The first thing I noticed when
I was plucked from a sound sleep by aliens and we started flying
around was that all the Western towns and cities were conveniently
labeled. Lifting off from Logan, Utah, I could clearly see the big
mountainside “L” get smaller as we zoomed skyward. Heading west, it
only took a few minutes in hyper-drive before we were over the big
“C” near Carlin, Nev. I wondered aloud to my pointy-eared pilots:
“Is this helpful?”
They replied that it did indeed help
with their humanoid catch-and release program. My orb-headed tour
guides explained that the hillside letters were taken as sort of an
“open for business” sign for alien-abduction-friendly towns.
Maybe that wasn’t the real reason the townspeople put the
letters there. No matter. It was the logical interpretation of life
forms more advanced than ours. The telepathic messages emanating
from their huge throbbing brains told me that if the people
believed that putting mammoth letters on the sides of pristine
mountains was a good idea, they would likely be receptive to almost
anything; including abductions.
Apparently, Western
states are just begging to be sucked up by zero-gravity rays,
because now you can’t drive 50 miles without seeing a mountain or
hillside festooned with letters of some sort.
In the
universal time scheme, mountainside letters have only been around a
few minutes. Students at the University of California, Berkeley,
put up what is believed to be the first hillside letter in 1905.
Brigham Young University put up a monstrous “Y” the next year, then
every school and town in the West started monogramming their
mountains. Soon after, all manner or pranks ensued. The blue
schools started painting the red school’s letter blue and vice
versa. One high school in Utah, foolish enough to put up a giant
“SS” on a hillside, routinely has an “A” added as a first letter by
a cross-country team’s rival school. This custom is similar to
painting combative epitaphs on water towers in the pancake states.
We love our letters. Some towns even set them on fire or
illuminate them in other ways when the home team wins. This must
really confuse the aliens.
I know you may not believe me.
I have no real proof that aliens flew me around the West. There is
something about their warp drives that renders digital cameras
functionless. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that the
letters weren’t really put there to guide advanced life forms. If
not, why are the letters there? Why would every town from Arcata to
Las Cruces label a nearby mountainside with grandiose graffiti?
Drive or fly Air Alien through the Midwest or South and
you don’t see any of this. Globally speaking, many perfectly fine
towns around the world have no letters whatsoever plastered on
their hills and mountains. Humans and aliens alike must rely solely
on maps and signs to find each town. It is possible that this
phenomenon has something to do with the West’s abundance of
mountains coupled with low self-esteem. Even the smallest mountains
in the West would be recreation destinations almost anywhere else
in the United States. Westerners, however, have so many peaks that
they feel the need to use them to draw attention to their towns and
universities.
“Look at us! We’re not really hicks. We
have high schools and institutions of higher education right here!”
the letters seems to say.
When you mix all these letters,
you have an alphabet soup or some giant game of Scrabble. It must
look like something readable from low orbit. Why big letters at
all? If you are going to plaster something on a mountain, why not a
logo or an artist’s rendering of something or other? Or, cities
could have something more symbolic. Logan, Utah, where I live,
could have a big wedge of cheese to symbolize its most prominent
agricultural product. Berkeley could most aptly honor its
counter-culture heritage with a big “LSD.” And what about Boise
State? Wouldn’t those make interesting initials to see from the
air?
Dennis Hinkamp is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). He lives in Logan, Utah, and does not believe in either
aliens or the need for mountainside
letters.
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