Friendly rules.

The road from Ely, Nevada to Panguitch, Utah runs a few hundred miles, and I had no real picture of it beforehand.

I grew up with power lines. They are the thing that is always at the edge of everything, whether or not anyone is looking at them. There are stretches out there with no line running anywhere, in any direction, as far as it is possible to see. Roads wind off past the sight line and keep going.

We left the last real town with a plan. A hundred miles on, the map showed another one, and the listings showed restaurants. That was lunch. We drove and talked and let the miles go.

Somewhere past the hundred and twentieth mile it occurred to us that we had not seen anything.

We checked. We had already driven through it. Three buildings, and the map had called it a town.

Nothing about this was dangerous. There was water in the car and gas in the tank and we were always going to arrive. But something changes in a car when the thing everyone was counting on turns out not to be there.

So we picked the next one. Seventy miles further, with a taco place listed. Seventy miles is nothing when there is a taco place at the end of it.

This time there were buildings. Eight of them, maybe nine, clustered tight, and the whole arrangement looked like an old west town that somebody had later run a road through.

The taco place was a truck. The truck was closed.

Nobody was out. No cars moving, no one on the street. It read as a ghost town, and by then we had gone a long stretch without eating, and the car had gone quiet.

The map showed a general store. We got back to the main street and it was immediately obvious which building it was.

The porch was full. Every seat taken, people standing along the front of it, all of them turned out toward the road. Every traveler going between those two places has to drive past that porch. They were watching the only thing there was to watch.

Then we opened the door.

It was like walking into a busy room in midtown Manhattan. I know how that sounds. We were in the middle of the Utah desert with nobody for an hour in any direction, and as far as I could tell every person who lived there was inside that store.

And it was a good store. Stocked, full of things, the kind of place that has whatever it is. A human oasis sitting in the emptiest country I have driven through.

The room was buzzing. Not with an event exactly, though there turned out to be one. With people who were glad to be near each other. Love for each other, and for where they were, and for what they were doing, which as far as I could tell was nothing at all. They were sitting together. That was the activity.

Eventually the owner came out and announced the tournament. Cribbage, I am fairly sure, which I have heard of and never played.

And he told everyone they were playing friendly rules. Friendly rules means that if you see something your opponent has missed, you point it out to them.

We had written that town off twice before we ever walked into it. Once from the map, when it was a name with nothing attached to it. Once from the street, when it was closed doors and a truck that was not running.

Both times we were wrong in the same direction. The distances make a place easy to discount, and the discounting is the error. Going in was the only way to find out.

What stayed with me is not the store. It is wondering how many people have driven straight through that town and never known how much of it was in there.