On a distant morning in the late 1960s, I awoke early, prior to the start of school, to ride off barely awake with another wannabe student automobile driver onto roads unknown.
We left our town of Lead Mine in Bingham Canyon well before 7 a.m. with our driver education teacher, Tommy Pazell—who had gotten up even earlier, driving up into Bingham Canyon to meet us across miles of barren dry farms from his home in Midvale.
Besides learning the nuances of standard and automatic transmissions and the shapes of all manner of road signs, we had been taught to never drive directly into a rising or setting sun. There are plenty of auto insurance actuaries out there who can attest that despite quality teaching and PSA reminders, certain among us will indeed drive directly into a blinding sun ray and that certain percentage of us will perish when our squinty eyes cause us to ramble headlong over a cliff.
It's the law of nature that humans are especially desirous of doing dangerous and stupid things. I don't think—even if I had a mobile device and a TikTok account loaded to the teeth with videos of people driving off cliffs while admiring the setting sun—that I would have been any less inspired to look at the sun as I did that morning.
So, I did. I looked right directly into the sun and pointed it out to everyone in the car.
If you knew Tommy Pazell, you already know what happened next. Born in Bingham Canyon himself, Pazell was a feisty, tough Croatian, and a stellar player on the Bingham High School all-state baseball team in 1939 (along with my uncle Tom Saltas). His prospects as a professional baseball player were dashed somewhere in Italy where a piece of Nazi German weaponry blew into his knee, ending his career. Nazis. Sheez. He fought them. Now lookie.
He returned to Bingham High School as an educator, one of the very best, and one of the toughest and most compassionate men I ever knew. When he swiftly turned his head and barked at me for distracting the poor driver, I understood where he was coming from. I mostly knew the swear words in the several languages I heard daily in Bingham Canyon. I won't give you readers a literal translation of what he said because I fear that doing so would ban this issue of City Weekly from the delicate eyes of Utah's better and more Christian residents.
But it went something like, "You dogrammed Greek rummy. Can't you see she's driving? Shut your dogrammed mouth and watch the road. Beezus, didn't Pete (my dad) teach you a dogrammed thing?"
It was more colorful in the moment. And we didn't wreck. How could we? After all, in the late 1960s, there were barely any automobiles on the interstate at any time of day, let alone at 6:57 a.m. and driving south.
No one willingly drove into Utah County in those hallowed days, so we had virtually no companion traffic in our lanes. Even if I did scare the bejeezus out of my fellow student driver by pointing out that staring into the sun was kinda neat, we weren't in any real danger—nearly all of us had been driving for years anyway and drivers ed was a mere formality.
It's certifiable that the average City Weekly reader is among the smartest and most well-educated of Utah's citizens. Therefore, to those "gotcha" graybeard liberals out there waiting to tear my eyes out for a columnar faux pas, let me point out that the sun was not in the driver's eyes. The sun was rising easterly, over the Wasatch, and by suddenly craning her neck to look that way, she also steered our car into the next left lane.
That's what pissed Tommy Pazell off. Plus, the fact that the two sides of Interstate 15 were not separated by much more than gravel and weeds. It could've turned out poorly for us even though there were a paltry few cars driving in the northbound lanes.
In the not-too-distant future years, that stream of traffic out of Utah County grew exponentially, causing many a traveler to divert to State Street or Redwood Road (a two-lane road the morning of my drivers ed training, with a four-way stop at 9000 South). Both Redwood Road and State Street were widened over the next many years, as was 700 East and other conduit roads. Next came the construction of the Bangerter Highway, Interstate 215, the rebuild of I-15 itself, current construction on Interstate 80 and proposed new lanes rampaging through Rose Park and North Salt Lake neighborhoods once again.
It never ends. Officials at the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) interpret increased traffic as a need to build more lanes. UDOT is wrong. We don't need more lanes. We need more sunshine.
Pollution makes the sun even less visible now, even at midday on some overcast days. Building more reasons for people to use the roads that are already dangerously crowded—at all times of the day—is a devil's errand. It needs to stop.
We are saturated with roads. We are polluted to the gills. If I were driving with Tommy Pazell today, he'd not chew at me, but on the butts of those in charge who are turning our Salt Lake Valley into the next—dare I say—Los Angeles. I can predict the exact word Pazell would use to describe them, and anyone slightly familiar with the Slavic tongue of Bingham Canyon would know it, too.
Let's just chew on that language lesson for another day. Drive safe. Don't look at the sun if you can find it.
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