I sped through that wretched place, and stopped well past midnight in Mesquite, on the Arizona-Nevada border. I stayed in a quiet casino, and went for the bar.

A drunken chap stumbled in, and being that there were only two of us in the bar, we exchanged 'where are you from's?' and 'where are you going's?'

"Oh so you are off to do some climbing," he said.
"Sort of. Do you climb?"

"Oh yeah. I used to climb all the time. Moab. Moabi. Red Rock. Everywhere."

"You don't climb anymore?"

"I had to give up one or the other, drinking or climbing."

"Why?"
"Because I had some bad falls, almost killed myself."

"You mean you drank and climbed at the same time?"

"Fuck yeah. We all did. We grew up that way."
"So you chose to stick with drinking, huh?"

And he raised his glass, "Yeah, my friends still climb. John was climbing this cliff and he just passed out and it took two guys on the belet to hold him up."

"Why'd he pass out?"

"He was fuckin' crazy man; mixing pot and alcohol and other shit. Yeah, and my other climbing buddy was doing this ice face without ropes. He was all drugged out and he fell a hundred thirty feet and nearly broke every bone in his body."

"Did he live?"
"Yeah, he's living out of garbage cans in California just so he can climb all day."
"So why are you here?"
"My brother-in-law. I'm helping him out. He's a horse jockey. Little guy. We're on our way to a race."
"And all these people in this casino, are they from Utah too?"
"Yeah, most of them."
"And any mormons here?"

"About half of these people are mormons. They act all good and shit but they're just as bad as the rest of us." "And speaking of mormons, what happened last night?"

"Oh yeah, it was the geneology center in Salt Lake. Some schizophrenic seventy year old went berzerk and killed and wounded all these people. And the funny thing is, some guy drove all the way down from Alaska to bitch about how they fucked up his geneology records and the SWAT team blew a hole through his truck thinking he might be the man. You know what he said to the TV camera? 'I aint never come back to Salt Lake again!' But you know, Salt Lake gets a bad rap for this shit, man. We got the good outdoor stuff. L.A.'s got the good clubs and bars, but we got the good outdoors, and our women are twice as good looking."

"In Utah?"
"Yeah, man. Maybe its all the inbreeding, but I swear to god."
"Then what does it matter if our bars are better?"
"Yeah, I guess so."