The Only Thing in Ogden

It's Friday morning, spent yesterday driving the eight-hundred miles from Ogden to Vancouver.  Needless to say, I was burnt out on arrival, but a good nights sleep and a cup of tea in the AM has worked wonders for my mood.

Mom is doing better.  She is still a weak old lady, but she is getting stronger now.  Who knows?

I grew up in the Ogden environs.  Ogden was the big town where we went to see the Pioneer Day parade every year and we would go and shop for clothes.  But now it appears to be a dying town.  The railroads are going, the farms are replaced by acres of tract homes, the industry second-tier and sporadic.  Even the Air Force Base is running down a little bit and the economic benefits are being siphoned off by the small, close in towns that have attached themselves, lamprey-like to the Hill AFB body.

The town is dying.  It has a small college that has recently given itself airs by awarding itself "University" status.  But that isn't enough.  It is being flooded by immigrants, which may just give it a chance to reinvent itself, but the pasty white-boys who currently run the town are sullen and hostile toward any reformation away from their Caucasian ideal.

It is a little piece of Ohio or New Jersey stuck in Utah.  A dying town with not too much in the way of prospects.  I remember now why I ran.