The Harrowing Highway

 

10-14 

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After collapsing into bed in complete exhaustion early last night, I woke up at a surprisingly wholesome hour. I then wasted that unexpected extra time puttering around doing everything but getting back into Jane for another round of Interstate Mad Max-ery.

Eventually, though, I was packed, so I stopped in at the front desk to turn in my key and inquire about gas stations that had air available – to inflate all four of my tires, which were apparently all semi-inflated to 22-25 psi. Oops.

The owner of the motel kindly lent me his air compressor, so I was able to fill my tires for free! Wonderful. We got to talking and passed some more time that way… but eventually it began to feel as if he was looking for more things to say, to keep me just a couple minutes longer. So, I said my goodbyes and got on the road.

Five minutes later, I was cruising along at a cool 85 MPH (no more vibration!) when traffic came to an abrupt halt in front of me. And let me tell you… when traffic stops on an interstate, far away from any known town or exit, it is not a good sign. But I figured things might be okay – just construction or something – as I didn’t see any truckers getting out of their semis to investigate. When truckers start getting out of their cabs and milling around, that’s the REALLY bad sign.

So then of course the truckers in front of me started getting out of their cabs and milling around. Welp. That’s the one foolproof way to know that shit has really hit the fan in some way on the road in front of you.

After a bit of milling around, all of the truckers climbed back in their cabs and, in unison, started peeling off of the highway entirely, opting to dogleg offroad through the shoulder onto an adjacent road. So, of course, I followed. When you can’t see what’s going on – which is common when you’re driving a small 1960’s pony car – trust the truckers and do what they do. Fortunately the shoulder was pretty flat, so Jane had no trouble following the big dogs. We hopped onto the side road, and shortly thereafter passed a rather inexplicable catastrophe. Two semis, crushed and twisted, their components and cargos scattered across every lane in a halo of carnage. Several cars and trucks surrounded the wreck but appeared unscathed, so possibly witnesses or people stopping to help. I couldn’t see any immediately identifiable cause of the wreck. It looked as if one had simply rear-ended the other. And maybe that’s what happened. But probably there’s more to the story than that.

Uncomfortably, it also looked as if the wreck had happened mere minutes prior – no emergency response on hand, little traffic, dust still settling. I thought back to the motel owner, engaging me in conversation just a little too long… or perhaps for exactly long enough. A shiver crawled down my spine and lodged there deeply. A clash between semis is often catastrophic, but throw a passenger car in the mix and it is usually deadly.

This all raced through my mind in the few minutes it took to pass the wreck. Then I found myself trailing the semis back across the shoulder and back onto the interstate, and with that… I had the freedom of the open road again. This time, though, it seemed a little ominous, a little too empty, a little vicious. A little menacing. This is a road that eats people.

I noticed for quite some time afterwards, all of the cars limited their speed to 70-75 MPH.

I spent the next few hours swimming through random pulses of extreme concern, surrounded by the emptiness of the Texan plains. Too wide open. Too fast. Too unpredictable. But Jane held steady and eventually the effects took a backburner to the relentless incessant thrum of her V8, a constant comforting force of the world beyond any other. I do hate being reminded of our fragility, but Jane always seems to help push past that.

She gifted me another full day of driving without incident, possibly to re-bolster my confidence, or perhaps just as eager to vacate Texas as I was. Either way, we sailed through El Paso, up through Deming, and into Arizona with nary a skip.

For a while, every couple miles there were large signs warning of dust storms with 0 visibility... yikes!

I did not find out what the Thing (mystery of the desert!) is, unfortunately.

One of the best state entry signs.

Classic Arizona... cross the border, immediately encounter a Semi Standoff.

Somewhere along the way, the odometer turned over the 100,000 mile mark, both a momentous and a completely meaningless number. Why, you say? Well, several reasons. First, the number is pretty approximate, as it changed a bit during a period when I was changing out gauge sets (at one point the new speedometer started adding miles at a rate of 1 per second, for quite a long time, and I had to reset it but was never sure exactly what the original mileage had been). Second, the original 1966 Mustang odometers only had five digits and thus returned to zero at 100,000 miles – so the number could be 100,000, or 200,000, or even 300,000! Third, not only does the number not even reflect the number of miles on the body of the car, but it also doesn’t reflect when the engine was rebuilt, or when the car was last restored, or anything even remotely significant.

Nevertheless, seeing that 100,000 pop up on the odometer was a little gratifying. I’ve put a lot of miles on this car – over 70,000 in road trips alone in the past 10 years. That is a pretty colossal amount of miles. My first trip remains my longest, at 10,054 miles in one go. In 2017 I came close to that number with my trip to Canada and the west coast. These days I do far less, mostly due to not having 7 weeks of time to be out anymore! But I’ll always be proud of how well this car travels. The original all-American pony car is made to run, after all.

Jane and I cruised into the Tucson area much earlier than expected, mostly owing to this part of Arizona not doing Daylight Savings Time (confusingly, most of the reservations in Arizona do observe DST, so the state of Arizona is sometimes in two time zones at once). So I stopped in at Saguaro National Park on my way into town. Saguaro is a pretty interesting park in that it is split into two separate districts, each on one side of Tucson. The park was originally created to preserve a couple large slices of the best parts of the saguaro-bearing desert at Arizona’s core, protecting them from the incessant pressures of cattle ranching that were essential to the early days of the West. Now, it anchors the city in the wildness of the desert, ensuring that inhabitants never forget where they are, to what they belong. Tucson is nothing if not the city nestled in the most iconic part of the American Southwest.

The eastern portion of the park, known as the Rincon Mountain District, is very similar to the western district in that it hosts a visitor center, a scenic loop drive, and a whole lot of epic hiking. But, as one of the rangers in the visitor center informed me, it differs from the western Tucson Mountain District in the quality, density, and age of the saguaros. Apparently, although the western district contains a denser accumulation of saguaros, the ones in the eastern district are much larger, older, and more awesome. Their words, not mine.

They helped me select some trails to hike for the duration of my stay, and then I set off to fill the rest of the afternoon with some high-quality puttering. We took a nice leisurely loop around the scenic drive, a wonderful narrow black ribbon of asphalt nestled close amongst the cacti, twisting to and fro so as to cause the least disturbance possible. Saguaros of immense size and age towered on all sides, lords of the desert demanding acknowledgment and obeisance. Ocotillos stood tall and reedy amongst them, and scrub trees – often the loving nurses of young saguaros – crouched humbly in the shadows of the giants.

Apparently, saguaros begin their lives as single trunks, flowering for the first time after a long 35 years and only gaining their trademark arms after more than 60! Those multi-armed, 30-ft monsters so often idolized as the icon of the American Southwest are usually over 150 years old. That means they’ve endured 150 years’ worth of scorching summers, freezing winters, intense droughts, heavy rains, and snowstorms – and 150 years’ worth of humans, coming and going, ever changing. How chaotic and frenetic we must seem to them, flitting about erratically even as they stoically, patiently, slowly draw water from the arid landscape drop by drop and turn it into new flesh.

We pulled off onto a dirt road – more of a dust road, to be honest – and trundled down it slowly, intruding on the solitude of the giants. Here, the landscape flattened, offering a much better perspective of the true size of the massive cacti in comparison to the surrounding scrub. Suddenly, we were very small.

The sun sank low as we neared the end of the loop, so I paused at Javelina Rocks, a scenic overlook with a small trail. I strolled out a ways among the rocks, disturbing a covey of quail as I came around a corner. They scattered, clucking and peeping furiously, and disappeared into the depths of the desert. And so all that remained was myself – and the cacti, of course. Chollas flared golden, catching fire in the late afternoon light. Saguaros struck sharp figures against the sky, thrown into sharp relief and shadow by the long low rays of the sun. And everywhere around them, the landscape glowed the ruddy red of cooling embers, a reminder of the waning strength of the day and the imminent onset of night.

I left the desert to the quail, sliding back into Jane’s familiar vinyl seat. As the sun blazed its final path across the horizon, reluctant to give up the day, we rumbled westward across town to our hotel.

 

I had chosen Hotel McCoy, a small independent hotel much beloved and well-known in town for its love of art and community, which seemed a huge improvement over the usual sterile hotel chains. I arrived and found I had chosen well – they offered me a couple drink tokens on the house, and a food truck by the pool hummed with the promise of delicious fried foods with an Asian flair. I settled in as the hotel’s workers oohed and aahed over Jane. It's been a long day, and I'm glad to have picked a great spot. It'll be a very nice home base for the next few days, I think.

Kelly signing out.