Roads From the Ashes

by Megan Edwards

  We found a campground near the Inn that was equipped with electrical hookups. They meant we could operate our air conditioner, which in turn meant that we’d only have to imagine what it was like for the forty-niners and borax miners who passed this way without benefit of Freon. Running at full tilt, our cooling system was able to keep the inside of the coach a few degrees below 90, just cool enough to leave Marvin inside while we went exploring.

  We stuck to the shade of a row of tamarisk trees and soon found ourselves at the edge of a swimming pool. Bobbing listlessly in the pool, looking like the floating remains of a shipwreck, were two lobster-red men and one scarlet woman. Beached lifelessly around the pool were more crimson bodies in bathing suits. Heat waves rose in shimmering little eddies off the concrete deck.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say we were looking at the aftermath of murder by blowtorch,” I whispered to Mark. “I’d bet money they’re from someplace cold, trying to soak up enough rays to last them through a northern winter. A man lying on an air mattress sneezed. “Gesundheit!” said the woman next to him. “They’re alive!” said Mark. “They’re German!” I said at the same time.

  We decided to act like snakes instead of Northern Europeans and stay inside until dark. We returned to the Phoenix, where the air conditioner was doing an admirable job. Our thermometer read 82°.

  “Well, it’s your birthday,” I said to Mark. “What do you want to do to celebrate?”

  “How about a game of backgammon to start with?” he said, and I rummaged in a cabinet to find the set.

  Twenty minutes later, Mark said, “The sky looks weird.” He was right. It was yellowish green. We went outside, where it was still as hot as a blast furnace, and there was still no hint of a breeze. “It looks even weirder now,” I said.

  “Look over there,” said Mark. Beyond the tamarisk trees, an opaque yellow wall was moving in our direction. We could see the mesquite in the distance begin to bend and snap before they were obliterated by the advancing cloud. A few minutes later, we felt the first gusts of wind.

  We retreated inside the Phoenix. Mark closed all the windows and raised all the shades. We watched the billowing mass approach, and soon we were enveloped in a cloud of sand and dust. Visibility shrank to zero, and we could hear the dry grit scour the outside of the Phoenix.

  “I’m going outside,” said Mark. “I’m staying here,” I replied. Mark left, admitting a flurry of sand in the process. Five minutes later, he was back. “It’s suffocating out there,” he panted. “It’s like being inside a vacuum cleaner bag. I couldn’t breathe.”

  The storm lasted about an hour. I’d been in blizzards before, and thunderstorms complete with serious wind, but this was the first wholly arid tempest of my life. “If we’d put a steak out there, we’d have jerky now,” I said. “Oh, and happy birthday, Mark.”

  “Best one yet,” he said.

  The Jayhawkers

  We left the campground before dawn the next morning. Everyone in the place knew it, because it’s impossible to sneak in the Phoenix One. When you turn the ignition switch, it emits a roar reminiscent of an Apollo rocket achieving liftoff. When you turn on the headlights, every object within a hundred yards is illuminated to the level of high noon. Since it couldn’t be silent, we made our exit swift.

  We made it to Zabriskie Point in time to see the sun rise over its other-worldly clefts and wrinkles. We rose high to Dante’s View and scanned the inferno before the sun burned the cool morning breeze away. By ten a.m. we descended into Badwater, at 265 feet below sea level, the lowest bit of dry land in the continent.

  A big red double-decker bus had beaten us to the spot, and two dozen tourists were busily taking pictures of the sign marking sea level high above them. The bus’s front end looked like an ordinary touring coach, with recliner seats and tall tinted windows. The back end was different. It sported two rows of porthole-like windows.

  “I think they sleep in there,” said Mark. “Those look like berths.” We moved closer for a look, and he was right. It was a camping-mobile, and it amazed us. While we should have been marveling over the unique little fish that survive in Badwater’s ponds and letting the alien topography overwhelm us, we found ourselves wondering why tourists would pay for the privilege of sleeping eighteen inches away from a stranger with smelly feet. “They should just sign up for a tour of duty on a submarine,” said Mark.

  The red buses, we discovered later, are very popular with European tourists. They spend twenty-one days traveling, and they do most of their own cooking. If they aren’t friends before they begin, they are when they’re done. “Either that or they’re dead,” said a driver we met at a hot springs resort. “And I’m dead regardless.”

  Before retiring for the hot part of the day, we stopped once more at the visitor’s center in Furnace Springs. “We’ve heard about the Jayhawkers,” we told the ranger. “And we’d like to learn more.” We left with the book that would not only tell us the story of the intrepid band of gold-seeking Midwesterners who were on the spot when Death Valley received its name, but also the beginning of a tradition of our own. I read The Jayhawkers aloud as we drove. Since then, we’ve never been without a “road read,” a work from the great corpus of travel literature that begins with Homer’s Odyssey and won’t end until the last adventurer reaches the horizon.

  The Jayhawkers was a perfect beginning. It was the history of a group of forty-niners who left Illinois in 1849 hoping to reach California’s gold fields before winter. Well-equipped with wagons, oxen, and supplies, they had every expectation that their journey would go smoothly.

  It did, until they left Utah. A map surfaced to challenge the knowledge of their Mormon guide, and there was dissent among the wagons. The group split up, some trusting the guide, and some electing to follow the new map.

  Instead of leading them on a shortcut, the map led the travelers into Tomesha. The name Death Valley is the Jayhawkers’ legacy, and the fact that many of them lived to tell the story of their agonizing ordeal in the Amargosa Desert bears witness to their stamina and determination.

  People nowadays use the Gold Rush as a metaphor for the mad stampede into cyberspace that exploded in 1996. It’s natural to compare the millions who rushed to stake claims on the electronic gold fields to the fortune seekers who converged on California in 1849. But the Web Rush took place on a plane where thirst is virtual, and dying oxen are mere metaphor. The bones in Death Valley exist in three dimensions, hard evidence that the Jayhawkers and their ilk gave their dream everything they had.

  Adventure in Finding Out

  From Death Valley, we headed north out of the arid rain shadow and into lush coastal spring. The roads were lined with lupines, and as we drove farther north, purple and white foxgloves. At the north edge of California, we slowed down to wend our way through the primeval groves of Redwood National Park. Nearby, we stopped in Scotia, last of the company towns and home of the largest redwood mill in the world.

  “We’re trying to get more land for the park,” said the park ranger, “Before all the virgin forests are gone.”

  “Trees are a renewable resource,” said the lumber mill guide. “We plant more than we cut.” And so the struggle goes. Coast redwoods and the silent fern kingdoms over which they reign are beautiful. Coast redwoods make beautiful houses.

  On up into Oregon we drove, to the center of the state. All our lives we’d heard of Crater Lake, and now, even though the snow was still thick on the mountains, we wanted to see the legendary waters.

  White men had been trapping in the Cascades for fifty years before any of them knew about the lake in the high caldera. They did business with Indians who knew the place well, but not a one divulged the secret. The lake was sacred.

  It wasn’t until 1853 that John Wesley Hilman and a band of prospectors who were searching for the Lost Cabin Gold Mine stumbled upon this unrevealed marvel. Their initial
reaction is unrecorded, but I like to think they were struck dumb when they reached the rim and first looked upon the deep blue lake created when Mount Mazama exploded over seven thousand years before.

  We were speechless, and so was the rest of the crowd of spectators that had gathered to look down into the serene circular crater that holds water nearly two thousand feet deep. There were hundreds of people there on that chilly spring day, and we were all moved to silence. Even the little boy next to me whispered as he pointed out Wizard Island to his mother.

  The road around the lake was still snow-covered and impassable, so our view on that pristine day was limited to what we could see from the parking lot. We stood looking until the ice under our feet made itself felt through our shoes. Then we headed back to the Phoenix.

  As we approached, a man stepped out of a sleek black car and greeted us. “Is that your truck?” he asked. “It’s quite the ride.”

  Mark answered his laundry list of questions about suspension and horsepower and mileage and torque, and then I said, “Where are you from?”

  “New Jersey,” he replied, “I’m the guy people call when they have too much money.”

  And so began a conversation of a type to which we’ve since become accustomed. When you meet people on the road, away from home, out where everyone’s a stranger, they want to tell you stuff. They want to tell you whatever it is they can’t talk about back where it matters. Maybe they want to strut a little. Maybe they want to unload. Whatever else may be the case, they want to talk.

  The man from New Jersey wasn’t kidding, he said. He really was the guy to call if you had too much money. He dealt in money, great piles of it, mountains of coins, bales of bills. “Cash piles up in places like Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It piles up in banks. Have you ever thought about what happens to it all?” We hadn’t. “Well, it comes to people like me in huge unmarked trucks. You’d never in a million years guess they were carrying money. We sort it, weigh it, redistribute it. And if it’s old, we burn it.”

  He went on about the vast quantities of coins and bills he dealt with. “It’s beyond ordinary comprehension,” he said. “Millions and millions of dollars pass through our facility every day. Every single day. You can’t even imagine the kind of security arrangements we have. It’s more elaborate than Fort Knox, and nobody really knows about it.” Finally Mark asked, “Where, exactly, is this place?”

  The man fell silent. His cheeks turned a little redder than the chilly breeze had made them. “Gee, uh, I can’t tell you. I’ve already told you too much.” He was running our conversation back through his brain, scanning it for dangerous details that might now be out of the bag. “Really, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking,” he stammered, and then he vanished into his car.

  It’s easy to think you’re away from it all when you’re three thousand miles from home and standing on the edge of a volcanic lake. What harm can come from telling a story to a couple of strangers? It feels good to wow them, and it’s such a pleasure to get the chance to speak freely about secret things. Then, the question. “Where, exactly, is this place?” You’d better leave fast. It’s either that or kill them.

  More often, it’s tall tales that come out of the mouths of strangers on the road. We met a man in Morro Bay, California, who claimed he’d sailed his little sloop to Hawaii, and that in a matter of weeks he’d be taking her “around the Horn.” The little sloop looked as though it had never been past the breakwater, and the man’s story had the cadence of oral tradition, a well-rehearsed epic aged in a whiskey keg and roasted over slow cigars. It lived only in the telling.

  Sometimes, though, you just can’t tell. A hunter in a campground in Montana held us in thrall with a story of industrial intrigue. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether it’s fact or fantasy.

  “I was working in an exclusive hunting lodge in the early eighties. One week, a small coterie of top Coca-Cola executives rented the whole place so they could have it to themselves. I was sort of their valet during the day, the guy who made sure they had pencils and coffee and overhead projectors — whatever they wanted all day long. They spent most of the day meeting together in one room, and I was pretty much with them all the time.

  “At first I didn’t pay much attention to what they were talking about. I’d been working at the lodge for nearly a year, and we had executive groups coming all the time for retreats and conferences. Mostly they talked about stuff an outsider wouldn’t be interested in.

  “But these guys were different. They were talking about Coke itself. Coke was sweetened with cane and beet sugar, and the price was rising at an alarming rate. They wanted to switch to corn syrup, which was much cheaper. The trouble was that corn syrup tastes different— not a lot different, but different enough that if you tasted the two right next to each other, you could tell easily.

  “So basically, these guys were trying to figure out a way to get Coca-Cola off the shelves for about two months. That way, people wouldn’t be able to compare the old with the new. So you know what they came up with? New Coke! They spent that week planning how they’d make a new recipe for a new-and-improved Coke, and they’d put it out there and take old Coke off the shelves.

  “They were pretty sure everyone would hate New Coke. They’d advertise it for two months, field all the press, then admit failure and bring back original Coke. Of course, it wouldn’t be totally genuine, the new old Coke would be sweetened with corn syrup, but by then there wouldn’t be enough real old Coke to compare it to. And of course, if by some miracle New Coke was a hit, they’d just keep the new recipe.

  “By the end of the week, they’d pretty much thought of every detail, including which one of them would be the public whipping boy for the whole orchestrated fiasco. He’d leave in shame, but he’d be getting a pretty fabulous golden handshake on his way out.

  “So that was pretty much it, and the group left. Six months later, I watched the whole thing unfold exactly as they’d planned. It was brilliant. Nobody ever suspected a thing.”

  “I sure didn’t,” I said. “I’ve never even heard anyone mention the possibility of subterfuge. And New Coke has become the textbook example of corporate marketing failure.”

  “I know,” said the hunter, smiling. “It makes you wonder who to believe, doesn’t it?”

  When you live on the road, you spend a fair amount of time wondering whom to believe. Do you believe the directions you get from a gas station attendant when they directly contradict your map? Do you believe a sign that says “Road Not Safe for RVs?” Do you believe that if you take a tiny road out of Wallace, Idaho, and go up past Burke, Mace, and Cornwall, through Yellow Dog, Black Bear, Frisco, and Gem, cross a rickety wooden bridge so narrow your tires barely fit on the planks, and drive up a rocky track to the top of Shifter’s Hill, that you’ll find a man hard at work with a chainsaw? The trouble with not believing is that you’ll miss meeting Vern Pine, a sculptor of consummate talent who creates masterpieces with power tools.

  It’s not safe to believe the gas station man. It’s risky to ignore the sign. You never know when a sagging bridge will plunge to the river below, and who’s to say whether the chainsaw master up on Shifter’s Hill is an artist or a madman? There’s safety in wondering. There’s adventure in finding out.

  Chapter 7

  Closed Until The Verdict Comes In

  Making Money On The Road

  When we first went to Traveland, the Revcon Trailblazer didn’t just attract our attention. It riveted it. It nailed us to the floor and refused to let us go. It ignited a firestorm of feelings best reflected in clichés. Life’s an adventure. The world is our oyster. It was only a motorhome, but it absolutely screamed the call of the open road.

  Once we were behind the wheel, we immediately began to notice that the Phoenix had the same effect on lots of people. Not everyone harbors a secret longing to hit the road, but Jack Kerouac and John
Steinbeck are the tiny tip of an enormous iceberg. We quickly came to recognize the faraway look that would steal into a young man’s eyes as he ran his hand over the hood. “I’m going to do this,” he’d say. “Some day.” There were dreamers everywhere, would-be itinerants who longed to leave the baggage of life behind and head for the horizon.

  I myself was once an Easy Rider romantic, longing for a trip that would reflect in three dimensions the journey of life. I’ve always been a lover of metaphor, and there is no better allegory for human existence than odyssey. In the dreaming stage, it’s easy to forget that life on a roll is not all sunsets and singing about Bobby McGee. In the dreaming stage, it’s literature, a mighty epic, a noble saga. Nothing happens without divine meaning. It’s a perfect composition. It’s freedom. It’s nothing left to lose.

  You write the book before you leave. You’re Homer, you’re Bunyan, you’re Twain. Really, the journey is far more magnificent before you set tire to pavement. As soon as you do that, as soon as reality bites, you’re wrestling a sewer hose and agonizing over how to pay for another tank of gas. It’s the part the authors who’ve inspired you left out, or if they mentioned it, they couched it in heroic terms. Trust me, there’s nothing epic about thawing out fifty gallons of frozen sewage with a diesel flame thrower. Heroic dialogue does not include lines like, “There’s a big hard turd clogging the hose.”

  But the sunsets are poetry in action, and with the windshield wiper slapping time, you still get the chance to sing. It’s time for a new dream to kick in, and there’s an excellent one ready and waiting. It’s the dream of making money on the road.