By Arthur Rosch © 2001
Trevor Joyce made sure that the two hundred foot extension cord was securely fastened to the outlet in his garage. Carefully he measured out the length to the swimming pool. He walked with the plastic reel, paying out the line, around his Ferrari, past his Bentley, and when he came to the last of his car collection, the Silver Ghost Rolls Royce, he kicked the cord firmly under its rear tire so that it wedged there. Backing up the driveway, he tugged at the line, ensuring that it was firmly seated under the tire and would not come loose.
The driveway angled steeply upward under a line of cypress trees. From the top Trevor could see the ocean and a big chunk of Malibu Canyon with its winding roads and private gated houses. He stopped and scratched at one of the tattoos on his right arm: it was the band tattoo, the famous one-eyed cat that rock fans instantly associate with the heavy metal group, Fish Store.
For eighteen years Trevor had been the lead guitarist with Fish Store. As of last week, some snaggly little kid named Keewee Bonior was the lead guitarist with Fish Store. One by one, the old members were being squeezed out. Trevor had seen it coming; first it was the keyboard player, Pierce Holling. Okay, Pierce had lost three fingers in a car crash. But that was just a bullshit pretext for booting him out of the band. Pierce didn't need ten fingers to play rock and roll. It was really the paunch and the wrinkles, that's what it was all about. He just wasn't fucking cute anymore.
The extension cord reached all the way to the hedge at the far end of the pool. Plenty of length for Trevor's purposes. He wound it in long loops between his thumb and his elbow and returned to the garage, laying the cord carefully on the trunk of the Rolls Royce.
He went upstairs and got his favorite guitar and his little amplifier, the Boogie, the one he used for rehearsals, "the little screamer" as he called it. The guitar was the pearl-inlaid Flying Vee, once owned by the late guitar legend Claxton Wanko. It had played many immortal rock hits in Claxton's band. It had played "Eat My Heart Out," "Work Me To The Bone," it had played "Tough Love Tonight" and "Willng Pussy." Trevor had bought it at auction for six thousand dollars in nineteen eighty five.
He gave it a little wipe with a polishing chamois, flipped it around on its strap button, inspected it from the top tuning peg to the green serial number etched into its bifurcated body. He hefted the guitar in one hand, the amp in the other, and returned to the garage.
Trevor placed the guitar and amp carefully on the work bench that ran the length of the left hand side of the cavernous chamber. He returned to the interior of the house, walked up the soft purple carpet, past the billiard room and the theatre room to the master bedroom. He went into Lynda's bathroom; Lynda had been gone for weeks. She wasn't coming back. There was nothing to indicate her eight years of residence in the house but a hairbrush with a few wisps of blonde hair, a chunk of glycerine soap and a bottle of Jack Daniels, half empty. Trevor took a swig from the bottle, wiped his lips, then looked at his reflection in the mirror.
"The fuck," he said, mumbling to himself. He splayed his fingers and ran them through his long, lanky, thinning black hair. "Kick me out of my own band 'cause I'm going bald. I'm not going bald." He could not, of course, see the round circle of flesh at the very top of his head, like a monk's tonsure, from which his flowing locks seemed to emerge as if they were rivers running off some invisible glacial lake.
He took another swig from the bottle of whiskey and went across the bedroom to his own bathroom on the other side. He opened the medicine cabinet and took out a little sealed glass bottle shaped like a bell. Morphine Sulfate, Two Hundred Milligrams.
"That should do it," he said, tapping the bottle with his fingernail. From one of the drawers he withdrew a rubber tourniquet and a twenty two gauge insulin syringe. He took these items back into the garage, and set them carefully next to his guitar and amp. He then got the end of the extension cord from atop the trunk of the Rolls and unwound enough of it to reach the work bench.
From the far corner of the double-doored garage, he pulled a blue plastic tarpaulin off his gleaming Harley Custom. The motorcycle stood there like a science fiction insect about to ingest some screaming prey. Its headlight was like the eye of a cyclops. Purple swirling paint swept in flames down to the One Eyed Cat logo painted on each side of the silver gas tank.
Trevor pushed it off its stand and wheeled it around his cars to the tool bench. There, he put it back on its stand and straddled its bulk. He reached for a roll of duct tape and pried a few inches from the fat cylinder and hung the sticky part from the bar of the motorcycle. Then he placed the amplifier in his lap, settling it as comfortably as possible, dividing its weight between the bike's saddle and his thighs. Methodically, he began taping the amplifier to his chest. Holding it with his left arm, he wound the tape around the amp, then switched off to his right hand and continued winding around his back, over and over again, until he had the electronic device reasonably secured to his torso.
He picked up the guitar and used a patch cord to connect it to the amp. Cumbersome, he decided, but certainly do-able. He put on his shades. He tied a bandanna around his head. He was already dressed in leather pants and a sleeveless leather vest that showed all his obscene tattoos.
He plugged the amp's power cord into the long extension cord. He turned on the amp. The light glowed green. Clumsily, he strummed a C Chord. Thwong! It echoed hugely in the garage. He got the duct tape and wound it around the join between the amp cord and the extension cord. He wound and wound, dozens of times, until he was certain the tape would hold.
"Yeahhh," Trevor drawled. "Ready ready ready."
He kicked the motorcycle into life. Its engine roared and he throttled it so the noise of the bike and the noise of the amp blended into a single savagely gleeful thunder.
Then he took the vial of morphine and filled the syringe with its contents. He had forgotten to tie off with the rubber tourniquet, so he used the guitar's patch cord to raise one of his few remaining useful veins. He had collapsed the big one inside his elbow and the big one that ran down the side of his arm, and most of the medium sized veins lower down near his wrist. But there was still the inch-long minor vein about two inches down from his elbow; he had been getting hits there for the last couple weeks, he knew he could hit it, even with all this stuff strapped around him.
After a few jabs, a few misses, he found the blood and mainlined that huge hit of pharmaceutical dope right into his bloodstream. It took only a few seconds to feel its soft blanket spreading from his innards to the periphery of the nerve endings at his fingertips.
"This is it," he thought. "The perfect rock and roll suicide!"
He gunned the motorcycle. He turned the amplifier all the way up and thwanged a huge chord. He was going to accelerate into the swimming pool, electrocute, overdose and drown himself all at the same time. Someone would find his corpse in the next couple weeks, sitting there at the bottom of the pool on his Harley, with his Claxton Wanko guitar strapped around his shoulder, his Boogie Amp short-circuited, his blood full of dope.
"Yeehaaaa!" he yelled, strumming the guitar. He managed to roll the bike out of the garage, extension cord trailing behind him. He went to the very bottom of the sloped driveway, just inside the swinging metal gate, gunned the engine, twanged the guitar, turned the motorcycle around and roared up the drive towards the swimming pool.
He strummed as he ascended. G Chord, Bflat Chord, C Chord, the famous intro to Fish Store's biggest hit, "Slam Me, Ma'am." He fought to keep his balance. He got to ten miles an hour, fifteen, twenty. He got to the very top of the drive and the extension chord snagged on a bit of outthrust pavement and whipped loose. The sound of the guitar suddenly died. The lip of the drive acted as a ramp and Trevor flew over the pool like a stunt rider, landed in the hedge, passed through it, tore through his downhill neighbor's fence and wound up on Malibu Drive, stoned out of his mind but not dead, carrying his guitar and his amplifier on his Custom Harley.
"Aw fuck," he said aloud, as he swerved across the dividing line on the serpentine road.
A Mountain Springs water truck honked at him and managed not to squash him. Unable to control the motorcycle any longer, he gunned the throttle, closed his eyes and simply let fate carry him. He hit a curb, went over some rocks, crashed through rhododendron bushes, flew into the air and finally landed with a gigantic splash in someone else's swimming pool.
He was still alive. Hands came to the bottom of the pool, pulled at the amp, pulled at his armpits, hauled him from the pool. A dozen teenagers avidly surrounded his stunned form.
"That was fuckin' great, dude!" One of the youngsters said. "Awesome! Did my mom set this up for my birthday? Fucking great... hey. Aren't you Trevor Joyce? Aren't you, like, Fish Store, dude?"
The kid did a naïve imitation of Trevor's duck-walking stage style, mocking the chords to "Slam Me, Ma'am," playing air guitar with his tongue hanging out.
Trevor handed the Claxton guitar to one of his young admirers. He took the bandanna from his head and wrung it out.
Not today, he thought. Not today. I've still got fans.
Art Rosch is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Petaluma, California with his wife, three cats and two toy poodles. The Miracle of Highway Six is an excerpt from his book Green Highway: Living a Good Life in a Changing America.
Showing posts with label Arthur Rosch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arthur Rosch. Show all posts
August 05, 2009
May 02, 2009
The Miracle of Highway Six
By Arthur Rosch © 2009
Highway 50 through Nevada is reputed to be the loneliest road in the USA. It has a rival, and its name is Highway 6. It takes a northeasterly diagonal the entire breadth of Nevada before vanishing into the wilds of The Great Basin in Utah. It is far more isolated than 50, a hard hot eerie stretch of rocky desert and bare crags. There is one Flying J truck stop a third of the way across the state. After that: nothing. The town of Ely (pronounced E –Lee) is the road's first destination. It's a crossroads town with signs pointing to Las Vegas, Reno, Salt Lake City. Highways 50, 6 and 93 enter and leave the town in a few confusing blocks.
After surviving our plunge down 89 we made it to Bishop, and, god knows why, we wanted to get onto 6 and put another fifty miles on the odometer before stopping for the night.
Rule number one about driving an RV. DON'T DRIVE AT NIGHT! It's hard enough to control a bulky machine without playing with peripheral monsters at the side of the road, highway fatigue and caffeine nerves.
We pushed out of Bishop after stopping at a Super K-Mart, where Fox and I got separated and I couldn't find her to save my life. I was reduced to calling her pet name, knowing that she would hear it more readily than a shouted “Fox, where are you?”
So, I stood in the middle of an aisle full of hosiery and started crying plaintively, "Boo Boo! BoooooBoooo!"
Everyone was certain I was retarded. I was wondering myself if my previous life of risky activities hadn't finally damaged my brain. From now on we carry cell phones or walkie talkies, I don't ever want to go through this ordeal again.
"Booooo boooooo!"
Where the hell did she go? One second she was right THERE, looking at skin cream, and the next, she had vaporized into the merchandise, wandered off like an un-tethered toddler. This store occupies ten thousand acres and you can't see more than twenty feet! I might never find her, or wander for two and a half years before fetching up at the customer service booth, begging the teenage girl in the silly uniform to speak into her microphone: Will Booboo come to the customer service counter, please?
At last, re-united by calling booboo until I got within sonic range of Fox, I was able to carry supplies out to Yertle, our beloved RV, in the darkening afternoon. Why did we continue driving? We were nuts. As I navigated the final stoplights of Bishop, a nearby driver began honking repeatedly and gesturing towards Yertle. I pulled over and discovered that I had been driving with the steps still sticking out of the camper. Keep a check list, RV rovers!
After fifty miles, we came to the tiny one-store town of Tonopah. Fortunately, the store was open. A very large young man, Native American, confirmed that there were no campgrounds before Ely. He said, however, that we could park in the school parking lot and spend the night. The school was just behind the store.
"Lots of people get stuck out here," he said. "It's okay. Just try to be gone before school starts in the morning. Nobody will bother you. I'll tell the sheriff when he drops by, that you're back there. But if he sees you before I do, tell him Bear said it was okay."
This kindness was touching. We began to realize that we had met kindness at every obstacle on this trip, and that kindness came in all sorts of disguises, in the most unlikely places.
In the morning there was snow on the tops of the mountains. Nevada is a washboard, an undulating series of mountains and valleys, and the roads cut straight across this ancient seabed. At the top of each peak, the view spreads down the road ahead, which goes in a straight line for miles and miles until it disappears into the next rise of the landscape. I had never expected Nevada to be so beautiful. There were huge clouds casting shadows upon the vast valley floors.
Tomorrow's drive was supposed to be easy: a hundred sixty miles to Ely, where we would join up with our old friend, Highway Fifty.
It was November; bright, clear, and warm in the valleys, crisp on the peaks. Yertle ran well, but I continued to be apprehensive. It's one thing to drive a car. It breaks down, you call a tow truck. An RV is another matter: we were carrying our lives in the damn thing. The water tank held twenty gallons. We had food, propane. There was no shelter on Highway Six, no trees, no roadside stops. If Yertle broke down, there was no telling how long we might be stranded.
I imagined our quandary if something happened. Out here in the desert, way beyond cell phone service, we could be truly stuck. There was little traffic. Every hour or so, we'd pass a car, going the other way. Everyone, it seemed, was going the other way.
Gathering my nerve, I hit the accelerator, and the old Chevy 350 gurgled forth, up the highway, into the brightening day. My gas tank had been filled in Bishop. The truck seemed happy. Yertle was whispering, "Don't worry, I'll get you to Arches, don't worry."
I can't help but worry, Yertle, I responded mentally. It's my nature to worry. I am the son of my father.
This was 'lower' Nevada, an uncompromising landscape. Sandstone blocks tipped by ancient floods and earthquakes littered the northern side of the road. On the south was nothing but miles and miles of scrub, tumbleweed, creosote bush. The stuff gave off a smell, a goldish earthen odor, not unpleasant. We were skirting the northern fringe of the immensity of Nellis Air Force Base, with its old atomic test sites. If they once tested atom bombs here, I thought, they must have considered this the ultimate in remoteness.
At fifty miles an hour, the noise from Yertle's engine and various parts bouncing around made conversation or music impossible. There was nothing to do but drive, and look at the landscape, however monotonous or downright eerie. Occasionally a vulture would mark the sky like a comma on vast blue paper.
We pushed north and east, and everything seemed okay. Then, about fifty miles out of Tonopah, I heard a high whining sound from the engine. Yertle kept on going, so I said my prayers and continued to drive. We had entered a wide valley. It looked like thirty miles to the next ridge, and I could see all thirty miles of road, slightly undulant, like a road-kill rattlesnake, until it disappeared between the breasts of the next rise in the primordial earth body.
Then I was brought to alertness by a loud bang, and a nasty smell of burning rubber. Yertle was running, but I had to pull over. I was afraid to turn the engine off; afraid she'd never start again. I got out and pulled open the hood. Pieces of fan belt were shredded all over the motor compartment. I picked them out, saving the biggest piece for reference. Fan belt for what, I wondered? How I wish I understood cars, how I wish I were a competent mechanic! Then, as I inspected the various parts of the motor, I saw a thumb-sized hole, right through the metal rectangle of the I-don't-know-what. Pieces of this metal were strewn about. It was as if we had been shot by a high caliber rifle. I knew, however, that it was a case of metal fatigue, that this porous, cheap material, this aluminum casing for some part of our vehicle's innards, had met its deadline.
Yet, the engine was running fine.
What the hell, I thought. Let's go until we can't go any more.
We kept driving, praying for Ely. Seventy miles to go. Come on, Ely, come on. About half an hour later, I saw a convoy of vehicles in the distance. Two highway patrol cars were parked at the side of the road. The officers were waving us to stop.
I was glad to see a human being, a person of authority. To make that statement, "I was glad to see a person of authority..." is indicative of how scared I was. I don't have anything against policemen. I have a significant resentment of all authority figures, always have and always will. I learned that there are times when one might be thrilled to see a person of authority, and this was one of those times.
We pulled out onto a wide margin. A mile down the road, a gigantic truck was hauling a gargantuan pipe, long as a freight car and wider than the entire road. I took a chance, and turned off the engine. I got out of Yertle and approached the officer.
"Sir," I asked respectfully, "can you spare a moment to look at our truck? Something broke a while ago, and I don't know what's going on."
The policeman was half my age. He was short and compact, and looked like someone who could tear three phone books in half with his bare hands. He glanced under the hood, while the monstrous pipe rolled slowly past our place beside the road.
"That's your air conditioner belt," he informed us. "And that hole, well that's your air conditioner. Looks like the belt shredded and then popped the AC unit right through the guts. Good thing it wasn't the fan belt, or you'd be stuck out here."
Greatly relieved, I thanked our benefactor, started Yertle and proceeded down the ever-lonely road.
Things happen to people. Events are events, but our interpretation of these events overshadows the events themselves. For me, the most important thing is to react with imagination, to view life as a process of gaining understanding, regardless of whether good things or bad things happen.
I didn't know what the hell was going on with this crazy trip. All I knew was that it was scaring the bejesus out of me. I asked Fox, several times, "Do you want to turn back?"
Fox is made of stronger stuff than I. "No," she always said, "We're supposed to go to Arches."
God, I felt like a pussy. Men don't enjoy feeling cowardly. It's not a good man-feeling. It's a feeling that lurks in some small fetid bathroom down in my soul, a bathroom with a naked bulb worked by a pull-string with a knot at the end, a bathroom with old squeaky faucets that give out brown water. It has a frosted window that's jammed shut, with a paint job where the streaky white paintbrush overswept right onto the window and the painter didn't give a shit to scrape it clean. That's what my cowardice feels like, it feels like that cheap hotel bathroom and it's not fun at all. I was going to have to brace up. That's what the wise old samurai said to the Toshirure Mifune character in "The Seven Samurai." It's become an in-joke for Fox and me.
"Brace up, Kikuchiyo," we'll tell one another. "Brace up."
And Yertle, in spite of her perfidy, kept reassuring me. "I'll get you there," she whispered, "Stop worrying so much. I may be old but I've got plenty of miles left in me."
Never once did I wonder if I was completely nuts, talking to an RV. I was simply being swept along by events as they occurred. What else could I do?
The landscape began to rise, as we came into another range of the Humboldt-Toyabe Forest. I looked at the gas gauge and with a shock realized that we were down to a quarter tank. Where did the gas go?! The tank was filled in Bishop, only a hundred fifty miles down the road. I had badly overestimated the mileage of which Yertle was capable. That, and a headwind, had drunk our gas, and I had been so preoccupied, I failed to fill her up at the one and only truck stop between Tonopah and Ely. Now, I wondered if we were going to run out of fuel on some tricky mountain curve without a shoulder.
Fox was an active participant in all this, of course. By mutual agreement, I was and would always be the driver of our RV. On rare occasions I would give Fox the wheel, but it was a shaky proposition. Fox is given to seeing things, especially when the light is low. A rhino can pop out of the sagebrush and give chase. Osama Bin Laden sits in the back of a pickup truck, grinning smugly. Fox isn't crazy, but she is psychic and sometimes has trouble separating vision from reality. Maybe it's the Apache blood. The closer we got to the ancestral homelands, the weirder she became. But she was calm where I was not. She was stoic where I was terrified.
Compulsively, I watched the gas gauge, then chastised myself and equally compulsively avoided watching the gas gauge. I forced my eyes to bypass the little meter as it quivered, ever downward toward EMPTY. Why weren't we carrying a gas can with five extra gallons. Rule Number Two of RV'ing. ALWAYS CARRY EXTRA FUEL! The fuel consumption of the most innocent looking RV is a ravening dragon, an elephant sucking up fluids faster than they can be replenished. Motor homes LOVE fuel, the way kids love candy or the way addicts love dope. Gimme some gas! they breathe, panting with appetite. Gimme some gas!
Thirty miles to Ely. Okay, steal a look at the gauge. It's hovering over the little line that says, EMERGENCY! hurry up and get a fill! I'm calculating. Let's see, if we are getting ten miles to the gallon, and we have three gallons, we can just get to Ely. But if we're getting eight per gallon, we're in big trouble. That's assuming there are three gallons. There might be five; or there might be two. Does the gauge read short when we're going uphill? That's possible, I suppose.
Naturally, the headwind grew more powerful and our route took to yet another interminable climb up into the Toyabe-Humboldt Forest. The road was Nevada-smooth, paid for by gambling taxes, well maintained. But here, on the undulant highway, there was no shoulder, just a line of white fence posts, blocking all exit from the road. Run out of gas here, around a blind curve, and some truck can come a'whamming along and crunch us like an old Pepsi can before the driver knows what's happening.
I spent the next forty five minutes waiting for the engine to sputter and die. I watched the side of the road for potential escapes, and watched the rear view mirror for the following eighteen wheeler that spelled our doom, like the monster truck from that early Spielberg movie, "Duel." The forest grew thicker, looking like a real forest. Now there were signs touting campgrounds and tourist sites, in the southern approach to Ely. They were little comfort to me. The gas gauge quivered and teased me as it sat on Empty. My heart was beating in every pore of my skin. Why so scared, I chided myself? Everybody runs out of gas at least a couple times in their lives. Yes, I responded, BUT NOT HERE! Not in Yertle, noble RV, not on a curvy road with no shoulder, where the last vehicle we saw was a FedEx truck, and it passed us going uphill in a no pass zone, like we were standing still. People drive crazy in Nevada on Highway Six. They think the roads are empty. Crazy.
We came to a crest of the mountain range, and I thought with relief, it's downhill from here! We can coast, we won't burn our precious bits of fuel climbing laboriously up every steep curve of the road. Alas! After going down for a bit, the road turned upward once again. The gauge was a millimeter above EMPTY. I played games with it. If I look at it from the side, it kinda looks like there's more gas in it. I leaned right, leaned left, but I wasn't fooling myself. Yertle soldiered onward. I was running out of gas on a road with no shoulder, I had a shredded air conditioner belt and a fist-sized hole in the engine.
The roadside sign said, "Ely — 12mi." And there we were, at the real crest of the range. I put Yertle in neutral, took my foot off the gas, and coasted down and around the mountain curves. At last, the ominous white fencing beside the road vanished. A few houses appeared. Billboards advertised motels and gift shops, gambling casinos, banks and auto body garages. More houses.
Ely! My eyes were pealed for a gas station. I made a left onto Ely's main drag and made a beeline for the first gas station I saw. Yertle coasted over the curb, I put her in drive, lined her up to the pump, and then... and then... she gurgled and died, out of gas.
Art Rosch is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Petaluma, California with his wife, three cats and two toy poodles. The Miracle of Highway Six is an excerpt from his book Green Highway: Living a Good Life in a Changing America.
Highway 50 through Nevada is reputed to be the loneliest road in the USA. It has a rival, and its name is Highway 6. It takes a northeasterly diagonal the entire breadth of Nevada before vanishing into the wilds of The Great Basin in Utah. It is far more isolated than 50, a hard hot eerie stretch of rocky desert and bare crags. There is one Flying J truck stop a third of the way across the state. After that: nothing. The town of Ely (pronounced E –Lee) is the road's first destination. It's a crossroads town with signs pointing to Las Vegas, Reno, Salt Lake City. Highways 50, 6 and 93 enter and leave the town in a few confusing blocks.
After surviving our plunge down 89 we made it to Bishop, and, god knows why, we wanted to get onto 6 and put another fifty miles on the odometer before stopping for the night.
Rule number one about driving an RV. DON'T DRIVE AT NIGHT! It's hard enough to control a bulky machine without playing with peripheral monsters at the side of the road, highway fatigue and caffeine nerves.
We pushed out of Bishop after stopping at a Super K-Mart, where Fox and I got separated and I couldn't find her to save my life. I was reduced to calling her pet name, knowing that she would hear it more readily than a shouted “Fox, where are you?”
So, I stood in the middle of an aisle full of hosiery and started crying plaintively, "Boo Boo! BoooooBoooo!"
Everyone was certain I was retarded. I was wondering myself if my previous life of risky activities hadn't finally damaged my brain. From now on we carry cell phones or walkie talkies, I don't ever want to go through this ordeal again.
"Booooo boooooo!"
Where the hell did she go? One second she was right THERE, looking at skin cream, and the next, she had vaporized into the merchandise, wandered off like an un-tethered toddler. This store occupies ten thousand acres and you can't see more than twenty feet! I might never find her, or wander for two and a half years before fetching up at the customer service booth, begging the teenage girl in the silly uniform to speak into her microphone: Will Booboo come to the customer service counter, please?
At last, re-united by calling booboo until I got within sonic range of Fox, I was able to carry supplies out to Yertle, our beloved RV, in the darkening afternoon. Why did we continue driving? We were nuts. As I navigated the final stoplights of Bishop, a nearby driver began honking repeatedly and gesturing towards Yertle. I pulled over and discovered that I had been driving with the steps still sticking out of the camper. Keep a check list, RV rovers!
After fifty miles, we came to the tiny one-store town of Tonopah. Fortunately, the store was open. A very large young man, Native American, confirmed that there were no campgrounds before Ely. He said, however, that we could park in the school parking lot and spend the night. The school was just behind the store.
"Lots of people get stuck out here," he said. "It's okay. Just try to be gone before school starts in the morning. Nobody will bother you. I'll tell the sheriff when he drops by, that you're back there. But if he sees you before I do, tell him Bear said it was okay."
This kindness was touching. We began to realize that we had met kindness at every obstacle on this trip, and that kindness came in all sorts of disguises, in the most unlikely places.
In the morning there was snow on the tops of the mountains. Nevada is a washboard, an undulating series of mountains and valleys, and the roads cut straight across this ancient seabed. At the top of each peak, the view spreads down the road ahead, which goes in a straight line for miles and miles until it disappears into the next rise of the landscape. I had never expected Nevada to be so beautiful. There were huge clouds casting shadows upon the vast valley floors.
Tomorrow's drive was supposed to be easy: a hundred sixty miles to Ely, where we would join up with our old friend, Highway Fifty.
It was November; bright, clear, and warm in the valleys, crisp on the peaks. Yertle ran well, but I continued to be apprehensive. It's one thing to drive a car. It breaks down, you call a tow truck. An RV is another matter: we were carrying our lives in the damn thing. The water tank held twenty gallons. We had food, propane. There was no shelter on Highway Six, no trees, no roadside stops. If Yertle broke down, there was no telling how long we might be stranded.
I imagined our quandary if something happened. Out here in the desert, way beyond cell phone service, we could be truly stuck. There was little traffic. Every hour or so, we'd pass a car, going the other way. Everyone, it seemed, was going the other way.
Gathering my nerve, I hit the accelerator, and the old Chevy 350 gurgled forth, up the highway, into the brightening day. My gas tank had been filled in Bishop. The truck seemed happy. Yertle was whispering, "Don't worry, I'll get you to Arches, don't worry."
I can't help but worry, Yertle, I responded mentally. It's my nature to worry. I am the son of my father.
This was 'lower' Nevada, an uncompromising landscape. Sandstone blocks tipped by ancient floods and earthquakes littered the northern side of the road. On the south was nothing but miles and miles of scrub, tumbleweed, creosote bush. The stuff gave off a smell, a goldish earthen odor, not unpleasant. We were skirting the northern fringe of the immensity of Nellis Air Force Base, with its old atomic test sites. If they once tested atom bombs here, I thought, they must have considered this the ultimate in remoteness.
At fifty miles an hour, the noise from Yertle's engine and various parts bouncing around made conversation or music impossible. There was nothing to do but drive, and look at the landscape, however monotonous or downright eerie. Occasionally a vulture would mark the sky like a comma on vast blue paper.
We pushed north and east, and everything seemed okay. Then, about fifty miles out of Tonopah, I heard a high whining sound from the engine. Yertle kept on going, so I said my prayers and continued to drive. We had entered a wide valley. It looked like thirty miles to the next ridge, and I could see all thirty miles of road, slightly undulant, like a road-kill rattlesnake, until it disappeared between the breasts of the next rise in the primordial earth body.
Then I was brought to alertness by a loud bang, and a nasty smell of burning rubber. Yertle was running, but I had to pull over. I was afraid to turn the engine off; afraid she'd never start again. I got out and pulled open the hood. Pieces of fan belt were shredded all over the motor compartment. I picked them out, saving the biggest piece for reference. Fan belt for what, I wondered? How I wish I understood cars, how I wish I were a competent mechanic! Then, as I inspected the various parts of the motor, I saw a thumb-sized hole, right through the metal rectangle of the I-don't-know-what. Pieces of this metal were strewn about. It was as if we had been shot by a high caliber rifle. I knew, however, that it was a case of metal fatigue, that this porous, cheap material, this aluminum casing for some part of our vehicle's innards, had met its deadline.
Yet, the engine was running fine.
What the hell, I thought. Let's go until we can't go any more.
We kept driving, praying for Ely. Seventy miles to go. Come on, Ely, come on. About half an hour later, I saw a convoy of vehicles in the distance. Two highway patrol cars were parked at the side of the road. The officers were waving us to stop.
I was glad to see a human being, a person of authority. To make that statement, "I was glad to see a person of authority..." is indicative of how scared I was. I don't have anything against policemen. I have a significant resentment of all authority figures, always have and always will. I learned that there are times when one might be thrilled to see a person of authority, and this was one of those times.
We pulled out onto a wide margin. A mile down the road, a gigantic truck was hauling a gargantuan pipe, long as a freight car and wider than the entire road. I took a chance, and turned off the engine. I got out of Yertle and approached the officer.
"Sir," I asked respectfully, "can you spare a moment to look at our truck? Something broke a while ago, and I don't know what's going on."
The policeman was half my age. He was short and compact, and looked like someone who could tear three phone books in half with his bare hands. He glanced under the hood, while the monstrous pipe rolled slowly past our place beside the road.
"That's your air conditioner belt," he informed us. "And that hole, well that's your air conditioner. Looks like the belt shredded and then popped the AC unit right through the guts. Good thing it wasn't the fan belt, or you'd be stuck out here."
Greatly relieved, I thanked our benefactor, started Yertle and proceeded down the ever-lonely road.
Things happen to people. Events are events, but our interpretation of these events overshadows the events themselves. For me, the most important thing is to react with imagination, to view life as a process of gaining understanding, regardless of whether good things or bad things happen.
I didn't know what the hell was going on with this crazy trip. All I knew was that it was scaring the bejesus out of me. I asked Fox, several times, "Do you want to turn back?"
Fox is made of stronger stuff than I. "No," she always said, "We're supposed to go to Arches."
God, I felt like a pussy. Men don't enjoy feeling cowardly. It's not a good man-feeling. It's a feeling that lurks in some small fetid bathroom down in my soul, a bathroom with a naked bulb worked by a pull-string with a knot at the end, a bathroom with old squeaky faucets that give out brown water. It has a frosted window that's jammed shut, with a paint job where the streaky white paintbrush overswept right onto the window and the painter didn't give a shit to scrape it clean. That's what my cowardice feels like, it feels like that cheap hotel bathroom and it's not fun at all. I was going to have to brace up. That's what the wise old samurai said to the Toshirure Mifune character in "The Seven Samurai." It's become an in-joke for Fox and me.
"Brace up, Kikuchiyo," we'll tell one another. "Brace up."
And Yertle, in spite of her perfidy, kept reassuring me. "I'll get you there," she whispered, "Stop worrying so much. I may be old but I've got plenty of miles left in me."
Never once did I wonder if I was completely nuts, talking to an RV. I was simply being swept along by events as they occurred. What else could I do?
The landscape began to rise, as we came into another range of the Humboldt-Toyabe Forest. I looked at the gas gauge and with a shock realized that we were down to a quarter tank. Where did the gas go?! The tank was filled in Bishop, only a hundred fifty miles down the road. I had badly overestimated the mileage of which Yertle was capable. That, and a headwind, had drunk our gas, and I had been so preoccupied, I failed to fill her up at the one and only truck stop between Tonopah and Ely. Now, I wondered if we were going to run out of fuel on some tricky mountain curve without a shoulder.
Fox was an active participant in all this, of course. By mutual agreement, I was and would always be the driver of our RV. On rare occasions I would give Fox the wheel, but it was a shaky proposition. Fox is given to seeing things, especially when the light is low. A rhino can pop out of the sagebrush and give chase. Osama Bin Laden sits in the back of a pickup truck, grinning smugly. Fox isn't crazy, but she is psychic and sometimes has trouble separating vision from reality. Maybe it's the Apache blood. The closer we got to the ancestral homelands, the weirder she became. But she was calm where I was not. She was stoic where I was terrified.
Compulsively, I watched the gas gauge, then chastised myself and equally compulsively avoided watching the gas gauge. I forced my eyes to bypass the little meter as it quivered, ever downward toward EMPTY. Why weren't we carrying a gas can with five extra gallons. Rule Number Two of RV'ing. ALWAYS CARRY EXTRA FUEL! The fuel consumption of the most innocent looking RV is a ravening dragon, an elephant sucking up fluids faster than they can be replenished. Motor homes LOVE fuel, the way kids love candy or the way addicts love dope. Gimme some gas! they breathe, panting with appetite. Gimme some gas!
Thirty miles to Ely. Okay, steal a look at the gauge. It's hovering over the little line that says, EMERGENCY! hurry up and get a fill! I'm calculating. Let's see, if we are getting ten miles to the gallon, and we have three gallons, we can just get to Ely. But if we're getting eight per gallon, we're in big trouble. That's assuming there are three gallons. There might be five; or there might be two. Does the gauge read short when we're going uphill? That's possible, I suppose.
Naturally, the headwind grew more powerful and our route took to yet another interminable climb up into the Toyabe-Humboldt Forest. The road was Nevada-smooth, paid for by gambling taxes, well maintained. But here, on the undulant highway, there was no shoulder, just a line of white fence posts, blocking all exit from the road. Run out of gas here, around a blind curve, and some truck can come a'whamming along and crunch us like an old Pepsi can before the driver knows what's happening.
I spent the next forty five minutes waiting for the engine to sputter and die. I watched the side of the road for potential escapes, and watched the rear view mirror for the following eighteen wheeler that spelled our doom, like the monster truck from that early Spielberg movie, "Duel." The forest grew thicker, looking like a real forest. Now there were signs touting campgrounds and tourist sites, in the southern approach to Ely. They were little comfort to me. The gas gauge quivered and teased me as it sat on Empty. My heart was beating in every pore of my skin. Why so scared, I chided myself? Everybody runs out of gas at least a couple times in their lives. Yes, I responded, BUT NOT HERE! Not in Yertle, noble RV, not on a curvy road with no shoulder, where the last vehicle we saw was a FedEx truck, and it passed us going uphill in a no pass zone, like we were standing still. People drive crazy in Nevada on Highway Six. They think the roads are empty. Crazy.
We came to a crest of the mountain range, and I thought with relief, it's downhill from here! We can coast, we won't burn our precious bits of fuel climbing laboriously up every steep curve of the road. Alas! After going down for a bit, the road turned upward once again. The gauge was a millimeter above EMPTY. I played games with it. If I look at it from the side, it kinda looks like there's more gas in it. I leaned right, leaned left, but I wasn't fooling myself. Yertle soldiered onward. I was running out of gas on a road with no shoulder, I had a shredded air conditioner belt and a fist-sized hole in the engine.
The roadside sign said, "Ely — 12mi." And there we were, at the real crest of the range. I put Yertle in neutral, took my foot off the gas, and coasted down and around the mountain curves. At last, the ominous white fencing beside the road vanished. A few houses appeared. Billboards advertised motels and gift shops, gambling casinos, banks and auto body garages. More houses.
Ely! My eyes were pealed for a gas station. I made a left onto Ely's main drag and made a beeline for the first gas station I saw. Yertle coasted over the curb, I put her in drive, lined her up to the pump, and then... and then... she gurgled and died, out of gas.
Art Rosch is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Petaluma, California with his wife, three cats and two toy poodles. The Miracle of Highway Six is an excerpt from his book Green Highway: Living a Good Life in a Changing America.
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