On the way home from my mother’s house last night (no limp dick windshield wiper this time!) Jon and I passed an open field that we used to drive the truck in. It sits at the foot of what’s called “point of the mountain,” the hill that separates Salt Lake County from Utah County, otherwise known as The Aryan Nation.
It used to be a great place to test out the four wheel drive on the truck, full of little mounds and curves to act out all of Jon’s four-dubbing fantasies, me screaming in the passenger’s seat, “WE’RE GOING TO DIE.” And we used to take photos there all the time, photos of sunsets and paragliders and things not yet destroyed by representatives of God.
In the past year that field has been developed into an afforadable planned community, which basically means that someone from Orange County, California drove up with some plastic townhouses and tossed them up on the dirt. One of Jon’s friends who works as a civil engineer once described this area as the most geologically unsafe place to build a house, because it’s a big mound of dirt and sand, and the wise man built his house upon a rock.
As we drove past the development last night, the sun had just set over the giant cardboard billboard featuring a white man and his white wife and their two white children and their happy life in their affordable plastic townhouse, and Jon looked over at the blight and sighed, “It just looks like one giant STD.”
