Snowy Creek Motel

Summary

Bradley Wilkins reminisces about his past as he visits the Snowy Creek Motel, where his honeymoon and subsequent romantic endeavors in room number 9 all ended in failed relationships.

Abstract

Bradley Wilkins, after years of absence, revisits the Snowy Creek Motel, a place that holds significant sentimental value for him. As a young man, he spent his honeymoon in room number 9, an experience marked by intense passion. Despite attempts to recapture that early romance and subsequent visits with different partners, each relationship deteriorated after staying in the same room. Haunted by these memories and the enigmatic pattern associated with room number 9, Bradley grapples with feelings of nostalgia, loss, and the unattainable nature of enduring love and passion.

Opinions

Bradley views the mountain peaks as an accessible escape from the desert's monotony, symbolizing a different reality.
The Snowy Creek Motel, particularly room number 9, is romanticized in Bradley's memory as a place of intense love and passion.
Bradley believes in the possibility of rekindling past passion, as evidenced by his return to the motel with his wife and later with other women.
There is a sense of superstition or spookiness associated with always being assigned room number 9 at the motel.
Bradley reflects on the transient nature of honeymoon-phase intensity in relationships and laments the loss of such passion in his later years.

The tale of room number 9

Bradley Wilkins pulled his rent-a-car into the gravel parking lot of the Snowy Creek Motel. Below the motel’s sign was a smaller sign that read, “Snowy Creek Motel: 10,872 feet in altitude.”

After many hours of driving through the desert, Bradley was glad to be up in the clouds, so to speak. Anyone who lives in the desert pines for the top of mountains. When, from the valley floor, one looks up at the mountain peaks on a daily basis those mountain peaks become a distant place that, unlike Heaven, is accessible to humans who are still alive and in bodies. An entirely different reality is just a few hours drive away.

It had been around thirty years since Bradley had been to the Snowy Creek Motel. He had no intention of securing a room. He just wanted to sit in the parking lot and stare at the motel.

Sitting in the rent-a-car with his hands still on the steering wheel, Bradley remembered way, way back to when he was a nineteen-year-old idiot who had just married a nineteen-year-old woman. After the make-shift wedding they only had one common day off from work so that one day became their honeymoon.

And where did they spend that incredibly brief honeymoon? They drove up out of the valleys to the mountaintops and a night at the Snowy Creek Motel. Room number 9.

For that late afternoon, evening, night, and next morning all they did was copulate. Excuse the foul language but when Bradley remembered back to that magical day that is all he could remember. He simply could not remember them doing anything else.

Two years later Bradley took his young wife back up to the Snowy Creek Motel in desperate hopes of rekindling their earlier passion.

It didn’t work.

In the subsequent years after the divorce Bradley took three different women up to the Snowy Creek Motel. And it was never good. Every relationship ended soon after a night there.

Eventually, he stopped going there.

What is truly weird, though, is that every single time he ever went to the Snowy Creek Motel he was always given the very same room! Room number 9.

It was just a tiny bit spooky. Sitting in his rent-a-car, Bradley realized that in that one little room in that one motel he made love to four different women.

And every one of those relationships crashed and burned after a night at the Snowy Creek Motel. That is probably the main reason that Bradley Wilkins had not been back to that motel in over thirty years.

For what seemed like a long time, Bradley sat there in his rent-a-car in the gravel parking lot of the Snowy Creek Motel just staring at the motel and the door to room number 9 which he could see from his car.

He allowed all the memories and all the emotions and all the passion to splash-back over him. He felt it viscerally while trying not to think about it too much. It felt both wonderful and sad. Why did the intensity and love and passion that he experienced in that room never last? Why can honeymoons not last forever? And why, Bradley wondered, did he no longer experience that kind of energy in his older years?

Eventually, he started up his rent-a-car. With a small amount of gravel flung, he peeled out of the motel parking lot and got back on the highway.

And he proceeded to come back down off the mountain.