America sure has a lot of festivals. "_____ weeks," as they so often seem to be called. The Week devoted to a cause, an idea, a pastime, an historical event, a person...anything that means something to somebody probably has a week somewhere.
Any justification for inviting a whole mess of people to congregate and celebrate amidst the reminders and symbols of the thing celebrated will do. Or, the simple idea of getting a bunch of people together to do the thing they do with a single-minded concentration of effort not possible at home is cause enough. Of the former are things like Cheyenne's Frontier Days, Memphis' Elvis Week, or, to a lesser extent, Oxford Mississippi's Move-In week. Of the latter is Speed Week on the Bonneville Salt Flats, a Week that consumes nearby Wendover Utah, which actually straddles Utah and Nevada. We inadvertently just missed or ran into all of them, each miss or near-miss provoking a wide range of feeling: regret for missing Frontier Days, regret for not missing Elvis Week, regret which morphed into unexpected pleasure at Move-in Week, and a bizarre mix of the blackest regret ever at having found every motel room within a sonic boom's radius of Bonneville taken, and doubled regret at not being able to stick around and check out the mad machines designed to hurtle humans at stupidly unsafe speeds once we did magically find a room; seemingly, the very last room anywhere within said radius.
Nevada has its advantages. Namely, if you stumble into a casino hotel after midnight, looking very weary and bedraggled after nine or something hours in the saddle only to find out that your last hope in town has no rooms and then become very sad when you realize the next town with any hope of a motel is another 110 miles up the road, and you make puppy dog eyes to the slot machine VIP something-or-other manager not realizing that she is the slot machine VIP something-or-other manager, and through quivering lips find yourself about to ask if you can sleep in the lobby, and she begins asking your name because you make nice puppy dog eyes and you don't even realize why she's asking for your name and writing it on a piece of official looking paper and you look at the guy behind the desk, a giant behemoth of a question mark floating over your head and you say "what's going on?" and he says "you're getting a room" and as the gears in your brain come to a grinding, shuddering halt you say "but you said there were no rooms," and he says that they always save a few rooms, just in case, and I say "oh" because I'm dumb like that and didn't know that casinos do that because I know nothing about gambling and that whole scene, and I thank them very, very profusely and run outside with the stupidst grin this side of of the Mississippi to tell Robert and we go to our Russian mafia room with the crushed blue velvet trim, wrap-around bolsters, mid-wall-to-ceiling-height smoked mirrors and faux blue granite furniture with black trim and praise Nevada and gambling and all that is right with the world and slept the sleep of a freshly minted angel delivered unto the sweet bossom of the empyrean.
Saved.
The second regret was engendered the next morning when we saw some of the vehicles that had not already taken off to the flats, and realized we were missing something special. We heard from someone that the highlights so far included some mad genius who's rigged an International (I'm told it's some kind of 70s or 80s truck; sort of a proto-SUV meets small panel truck or something) with two diesel engines and got it up to 250-something miles per hour.
Some other dude had apparently crafted a car that was still in some way shape or form dependent on internal combustion, and it topped 400 mph. The guy Robert talked to revealed this with reverential awe, stammering that it was something divine to see with one's own eyes a land-born vehicle actually move at over half the speed of sound. I can only imagine.
Sadly, we had to carry on.
As for Frontier Days, from what I gathered it's the year's big event; a vast congregation of both Wyoming residents and out of state visitors, eager to soak up a slice of the Old West, at least as it's embodied by Cheyenne's civic sense of self. Elvis Week was deemed important enough to warrant a whole bevy of news and other broadcast trucks parked half way up the lawn between Elvis Presley street and the actual Graceland mansion itself. I don't know if Graceland is usually that busy, but if the number of visitors wearing Elvis Week shirts was anything to go by, it was massive. Not my thing really.
Move-in week was an altogether different thing. Centered around the return of Ole Miss' college students for the fall semester, it appears to have become a major event on Oxford's social calendar, and a startling piece of what I guess is Southern Life: parents, younger brothers, older sisters, accompanying those who are entering or returning to Ole Miss; eating out, strolling around town, and meeting up for impromptu chats and introductions on street corners. There was something old-fashioned about it, as quaint as it was disarmingly civilized. Too, parents and students were sharply attired. Nothing stiff or formal, but a far cry from the schleppiness that seems to attend a lot of college gatherings I've seen. Moreover, there was a sense of calm and even a sort of relaxed joy amongst the gathered parents and students. Everyone seemed so remarkably at ease.
I spoke with a few parents here and there--sitting next to them in a diner--and a few of the students, and it all seemed more or less perfectly natural. Yes, the dad from Jackson was a bit misty over his son leaving the nest, but at the same time thrilled for him. For me, and many people I know, the mere idea of having dad or mom escort us to the threshold of our blossoming collegiate adventure would have been horrific. The students in Oxford seemed to have no problem with it at all.
