You don’t need any signs to explain what you’re looking at when you’re near Arizona’s Kayenta Mine. All you need is a copy of Ed Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang.
There’s a stretch of I-70 in Utah which runs through a landscape nearly bleached of color. Then, once in the town of Green River, there is a former gas station repainted in bright yellow and orange hues with a truck reading MEXICAN FOOD and a sign reading TACOS.
We may have been in Springdale, UT, but when we mentioned Giddings, TX to our hosts, they began telling us an improbable story that, while set in Texas, was full of Utahn industriousness.
I grew very tired of whatever I had been doing. I decided to engage some temporary manifest destiny and go west to explore San Diego and its vast desert backyard. This is what I saw.
