Monticello is a small town in Utah’s eastern high desert. To the west of Monticello are mountains and Utah’s world-famous geological wonders — red and white stone towers, and otherworldly sandstone and limestone canyons with their soft curves and forbidding facades. To the east of Monticello is flatland filled with farms, fields, desert brush, and junipers. And if you can see far into the distance, the flatland seems to drop away abruptly, into another strange alien landscape where on a clear day you can make out the distant silhouettes of stone towers, like monsters or buildings, far away.
I was driving drowsily on my way to Blanding, and decided to stop for the night in Monticello. I pulled into the first hotel that caught my eye, booked a room, then went in search of food, settling for an old storefront with “Pizza and Pasta” painted on the window.
Expecting to find myself inside a restaurant, I took a book — Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which I’ve been working on for weeks — with me. But I was disappointed to find myself in a strange bakery with only a single table and three chairs. The table was taken by a man, his large backpack, and his photography gear. I ordered pasta, stood at the counter, and waited.
The hungry man looked to be in his mid-twenties. He ate his pizza quickly, but mannerly. His black beard was bushy, but well trimmed, in the sense that the hair around his mouth was cut so food didn’t get stuck in it. He wore a ball-cap.
It was clear he had been traveling a long time. His clothes and shoes were worn. His camera seemed beat up, and his backpack was well-used. He looked up at me, smiled, and asked if I was a local.
“No. I’m traveling. Just stopped here for the night.”
“Me too,” he said.
“Where are you staying?” I asked.
“Wherever.” He smiled, and took another bite of pizza.
With a little more conversation I discovered he was from some town in Ontario. His slight accent gave him away as a native French-speaker. But his English was proper.
“So, how long have you been traveling?” I asked.
“Almost two years. I’ve been an illegal immigrant in every country including this one, starting in Argentina.” He smiled mischievously.
“What?”
“I’ve hitchhiked my way back and forth across South America and Central America, and through Mexico.”
“Why?”
“Just to do it. I take pictures along the way.”
The man — I’ll call him Peter — told me he got his ideas about backpacking the continent from his father, who had also been a world traveler in his twenties. Peter had grown up listening to his father’s stories and he wanted to have stories to tell his own children in the future.
“Haven’t you been mugged? Isn’t it dangerous?” I asked.
“No,” he said. Then he thought again, and changed his answer. “Well, I was mugged just once. But I was in a place I shouldn’t have been.” Peter went on to tell me he was mugged while walking in a Central American slum at night, but he had fortunately stashed his backpack, including his camera, in a safe place. “I had it coming.” he said. “If you stay away from the tourist areas, and find the places where the average people of the country work, live, buy and sell, bad things usually don’t happen. If you find yourself among all the tourists, who walk around carrying cash, wearing jewelry, and looking like targets, then you’ll be a target too. To be honest,” he said, “I was never as afraid in those countries as I have been in some parts of the United States. The criminals are more dangerous here.”
“Where are you headed from here?” I asked.
“I’m going to get lost in the canyonlands tomorrow,” he said. Again, he smiled. He seemed eager to lose himself in one of the world’s most forbidding landscapes. “I’ll spend a few weeks there.”
“You’re not afraid?”
He laughed. “I’m not afraid of anything anymore.”
I took my pasta when the baker handed it across the counter to me. Then I shook Peter’s hand and wished him well. I ate alone in my hotel room.
Yesterday I drove back northward through Monticello and Moab while the sun was lowering and setting in the west. I watched for Peter, thinking perhaps I might see him hitchhiking along the way. I didn’t see him.
I suppose he had already made his way into the canyonlands. Maybe he was scaling down, down, down into one of the thousands of washes, ravines or canyons among the strange stone structures that filled the landscape and created the skyline to my left. Perhaps he was walking along the bank of the Colorado River somewhere. Or maybe he was sitting in the passenger’s seat of some stranger’s car, telling his tales.