i'm a sucker.
the prospect of someday being in the same situation myself starts gnawing at me and by the time i exit grants and see my travelodge (R) i'm turning around. i figure it'll take me almost 10 minutes to get back and someone else will have stopped by then but i figure karma is karma and i mean it. so i do the loop, no longer drooping, with the prospect of being a good person (and maybe she's cute!) i pull over in front of the still blinking but now un-sat-upon car and get out just to be sure, to go take a look. and the door opens. and Buddy gets out. overweight, grizzled, barefoot, and obviously naked except for his overalls. he ambles over. stumbles, really. i smell him from 10 feet away. he must have either bathed in everclear, or been drinking for days to be this pungent. it's him, not his breath--i take care not to sample that. he thanks me for stopping at least 10 times and curses his car for running out of gas and he's missed town and was just turning around and i'm starting to get tired of standing on the side of the freeway listening already. i offer to take him for gas and promise i'll bring him back with it, before sabrina shows up. she is unable to speak a single unslurred word. she refuses to stay alone. i have room for none in my car but make enough room for one in the front seat. they both cram in. i am wishing for the quick fix, wishing i had the gumption to put them back out. i maintain a lack of eye contact. i drive to the nearest 4 gas stations, which necessitates two trips on the interstate. they are all closed. i am starting to get a contact high from the alcoholic haze i'm trapped in the car with. sabrina suddenly figures out our mission and announces that she lives "just over there" and there's an open gas station if i'll just go there. where? there. vague gestures added to slow uncertain driving plus guesses at what her incoherent noises might mean some how manage to find us not lost and at a 24h allsups. sabrina scooches over into my lap to let buddy out to negotiate gas and gas can purchase, sans shoes or a prayer of the attendant being willing to do business with him, i'm thinking. sabrina proceeds to tell me her life's story after introducing herself 3 times in 60 seconds. she's pretty viciously skanky, if not ugly, but i'm trying not to look. she's here cos her mom lives here; her mom just got out of the hospital. why was she there? she killed her boyfriend and broke her own head open. i did not request details on how this might have happened, after i got her most lucid comment yet about her mother's gruesome state when sabrina arrived after the "accident".
about this time buddy comes back with a milk jug full of gas. i implore him not to spill in my car; it's toxic enough in here with just their aroma. sabrina apparently just met him and the attraction is wearing thin. she sits on my arm as i drive us back to their car. they try to navigate really badly. i find the way despite them.
during all the driving around, i find out more about our new friends: they'd been out skinny dipping & trespassing on someone's lake and had been chased away by dogs, before getting on the freeway; this explains buddy's lack of clothes other than the overalls. they were bickering most of the way, and pretty soon she's smacking him and he's biting her even as she's still sitting on my arm. i drive 65 miles an hour down the freeway. in a moment of sensitivity buddy stops fighting long enough to confide that this is the first time in almost an entire year that he's run out of gas, in this car anyway! how unfortunate that it should happen on this, his and my first day in town.
i can see the cop, flashers on, behind their car from a mile away. it's incredibly straight tho not particularly flat around here. i spend the mile convincing them that there's a cop and we shouldn't stop since they are both obviously trashed. sabrina is STILL worried about her dog, especially after she sees the cop rummaging through their car as we approach. at this point buddy points out that the gun is still on the dashboard. the freshly fired gun.
we cruise past the cop as buddy suddenly gets scared sensible for a moment. as soon as the flashers stop dominating the rearview mirrors though, he's aching to head back. fate chooses that moment to smile upon them and i see the cop turn off his lights and pull out from behind their car. we do the loop again, pulling up behind their now-deserted car. buddy and sabrina spill out slowly, and i'm still parked in front of their car when the cop comes back. he pulls in behind me and walks up to my car. "what's going on here?" "those folks ran out of gas and i took them for more." "who are they?" "no idea, really. can i go, officer?" "sure." and suddenly buddy stands up straight from rifling around inside the car, and stops smiling. but for me, finally, the travelodge becomes home-for-a-night.
i figure there's a great story in the rest of buddy and sabrina's night, but somehow i'm unconvinced it has a happy ending, and so i never did call sabrina even though she insisted on giving me her phone number when she found out i'd be near her home in California in a week. after all, she stole my gum.
8/15 12:30pm - gallup, nm -
wendy's is not the same everywhere. they insisted upon overcharging me because i wanted a frosty with my combo, unlike in austin. after lunch, two nice old ladies gave me road advice.
spotted before i stopped for lunch: "the best way to make a long story short is not to tell it." on a sign in front of a church.
8/15 8ish pm - desert view campsite, grand canyon, NM -
i suddenly begin to appreciate how much it must have sucked trying to do anything after dark before omnipresent electricity came to be. i will probably need new glasses after this trip if i keep writing as much as i have been. [turns out that my vision didn't noticeably worsen as a result]
i can't figure out route 66. i guess its just a memory now--it's not on the map, but it's all over where i was in NM and always on random streets, like business i40 in gallup. the speed limit should be 66. but instead it's 40.
indian country is strange. there were probably 30 hitchikkers thru the ~220 miles of rez i drove today. i didn't stop but i feel i should have - probably less likely to pick up someone who'd actually kill me on a rez than anywhere else, and i've always kind of wanted to pick up a hitcher. owell. guess buddy and sabrina sated my curiousity for the time being.
strange too, in the range of junk laying around--but no trash. just about every mile of highway had been adopted by some community or group. almost none by businesses.
all of the indians drove american cars. the obvious intruders like me drove mercedes, lexi, toyotas, etc. the natives were friendly, with the hand-lift-in-passing-wave going over big. i started intitiating it. this time it was guys and girls playing along.
somehow the land felt sad, tho. maybe i transposed the people's supposed
sadness (though, i saw no sad people, only smilers and thinkers) onto the
scrubby wilderness. it was desolate but beautiful. many marching rows of
telephone pole soldiers crossed and recrossed the road, lined canyonlips,
and met in the middles. but there was an otherwise strange lack of obvious
man-sign. roads and cars, ok, but i was on the road in a car. there were
no megafactories w/smokestacks. no 3-story buildings. these people know
how to live in harmony with the environment, it seems. i wish i were more
like them, a little. but what do i know?
i saw indian graffiti. some was well done wildstyle,
then there was
something like this:
pulled into the grand canyon national parkland at 5pm exactly, afraid i'd be unable to find a place to stay or even someone to ask. boy was i wrong! everything was still open past 6pm and good karma helped a lot in finding me a campsite, even cheaper than the davis mountains SP. who knew? i won't worry next time - this desert view campground rarely fills up according to helpful man at the info/map place. as he leisurely rang up my hiking maps and explained the logistics of this self-registration campsite thingie to me, the gate attendant's warning from 5 minutes prior echoes ominously in my head:
but the campsite is a stone's throw from the gate so there should be no problem...except it's starting to rain.
i hurry a thanks and make it to my car just as the sky opens up. after a brief episode of driving on the sidewalk as i followed a moron in an SUV into a still-being-built-zone (who's the greater fool--the fool leading or the fool following?), i find the campsites amidst torrential rain and hail. i pick a likely site and decide to wait out the tempest to pitch my tent. i read the guide and map while i wait. then something catches my eye--a stream of water coming in my sunroof! rainroof. bah. not a trickle, a flow. right into the passenger seat and the pile of stuff thereupon. including only the important stuff like camera, journal, books, etc, that i'd been using since the mad grab to clear off the seat for buddy and sabrina. averted disaster with some quick thinking (got out and removed handfuls of melting hail from the windguard, pointed leaky end of sunroof uphill, and blow dried my floor--thank goodness for excessive AC power--for 20 minutes). still raining steadily. i notice that the site i was considering is basically a river by now and move on to find something less fluvial. stop at a more promising site, leaving the car running so the heater can continue to abate the minor pool that collected on the floor under the leak. get out, carefully taking the extra key to prevent tragedy of a lockout in the rain. threw on the poncho and scouted around. turned around to a loud thump right behind me. and found my car. 12 feet from where i'd left it, still running. still in Drive apparently. kissing a very large rock. amazingly the tiny plastic stripe on an otherwise painted fender took the entire impact. net damage: incredibly minimal. i think i used up a lot of my good karma today. after all, rolling off the side of one of the biggest cliffs on the continent was an option--it IS just downhill from where i am..
finally i find #46, a site with an uphill driveway and a spot for a tent that isn't already a lake. the rain subsides a bit and i pitch my tent on the picnic table, throw the rain-fly on before it gets quite completely soaked (like i am already) then throw the tarp down, plop tent atop, secure, shore up against later potential rivers, and collapse inside.
an hour later i decide to eat and cook a can of dinner. what a life.
a funny thing happened during my campsite-finding odyssey. just after i'd had the wee boulder incident, i watched very tiredly as a guy backed his brand new RV into a tree and thoroughly dented the side of it. i guess Murphy was sticking around and irritated that i wasn't providing any more low hanging fruit..
it never got unwindy/unrainy enough to really go look at the canyon during the day. it is now calm (@10ish) but it's cloudy and thus i imagine, just a big blot of dark. i'll see it tomorrow.
midafternoon
my sudden advisor in town near the canyon (who is a movie theatre worker named Tusayan), has no idea what an "internet cafe" is. to be fair, the place she sent me had the intarnet, and some hicks and scruffies from the park at the terminals, but there was no wireless so my zaurus (pocket computer) remained unloved. nobody who spoke enough english to complain to about winME on a wire being a weak facsimile of real world net access, seemed to be around. a sign warned of the establishment's lack of liability for "lost or slow data". indeed.
6:40pm, brink of the grand canyon, NM
they say a picture's worth a thousand words.
a hawk soars across the vast space between two cliffs; a space perhaps not otherwise vast if not for the 3 thousand foot deep declivity between. oh and not to mention the adjacent 277-mile chasm colored with rust and mold, a place where new meets old - a young river cuts through lands older and older; at the bottom, 1.8billion years have passed without change when suddenly a kid of a river starts slicing on through.
the sun sits low over the horizon and gives a bright slant to the canyon, innumerable spires, temples they call them - and rightly so - buttes and rocks suddenly stretch eastwards in shadow as the sun drips into the west. the floor is in the manifold shadowy twilight of its upthrust arms and fingers, but still basks in the light of mine eyes.
dry but not dead, spotted with bushes, brush, occasional junipers but mostly dirt, dirt that was rock not so long ago as to have forgotten to be massive and majestic.
red cliffs tower from below, an impressive feat below my feet, stretching down, reaching up through many hues dulled by haze, distance, and shadow, but splendid for their setting, not sheer but varied, too steep yet not steep enough to keep out nature and beauty. the hawk nests just at the edge of vision, surely miles away but so close in comparison. an ant climbs along the edge of a hundred foot drop; it wouldn't be hurt though it would be forever lost after a sudden descent. but its footing is sure. below, the steps not steppes lie terraced on the hillside, exposing their bounty to the elements but not the fire from the sun any more as they hide and await fire anew in the morning.
my privacy is invaded and my train of thought departs without me. i'll have to try again tomorrow.
fire drips from the clouds/sky and its smoke is the dusk that fills the canyon. a dull commotion consumes the evening from the hundreds who share this experience with me.
the sky and clouds gunmetal gray of failing light, a few dusted in a buff powder that is the memory of a sun gone beyond the horizon.
the air is undesertly moist, piney, smell of lush drips among the shadows which are laid over the land as a bedtime blanket. green, red, brown all fade into black, in the end.
10pm back at camp
i should write the NPS and commend John S Dugar. his presentation was nifty. slideshow w/sky and fun comments and a good sense of history. he recommended the South Kaibab trail which i'll try tomorrow.