"Oh? My parents are from Iowa," remarked Clambo in a non-Long Island accent.
"Really, where?" inquired the college student.
"My mom’s from Kalona, about 60 miles south of Iowa City. Dad’s from Johnston, just outside of Des Moines."
"I’m from Johnson!" asserted the Iowonian.
(It should be noted here that Johnson is very small. In fact, Clambo’s father has a framed high school graduation photo that includes his entire graduation class and school faculty, about 35 people in all. And this is for Johnson Consolidated School District, which includes the area around Johnson.)
"So then you know the Kinseys," stated Clambo.
"Of course, everyone does." she stated.
What then ensued was a brief discussion in which she asked the Clam Lord how long he’d been in Yellowstone and how long he intended to stay. He told her that he was just leaving, and she asked if he might consider staying a little longer. The Clam Lord looked toward the open road and told her he had to be moving on.
After another half day of touring Yellowstone, Clambo left the park to drive onto Idaho towards Craters of the Moon National Park. Yes Virginia, the astronauts really did train there. Clambo loved all the lava tubes, cinder cones and general rockiness of the place. But his lonelyness was really starting to get to him. He had been away from Buffalo for 5 days, and it dawned on him that in order to get back it would take an equal amount of driving. He started to rethink the whole Oakland, California plan.
It was in one of the aforementioned lava tubes (underground caves where lava poured through the earth millions of years ago) that Clambo met a pair of strange (Mormon) youths.
The two boys called out to him, "Where are you from?"
"Ummmm, New York" mustered the Clam Lord.
"Then you must have the Toyota in the parking lot."
"You kids must be playing the license plate game," stated Clambo.
"Yea, you’re the first car from New York we’ve seen", the boys exclaimed with glee.
"We’re from Utah", said the older boy, "we’re here in Idaho for a wedding and for sightseeing."
I only mention this encounter because it is one of the few human encounters Clambo had during his trip, and because it planted a seed in his mind. Soon after leaving the park and traveling through a huge desolate stretch of land owned by the Department of Energy, he passed by the first commercial Nuclear Power Plant and the first town powered by Nuclear Energy (Avoca, Idaho). It was sometime around this point it began to rain. Sadened by the aforementioned lack of human contact, and inability to get ahold of his girlfriend by phone, Clambo considered an alternate route that would at least get him to the Grand Canyon. In a fit of depression, Clambo turned South and drove long into the night through the rain until he passed over the border into Utah. The trip to his birthplace had been abandoned. After driving himself to exhaustion in the torrential rain, Clambo pulled off the road in a random location in the middle of nowhere and fell asleep.
Morning
brought a beautiful day, and Clambo became at peace with his new decision.
However his gas mileage had become noticeably lower. Clambo was convinced
that this was related to the loss of his gas cap at a service station in Idaho
Falls, Idaho. He managed to procure a new gas cap in Ogden, Utah as he traveled
south past Salt Lake City, and on to Bryce Canyon.
At Bryce Canyon, Clambo crashed for the night at a KOA camp (the free guide they hand out comes complete with an Atlas of all the KOA camps in the country, illustrated by Bill Keans loveable Family Circus characters, and entitled "Kamping is Fun"). Clambo hates to admit it, but this was not the first time he stayed at a KOA camp while galavanting about. Sometimes even Churches are hard to find, and getting rousted an hour before dawn by the Police at a Rest Stop is not the Clam Lord’s idea of fun. In fact any time you’re awakened by someone in uniform it can’t possibly be good. Here at the KOA camp, Clambo found himself camped next to a group of four loud German tourists who were cooking steak and drinking copious quantities of Busch beer.
On the way back from the shower, Clambo decided to make a joke.
"Ich bein ein Berliner!" he proclaimed loudly.
"Ah, yes. President Kennedy," one of them stated.
Clambo was slightly confused by their fluency in English and walked over to share a beer with them.
