The Open Road

“You’re getting bored,” says Monte.

“Am not.”

We are somewhere on Highway 6 in Nevada. Miles and miles of straight road edged by scrubby desert and barren mountains. I have my feet on the dashboard and I'm chewing gum and scrolling through the playlists on Monte's ipod. We're in a silver van that we've rented just for this adventure, and it's our second day of driving, maybe our third. It's just the two of us on the open road.

If you're going to take a trip like this, you better enjoy the ramblings of your own mind. Unfortunately, I don't. For starters, I'm obsessing about the fact that we left our old dog at the Humane Society kennel, and I've convinced myself that she is traumatized and grief-stricken in this terrible abandonment. I have already called the staff twice to see how she is and to remind them to comfort her.

"She's doing fine" said the woman at the desk, "but she can't come to the phone right now." Cute. And I would call again anyway, but we're not getting cell service here.

Driving into Bakersfield yesterday we passed white barren hills, an occasional oil well, cottonwood trees and old barns. There was a Hay for Sale sign...Siesta Apartments...a boarded up restaurant...so many brave little businesses gone under...and me meanwhile bereft about the dog. Later we stopped near Kernville for gas and a market. A skinny sun-dried woman in a t-shirt and tattoos stood by a motorcycle and smoked a cigarette, looking as though she'd been around the block way more than once and it wasn't that great. A couple of doughy-looking teen-aged girls with penciled-in eyebrows were standing around in a parking lot watching for their prince, and an old guy with an unruly beard was taking his change in lottery tickets at the gas station. "I'm gonna go for the mega-million this time," he told the clerk, sounding pretty confident. In front of the grocery store a little girl in purple hot pants and chunky high black boots stood over a cardboard box filled with mewing kittens, hoping to give them away, no takers so far. Naturally it made me think of the dog.

The road got twistier and I started to get a little carsick, plus my ears were popping, so I put away my journal for awhile, but not before recording the image of Monte slipping off his flip-flops and balancing on the rocks in the Kern River just so he could put his feet in and feel the temperature of the water because, as he explained, that’s what he has to do. He also likes to get the lay of the land as we drive, composing an ongoing sort of inquiry and commentary on the physical aspects of the world: "This was all greened up and forested when I came here with Steve, all covered in timber. I can't believe how far this fire burned. Did it jump the highway back there? Check out that switchback. Where does it go? Look at that interesting rock formation. You can tell they recently resurfaced this road. Is that a waterfall over there?"

We were climbing along Sherman Pass at about 6,000 feet, and the air was clean and cool. There were light colored rock formations, the charred sticks of bare trees, and yellow blooming brush everywhere. I wish I knew the name of those flowers. I wish I'd brought along a field guide so I could look it up. I wish there was a bottle of root beer in the cooler. Yeah. Root beer. It's a little different. I'm really not that into Coke lately. I definitely intend to give up Diet Cokes. Those artificial sweeteners can't be good for you. I wonder why sugar gets such a bad rap anyway? Sugar. Now there's a thought. Maybe we still have some of that chocolate. Okay. Let's see what this satellite radio has to offer. Two stations of Sinatra? Three of Howard Stern? How about Coffee House? Best of the Seventies, perhaps? CNN? NPR? BBC? Are we there yet?

There, however, is here. We parked and walked a short pleasant stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail along the south fork of the Kern River in the Southern Sierra wilderness.

Our first night camping was at Tuttle Creek, outside of Lone Pine, a place where we often stayed in the 1980s when we were younger fitter versions of ourselves. Monte promptly clicked into full-on camping mode. I think he genuinely enjoys this -- there's an order and compactness to it that suits him. For me, though, it’s a sentence. I hate having to think ahead about every detail, then lie there cramped and still in our metal receptacle hoping for sleep. I hate having to climb outside in the dark to go pee. I hate using nylon sleeping bags -- blankets should not swish and slip off in the night. Mostly, I hate the landscape of my mind, despite the full moon rising over the mountains, a big round yellow disk. In the morning we passed Manzanar...sorrow in the air...snow in the high mountains...a wide panorama...a starting over...a day blue and white and clean. On the radio, R.E.M. was singing It’s the End of the World as We Know It. Onward to Bishop and beyond to Highway 6 and Great Basin and Salt Lake City and southern Utah...

"I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear," wrote Everett Ruess, who vanished into the Utah wilderness when he was twenty years old, and even as shallow as I am, I DO know what he meant. I won't cheapen the wonders with words. But my reverence for beauty diminishes with strong cold winds, and a snowy landscape looks best to me from a vantage point with heat. In this I differ from the woman we met at an overlook near Wheeler Peak the morning after snow who actually mimed some sort of swoosh-swoosh ski motion and said, "Yes, yes! I smell winter sports!"

So I'm a hotel person, basically. What's wrong with that? And I love nature as much as the next guy, but I definitely crave the material comforts and distractions of a city now and then. And I have had a headache from the altitude ever since our little stroll to Baker Lake, somewhere above 10,000 feet, unbearably beautiful indeed. And I'm thinking about that funny little dog, transformed by age, who just wants to be near her people, knowing nothing of mortality but showing us the fast-forward version of our own. And I'm remembering a cross-country trip in 1974, calling home collect from KOA campgrounds in alien worlds...the befuddled voice of faraway Daddy, recipient of Georgia pecans and engorged phone bills...the ringing silence afterwards. The heart of a woman is not so hard to figure out.

Blind Canyon. Outback Taxidermy. Sometimes the world looks empty. Lonely roads and abandoned dwellings. So many broken dreams. I wish I could have photographed that flag-draped trailer with junk in the yard, or the wooden house with the broken windows and laundry on the line, unlikely places, but someone is home. On the radio an American Marine is talking about the difficulty of gouging out a man's eyeball during house-to-house fighting in Fallujah. On another station, the need for access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa. Barack Obama not wearing his American flag lapel pin. Retreating ice in the Arctic Ocean. Blackwater shootings. Ethanol glut.

I wish I could shake the feeling that I am bearing witness to endings. I wish I could pause more often, as I have watched Monte do, to listen and be still. I wish I wouldn't stamp my own sad story on the world. I wish I could look inside and feel a sense of peace. And I want to be a Buddhist? I'm a churned up neurotic with an awful lot of baggage and the open road just opens up the onslaught.

I reach back to fumble through the grocery sacks, remembering those sweet dried Mission figs we bought at Trader Joe's.

"You're getting bored," says Monte.

"Am not."