.

The fries are hot and crisp and made with fresh oil so they taste pretty good, though nothing out of the ordinary, and the shake (Banana Raspberry) has heaps of bananas and fruit, not just fruit syrup. A winner, (the burger quite simply, rocks) if not necessarily a Trifecta champion. Well fortified (my burger is so big, I wrap it to go—I’ll be hungry again in an hour), we head South to the real beginning of our trip…        

  



 

Within Sight of Sleeping Ute Mountain…

The Ute’s head points rorth. He lies supine with his hands folded gently across his soft body; his legs spread out to the north, relaxed.  The figure is clear; looking at the mountain, I would have thought of a sleeping person even without the moniker. When I look at this looming figure though, it doesn’t occur to me to identify him as a “Ute;” lately, my imagination has been steeped in all things Anasazi.   

His is a superbly lonely place to doze. The Mountain is sacred to the Utes, and consequently off limits for any development or habitation. All around, the high gray plains of the Colorado Plateau roll out wide and empty; great sage plains, a seemingly limitless horizon.  A smattering of junipers scent the air and attempt to fill up all this space. The San Juan Mountains hover to the South East, so indistinct as to appear inconsequential. The closest town—not counting the secluded polygamist compound we passed on the drive in—is 30 miles away and has less than 200 people.

This is what I know about the island mountain: I know that a ceremonial Anasazi road runs South of it and if I were to follow it, it would lead me to Mesa Verde or Chaco Canyon; depending on how far I felt like walking. I know that there is another island, also to the south, this one a totem in the desert, whose top is ashen with the remains of signal fires—circles of stone wrapping heaps of charred and nearly petrified juniper and bits of broken pots—cold now for more than 800 years.  I know that on the Eastern slopes of the Mountain, there is a dizzying concentration of Anasazi ruins; vestiges speaking of violent ends. There, there is an Anasazi stone storage chamber, empty but for a single human defecation. Once studied, the waste was found to contain four different types of human DNA. Whoever left these remains, was a cannibal.

 

 
Walking along a gorge—maybe 100 feet deep—in Hovenweep National Monument, we lose the trail for a minute and find ourselves at the doorstep of a two-story Anasazi structure. The stones still fit snugly together, sticks are still embedded in the top of the door frame. Having merely skirted the several ruined sites we have looked at thus far, my sudden proximity to this ruin leaves me a little dizzy.  This house dates from around 1200 C.E., one of the last Anasazi settlements built before they “disappeared.” Reading Craig Child’s, House of Rain for the last few weeks, I have been following their mystery as Child’s explores Anasazi settlements from Chaco Canyon, North and West, to the limits of their empire.  Just as we drove into the monument, I read the section on Hovenweep aloud to my dad:

Anasazi towers frequently show signs of extensive burning, and not necessarily the kind seen in ceremonial departures. One excavated tower revealed the remains of more than thirty infants and children, who appeared to have burned alive (Childs, 169).

Although this particular house has no charred walls, no flame licked windows, the air around the house feels thick with the web of Anasazi fate.  The web, laden with mystery and violence and devotion, is double for me.  The remains of this culture have the draw not only of the unknown, of a great puzzle or treasure map, but are literally drawn up from the elements of the land—the land to which I am addicted, the land that has given me a sense of home for the first time in my life.

  The house that I stand so close to now is made from the dirt at my feet and the stones piled against the hillside to my right. These people lived with their hands always against the land. Their feet always dusty with it, their ears pressed to it; listening.  Their landmarks—Chaco, Chimney Rock in Colorado, Mesa Verde—show that this culture lived attuned to seasonal change and in tune with the movements of moon, sun and stars. Houses and temples are built so that on the solstice, windows and doorways are illuminated, light cast through each room of the house.  In this way, the houses become communion made material.

   Each community here is built around a spring.  This choice was made both functionally and devotionally. Each house and tower face the spring, bowing in devotion to this ancient emanation from the deeps of the land, this element on which the Anasazi entirely relied. When the water was gone, it was time to leave.

Living with this sort of awareness, literally inside this kind of awareness of land and sky is something I am constantly hungry for.  Hikes and backpacking are not enough. How would it feel to live in a house that felt continuous with the earth around me rather than a harbor from it? To feel that I move with the flow of sun and moon and birds and water rather than as an observer of distant phenomena?  To take major life choices from indications in the land, to feel that I myself was—through every gesture (creative, functional, casual)—expressing my own devotion and connection to the elements, would be to more deeply recognize that I am made up of these elements; a tuning fork. I want this.

  A tower built just outside the monument sits in a gorge. At the mouth of the gorge, a seep spring still produces enough moisture to foster a huge cottonwood to maturity.  In the middle of the gorge, a tower of rock juts out of the ground, the boulders that once connected it to the walls of the gorge have long since crumbled and now lie scattered all around the gorge floor.  Atop the tower of rock, the Anasazi built a three-story tower of their own. The contours of this tower fit precisely with the contours of the rock, the walls flowing seamlessly from manmade structure to stone, fitting the lives of the Anasazi exquisitely to the confines of their natural environment.
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 Standing at the doorway to an Anasazi house, profound longing and jealousy impel me closer. I lean forward and place my hands on the sill of the doorframe and look inside...     



   

Teapot Rock…
I have been assured that high clearance, full sized vehicles can make it to the Doll House. I have even checked on Youtube, knowing that if some knuckle head had rolled his truck down into the Maze, his buddy—walking down the broken slick rock track in front of the truck— would have caught the whole thing on his cell phone and mobile uploaded it the moment he reached satellite service.  And I did in fact see a few videos of long-bed farm trucks successfully creeping along narrow banks of sandstone. 

I have looked forward to coming into the Maze District of Canyonlands for years—ever since (of course) I followed Hayduke and Doc and Miss Abzug through its twists and turns looking for slow elk and water.  I love it when we drive into the deserted Hite ranger station to fill out our backcountry permit. I love it when we leave Highway 95 at a turn-off I have somehow never seen before, although I have driven this highway dozens of times. I love it as we loop in and out of sandstone drainages, circumambulating towers of dark red rock, crossing grassy meadows backed by hundred foot striated walls, following the Colorado North. I am nervous when we trundle up a bank of slickrock to find that the road is now less of a road then a heavily scratched and dented mound of sandstone, plunging downward and turning a sharp corner at the head of a dry fall.  This is where low clearance vehicles stop and camp, backpackers and climbers continuing on foot.

The country ahead of us is all rocks and boulders and twisted junipers sucking at seeps of water in one layer or other of sandstone. To the West, enormous headwalls tower; Kayenta, Chinle, Moenkopi. To the North East, the Golden Stairs lay below me, and beyond that—the river.  There are no buildings for miles. No park visitor center. No real roads. Only the most remote country in Utah.  We see no people on the way in.

Passing a “4x4 required beyond this point” sign, we follow slips of slickrock shelves perpetually interrupted by heaves of rock.  The road around Teapot (really) Rock is filled with abrupt hairpin turns with room for little or no maneuverability. Holding our breath, we creep over the arched and bucking ground, listening to the railgaurds running at the base of each truck door, screeching across the stone. I wonder if their sturdy metal presence is enough to lever us over a cliff, as we tilt acutely from one side to the other between boulders and mounds. I wonder what else is being scraped from our undercarriage. I wonder how long it will take for us to walk until we run into someone else who could or would run us up to Bullfrog or Ticaboo to get help. How could a tow-truck even get in here to pull us out? Helicopter? I start to close my eyes as we shoot down a narrow, steep trench in the rock, but stop when my Dad nearly shouts, “How is that gonna to help me?” It's not going to help him, it’s going to help me.

The Doll House…
The light is leaving. My hands, pale against the white pages of my sketch book, take on a blue hue and I can no longer discern the black smears of charcoal across my knuckles and between my fingers. Warped faces in striated totems of rock become, for a moment, even more exaggerated before losing distinction, features blurred by shadow. An elongated nose blends into a forehead and then becomes just a rounded stone hummock.  I turn an infinitesimal amount to the left and try and catch the next face, the light continues to recede. I turn again, sketching three scapes at once: austere and commanding, an erect figure with an elongated face—stern chin, thin mouth, precise nose and straight back—bows out; fleshy cheeks, mouth slightly open as if in ecstasy, bulbous nose tipped slightly backwards becomes a smooth silhouette; a cluster of spindly minarettes darken into the solid wall at their back. 
    

  I am drawing because…I like to. I am drawing because when I do, all of the disparate streams of my mind—like frantic tendrils of electricity—coalesce into one solid, slow moving course. A river of mind, wide and peaceful like the Mississippi— rather than say, the Cataract Canyon section of the Colorado.  Which, as it happens, rushes, slips, sluices,(invite me on a river trip please!) rages, tumbles, explodes, froths and generally celebrates its wild riverness hundreds of feet below where I sit in my littleass camp chair, sketching. (“Littleass” because it’s sized for a child-butt. I didn’t know this when I bought it on sale at REI 8 years ago and am grateful that despite the weight I continue to accumulate in that region of my body, I still manage to fit in my chair).
Then, just as the figures in front of me finally pale in preparation for taking on stars, a stream of blue moon light hits my left shoulder. I turn and hurrah! the sky, the scape, my dad’s tent, the giant juniper at the edge of our camp, the vaguely creased tower we saw two boys climbing on today—hanging from harnesses, grappling for hand or finger tip holds hidden in the darkness of iron and manganese streaks on otherwise pink rock—are all flood lit; silver and cold, bright and crisp. I flip to a new page and start again.  In the morning, I have to leave.

Region:

South Eastern Utah

Contact Info:

The Patio Drive-In
(435) 678-2177
95 N Grayson Pkwy
Blanding, UT 84511

Rating out of ☼☼☼☼☼:
Burger: ☼☼☼☼☼    Fries: ☼☼.5     Shake: ☼☼☼.5

You may want to visit The Patio of you are…

·         Escaping the tourist madness of Moab
·         Visiting Monument Valley
·         Exploring Hovenweep
·         Visiting Edge of the Cedars State Park (the best Anasazi museum around)
·         Fishing or hunting in the LaSals or the Abajoes
·         On your way to run the San Juan river
·         Backpacking Grand Gulch
·         Canyoneering around White Canyon
·         Visiting Natural Bridges National Monument
·         Backpacking Dark Canyon
·         Heading into the Maze!