A Night to the City of Mine

Something had changed a while ago.

For a long time, everything around me had been pitch black.

Now the world seemed divided into two horizontal halves: twinkling stars above, darkness below, with the gray road cutting through it in my headlights.

My foot eased off the gas almost on its own when I noticed a faint glow far off to the left. I knew I was close. Soon a blue rest-area sign came into view.

Did I need a break? Not sure. Yet, I turned left and pulled in.

The map on my phone said, “Sweetwater Station.”

The place felt eerie — totally empty, barely lit, suspended in darkness. I had never planned to come here.

At that very moment, a thought struck me:

It all came down to a city’s initial sense. Two kinds. No more.

At another time, I might even have jotted the idea down in my notebook so I wouldn’t forget it. I did that a lot. But now I was too tired. Both from the road and from thinking.

Yes, I get it. You may say that after a sleepless night, all kinds of silly thoughts start to seem like genius. But it felt as if I had finally put the whole puzzle together. And I bet you’d agree with me if you gave me a chance to explain.

I turned off the engine and leaned back, stretching my legs.

My plans would have to be changed. Again. Not for the first time that night.

I had left my home in Pocatello around 10 p.m., hoping to reach my new destination in the morning. It had been a warm spring, much warmer than we usually get in that part of Idaho. So I hoped the drive would be pleasant, or at least bearable.

After about twenty years of working at a small construction company, I had finally gotten a job offer that really suited me.

Well, my work wasn’t that bad, of course. But since Laura and I had gotten married while we were students, I had decided that a bachelor’s degree was enough. That was how we settled in Boise. We worked, raised kids, quarreled sometimes, of course, but basically we considered ourselves to be a good family.

My memories picked situations randomly.

A ding woke a sleeping shop assistant. He rubbed his eyes.

“You’re early, dude.”

I agreed. “Double espresso.”

It had been only a few hours earlier. Yet it felt like ages.

I looked around. Quite a big shop at a gas station in a small town.

“Where’s everyone else?” I asked.

“Sleeping,” he said. “At this hour, we rarely have visitors.”

I only hummed, took my coffee, and went back to the car.

When I left Farson behind, I was still lost in thoughts about Jill. How would we meet the next day? At the same time, I couldn’t help thinking about leaving Laura alone. But, honestly, I worried more about the road. I’ve never been much of a driver, and I didn’t like long drives at all. This time was an exception. Why? I can’t tell…

Yet, after the turn toward Atlantic City, a weird, suspicious feeling arose.

When I checked the map on my phone, I could only whisper, “Oh, my…”

One day, when we were still living in Boise, I dropped the kids off at school early. When I got to work, my boss was waiting for me almost at the door.

“Hey, David. I have something for you,” he said.

Since the construction market was growing, Mr. Reynolds offered me a more responsible, better-paying job in Pocatello, where the company had opened a branch.

“It’s a new opportunity,” I said, returning home.

“David, it’s Pocatello!” protested Laura, raising her hands in despair. Besides, she had her job as a teacher, and the kids had gotten used to their school. It was quite a challenge for her. Well, to tell the truth, for all of us.

And now I was in the middle of nowhere.

An empty rest area. A formless void beyond its lights. Not a single car around.

But I already knew what was waiting for me.

I unlocked the car and stepped out. Stretched.

Since I had stopped, not a single vehicle had passed in either direction. I looked at the sky, trying to read some constellations. The Big and Little Dippers. The North Star. Draco. In the small town where I was born, the night sky was clear and deep, and my mom taught me a lot about stars. My eyes gradually got used to the poorly lit place.

I took a few steps across the parking lot, looked farther…

What was that? Wow…

Actually, our kids liked Pocatello. And it turned out that finding a better job there was easier for Laura than convincing her to move there had been. Small towns have a charm of their own.

“You know,” Laura said once over dinner, “somehow, I don’t miss Boise at all.”

“Me too!”

“And me too!” our kids, Jill and Tommy, agreed, smiling.

They really grew up quickly.

Years later, they never asked our opinion when they decided to move away for college and work…

“When we retire,” I said to Laura once, “let’s travel more.”

She smiled. “Why wait?”

Maybe this time I dared to take a long drive because of her words?

In the poor light of the rest area, I didn’t recognize it at first. Yet, getting closer, I saw it. A real playground. Nothing for dozens of miles around. Just the dark night in the wilderness. And here, this little modern insert, as if cut from somewhere else and dropped into the desert. Everything about it felt quite uncanny. Why? It should have been the same place, but somehow it wasn’t.

I had loved history since childhood. There was something beyond imagination in civilizations rising and falling. Maybe all the talk about progress and destiny pushed my interest even further?

By the time I was in first grade, I already knew that the town we lived in was really special. It represented the future of the whole nation. Maybe even the whole world. New sources of energy, new ideas, real scientists and researchers came into our classes and told us fascinating stories.

My parents kept talking about the enormous amount of energy that God had prepared for us quite nearby. Yet, I had also heard people say, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” Later, I thought that maybe God simply disapproved of what we were doing. In a sense.

The same might have been true of our life in Pocatello. The crisis came, and the job market shrank. I wasn’t fired at first, but I lost a significant part of my salary. It was painful for the whole family.

And the situation kept getting worse.

When my boss came from Boise to visit the Pocatello branch, he invited me to talk, promising “a good deal.”

“You know, David,” he said, “the market is crashing, and we’re not sure we’ll survive at all.”

That wasn’t much of a relief.

“And,” he continued, “the only thing we can do for you is offer some extra compensation and a bonus. But we still have to let you go in two weeks.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just said, “It’s okay. Thank you.”

Was it “a good deal”? You tell me…

After that, I followed my friends’ suggestion and started learning programming and software testing. Did I really like it? Well, to some degree. But that was what eventually led me to the offer in Denver. The one I was heading to now.

This time, even Laura was happy. “We’ll be closer to the kids,” she said.

And so, late that evening, I had set out toward our new destiny.

But then came that wrong turn… Or was it wrong?

What could happen late at night, you may ask? Well… It turned out that a tanker had overturned six or seven miles east of Rock Springs, and several other cars had collided behind it. Both eastbound lanes were closed because of a fuel spill.

“The estimated reopening time is five hours,” the polite policeman said. “You can wait if you want.”

“If I want? Who would ever want that?”

So I had a choice: wait or turn back and take another route. I chose the latter. My GPS said that, this time, the road through Farson would be considerably faster because of bad weather on the route through Vernal. I took US-191 North without much thought. I didn’t even pay much attention to the route map. I was annoyed and just wanted to keep moving.

Only after an hour of driving did I realize where I was heading…

You may not believe me, but it was true. Our brains sometimes work in a weird way… And maybe that was exactly why I had started thinking about towns and cities, about their initial sense.

My great-grandfather had worked in Jerome. A great-great-uncle on my father’s side had spent several years in St. Elmo. And one of my mother’s distant cousins had worked in Amboy for quite a while. My father was obsessed with genealogy, so by the time I was twelve, I knew more about distant relatives than most people knew about their neighbors. And I became passionate about ghost-town stories and history in general.

I just couldn’t imagine that the same fate would reach my own city. Maybe it was some kind of curse. Or… I don’t know.

I walked around Sweetwater Station for a while, breathing in the fresh spring air. It was empty. But it wasn’t haunted.

A narrow line of brighter blue was slowly appearing in the southeast. Nature had always been here. And it would be here after us. Why did we so often come, settle, build towns — only to take?

When I was seven, my dad took us fishing on the Sweetwater River for the first time. On the way back, we stopped here. It was a different world then. Vivid, full of life. A gas station. Shops. Trucks and trailers. People everywhere.

And now — nothing.

I got back into the car to take a short nap before moving on.

My memories rolled in, wave after wave…

I barely recognized my hometown when I came back after my first year of college.

“Everything is falling apart,” my dad said with a frown.

“Aunt Ellie has already moved. And the Barretts. And many others,” my mom added.

Maybe it was for the better, I told myself.

In my senior year, we lost the game that would have taken us to the state tournament. I missed the decisive shot.

The year before, my best friend had left for Chicago with his family so he could join a stronger basketball program.

And Kyera… I finally told her how I felt. She tried to joke.

“David Turner,” she said with a small smile, “I don’t think this is the right turn.”

She chose Morgan.

Back then, I wanted to get as far away from that town as I could. Never come back. Of course, my parents had no clue.

Half-dozing, I smiled. It had all seemed enormous then. Now it was nothing.

A few years later, I was coming back again, watching the town through the bus window. It looked like a construction site in reverse, as if someone were taking it apart piece by piece.

Something tightened inside me.

Then I smelled Mom’s baking. The pie looked delicious as always…

“We’re going back to Riverton,” my dad said, taking a sip of tea. “It was a hard decision.”

“When?” I asked.

“After Christmas.”

I just nodded, wondering when I could introduce Laura to them.

“You know, there are two kinds of cities,” I said unexpectedly. “You have to choose the right one.”

Dad looked at me. “Riverton? The place where your mother and I started out. Is that the right kind?”

“I’ll check,” I replied.

My mom raised an eyebrow.

An alarm on the fridge beeped.

“Who set it for lunch?” Mom asked. “Who’s that hungry?”

We laughed.

I woke up, surprisingly refreshed, and turned off the alarm clock.

Half the eastern horizon was already glowing peach-pink.

5:29 a.m.

Ready… Steady…

After half an hour of easy driving, I got there…

A Yellowcake city. A nickname for towns that mined uranium ore.

And this one was the city of mine. I laughed. Of mine.

A faint ache stirred in my chest when I saw the gym building we had never used. It had opened after my graduation, just as the crisis broke out… I turned right, drove past it, and reached the school.

I had missed this place. Even though I hadn’t believed I had. And now it hurt.

Everything had been demolished except the original tiny elementary school building. Grass and small bushes were pushing their way through cracks in the pavement.

I pushed the door open. The smell of dust, old wood, and a hint of damp.

Empty rooms.

I couldn’t even feel anything.

The city had transitioned.

It had been built to mine uranium and make a profit.

And we, its citizens, had simply served that purpose. Even as kids.

We lived there to take. That was the sense of it.

“It never works out well,” I whispered into the air…

I’d heard the town was completely empty. For years. It certainly seemed that way.

Getting back into the car, I drove east.

One more place had to be checked.

The Split Rock Cafe.

Well, maybe…

My granddad once told me a story about Fairhope. An army friend of his who lived there had told him about it. A century ago, twenty-eight people came to an empty place, hoping to live in harmony with nature. They worked hard and prospered. The community grew slowly but steadily. They tried to give more than they took.

Now I believed this was the second idea, the second sense. Everything I knew and everything I had learned since seemed only to support it. The rest seemed to fall somewhere between the two.

I pulled into the cafe parking lot.

A new car at the entrance. The door opened.

Empty inside.

Then footsteps.

A lady with gray-brown hair came from behind the bar.

“Welcome! Long night?” She smiled. “I didn’t mean to be here, but I couldn’t sleep. Why not come in and tidy up, huh?”

She felt more than real and alive.

“David,” I said. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”

“Ha!” She looked as if she were ready to challenge me. “I’m Mary. Surely not many of us. There were several thousand a few decades ago. You could find around twenty now. Or thirty. Depending on whom you count.”

I nodded.

“Take a seat,” she invited. “Coffee?”

“Sure.”

When she returned, she set the coffee and a small snack on the table, met my eyes with quiet confidence, and said:

“Don’t underestimate the city. It can have a future of its own. We simply try to live in trust. And help each other.”

After I backed out and hit the road again, I felt like I’d found the missing pieces of my life. I had my hometown back. Again.

The phone rang half an hour later, when I was approaching Rawlins.

“Dad!” It was Jill. “Where are you?”

“Sorry, sweetie,” I replied. “It took me longer. I’ll tell you later. And you’ll never believe where I’ve been.”

“You’ll be tired. You need to get some rest. Remember, you have your first day of work tomorrow. And we wanted to talk. I hoped to see you around.”

“Of course. I’ll be okay. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

“I’ll tell you a secret. Tommy is also coming to see you. Please act surprised.”

I smiled and promised. Then added, “Do you still like Lyons? Isn’t your city too wild?”

She laughed with her usual silver laugh that I remembered from her childhood.

“We have an amazing community here. People keep coming with ideas, investing, and trying to make things better. We don’t even know what this place will look like in a few years. It’s changed so much since you were last here!” Her voice sounded almost cheerful. “I’ll show you everything — new trails, restored land, community projects… It’s like…” She paused, searching for the word. “It’s like a different planet.”

When I hung up, I remembered Mary’s words. And suddenly I knew I had been wrong.

“There weren’t just two kinds. A city could change its mind.”

I nodded to myself, smiling. “We really could come back to life. Together.”

The morning sun was shining brightly, but the light was fresh and gentle, the way it is in spring.

And then I realized something about God, remembering the old joke.

He laughs at our plans not because we are naive, not because He knows they’ll be ruined.

No.

He laughs with happiness, seeing us brave enough to dream and to plan.

And to see a better tomorrow.

Who knows? Maybe that is part of what it means to be made in His image and likeness.