Sleepless in SLC
On a Friday morning not too long ago I landed in Salt Lake City for my first ever business trip to involve flying and expense reports and official paperwork and all that jazz. My company had abruptly decided to fly me out to the Utah end of the operation to — well, actually, it’s kind of hush-hush. So they booked me on the earliest possible flight to leave Portland so I could get straight to work at the SLC office. In keeping with my usual tradition of getting almost no sleep the night before my early morning flights I’d gone to bed around midnight and rolled back out onto my feet a little before four in the morning. In the past this has worked out just fine because I’ve only flown anywhere for vacation, where upon landing I wasn’t required to make any sort of difficult decisions, and when I inevitably suffered from a messy collapse later on in the day, it was of little consequence.
This time, however, I would be required to drive to the office upon landing and perform a series of somewhat meaningful tasks for several hours. Since I wasn’t getting paid for my travel time in any way (other than being recompensed for my expenses) I had previously decided that I was going to work till about four-thirty and call it a day. This didn’t quite work out as well as I’d planned: I reported to my boss-away-from-home a little after five and gave a stuttering, incoherent summary of the changes that I’d effected, a report which involved a lot of hand-waving and spastic blinking and stopping and restarting nearly all of my sentences. It wasn’t until nearly six that I stumbled out of the office to attempt to find my hotel.
A word about Salt Lake City, for those who haven’t been there: the Mormon Temple sits at the middle of the city, and the streets are set up as a grid around it with street addresses given as coordinates so that at any place within the city a traveler might know the distance and direction to Mormon headquarters, like a Cartesian plane with the Temple as its origin. My hotel, for example, was listed as being at 100 East 600 South.
I checked into said hotel and got settled into my room, fully expecting to be there just long enough to take a shower and grab a snack before heading back out. It’s not that I thought that Utah had a whole lot to offer me, but I absolutely love driving around new places at night and getting thoroughly lost before finding my way back home. At this point, however, my body decided it was going to have a conversation with me.
Body: Hey. What do you think you’re doing?
Me: I’m going out! I’m going to go exploring.
Body: Ha ha, no I’m serious, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?
Me: I just told you I’m–
Body: Listen up, dude: you had three hours of sleep, sixteen hours ago in a different time zone. Today you’ve eaten 1) airplane peanuts, 2) a banana and some milk, 3) a minor chimichanga. That’s not going to cut it. Go eat up, the company is paying for it anyway.
Me: Sure, but first I’m just gonna –
Body: Oh, I get it, you think I’m fooling around here, right? START THE CONVULSIONS!
On cue I began to twitch and blink and bump into the walls as my body went on strike. I limped down to the dining room and managed to pull together enough hand-eye coordination to get my meal into my mouth. I thought this would fix me up enough to allow me to get out and roam around, but in reality my body was now shifting from hunter-gatherer mode in a hibernation state. So I went back to my room and collapsed.
This, too, was foiled by the flurry of text messages and phone calls I received at 11:30 from friends who I’d neglected to let know that I was leaving the state for the weekend. Between the erratic sleeping-and-feeding schedule I found that I was still awake at one AM, although I wouldn’t necessarily refer to my state as being ‘alert.’ Too tired to read but not able to sleep left me with the option of watching cable TV, so I ended up watching “The Island” until three in the morning. I tossed and turned and ended up finally falling asleep around the time (after adjusting for the time change) I had woken up the previous day.
In the tumultuous four hours of additional sleep I had before getting up I remember having a bizarre dream that I was meeting Al Gore, who smiled his plastic politician’s smile at me as I shook his hand and struggled to come up with something nice to say to this man who I didn’t much care for and in fact thought of as a fat hypocrite, as well as an idiot. So I think I ended up telling him that I knew someone who’d read his “Inconvenient Truth” book and thought it was pretty good.
After my complimentary breakfast and a hasty check-out I went back to the office to put a few hours work in before deciding I was past the point of diminishing returns and checked out to get in some sight-seeing before my flight. As long as I was in Salt Lake City I decided that I should at least take a look at the Mormon Temple. Visiting the Temple turned out to be not unlike what I imagine crashing an Amway convention to be like, in that everyone I met was very polite and not only eager to sell you something, but also wanting to recruit you to go out and sell their product yourself. I turned down an official tour at least four times, preferring to wander around the complex on my own. The Mormons were very polite but also very insistent that I not sit on their special Gentiles-Only Tree:
The Temple itself was an imposing castle-like structure. I walked by numerous statues of Joseph Smith and his brother, and of Brigham Young. I also came across the Seagull Monument, which told an interesting tale of how the early Mormon settlers trying to raise enough crops to get them through the winter found their fields besieged by a Plague of Grasshoppers from the mountains. It said that they fought the grasshopper incursion with water and clubs and fire, which made me wonder if they’d really thought that one out very well. Seriously, when was the last time you discovered bugs eating the corn in your garden and thought, “What I really need to get rid of these insects is a club and a torch”? Anyway, the Mormons found themselves on the losing end of the battle with the invading arthropods and prayed for a miracle to deliver them from the Plague of Grasshoppers — a miracle which took the form of a Flock of Seagulls, who drove the grasshoppers back into the mountains with their synth-heavy pop jams and guitar riffs. And so it was in gratitude that the Seagull became Utah’s state bird, and “I Ran So Far Away” became the state song. Or something like that.
After the Mormon Temple it turns out that there really isn’t much else to see in Salt Lake City, so I decided to go west to see if I could get to the Great Salt Lake. I lost interest in driving before I made it there, but I did get a better view of the mountains from outside the city.
I went back to the airport after this. Trust me when I say I’m glad to be back home.
