Sunday, December 26, 2010

Intrusion

100 miles east of Salt Lake City sits the land my brothers and I own together.  3½ miles up a dirt road, the closest town is Duchesne 15 miles further east, with a population of less than 20,000.  At the land, there’s no electricity, no plumbing and we have to pack in our own water.  We go there to get away from the chaos of modern life.
Sitting in the clearing by the campfire all I can see are trees, our 16’x16’ one room cabin and the campers we sleep in.  The rest of humanity is out of sight.  That day, the sky was a beautiful blue, not a single cloud floating around.  I looked up from the book I was reading and saw the world encroaching on my solitude.  Three jet trails, criss-crossing right above me.  Made me wonder if there still was a place on this planet that you could get completely removed from civilization. 


7 comments:

A Paperback Writer said...

And it's a St. Andrew's Cross! Go. Scotland!

(And the word verification is so close to something untypable in a junior high school that I can hardly bring myself to type it in here now. Oh my.)

Max Sartin said...

Figures you'd bring Scotland into it somehow :)
Ok, you got me wondering about that word verification, You're going to have to tell me sometime, right?

A Paperback Writer said...

Uh, I'll e-mail it.

Alexia said...

Sounds blissful........ the land, not whatever the word is :0)
Nice trails in the sky, although I always feel faintly aggrieved when I'm somewhere isolated and then a jet trail reminds me of the world.

Jeff said...

Out of curiosity, how do you pronounce "Duchesne"? My first thought is that it is a variation on "Duquesne", which of course is pronounced "Dukane". Is this accurate, or is it something else altogether?

But, like Alexia said, it does sounds very nice!

21 Wits said...

X marks the spot!

Max Sartin said...

Jeff - As weird as this may seem, it's pronounced Dew-shane. Even after we bought the land, it took me a while to remember how it was spelled. I wanted to spell it Dushene, but I knew there was a c in there somewhere, just couldn't figure out where it was supposed to go.