Departure
"You need to take a trip," she said. "A trip would interrupt your routine, break you out of the mental loops you're stuck in. You might find something out about yourself that will give you some insight into what comes next and how best to live it."
I agreed that I needed a fresh outlook, that I had been wandering through my days in a fog of ennui, looking for the thread that might lead me to the answers of what I should do with this chapter of my life, the pre-dead endgame of retirement. More specifically, I was in rough patch of writer's block. I was angry about it too. I felt like I was in a straight jacket.
This came to a head when I was asked to accompany my friend Tom on a rescue mission to Baja. Some sailing friends were taking shelter from winds and waves. They were in danger to the point of having to abandon their goal of a Hawaii voyage. More on that later.
I felt skewered by contraries. I wanted to stay home, live simply, play music, cut down on my carbon footprint. I also wanted big horizons -- wind, sun, excitement. I was bound up in ambivalence.
I wanted to stay safe. I wanted to protect my stuff. But that felt narrow, small, and constipated.
Another part of me said don't be such a chicken shit; think of them for a second. Do what needs to be done. Your soul needs to decide this one. Make a difference. Tip the scale of karma a bit in your favor, even if it means discomfort, danger, possible loss or damage to your possessions.
Yes, you have a new toy, the camper you have dreamed of since childhood. It is your one shot at a vehicle like this. You want to keep it safe, functional, looking good. You don't want to put it harm's way.
The parts of me were locked in contention. I had to do something.
I had no idea where I would go and did not have a vision of a destination until Tom came striding up to me in the alley behind his home with an invitation to join him on rescue mission to Baja.
It seemed that some friends of his were stranded in their boat near the little town of San Quintin, a couple hundred miles down the Pacific coast of the peninsula. They needed help to get them and their boat back to Arizona.
"I'd like company," he said. "You could help with the driving. And we could use extra hands to take apart the boat, get it on the trailer, and haul it back to Cascabel," he said. I knew Cascabel, a little burg in southern Arizona. It was my kind of place -- populated by seekers, sustainability people, wood workers, welders, artists, independent thinkers, misfits like myself. I liked the connection.
So, the trip called me. I was busy I told him, but let me think about it. Later, while driving into the Tucson Mountains in my loping pick-up truck, it occurred to me that we would have to take a bigger vehicle than Tom's little four-cylinder Toyota. My V-8 would be able to haul a 23 foot catamaran up the steep grades in Baja and southern California. The idea took shape, seemed like a journey that fit my assignment to take a trip, get out my habit, leave the known, well worn horizons of my routine.
"Let's do it," I said.
Crossing the Line
"I'll need your papers for the trailer," the Mexican border agent said.
I rummaged through the file folder that held my passport, registration, boat title, trailer registration, insurance proof, and other documents. But I couldn't locate the title and registration for the trailer. She got a little irritated and asked what we were doing with the big trailer, where we were going.
"It's a rescue mission, " I said. "Some friends are stuck in their sailboat, off the Pacific coast, near Molino Viejo, pinned down in an estuary by high winds, big seas, cold, and fog. The currents are dangerous. They just take shelter in the boat that keeps getting hammered by the waves and howling wind."
She seemed to take that as legit, handed me back my folder, and told me to bring better, original documents next time.
Driving in Mexico is not like driving in the US. There, it is an act of faith. You just surrender to ongoing hazard after hazard. If you are not threading the needle between oncoming semis and the edge of the pavement, you are dodging gaping cavities in the asphalt. Forget about steady speed. Turn off you cruise control. Don't even think about picking up your phone. You are on manual now. Focus and respond or accept the consequences.
The rules are different. It's expected that you straddle the shoulder fog line to let people pass; yellow no passing lines mean nothing; weaving through dense traffic, if you can, is expected; speed limits are more like suggestions; you should not be surprised if you round a blind corner and meet a steam roller smoothing new asphalt (no warning, no "road work ahead" caution signs).
The roads are a patchwork ranging from state-of-the-art to barely driveable. Narrow highways, pot holes, decrepit vehicles, obscure traffic directions, non-existent stop signs where, yes, drivers are required to stop, lanes that just end without warning, stretches where the shoulder disappears completely at a drop-off of a couple feet.
Yes, I had left the familiar and was now on the journey that would rattle my habits and shake loose the calcified questions I needed to ask myself.
Road Hell
The drive felt harsh and wouldn't end. We drove through small towns, stop-and-go traffic, dust, dead dogs, and sprawling humanity for twelve hours. By the time we turned off at San Quintin, the sun was a memory, the road ahead a mystery of rugged hazard. My little brain was fried.
The twelve-hour drive had been a salad consisting of the best of highways, long, sweeping, 21st century smooth tarmac, and outdated, crumbling, axel-snapping ruts and potholes. Gaudy semis, decked out in chrome and flashing lights shared the road with school buses converted to public transport. Corrugated shanties crowded the shoulder of the highway between groomed vineyards and modern architecture of the super-rich. The best of the best rubbed shoulders with the destitute. Abject poverty sandwiched between opulence that bordered on the obscene. Sleek luxury sedans with windows tinted so dark, no silhouette was visible snaked through the traffic flow on their way to fine dinners and meetings about money.
Rows of grape vines combed the rolling hills, corduroy stretching to the horizon.
But my eyes were on the road, always on the road, trying anticipate the next surprise, the next problem to assess an solve, urgency my constant concern.
I guess if you sign up for not being a chicken shit, you will pass through some hard, tired moments that demand of you more than you imagined you could give. I had not imagined this would be so hard. The trip was lifting me up and out of the container of possibility I had been living in for so long. I felt the shell I was hiding in begin to crack.
Tom and I watched for gas stations that could accommodate the truck and trailer. They had to meet certain criteria: long space that would allow us to pull through after filling up and re-enter the highway. Young gas attendants were eager to talk, to ask where we were headed, why we had such a rig.
In the hell of driving, the young people were a tonic, angels that helped ease my fear of what was coming, both in the immediate and long term. Their eyes were bright with intelligence and hope. They had everything to look forward to, even if that future was crowded with more applicants than slots available. What would they lose by hoping so much I wondered.
We saw the sun sink into the Pacific as we made the turn that would lead us to the estuary where David and Pearl were waiting for us, waiting to be conveyed up and out of the ocean, back onto land, another country, yes, but land. And then the trip across the land, across the border, across the deserts, back to home. Home. They were leaning into that prospect as only souls in adversity can lean into a better possibility.
They were waiting for us at the corner, wearing their dry-bag packs, sailors weary of the sea.
Here's a link to their blog if you'd like more in-depth information about their voyage(s).
https://voyageofminimusii.wordpress.com/
The Boat
From the road, with all its menacing obstacles, we arrived to a banquet. David and Pearl rolled out the carpet. They had been subsisting on the minimum while hunkering down in the wind. They had spent weeks pinned down in an estuary while twelve foot seas battered the coast line. The wind had howled even in the harbor and waves slapped at the hulls of their catamaran. They took sleeping pills wore ear plugs to escape the din. Their only company on the water was a derelict sloop, abandoned and left to swing at its mooring on the changes of the tide. It was more skeleton than living flesh, pirated, abused, picked clean of anything worth taking. At night it returned to appearing a working boat, a ghost of itself in some previous incarnation.
But now, here on shore, with the arrival of friends, they celebrated. The rescuers had arrived to take them out of the water, away from the punishing gale-force winds, the fouurteen-foot swells. It was time to indulge. to play the card of extravagance. There would be work in the morning, but tonight we would toast and eat, fill our glasses with beer, mescal, and tequila, listen to the stories, comfort each other in the shared enterprise of stepping out of the easy way of simply gathering and caring for commodities. There is no meal like the meal of relief as danger passes by, as the dark angel glides by overhead, even if only a brief respite.
Pearl and David slept on their boat, but they paid for Tom and me to have a suite on a second floor overlooking the estuary. The Molino Viejo is luxury by my standards, and being delivered from highway hell to a bed in a room with a porch view of the water was pure heaven.
But my worries kept me from sleep. I knew the road home would be a hard one to navigate with a twenty-three foot catamaran that weighed three thousand pounds. We had mountains to get over and descend. The problems demanded attention, kept my adrenaline pumping to point where there was no more to pump, and kept sleep at a distance. Physical comfort cannot overcome mental anguish. I kept thinking there had to be a better way back than the way we had come. I would not find the solution to that problem because the only option was the one I wanted to avoid. The only way out is through, as they say.
In the morning we met David and Pearl at the dock. They had already removed the masts and rigging. The boat was a white deck.
David had built the Minimus II with two criteria in mind: the boat had to be unsinkable, ocean worthy, and it had to be easy to assemble and disassemble for trailering. He had succeeded in both. The hulls were living space and storage. Masts were low and junk design. She would be stable and fast with a wide berth and shallow draw. It was an experimental design.
To me it was a big "wow!", the work of innovation bordering on genius. I could not believe it was hand built and that they had already been through so much ocean sailing.
But that was the assembled form of the craft. Now it would have to be taken apart for the road.
That was our work for the day.
Of course, the trailer and truck needed tweaking to work with the boat. That interface would require a hitch extension, added safety chain, a wiring splice, and careful placement on the trailer so the hulls didn't puncture the camper or break a window.
My underlying imperatives to "protect my stuff" began to fret. I didn't want this mission to break my tools.
We pulled the boat out of the water and began the work of taking it apart.
Weather, for once, was good. We worked under a gentle sun on a breezy cool day. I followed David's lead and did the low skill job of unlashing the cross beams and other structural members. I marveled at the design beneath the unfastening. We took apart, by hand, an ocean-going sailboat. We used some tools but not many. Davids craftsmanship was evident in the tight tolerances and user-friendly access to important components of the boat. And the man knew his knots.
Pearl kept track of the ropes and the fasteners, a myriad of detail necessary for simplicity. For it all to work, one needed to be patient, focused, methodical, and conscientious. Our work was as much a meditation as a job.
I made a point of planning to ask Dave how he had become such a designer, such an engineer and adventurer. So many questions. So much energy. So much curiosity.
With the deck removed, the cross beams unlashed, rudders detached, motor stowed, it was time to move the hulls onto the trailer. First we lifted the ends to set blocks underneath to support the hulls when we removed the 14 foot wide beams necessary to load the assembled boat onto the trailer. Then, gradually, once we had shifted the weight of the hulls to the blocks and removed the long beams, we lifted the ends of the hulls in order to removed the blocks, lowering the hull onto the trailer itself. The entire process could be done with a couple of people; no hydraulics necessary.
The work took until mid afternoon, when, boat loaded, rigging stashed in the camper, and luggage squeezed into spaces leftover, we broke for lunch.
"I'm beat," said Dave. "Me too," Tom agreed. "It's been a long day," Pearl addded.
They all turned to me. "I think we should hit the road. Get a chunk of the drive done today. Before sunset. I don't want to drive in the dark on roads I don't know, but we could maybe make it to Ensenada," I suprised myself by saying.
They nodded. It was settled. We would leave after lunch.
We took our time eating, not talking much, each of us quietly preparing mentally for the beginning of the return home. We still had a long way to go.
Ensenada and Ruta del Vino
The drive was bone jarring and white knuckle. We made our way slowly through the gauntlet of dogs, diesel fumes, roaring dump trucks, and late afternoon school releases, avoiding pedestrians, trying to stay on the pavement when the shoulders had a gaping drop-off.
I found something below being tired; maybe it was adrenaline pumping to meet the ongoing threats to progress and injury. I felt good. The act of faith overrode my logical conclusion that driving here was madness. Sometimes you need not to be reasonable I told myself. Take a chance. Go for it. Don't live like a chicken shit.
And so Ensenada somehow came to us, opening its doors to swallow our little caravan. The glitz of tourist luxury sang to us from the high rise hotels and the five star lodgings. There was no way our long train and wide turning radius would survive leaving to road for a a hotel or even gas. We were prisoners of the road, our sentence to be served, the other side of the city.
Chile Verde, the big truck, loped along like it was made for the crazy conditions. It barely broke a sweat on the hills and held the descents in check in a vise-like grip. But we passengers were running out of gas as exhaustion took over.
By the time we reached the far side of Ensenada, it was dark, and we were a ship without a port in a storm of container trucks and industrial indifference. We needed a place to stop. Soon.
Phones gave us little help. We were no longer in the tourist zone, the money pot of high volume clients. We were in a limbo between internet interest and advertising. Google was no good. GPS was a POS. We were on our own. I couldn't see well through the salt film on the windshield. We hit potholes, rattling the trailer, threatening to blow out a tire, smash a rim. The semis came us like the tide, in an unrelenting, constant stream. They laid onto the horns warning us to speed up or get off the road.
We climbed up a steep, winding grade out of Ensenada, away from the coast, and into the mountains. Each of us struggled to stay calm, focused, on the task of threading the highway needle again and again.
After what seemed an impossible stretch of forced alertness, the lights of a hotel appeared on our side of the road. There was a long ramp to enter and a big parking area. The place looked good, so we took our chances. The Plaza de Fatima Hotel was a welcome blessing, a safe port.
We climbed down from the truck, relieved to be off the road.
Night Visitor
Pearl, bless her, got Tom and myself a room. She and David would sleep in the boat. David wanted to park the truck behind the hotel. That meant taking it down a narrow drive alongside the hotel, between a curb and a grove of eucalyptus trees. Tom offered to watch the hulls while David made his way through the curves leading to the driveway that went out back.
He stood on the hitch. David opened the window to better hear Tom's report. Good thing too. The mild radius pushed the metal tie down at the tip of the hull right toward the rear window of the camper. Tom's yell prevented the puncture of the window by fractions of an inch. The hulls had slid forward because of all the rattling and vibrations of the trip. We would have to slide them back somehow.
It was clear the boat would have to stay in front, visible from the road.
After a brief powwow about how to reset the hull on the trailer, we grabbed our toothbrushes and pillows out of the camper. The work of loosening the straps could wait until morning. We all knoew that somehow we'd have to move the 1500 pound hulls back about six inches in order to continue, to be able to turn if we stopped for gas or any other reason.
Once settled, we all trundled off to bed as the container trucks continued to roar up and down the highway, engine brakes growling as the hit the steep grade back to Ensenada.
My room was airy and clean. I brushed my teeth, set the deadbolt in the door, and fluffed my pillow. I hoped to fall into a sweet sleep, but could only spin in anxious mental circles about the truck, my truck and camper, suspended in harm's way. I thought about how I should have taken off the camper, how I should have gotten a smaller one at the very least. I thought we could detach the steel plates at the point of hull, plates that held the anchor chain or painter lines, or towing ropes. Not likely
I went into a vortex of obsessive anxiety and regret that I had even considered taking this trip with all its risks. What was I thinking?
I also realized that this was a reaction to an identity-defining story, personal and social conditioning about how to relate to possessions, material goods, a learned narrative about "stuff." Take care of your stuff I could hear my dad saying. He berated me one time when I was about twelve for loaning a friend a bicycle. "You're a real nice guy," he said, his voice dripping with uncharacteristic sarcasm.
I stepped back enough to see that this was what my friend had foreseen when told me to take a trip. She knew that a trip like this would be epic enough to bring me to my limits, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Spiritually too. Situations like these bring to the surface in stark relief what is usually submerged, taken as truth. I was "in it," and had the opportunity to face and examine some demons.
I also saw that my fear and anxiety was exactly what I wanted to leave behind me in my past. I wanted that hyper-protective, security of guarding "stuff" to dissolve into a life that was lived by a larger ethic, that subordinated "stuff" to richness of experience, to enhancement of my soul, for lack of a better word.
I wanted to be less of a chicken-shit and more of a servant to a greater purpose, vague as that was.
So I lay there at two in the morning, thinking about this when a hand outside the door violently and aggressively grabbed to door knob to test it. The shock of the sound was palpable, and I bolted upright in the bed, my entire attention a point of laser on that knob. It held. The dead bolt was a good one; the frame quality wood. I realized that this was the parry of the pickpocket, the knife-slice through fabric of the back-pack pirate. It was the surprise strike, the blind-side punch, the overt threat to hand it over or else.
Seconds ticked off. I stared in the dark, wondering if I had imagined such a thrust of frontal assault. The light from the hotel office shown onto my window, and a shadow of a man silhouetted on the blind, looking into the room. He then turned away and headed toward the main office.
I got out of bed and peered through the blind. There he was. A young guy, trim, fit, wearing a surgical mask, testing the door of the office, looking in the window. I wondered if he was just security making the rounds, but then remembered the sound of a car pulling into the lot a few minutes earlier. The dogs had been barking excitedly before stopping suddenly. Had someone given them food? Seemed odd.
This man was from that car. He was no security guard. He saw the boat and truck and wanted to see if he could gain access to a room with a wealthy tourist sleeping the deep sleep of the wolf hour.
I waited there as he made his way back toward the driveway and parking. No other cars or guests were moving. I cautiously cracked my door. I heard the slam of a car door. Another. There were two. Plus the get-away driver. The engine cranked and took, a low growl. It then slid back into the night.
I had to wonder if I had remembered to lock the truck. My passport was there. The truck registration. My check book. The paperwork for the camper, trailer, and boat.
I tried to go back to sleep, but only felt the churning nausea of turista in my gut.
They next day promised to be a long one.
Tecate
I went out before dawn to check the truck. Doors were all locked. Documents still intact.
David popped his head out the hatch of the hull. "How'd you sleep?"
"Not so good."
"Pearl didn't either. I'll let her tell you."
"Yeah, I think we have some visitors last night."
"Yup. Pearl knows all about it."
I got my coffee kit and set about making some brew, knowing that it might come back to haunt me later. Tom was standing in his door, still clearing the fog of sleep from his eyes. "Everybody sleep OK?"
"I've had better nights," I said.
The inventory showed nothing damaged or missing. We got lucky.
After some breakfast and coffee the morning burned off as we loosened the grip of straps on the hull. We rocked it back and forth until we got it to move back far enough to make a fair turn. Then David secured the hull with strap that would keep it from sliding forward.
"We should be good," he said.
"I'll drive," I said.
And so we rolled through the vineyards of the Ruta Del Vino, a lovely bunch of valleys and tony estates and villas. Think Napa, Mexican style. The Mexican elites seem to have spread the gap between themselves and the poor of Mexico. Luxury next to squatters and tar paper shacks. Somewhat like the US, the rich have fashioned the system for their own interests, it seems. Baja is no exception.
The truck, however, didn't care a whit and bent into the traces, loping along up grades and down winding descents. It purred. Our pack horse of truck was a great comfort, padding between us and harsh circumstance.
Kilometer markers painted on the pavement counted down the distance to Tecate. Tick, 45. Tick, 24. Tick, we are there.
No signs directed us to the frontier, so we just followed the road into the center of town. The road we had traveled on the way down, through the Mexican customs. I thought the US border should be near, or at least accessible. Nope.
In the center of town, a federal police officer pulled us over to inform us we were far from the road to the US border and that he would lead us to the correct route. He and another motorcycle officer bookended us across town and up a steep side-street before signaling us to stop.
"Este camino llega a la frontera. Tiene que seguir hacia la interseccion, donde puede bajar a la linea." (This will get you to the border. Just turn at the intersection.)
I couldn't believe our luck. This cop had escorted us to within a few blocks from the border back into the US.
Then his expression changed. His face went hard and sharp, his dark eyes hidden behind expensive mirrored aviators.
"Tener un remolque come este en el centro de la municipalidad es una infraccion de la reglas de trafico. Lleva una multa de dos mil pesos. Usted tiene que ir a la oficina de la municiplalidad para pagar la multa, hablar con el juez para averiguar si usted seria detenido. Vamos a quedar con el troque y el remolque y velero." (You have taken a trailer into the city center. That's a violation of city code carrying a 2000 peso fine or jail. You need to go to city hall and pay the fine in cash, in pesos. You'll have to change money if necessary. You will leave the truck, trailer and boat here. Your passengers will have to wait outside.)
I explained that I understood and was guilty but that I didn't know I had broken the law.
He seemed to be waiting for something.
"Le puedo pagar aqui la multa en efectivo en dolares?" I asked. (Can I pay you cash here?)
He considered this for a moment and then nodded. "Si."
I extracted a hundred dollar bill from my wallet and asked it it would suffice. He nodded, but indicated that I should lower the bill so his colleague couldn't see it and then pass it to him below the open window of the truck door.
He took it between his fingers like a magician.
"Feliz Viaje," he smiled.
They both turned and left in a cloud of motorcycle exhaust.
"Let's get to the border," I said, very aware of the potentially dire situation we were leaving behind. I had lived to two years in Mexico and knew of gringo travelers who had been framed with planted contraband only to lose their vehicles and end up in Mexican prison. One does not want to engage a federale in an argument over just cause for arrest or impoundment.
The crossing went off without so much as an open door.
"Passports?" She glanced at them and ran a computer scan over the bar codes.
"Proceed."
And we were home.
Integration
Crossing the border felt like deliverance from unrelenting hazard, and the weight lifted from my psyche was as palpable as dumping a heavy back pack. I turned the driving over to David before retiring, exhausted to the back seat. I didn't mind at all being scrunched into the little king cab cubbie. In fact, I needed to take a step back, to reflect on these days, to take in the sights, to just listen.
Pearl took shotgun even though she didn't want to navigate.
"You don't need to," I said. "It's a straight shot back up to Interstate 8. There's a burrito truck in Campo that I want to stop at though."
High fives all around. From here it was all American-engineered highway, even if narrow in places, until we hit the interstate.
The wider road helped relax the travelers. They sat back in the seats, took in some of the scenery. I asked David about sailing, how he got started. "Long story," he said.
"That's okay. We've got time," I said.
He was eighteen or nineteen when he decided he would sail from Seattle to Alaska. He had no experience as a sailor and set out along the coast of British Columbia in a craft not up to the trip. He about died.
Undaunted, he returned to Seattle and worked at some sewing jobs with crews of Chinese women, the only white male. It worth noting here that David is a tall guy, over six feet. Long boned. Strong. He stood out.
He did other jobs -- a stint in a sleeping bag factory that gave him a taste of what it would be like to design and sew up sails. He haunted the piers, made connections with boat people, went out as crew on sailing yachts, began to learn the ropes.
After a year or two of saving money, he found a small sailboat with a cabin. It was sea-worthy enough to make the voyage to Alaska. He bought it, left his jobs, and set sail.
I had to notice that here was a man who both took meticulous care of his stuff and still put it to use on adventure. He was a wild one, for sure, but one with his head screwed on. He possessed by both the thing itself, the design and function of boats, and the wide horizon of uncontrolled adventure.
He was not domesticated, but very much capable of functioning in society.
The luscious scrub of alpine flora of southern California slid by the windows. It was clean, beautiful, and eccentric. Collections of ancient trucks, craftsman homes, sweet meadows all put us at ease in a way that we had not felt for a while. We had the day to roll, just roll, all the way home.
After David's story, Pearl volunteered to give her take on adventure. She was raised Mennonite, conservative Mennonite. As in cover your face Mennonite. That wasn't who she was, though. Inside she wanted to move through the wider world without all the attention of being so different, so she got a spot on a mission group and boarded a train to join the group. She had jeans and a t-shirt in her suitcase. She entered the bathroom a covered Mennonite and emerged a young woman in jeans and t-shirt. Transformed. Her life took a new direction.
She too, had the wild streak woven into taking care of her things. She had the attention to detail necessary to survive on a small sailboat in the Pacific Ocean. Appropriately, she called the hull she slept in a cocoon, one from which emerged renewed again and again.
Tom told a story in which he and his future wife had ventured out, in spite of small craft warnings, in a catamaran not up to the conditions. Patti had been knocked off the boat by a swinging sail and had injured her legs. She couldn't swim. Tom took half a mile to turn around and found her, a needle in a haystack sea. Another adventure taken to the edge.
We dropped down off the Coast Range and were carried across the Mojave Desert by a stiff tailwind. Our little caravan fairly whistled across the barren flats below sea level, through El Centro. By the time we crossed into Arizona we had decided to try to make it all the way to Cascablel, home of David and Pearl, fifty some miles past Tucson.
The lessons of this journey were still taking shape. I felt that I was the one being given a favor. I was on the receiving end of insights that shone a way around the either/or of my "chicken shit vs. adventure" dilemma. I saw, as the shadows lengthened over the hills east of Tucson, that it was possible to integrate caring for one's tools and putting them to use for a greater good, a life affirming set of risks.
I had run away from the rigid safety from losing things to a wildness of the open road long ago. I left home to hitch hike to the West, Glacier National Park, the Grand Tetons. I was reading Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the back of a pick-up truck going through Yellowstone when I decided I would never be able to go home to all-out safety again.
But then I had a family and felt the need to provide, a good thing. I saw the wild life as indulgent and contrary to my need for responsibility. I shut the door on wandering.
In a way, that denial had helped me grow up, but had planted a resentment of having to give up the exploring wild side. In response, I withheld what I most wanted to do out of spite. I wouldn't write as way to get back at a life that required schedules and accountability to my "stuff."
Problem was, the only person I was hurting was myself.
David asked me about writing, how I had come to it, why I was so stuck about it.
"Long story," I said.
"That's okay. We've got time, miles still to go," he said.
By the time we made the turn up Melpomene Road toward Cascabel, where the road turns to washboard gravel, it was dark. Animals ran into the headlight beams and then back out into shadows. I think one of them was a ringtail cat. The others were jack rabbits, coyotes, and kangaroo rats. The desert was coming to life.
