SCREED FROM THE ROAD #4
THE HAUL FROM HELL. NIGHT TERRORS ON HIGHWAY 25 REVISITED. WILD-EYED PLOWING THROUGH THE HELL-FREEZING WHITEOUT. DELIRIUM IN THE DESERT. WELCOME TO TUCSON.
This wheels on fire, rolling down the road.
Best notify my next of kin, this wheel shall explode.
-The Band
A SHORT PREFACE TO MY ROAD, THE PULSING VEIN OF AMERICAN MOVEMENT & EXPANSION.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent a trucker’s career behind the wheel of an automobile careening out across desolate highways or winding through terrifying mountain passes. A son of this cracked asphalt generation, I have covered the wild breath of the lower forty-eight in just a chunk of my twenty-four years on this paved earth. For as long as I can remember I have been fueled by restlessness and an unquenchable thirst for careening through the bowels of this vast American landscape in a vehicle stripped to bare essentials yet filled with the necessary commodore that it takes to drive for inhuman numbers of hours and days. From the lobster trap lined harbors of Maine to the blizzard-riddled peaks of the Rockies down to the entirety of the strange California coast, I have traveled far and wide on four wheels.
As we sped out of Billings already pissed off and in the early stages of bodily and mental fatigue we were dead set on burning through the western chest of the states, scaling the entire east side of the rugged Rocky Mountain Range. Fed up with the brutal wintry weather of Canada and Colorado and everywhere in between we set our sights on the mild lowlands of the Southwest, intent on beginning a strong stint of camping in the desert and burrowing deep into the weird earth that stretches out just above Mexico. I had crawled though the underbellies of New Mexico and Arizona before and in the winter months they still upheld a comfortable arid air, even though they generally weren’t the sun-baked sandy plains that they were most of the year. Either way, we were sick of digging snow off of the now cursed Jeep and not being able to feel our fingers anymore. We?d ridden enough powder and taken enough painful high-speed crashes to satisfy our fiendish adrenaline cravings for a good while and we were ready to kick back and do some serious living outdoors and cooking over fire. We also couldn’t afford to live the ski bum life any longer because it’s so goddamn expensive.
I have little recollection of the second drive from Billings and Denver. I remember vividly doing it the first time in a shitty rented white Dodge Stratus because the intense disgust that boiled inside me from the Billings situation resonated so much. It had already been close to twenty hours since I’d picked Max up at the airport in Denver and then raced back up to Billings to pick up the Jeep from that scumbag mechanic Darrin. Memory jolts back to life when the dim lights of Denver reappeared in a foggy dusting of snow around rush hour. I hadn’t slept a wink since I’d seen them last and as I stared through the flurry-caked windshield with wild eyes my will to get out of the blizzard-riddled mountains grew as my nerves began to unravel. Although it’s just over 200 miles to the New Mexico boarder town of Raton the drive took something like eight dreadful hours.
The jeep was chugging along again like it was built to do and a little snow wasn’t about to stop us from getting out of the high country and into tumbleweed and cactus laden plains. I recall the traffic slowing to a debilitated crawl around Denver, where at all times at least two of the lanes were occupied by massive barreling plows, clearing the fresh snow that seemed to fall harder by the minute. Tuning the XM satellite radio to the weather channel only led to ugly predictions of blasting winter weather well through Colorado Springs and indefinitely down Highway 25. As we floated white-knuckled South the snow only fell harder as everything out of headlights reach disappeared along with any reasonably safe traction on the road. It should have been a blatant clue that it was stupid to keep going as we slowly passed hotels in Pueblo with packed parking lots of semis that stretched unmoving down the sides of off and on ramps. The radio was blaring warnings of whiteouts and chain-only vehicles on the road, deterring any further travel unless absolutely necessary. Our heads hummed with a feverish determination of already way too much medicine which was the only thing keeping us wide-awake and still relatively coherent.
At this point it became blindingly apparent that shit was hitting the fan, and it was frozen and white and engulfed everything outside of the ragtop Jeep. Past Pueblo the only hope of actually staying on the road was following a plow or semi close enough to trail behind the dim red blur of their taillights. Whenever we rolled the windows down a few inches to have a smoke a horizontal stream of cold wetness slapped our faces to remind us what insanity we were heading full-steam into. Slowly screwing our way up the last mountain pass that peaked at the New Mexico boarder a dark maelstrom whipped across the road that no longer had any recognizable form or direction. Blind sheer drops lurked on either side of the invisible crash guards and with a mix of mad ambition and strung-out foolishness we powered into the godforsaken blizzard. Terrifying hours peeled by behind the wheel, adrift plowing forward with hardly any sign of progress except the building anxiety and fear inside our vulnerable fortress on four wheels. The disoriented and hysterical zombie trance that one slips into in these kinds of conditions is not something that everyone can control and actually function under. It is impossible to convey the pure horror that is unavoidable when you drive through a veritable tunnel of swirling ice that takes any limited visibility and turns it into a severely disorienting vertigo. As the Jeep lurched onward up a winding road that wouldn?t reveal itself any more than ten feet ahead in the powerless headlights, a big metallic yellow sign appeared like a lighthouse that welcomed us to New Mexico. Even though the storm hadn’t eased up an ounce, we gained a minor sense of victory and maybe even relief since this meant that the road would finally begin to descend, hopefully dropping us out of the apocalyptic clouds we’d been battered by for eight blurry hours.
Raw nerves kept hands clamped on the wheel and eyes peeled open as far as humanly possible and a soundtrack of heavy rock ‘n’ roll covered up the sounds of the hammering squall outside as we ground our teeth and pressed on. Stopping for gas in the desolate little town of Las Vegas, New Mexico we must have seemed idiotic to the old weathered Native American attendant when we filled up the tank and asked for updated weather reports. His grim words and uneasy looks told us that you’d have to be both crazy and stupid to stay on the highway for the rest of the ungodly pre-dawn hours. Trucks have been sliding into the ditches like go-karts on the patches black ice out there. It’s near suicide, just wait until the sun comes up and you can at least see what the hell you’re driving on. Obviously dire predictions, we nodded like we would heed his warnings but after the serious shit-storm that we’d just gotten through over the peak of the boarder pass, it seemed like smooth sailing in our bleary heads. The snow had finally stopped falling and the suffocating darkness was turning slightly lighter shades of hazy grey as we desperately continued to fly South.
As the sun rose somewhere behind the curtain of ashen clouds that filled the morning I remember being behind the wheel as Tom Waits crowed from the stereo and finally vegetation began to break through the snowy crust and the pavement lost it’s icy sheen. Speeding up as the sky began to break apart, shedding some desperately needed light onto the earth that I was beginning to believe would stay frozen and dead until we hit Mexico, we hardly realized how fucking miraculous it was that we’d made it through the night alive. It must have been a fourth or fifth wind that we caught, induced by more medicine, that had finally put the remorseless snows and biting winds behind us. Sipping hot gritty gas station coffee as an Albuquerque that was coming alive like any normal weekday whizzed by, it was hard to even begin to conceive the ridiculous number of hours that we’d been awake. At that point it had been two full days and about 1600 miles since our bloodshot eyes had more than blinked. The stretch down from Albuquerque heading towards Las Cruces felt like family vacation drive compared to what lay behind us. Somewhere before we reached that strange bottomed out town. The Crosses we’d found what looked like an appealing shortcut over to Tucson, where the plan was to hole up in a cheap hotel for a night before we took to the arid mountains to camp for a while. On the map the angled scenic route seemed quicker and more interesting than the ass end of Highway 25, which we’d been stuck on since Northern Wyoming. Indeed, we thought, we were feeling halfway human again somehow so we?d take a little shortcut and smoke a joint along the way and really enjoy the welcoming desert landscape.
One hand naturally clutching the wheel, the other raising the celebratory stick to my lips, I wove back and forth with the two-lane detour as it wound like a scared rattlesnake through the dried rocky terrain. Although it seemed like such a good idea as we rolled it, I remember rethinking smoking it while the thing still rested smoldering in my tingling fingertips. For obvious reasons we laid off the grass for most of the first two days on that far-flung jaunt, and in retrospect we should have kept that philosophy until we finally stopped for a night. It couldn’t have been more than a handful of minutes before it crept into my utterly fatigued bloodstream and began pulsing through my on-edge and jacked-up body. Both hands grafted to the wheel at this point, the Jeep was driving me, somehow leading me down the twisting and dipping road. My head completely detached from my numb body the synapses in the back of my neck began firing in discombobulated and unexplainable sequences. Sagebrush became herds of buffalo stirring on the shoulder of the narrowing road, leafless trees jumped to life like scarecrows flinging themselves at the Jeep in my tainted peripheral vision. There is no way for me to look back and think about how long I was behind the wheel in this delirious stupor. I remember mumbling some vague words of unease to Max, who sat chain-smoking staring out the window with a similar burnt-out gaze, but he didn’t even try to comprehend it. Then it really hit me as I hopelessly tried to focus on the radiating asphalt in front of me, glanced at my dry white knuckles, while I realized that I had become completely detached from my senses. I couldn’t feel the wheel in my clammy hands, my foot no longer pushed down on the gas pedal, I wasn’t driving anymore and the epiphany came like an electric shock up my spine, somehow sparking the last functioning nerve in my brain. Another complete blank fills the spot where I somehow maneuvered the Jeep to the shoulder of the road in one piece. Crawling out of that wretched drivers seat my legs almost gave out but I managed to haul my debilitated body over to a rock where I sat down to hopefully regain any remote sense of physical or mental feeling again. Max sauntered up and handed me a bagel and told me I needed to eat it so I took a few bites and I felt like I was chewing on Styrofoam. The reality of how long we had been wide-awake had finally caught up, there was no way in hell that I could climb back into the driver’s seat and I couldn’t think straight enough to rationalize that Max probably shouldn’t either. Nonetheless, we were off again, Max hunched over the wheel with only about 200 miles to Tucson, nothing compared to the over 1800 behind us. Apparently my body and mind were desperately trying to shut down, but still popping back those magic little capsules I was determined to make it the short last leg, awake but still barely aware of that fact.
Rolling into Tucson Max expressed his relief in the fact that the small Indian children had stopped darting across the desert road as afternoon commuter traffic took their places. Knowing that something doesn’t exist doesn’t make it any less frightening to see due to the ill-advised reasons why it is there in the first place. We?d both been subjected to these strange hallucinations that jumped out of the landscape at us after letting it whiz by us for nearly sixty (60) hours, and realistically it was amazing that we made it through that brutal blizzard in one piece anyway. Completely burnt-out we rolled to a stop at the first obviously cheap motel we saw, which turned out to be more like an abandoned housing project. We paid a seedy guy cash and didn’t get a receipt, and although there were footprints on the walls, dead light bulbs, holes in the sheets and the stench of soggy cigarettes in the air, it was a place to finally lie down for a night.
John Dick
February 2009, almost a year after the Haul
Tags: from the road, John Dick
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Very enjoyable. I found it fairly Hunter S. Thompson(esque). Good stuff