Is there any more potent medicine to clear one’s head than the wide open road? In 2017 I set off on a 5000 mile solo road trip to celebrate the completion of some serious mental Marie Kondo’ing. Call it my one-person victory parade across America in a trusty old Subaru. A lover of abandoned things, I stumbled into Cisco, Utah believing it to be the uninhabited ghost town I’d read about. Cisco is what’s left of a raft of wreckage in Utah’s unforgiving high desert. If you blink, you’d miss it.
I rolled quietly into town, immediately sensing that I was not alone. I was right, too. Out peeks Eileen’s small frame from a building across the street. With a giant bowl of noodles in one hand and an equally giant gun strapped to their hip, they kindly ask me if I’m their AirBnB guest. “I’m sorry. Your what?” And so began an extraordinary friendship that continues to this day.
Eileen offers me the grand tour.
There’s no running water. But there is wifi.
The good news is they finally quit (I hope).
Cisco is one continual organ transplant, an ever shifting bone yard. One person’s debris field is another person’s guest house. In Cisco, both those people are Eileen.
Eileen sleeps in a very vintage Spartan Mansion once owned by the town’s former lone resident, an opal miner named Ernie. They bought the town from his family who’d inherited it from Ernie following his death many years back. The family never stepped foot in Cisco. So Eileen picked up exactly where Ernie left off. They even wears his shirts from time to time.
Eileen and I both hail from strong mothers. Here they share with me the doll their mother made for them when they were little.
In 2018, I returned to Cisco again where I would meet one of Eileen’s many sisters and several of their friends. Ghost town no more!
Nothing is ever wasted in Cisco. In a year’s time, there’s no telling what Eileen will have made out of this.
When I met Eileen, we passed a magical afternoon infused with umpteen stories and nine kinds of serendipity. When it was time to leave, Eileen insisted on giving me a present. So it was only fair to reply in kind. Having been given this pamphlet by exactly the right person at exactly the right time, I’d held on to it like a little prayer book for almost 30 years. The road trip let me know in its own wonderful way that I didn’t need to anymore. It was immediately clear to me that Eileen did.