5:41 AM

About every two years, like clockwork, usually in the

Spring, I take a long drive through the desert.

I like deserts because they are barren, bleak places with no people around to mess up a perfectly nice day. Just creepy, crawly, and sometimes dangerous desert creatures who, unlike humans, don’t bother you if you don’t bother them.

Because my desert adventures were usually about 12 days long covering almost 3100 miles, at the end of a day of driving, I would stay at a motel—usually a cheap motel built in the 1940’s with cool signage and hard mattresses--along the way to rest and rejuvenate myself for the next day. Each day, I drove for about 7 hours, covering about 400 miles, and only stopped for gas and snacks or to admire a particularly beautiful view.  

On my last and final trip, I was staying at my cheap motel in Klamath Falls, Oregon and woke up, with no alarm buzzing, exactly at 5:41 AM. No reason why. Yes, I was tired from the drive the day before and went to bed about 10 PM and normally would get up around 7 AM. Not today. I woke exactly at 5:41 AM and not doing anything else and wanting to get back on the road, I made myself some bad motel room coffee, poured those little dry packets of cream and sugar into it to hide the taste, showered, dressed, and then drove onto the closest highway.

I drove about 8 hours on this day. Before I checked into my sleazy motel, I ate dinner, watched a little TV, read my book, and then fell off to sleep around 10 AM.

I did not set my alarm again, wanting to wake-up naturally after a good night’s sleep, and when I awoke, I looked at the digital clock sitting on my bedside table, and the bright white numbers blared, 5:41 AM. “Two mornings in a row,” I thought to myself, “when my body woke me up exactly at 5:41 AM.” Weird.

After showering and eating a little breakfast I drove onto the highway and begin the new day’s drive. Seven hours later after passing through some deserted valleys littered with abandoned houses, ancient volcanic lava flows, and racing wild antelope running along my car down the highway I entered a town called Eden. Eden, Nevada. Before checking into my motel, I ate a great burger at an old-fashioned diner. After dinner, I went to my motel room, laid in bed, watched a little TV, read for about an hour, and then dozed off around 10:30.

In the morning and still dark outside, I awoke to a bright blue light shining on the ceiling above my bed, projected by my cell phone screen lying on the bedside table. I picked the phone up and the screen said, “A significant event will happen soon!” There was a big “X” on the page too and so I pushed it to get back to my main cellphone screen. When I did, the screen proclaimed, in very large words,” A significant event will occur at 5:41 AM.” More unexplained weirdness.

After two days waking up exactly at 5:41 AM, and not purposely setting my cellphone alarm for this time or getting any phone message I did not ask for or seek telling me that a “significant event will occur at 5:41 AM,” I understandingly began to worry.

Was it a warning! Was it a prescient event that only my mind knew about? Was some catastrophe about to happen to me? Why 5:41 AM and not 5:40 AM or 5:42 AM?

Shrugging off the coincidence of waking up two days in a row at exactly 5:41 AM and then receiving an announcement on my phone on the third day of my travels of an impending event at 5:41 AM, I chugged down my morning motel coffee, drove to the highway and began my 4^th day journey.  

I drove down Highway 93, a desolate paved desert highway about 260 miles north of Las Vegas, my target destination for the day. Nice thing about desert highways, like the desert themselves, they are mostly deserted and so there was little traffic. Because of the long stretches of road ahead and few cars, it was easy to pass by a slower moving car.

Around 130 miles into my trip, now about halfway to Las Vegas, there was a slow-moving car ahead of me with a family inside. I came up behind the car, patiently waiting for a chance to zoom around the car and continue my trip at a higher speed to keep to my schedule.

Seeing off in the distance, down the highway, that no cars were coming my way, I zoomed around the slow car and now I was in the left lane. Up ahead, there was a slight rise in the highway, a hill hardly noticeable when one was looking far, far down the highway for oncoming traffic. I did not see any oncoming traffic. When I got to the top of the rise, there was another car moving as fast as I was in the same lane. There really was no time to get out of the way, no time to think, no time to brake, no time to survive as we crashed into one another at a combined speed of 150 miles per hour.

I was killed instantly and so was the woman driving the other car. Smashed and smoking, her car careened off the highway to the right of her and my car careened off the highway to the right of me, the front ends of our cars crushed like our bodies inside of them.  

On the right side of the highway, my car had rolled over a standing mile marker; you know those white metal markers along highways that tell you how far you are from the southern border of a state. The mile marker I drove over read “541.” It was still morning in the desert; “AM.”