Road Trippin

“Where are we to go? Every year it becomes the question I fear, as there is no agreeable destination. Planning has a way of destroying the very thing you wish to accomplish. Spontaneity is one way to invoke the intended hope of something poignant, interesting, different than last year, or the year before that…but it always seems to end with having forgot something. Or something happening you hadn’t anticipated, which of course you would have had, had it not been for the newly acquired spontaneity. Then there is the car overheating, the failed tire, watching your tent being dragged into the forest by a bear who had simply had enough of sightseers traipsing through his front yard.

But it isn’t all bad. There is something about leaving, which is always better than coming home, no matter the enduring hours of contemplation and regret. There is always a spark of something that remains after the adventure has ended, the bruises have healed, the fire department has put out the fire, and the police said it was alright to continue driving the vehicle, if you remained on back roads, and didn’t exceed twenty-five mile per hour when the roads were wet.

Being contrary by nature, I decided to defy expectations, and go where no man has gone before, until he had, and then probably regretted it, Death Valley. My thinking on the subject had little to do with thinking actually, and more to do with reasoning. I figured if the world was about to explode in a firestorm of uncompromising temperatures, what better way to prepare, than by going to the lowest place in the country where the temperature were rumored to make rocks cry. I was going to prepare myself for the promised Armageddon by acclimating myself to the harbinger of what was to come.

I was surprised leaving the temperate rainforest ecology and making my way over the river and through the woods, that things would change so abruptly. It was as if the landscape itself had become part of the training ritual. The mountains slipped ungracefully onto a plateau of unadulterated flatness, accompanied by the dwarfed examples of flora that have been deprived of nurture and water. 

The dream continues for nearly a thousand miles as one of a thousand rock formations becomes a strikingly beautiful example, of why the majority of the west is uninhabitable. The phrase you can’t eat beauty was once uttered to me by a ninety-pound Native American hitchhiker. He also relayed to me that although New Mexico was the Land of Enchantment, enchantment was also inedible, and no matter the amount of superlatives applied, it remains as such.

The stark beauty of the land however does make you appreciate the fact that only a few hardy souls who believed, that because it was good enough for Jesus it was good enough for them, stayed. Everyone else had enough sense to migrate towards water and greenery. Eating has become the envy of many displaced societies who have realized that sustenance is a symbiotic relationship between man and his environment.

Believing one is prepared is not nearly so, to put it bluntly, wrong, as when you enter the Twenty Mule Team loop. It is a one-way trail through a tripping and stumbling environment carved by past flashfloods. The here today gone tomorrow, except for the scar that looks like a broken watermelon rind exposing a glimpse into a future and the past, of a time yet to come, is applicable.

The white alkaline hills, a rumpled quilt of time, remains a reminder of failing to heed the warnings of Greek Gods, and pretend we are the rulers of our own destiny.

Leaving it is said, "is such sweet sorrow.” By whom and when I do not know, but they missed it by a mile.

Although I had never felt as at one with a place, as I did that day. A tin can, a relic in its own right, a stark reminder that a spirit once attempted to eat beans, and wash them with beer, its tin container complete with the V shaped brand of the ancient past carved into its lid, a testament to the ingenuity of the time. Tin cans and rust, waiting for a time when they would become relics of a past, studied by the evolutionary historians of a new world.

Blue skies, tempered only by a haze that rises from the reflective surface and collects on the cars thermometer, is painted on my vision. 103 degrees Fahrenheit, but then it is already 10 AM.

A bird lost no doubt, circles above eyeing me, as I eye it. It hoping for lunch, me hoping a spirit of this abandoned place will have mercy, and send a cloud. But no such dispensation. We decide to leave following the ghost of waters past to the highway that is made of the fossilized algae, that once floated triumphantly above this place, blessing it with the curse of progress so many peoples have fallen prey to.

We follow the serpentine trail along the undulating hills that flank the valley floor. The vistas form an endless stream of pasts and futures magnified in the oasis like reservoir that appears as an apparition from one of Gulliver’s travels. And then as quietly as it had begun, a voice whispers from the no longer dead radio, warning of excessive heat, precautions.

I fear it is too late for precautions as the past nips at our societal heals as we plod down the road of no return pretending we missed a sign or two, and are content to spend eternity regretting having faked our eye exam at the DMV.

“Shall we,” I ask, the window down, the wind in the hair that remains, a tear in my eye for having seen the vision of summers past, present, and future, should the sun remain where it is and our attitudes do not become more cognitive of its power. 

And then as if awakened from a torturous dream, we emerge into a valley where the river runs through it. Cottonwood trees cry their dry tears, homes appear like mushrooms after a rain, and we stop and remove our souls from the ice chest, cradled in the trucks bed. The ice, like the memories of doom has changed its physical appearance. And now as the lettuce grows soggy, a tomato floats gracefully by, and the cheese has drowned, we realize that you should never keep the bread where it might succumb to drastic changes of its environment.