Do They Go to the Sun?

Joe Griffin on chicken nuggets and the dead.

Truck Stop Transcendentalism, Madeline Rupard, Acrylic on paper, 2023

“Where is the spirit world? It is right here. Do the good and evil spirits go together? Yes, they do. . . . Do they go to the sun? No.” (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 3:369.)

Quinn drops me off at the travel stop near Shelley, Idaho. It’s a Love’s Travel Stop, but we call it Mike Love’s Travel Stop, in honor of the worst Beach Boy.

It’s 5pm. We’ve fished the glacial channels of the Snake River below American Falls Dam since sunrise. A pallid, arctic, February day. We didn’t see another soul. My pincushioned waders had seeped river into my skin. The occasional fish lets you forget the cold, for a moment, but now here it was, a burning and frigid pain, rich and strange like polar bear milk.

I hadn’t eaten all day. Through my shivering, I ordered chicken McNuggets from the McDonald’s retrofitted to the side of Mike Love’s. A 20 piece. Sweet and Sour. I’m not scared.

Sitting in the oily, windswept parking area of Mike Love’s, where every Walmart bag on earth comes to die along a chain-link fence, the aroma of fried chicken parts fought through the dank dampness of me, inundating the oil-scorching SUV as the heater roared. I swear that light emanated from the chicken box as I opened it, as I peeled back the sauce so sweet and sour, dipped, and devoured.

I began then, in earnest, to eat the nuggets with a near maniacal fervor. The nugget number ticked quickly skyward, the pace of a turnstile in a rush hour subway tunnel. In my shivering gluttony, a gurgle, a guttural gulp came from me—the congress of exhaled air, and inhaled nugget, nugget sauce and Coke Zero. I startled myself, looked up, though completely alone, embarrassed of someone privy to the bacchanalia of Joe.

And in that moment, the memory. The Mormon belief that the spirit world is here, among us. The souls of those long passed browse the yard sales of our lives, watch us in our waking moments. My Scots-Irish ancestors, forging iron in smithy shops to pay their way across the Atlantic for a better life. The Voortrekkers, taking bullets and lion’s teeth for their children.

My namesake grandfather, having flown 50 harrowing missions in the South Pacific. Dusted, dysenteried farmers and drowned kinsmen, peering at me through the warped windows of my wagon, the sacrificing eyes of millennia resting full upon me, as I sat hobbled and hunched in my rattlecan Subaru Outback, inhaling chicken nuggets like a damp rat.

I paused for that moment in fearful deference of their certain disapproval; a stuffed mouth, a crumb-flecked flannel, these conditions my gauntlet, borne upon their centuries of suffering.

And then I inhaled the rest.

This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.