I detest Apple products, going all the way back to when they were just making Macintosh computers (if Apple was any good, you know there'd be more than one bite taken out of that apple) but the recent update to Apple Music has one feature that I have no complaints about. My pandemic partner uses Apple products and since neither of us really watch TV we end up using them to listen to music quite a bit. Recently, once our musical selection has finished playing it has started playing 'similar' music and I have discovered several new (to me) artists that I really like because of this. Pandora used to be good for this but I quit using it once every playlist started to sound the same. Apple's algorithm appeared to have similar tendencies, Sabotage by the Beastie Boys or This Fucking Job by the Drive By Truckers made it into just about every playlist we heard. This long winded and somewhat unnecessary explanation isn't meant as a product review, I just got carried away explaining how I found the song below:
This is Salt Lake City by The Dwarves, a song I discovered while listening to another artist I'd found thanks to Apple's algorithm. According to Wikipedia, they're a punk rock band who's sound changed a bit "before settling into an eclectic punk rock sound emphasizing intentionally shocking lyrics," so don't say I didn't warn you. The song got stuck in my head, in part because I've (kinda) been to Salt Lake City and that seemed as good of an inspiration for a post as any I've had recently.
My experience in Salt Lake City was largely of the "seen through the car windshield" variety, I spent less than 30 minutes outside my car in the city itself. I spent a night camping on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake and to get to it I had to drive through Salt Lake City. Having just left the land of brothels, truck stop casinos, and legal weed (Nevada), Salt Lake City was a bit of a culture shock. I don't recall the specifics of what inspired it but I'm not in Kansas anymore was definitely running through my head.
Antelope Island was cool, in more ways than one (high temp, 55F). It's a Utah State Park, I rolled in well after dark and picked out a campsite while attempting to fend off the worst swarm of mosquitoes I've ever encountered. I've read anecdotes from the Vietnam War of men having to chain smoke cigarettes just to keep the mosquitoes out of their mouth, this was my first experience to make me less suspicious of that being hyperbole (it didn't seem to work particularly well on those mosquitoes though). Since I hadn't made a reservation I had to drive the 9 or so miles back to the park entrance to pay for my campsite. By the time I made it back to my campsite the mosquitoes were gone, replaced by a strong, steady wind (rough estimate, at least 30-40 mph).
After a long day of driving across desert I wasn't feeling like wrestling with setting up my tent in that wind so I just threw my sleeping bag on the ground beside my car, crawled in and went to sleep. I've slept comfortably in much colder weather in that bag (it's rated to 0F) but that wind made for the least comfortable night I've ever spent in it. The next morning a noisily chewing bison served well in lieu of an alarm clock. When I poked my head out of the bag to investigate the noise I discovered that there was a bison having breakfast a few feet from the foot of my sleeping bag.
I remember thinking I'm not supposed to be this close to you before deciding that was a really good time to smoke a cigarette in the car. By the time I'd had some nicotine the bison had found other places to eat so I got out my camera and snapped these shots. The next photo is from Buffalo Point although it was one of the few places on the island where there weren't buffalo wandering around.
After a bit of wandering and shooting I looked up the weather forecast and discovered that it was warm and sunny in Moab and it was going to remain cool and cloudy on Antelope Island. That was all the encouragement I needed and I quickly hit the road for southeastern Utah. If any of y'all are actually fond of Salt Lake City, please drop me a comment and let me know what I missed, what I should check out the next time I wander through. Until next time, May the Force be with You!