The Jackass Sandwich

 

11-12-2022

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It turns out that staying at the Buzzard’s Roost in my swanky tipi again was a good idea, considering that I woke up to frigid high-30’s temperatures this morning. Packing up camp in the cold is the worst, and as it was I still struggled to crawl out of my warm cocoon to face the brittle outside air. I can’t say I was super motivated to depart any earlier than necessary anyways, considering that I only had a drive home to contend with. A long drive home, but still just a drive.

Eventually I worked up the gumption to depart the tent, and found a lovely day burgeoning. Well, I suppose by that point it had already burgeoned, and was well on its way to just normal progression. Whatever, I’m not an early morning person.

The sharp morning light revealed my beautiful Jane, absolutely filthy with fine white silica dust – the wispy remnants of ancient volcanoes, now set upon the destruction of Jane’s paint.

Part of any road trip is building up a good “patina”, an accumulation of grime so thick that it could feasibly actually add protection if you’re casual enough about the definition of “protection”. But this patina is dependent on it lying undisturbed, as any interaction with the car below – say, by brushing past it, leaning on the fender, writing your name in the dust, etc. - immediately grinds all of that dirt right into the paint, leaving fine scratches. Annoying. Jane has picked up her share of fine scratches over the years from exactly this (and worse, I’m sure), and today I would certainly add more. Nothing like 85 MPH wind rushing over a coating of sharp silica particles, scraping them inexorably backwards along the car!

My detailer friends would NOT be happy.

Fortunately, I’m a complete hooligan so I only spent about 30 seconds thinking about that.

I took the opportunity to co-opt an art installation nearby – no doubt intended for a very picturesque Instagrammable post featuring some very pretty girl – to instead take more pictures of my car.

 

Lol.

Somehow, it didn’t quite seem to fit in the hand right. Oh well. Dream Big Bend, indeed.

That silliness aside, Jane and I hopped on the road and started the long trek back. After getting past the Christmas Mountains of Terlingua, we had a lot of time to look at some very flat land.

 

Occasionally, a mountain or mesa would draw near, then disappear in the rearview mirror, just a blip in the monotony of a classic West Texas drive. Staving off boredom is pretty difficult on a drive in this part of the country.

 

And then it happened: I came upon the Jackass Sandwich.

A Jackass Sandwich is three (or more!) cars, all in a line, all tailgating each other very closely, on an otherwise completely unoccupied, wide-open highway. They are almost always in the left-hand lane, and they are almost always going on average exactly the speed limit, but with a range of 10-15 MPH on either side. This one was no exception.

I’ve run into a lot of these on the road, and they’ve always kind of baffled me. As far as I can tell, they are usually started by one guy, going very slow in the fast lane. And that kind of person attracts two types of retaliatory drivers: the kind that tailgate them to try to get them to move over, and the kind that pass them and then get right in front of them to go EVEN SLOWER, to send a message. The problem is that these people all feed off of one another, creating a literal revolving stack of jackasses all swapping places angrily within one sandwich, the whole thing alternately speeding up and slowing down to ensure that they are all as angry and ineffective as possible.

It's infuriating but fascinating to drive near. Fascinating because you can experience these peoples’ completely unnecessary rage, with the knowledge that any of them could decide to just drive away normally at any moment, dissolving the sandwich. Infuriating because you constantly find yourself getting closer, then further away, from these people without changing your speed at all. They are funny when they occur on highways with multiple lanes, annoying when they occur on single-lane highways with only periodic passing lanes, and completely outraging when they occur on single lane highways with no passing lanes. That is, unless you have a fast car capable of passing three vehicles all in one go.

I spent some time watching the jackass sandwich waffle around, until it occurred to me that probably it was getting dangerous to be near. So, I passed them. At a very high speed.

I’ve found that if you don’t pass jackass sandwiches at high speed, they will speed up to prevent you from passing, presumably in an attempt to incorporate you into their sandwich to make it larger and possibly more tasty.

Very fortunately, a small block Ford motor has a lot of torque and it’s sitting right in its optimal power band at highway speeds.

After putting a significant distance between us, I settled back to my contemplation of the landscape. Hmm, still flat.

 

Maybe even flatter than before?

That Ford V8 growled along contentedly, its voice opening up to a full-throated roar as we hit I-10. It was a clear bluebird day, perfect for driving, although I found it a bit chilly for my tastes. Jane seemed to like it. And so, each mile seemed to pass faster and faster, blurring together into one seamless reel of black asphalt and white dotted lines and endless blue sky, a film on fast-forward, played at double speed.

As we approached Central Texas, the landmarks came faster and more frequently. At first, the odd hill would pop out of the flatlands, a subject of amused consideration.

 

I'll give you three guesses what this one's named, and the first two don't count

Then, those scattered scarce hills became large rolling hills, roadcuts slicing through massive swaths of rock where the hill was simply too big to climb.

 

And then, seemingly very suddenly, I was in the outskirts of Hill Country, that beautiful land of swaying thick grasses and mighty live oaks with 100-foot canopies, a perfection of pastoral life.

 

It was only a short time after that that I found myself overlooking my city, beautiful monster that it is. Sure, the traffic here might be completely asinine, the hustle and bustle sometimes a bit too hustley and bustley. I love leaving, getting out on the open road where I have more space to myself, room to breathe, exciting new things to see. But I also love coming back, because this is my home.

So now here we are, back in reality, in the land of tacos and techbros and hippies and hipsters. It’s been an awesome week. Big Bend was just as incredible as advertised – I know I’ll be back. But maybe not for a while. Because I have some other things planned for us this year…

For now, I’ll start with fixing that rearview mirror. And maybe I'll see about getting that dust off the paint, too.

Kelly signing out.

**Post-blog note: Thanks for all of your patience while I've taken my sweet time finishing these posts!! These days it gets harder and harder to swap back and forth between blog-writing mode, and scientific-writing mode (which I need for my job). Anyways, this post concludes my 2022 Big Bend saga! Stay tuned for more adventures later this year... I have some cool ideas for new places to go :)