Cisco

I witnessed these scenes in June 1970 while on my way from Indiana to Lake Tahoe.

One of the really fun things about documenting our South Route 2023 is the opportunity to revisit Old Stories. This story is more than 53 years old and it's a Story Within Story.

My first summer in South Lake Tahoe was 1968. I worked for the US Bureau of Public Roads building a new road through Carson Pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I lived in a rooming house with a bunch of other college kids who worked various summer jobs at the nearby Nevada casinos.

I went back out to work for US BPR again in 1969 but they wanted to send me to some gawd-forsaken location in Northern California. I quit and decided to see what I could find for work back in South Lake Tahoe. I was immediately hired on to help manage a small park in a land development called Tahoe Paradise Resort. It was a great job and I sure learned a lot about how to keep a small recreational park ticking.

As the summer of 1970 approached, I convinced my girl friend and a mutual friend of ours to go to South Lake Tahoe. I told them I thought we could get work there because jobs were so plentiful. Anyway, they agreed and we three piled into Dale's 1967 GTO and headed West. Dale loved to drive fast so we covered a lot of ground in a hurry.

After we left Grand Junction on what's was then US 6, we eventually approached Cisco, Utah. It's about 25 miles or so west of the Utah state line.

The narrative below these photos was written about 7 years ago and it's fairly sparce.

However, it sets the scene and explains the how and why of our witnessing this very spectacular Hollywood scene-in-the-making.

Being Hoosier hicks, none of us had ever witnessed anything quite as wildly spectacular as this scene. It was quite a long time before they cleared away the wreckage and resumed letting traffic pass. Here's a great 19 minute compilation of Kowalski's Last Day: https://youtu.be/ElKHlwKuSYs?feature=shared

It was in early June of 1970 when we witnessed the epic ending of the now cult movie "Vanishing Point." I was riding in 1967 GTO with some other free range hippies headed for my third Lake Tahoe Summer. As we sped west across Utah's desolate deserts on Old US 6, we reached a major road block at Cisco. The cops said, "It's gonna be hours, Hollywood's here to blow up a car."

Well, that sure perked us up and we immediately set forth to see the action. Oh, what a Hollywood Scene awaited in Old Cisco. Unforgettable. Anyway, there were a bunch of flatbed rail cars on the nearby tracks. Lots of hippies were hanging out on those flatbeds so, being birds of a feather, we immediately flocked to our kind.

The hippies told us they were actually extras in a movie and actually getting paid to loaf around and look and act like hippies. They invited us join them. That's where I first heard about running Westwater Canyon on the nearby Colorado River. We sure were having fun when the Director spotted us and yelled through his megaphone to "get the hell out of there." A couple of beefy bouncers grabbed us and practically threw us into the sagebrush.

However, things being what there were in Cisco back in 1970, it wasn't too danged difficult to weasel our way back to a prime viewing spot. We were close enough to the final destruction scene to feel the concussion and the intense heat from the explosion that you see in the photos here.

After the fanfare died down, we went back to our GTO and resumed our own little Vanishing Point-style Road Trip to Tahoe. After leaving Cisco, we were famished and, as the day drew down to sunset, pulled into a genuine Dive Bar in Green River. It was definitely NOT the place a carload of hippies should have stopped to eat.

We never did get anything to eat there in Green River because the red-neck Bubba Boyz in that bar told us we better be outta Green River by sundown or they wouldn't be responsible for our safety and physical well being. Of course, they didn't say it nice and polite like I just wrote it.

Since sundown was happening right then and there, we burned rubber getting outta Green River and forgot how hungry we were.

Here are some Vanishing Point links:

The Wiki, of course:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_Point_(1971_film)

This much more detailed description of the film's birth & development includes these classic quotes:

"The writer reimagined Malcolm Hart's treatment as a mystical vision quest, the story of a man who grows weary of his mortality and seeks transcendence in velocity."

"He asked me what the title Vanishing Point meant, and I told him all about linear perspective and the end of a man as convergence of life lines."

See: http://www.tcm.com/.../1091952%7C0/Vanishing-Point.html

Here's a detailed description of the Vanishing Point cars:

http://www.carlwalski.com/VanishingPoint.html

Here's the native YouTube from which the screen clips were extracted:

https://youtu.be/DE33RbghkdY

You can easily get completely and totally lost in studying this movie and the commentary of its cult status and devout followers. In closing this quote from an Amazon review perhaps sums up the movie the best:

"Richard Sarafian's 1971 film "Vanishing Point" is, for starters, a fascinating study of those persons anthropologists sometimes term "marginal men"--individuals caught between two powerful and competing cultures, sharing some important aspects of both but not a true part of either, and, as such, remain tragically confined to an often-painful existential loneliness. Inhabiting a sort of twilight zone between "here" and "there," a sort of peculiar purgatory, these restless specters cannot find any peace or place, so they instead instinctively press madly on to some obscure and unknown destination, the relentless journey itself being the only reason and justification."