Cedar City, Utah

Just over the state line, tankers and big rigs idle outside a squat cinderblock building. They are stretched out haphazardly at awkward angles to one another. The pickup manages to navigate this maze of four-foot tires and spitting exhaust pipes slowly. The tires kick up the dry, gray-white dust common to the salt flats. It floats away in billows on the wind.

The same crème-colored dirt cakes everything: not only the trucks but the low hedges lining the rest stop. It collects in an opaque film on the diner’s windows.

There hangs overhead what must have once functioned as a large neon sign. The arrow under the cursive “Come on in” points directly to the door, through which the driver and the hitchhiker enter.

The inside is not much cleaner. In this case, instead of windswept dust, it is a grime of part-cigarette smoke, part-bacon grease, that seems to coat everything inside.

They approach two free stools at the counter. The vinyl cushioning croaks with the wear of ages and the linoleum tabletop has a dull glare; the kind that would never wash clean with any amount of bleach and hot water and vigorous scrubbing.

This rest stop, much like the stretch of highway it is found on, clearly settled into the comforts of dilapidation long ago, and will continue to remain so until a terrible windstorm or a stray tractor trailer finally has the good fortune to knock it down. For now, like so many years past, it stands proudly askew in its concrete, Spanish tile-trimmed shell.

The counter is full with a few variations of the cross-country trucker type: crisp denim cuffed at the ankle, the inevitable plaid flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows, and the backs of fifteen or so sandy blonde to chestnut brown hair, nodding in silent diligence. All down the row come the tinkle of silverware on ceramic, the slurp of coffee, and a few satisfied belches, along with hurried guffaws and a few grumbled words in passing: the mark of men who can’t afford to simply lounge and eat.