Green River

Silver Eagle – Gas for less. This is the very first thing one can see on the right of UT-19, getting out of the desert and the Interstate 70 West. On the left, a Super 8 starting at 71.89 USD per night, taxes excluded, a Phillips 66 with ten gas and four diesel pumps, and a Burger King that Ludovicvn, a man between 50 and 64 from Lier, in Belgium, commented on TripAdvisor, one year before my arrival, as «clean but not really exciting».
2.8 miles further, a Chevron, a Subway, and finally the desert and the Interstate 70. In-between, it’s a mirage, it’s Green River. It’s everything a small south-west American town seems to be able to offer: a burning and dusty climate that will dry your eyes and your mind, a greenery subject to the dictates of the hosepipes, a past mixing Butch Cassidy and radioactive waste, basketball hoops behind every shack, those same shacks being on the brink of plagiarizing Playmobil.
Green River, however, has that unimaginable and incomprehensible charm too, that purely American sterile charm which would move you at the sight of a truck, a golf course, a post office. The magnificence of Parisian streets suddenly seems to be of a frightful mediocrity, when you compare it to a Jaguar parked in a motel yard. The aesthetics of the places are so flawless that you’d believe you are in a Wes Anderson film or an Edward Hopper painting. Except that nobody lives in Green River.