by Dan Millman
Around dusk, I stopped to stretch and relieve myself. Then I drove twenty more miles before catching a few fitful hours of sleep stretched out in the back of the pickup. I rose in the cooling air of the early-morning hours and drove on.
The day dawned hot as I continued west, driving slowly now, scanning the horizon for any promising signs. A mirage on the horizon turned into a real gas station and convenience store. A welcome sight. I pulled in and entered the store.
After loading up on water and a few snacks, I studied a map on the wall, looking for any promising landmarks around Fort Mohave. I noted Las Vegas, about two hours north on Route 95, which passed through the town of Cal-Nev-Ari, named for the three state borders nearby.
I added another quart of oil, and topped off the gas tank and radiator. This old service station, an oasis in the arid expanse, had a special meaning for me, calling forth the many evenings I’d spent with my old mentor back in Berkeley nearly ten years before—like the time Socrates and I had engaged in a heated conversation about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Has the world changed, I wondered, or have I? Tapping the dashboard in time to a pop tune on the radio, momentarily lifted by a grander sense of purpose, I eased the pickup back out onto the highway.
Well after dusk, I found a budget motel whose noisy window air conditioner did its best to hold the heat at bay.
Morning was a long time coming. I shook off sleep with some push-ups and sit-ups until the rising heat made such exertion foolish. I found a pay phone in the hall and called Ama, hoping that she might have recalled some details about the journal’s location. When she didn’t answer, I called my daughter, listening to the phone ring again and again, reminding myself to send another postcard.
Skipping the motel’s continental breakfast—white toast and cornflakes—I continued west.
An hour later, as I checked my map on a long straightaway, a hot breath of wind tore it out of my hands like an angry dog, whipping it out the window and off into the desert. I wasn’t about to slam on the brakes and chase it. And what use had it served? Maps were only good for people who knew where they were going.
After a few more miles, I caught sight of a hitchhiker ahead. As I slowed, I saw that he was dressed in a worn suit, even in the desert heat. Pulling over, I rolled down the window. He wasn’t as young as I’d first thought, but he wasn’t old either—maybe in his midthirties, probably Mexican or mestizo. I sensed a wiry frame underneath his oversize coat. He had a mop of black hair and a deeply tanned face, clean-shaven. “My name is Pájaro,” he said with a slight bow.
“And I’m Dan. Would you like a ride?”
He bowed again. “Gracias. As long as you are heading in the direction of water.”
As the hitchhiker climbed in, I handed him my canteen. He took several modest sips, pouring water into his open mouth without touching his lips to the rim. “You speak English well,” I said. “Where did you learn it?”
“Here and there. I made it my business to learn since I’m a businessman.”
“What’s your business?”
“I buy and sell.”
“Anything special?”
“Everything that I sell is special. What I buy—well, that’s rather ordinary. As it happens, I’m also a desert guide.”
Hmmm, I thought. A desert guide without any food or water, standing by the highway. I let the irony settle before asking, “And what do you charge as a desert guide?”
“My fee is nominal and my service exclusive,” he explained. “I only take on one client at a time. How about five dollars a day plus food and water?”
“Where do you propose to guide me?”
“Wherever you wish to go. I know every town, every mountain, and every part of the desert,” he said without false modesty.
“Every part of the desert?”
“Every one, Señor Dan. I know where the snakes hide, where the dangers lie, and how to find water from the saguaro cactus. . . .”
Why not? I thought. If I was going to play Don Quixote searching for this impossible dream, why not hire a trusted compañero? “Okay, Pájaro. It’s a deal. For a few days, anyway.”
I removed one hand from the wheel, and we shook on it.
“Pájaro means bird,” he informed me.
We traveled in silence, passing red mesas and foothills as the afternoon pulled the sun toward a distant mountain range.
When the sky to the west turned orange and magenta, I pulled off the dusty road and we made camp. Pájaro suggested a spot that would provide shelter from prevailing winds out of the east or south and offer shade from the rising sun to the east. My spirits rose as sunset brought some relief from the heat. Forewarned about cool nights in the higher elevations, I spread my sleeping sack on a level spot, checking for anthills or other insect activity. Pájaro seemed content to stretch out on his coat.
How different the desert felt when I became a part of it. What looked dead and arid from a distance came alive at night. As a canopy of darkness descended, Pájaro made a small fire. We gazed into the crackling flames. I heard a coyote howl, then two or three more. Pájaro had asked earlier what I was doing in this region; I’d told him only that I was on a personal quest and that I hoped I was heading in the right direction. I gazed up at the star-specked sky. Soon the stars faded into dreams.
The next morning we broke camp early to beat the sun. I figured we’d find somewhere to eat and gas up closer to a populated town. “As it happens, I know a place,” Pájaro announced. He directed me to drive due west and, sure enough, after about twenty miles, scattered buildings appeared, then an old gas station adjoining a small café. I knew I needed to find another map despite Pájaro’s self-proclaimed mastery of the local geography.
I filled the tank while Pájaro cleaned the windows. I paid him five dollars in advance for the day’s services, and extra money to pay for the gas. After he took care of that, he told me he would visit the outdoor restroom, then join me inside the café.
I didn’t need a menu: the place smelled of hash browns, coffee, and pancakes. A waitress poured two waters. I drained mine quickly and signaled for a refill.
I looked around at the other diners: A couple. An older woman. A few businessmen on the road. And Papa Joe. Seated at the counter to my left, he dipped a piece of fried bread into a plate of eggs. Shaking my head, I moved over and sat down next to him. He cracked a smile but didn’t look up from his food.
“All right, abuelo, I have to know. How—”
“Nearly everyone stops here. I can recommend the huevos rancheros.”
A few minutes later, I nodded to the waitress as she refilled my glass for the third time, and placed my order. Glancing out the window toward the restroom just outside, wondering what was keeping Pájaro but glad to have some one-on-one time with Papa Joe, I asked, “Can I get you something else to drink? You look as dry as a prune.”
“A lemonade will be fine,” he said. “And to pass the time as your huevos get cooked, I have another—”
I interrupted: “You can only imagine my enthusiasm for yet another riddle paired with almost no useful information.”
“I can imagine that and more,” he said. “Still, you may learn something useful on the other side of this little mystery: ‘I have marble walls as white as milk, lined with skin as soft as silk; no walls are there to this stronghold, yet thieves break in and steal my gold. What am I?’ ”
“I often wonder about that . . . but let me think: marble walls as white as milk . . .”
“Lined with skin as soft as silk,” he repeated.
“Hold on. You said it had marble walls, but later you said that the stronghold had no walls, yet thieves break in to steal its gold. How can there be walls but no walls? And how can thieves break in if there are no walls? It doesn’t make any sense!”
“That’s why it’s a riddle, burrito.”
The waitress brought the food and I dug in. “It’s solvable, though, right?”
“Sure. This
is an easy one. The answer is right in front of your nose.”
I looked down and took another bite of—of course. “An egg,” I answered.
“Thought I might have to cluck and lay one before you got it! But now,” he said, finishing off his lemonade with a loud slurp on his straw and setting the glass on the counter with a clunk of authority, “I suppose you expect more information.”
“From your vast treasure house.”
He leaned conspiratorially toward me and whispered in my ear, “You’ll likely find this journal where the hawk soars—in a high place.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, now you can avoid low places.” Glancing left and right as if he could see, as if other ears might be listening, he whispered, “And be selective about where you place your trust.”
“Apparently that would include you.”
“Of course!” he said with another snaggletoothed smile.
I recalled that Socrates had given me a similar caution years ago, saying that trust had to be earned over time. Meanwhile, Papa Joe gazed through me with his unseeing eyes—an unsettling feeling—and added another caution of his own: “You’re in desert country, nieto. Pay better attention to what surrounds you than you paid to your meal.” With a nod, he slid from his stool and deftly accepted the arm of a passing waitress. I watched as they proceeded outside toward the restroom.
By now it seemed unlikely that Pájaro would be rejoining me. But before he vanished as mysteriously as he’d appeared, he had paid for the gas.
EIGHT
* * *
That night I made camp without my desert guide. I took a short night walk by moonlight, hoping the desert might whisper its secrets. Extending my senses into the surroundings, alert to any sign, I glimpsed a rabbit, an owl, and a few lizards. The journal still felt far away.
I got down on hands and knees to watch some fuzzy ants. Just as my face was nearly at ground level, I looked past the ants and saw what they were running from—my first up-close look at a scorpion. Not just any scorpion but, as I later learned from my survival book, a giant desert hairy scorpion, which was ambling in my direction. I jumped up and backed away, my heart pounding as I headed back to camp.
I lay down in my sleeping bag but saw the scorpion again whenever I shut my eyes. That whiplike stinger stirred a memory of the time Socrates referred to my busy mind as a “wild monkey stung by a scorpion.” Maybe it’s not the creatures that are frightening me, but my thoughts about them. Despite the insight, I still jumped up several times, like a wild monkey, to turn my sleeping bag inside out and shake it. Satisfied, I gazed up into the starry firmament, alone in the desert. Just before sleep took me, I heard a coyote and realized: In the desert, you’re never really alone. A thousand creepy-crawlies are out there, waiting.
* * *
In this southern part of the Kaibab National Forest of northern Arizona, a cloudburst could bring out rippling colors: countless arrays of wildflowers splashed with white, yellow, blue, pink, orange, red, and magenta; even the beavertail and prickly pear cacti wore their best. But the heat quickly reasserted itself, increasing my sense of urgency. By the time I crossed paths with an old local at a gas pump, I was feeling so desperate I tried a Hail Mary pass and told him, in faltering Spanish, that I was searching for a libro particular, a particular book. He answered, in English, “You can find a nice bookstore back in Flagstaff.”
Clearly, I needed to cool off my brain.
The quality of my logic continued to deteriorate as I cheered myself with such original banalities as: If you don’t care where you are, you’re never lost. Which brought to mind how Socrates would frequently remind me that I was always here, and the time was always now. And the journal? I thought. Always somewhere else.
Meanwhile, the pickup devoured oil like a drunk on a binge as I chugged past an endless array of cacti and sand drifts, and through a brief downpour that evaporated even before it touched the earth—a local phenomenon called the virga, the guidebook said. I reminded myself that sun exposure was the most common cause of death in this area, bringing to mind a visceral memory of my misadventure on a surfboard adrift at sea under a similar blazing sun. Wherever I turn, death reminds me of Samarra.
I felt the irrational impulse to pull over, get out my shovel, and start breaking up the soil. I imagined myself as 102-year-old Desert Rat Dan with mummified skin, digging his hundred-thousandth hole. I kept driving.
Alone in the truck, I found my thoughts drifting again and again to the past: a few hundred miles from my current location and seven years past, I was a young college athlete competing in a national championship as if it were the most important thing in the world. I suppose it was at the time, at least to me. Now life had other “importances,” as Socrates had once called them—changing values, shifting perspectives.
Other random images and impressions passed through my awareness—Tappan Square Park on the Oberlin campus . . . bodysurfing in the waves at Santa Monica Beach, where I’d come of age—jumbled together with the face of my daughter looking up at me. Then I saw the faces of Ama and then Kimo, a Hawaiian youth who’d shown me the cave beneath the sea where I’d found the little samurai. Which reminded me of Japan, where I’d be right now if I hadn’t found that letter from Socrates.
That night I had a crazy dream about my old mentor wearing a string tie, white shirt, and vest—dealing blackjack in a casino! This struck me as so ridiculous that I laughed out loud, waking myself. Still held by the dream, I sat up in my sleeping bag in the cool hours before dawn. I spoke aloud, my throat dry: “No, Soc—you can’t be serious!” But according to Ama, Socrates had mentioned that city, or someplace nearby. I couldn’t discount any possibility. Vegas rooftops were, after all, high places. Who else but a delirious Socrates would think of concealing a mystic journal atop a hotel casino, hidden in plain sight where no one would look?
Even if the notion was unlikely, I needed a respite from the dust and heat. So I broke camp, headed north, and checked into a motel a few blocks from the Las Vegas Strip—no luxury resort, but clean, cool, and without an insect in sight.
I dove onto the bed and fell instantly into a deep sleep.
NINE
* * *
I awoke the next morning to the maid knocking on my door. “Uh, no need to clean—thanks!” I called out before stepping into a long, steamy shower. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how drained I felt. I shaved and applied a liberal amount of the motel’s skin lotion. When in Vegas, I thought, follow the house rules. (Soc would have approved.)
Outside, I strolled around the swimming pool. They should put more pools out in the desert, I thought, making a note to immerse myself soon.
In the motel coffee shop, I drank two glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice and polished off a fruit salad, an English muffin, and some oatmeal. And a strawberry waffle. Later, I treated the old pickup truck to a wash, watching layers of dirt, grit, and grime slide away. While I waited, I tossed a quarter into one of the omnipresent slot machines in Sin City. The one-armed bandit whirred, the images spun, and when they clicked to a crisp stop, I heard the jingling of quarters—not a lot, but enough to pay for the wash. Maybe my luck was changing.
The Strip was crowded as usual with tourists heading to hotel casinos or wedding chapels promising dreams-come-true. Surrounded on all sides by desert, roasting under a blistering sun, the city if left unattended would soon turn back to dust and sand. While it lasted, it both delivered riches and broke hearts—a place where one could arrive in a $20,000 car and leave on a $100,000 bus.
I decided to take a siesta so I could shift to Vegas time. Like most stylish vampires, the city woke up after dark, making you forget who you were for a little while. But I couldn’t afford to forget. Even now, the journal might be nearby, nestled somewhere above my head.
Later, moving through the downtown crowds at 2 a.m., blinking against the lights, I walked through a balmy dreamscape of steel, neon, and deep-pile carpets. Luxuri
ous foliage and fountains conveyed a sense of permanence, but, like much of the town, it was all an illusion.
I drove to the outskirts of the city to view its silhouette, scouting the tallest buildings, where Soc might possibly have hidden the journal. But I couldn’t find a single hotel or casino that looked like it would allow rooftop access. So I decided that one or two days of rest and relaxation might refresh my perspective.
I played some blackjack and a little roulette. Twenty dollars ahead, I treated myself to the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles at an all-night movie theater, forgetting everything else for a few hours of cool air-conditioning and warm popcorn. Back at the motel in the early-morning hours, I stripped down to my underwear (which I figured looked enough like a swimsuit), dove into the lighted pool, and backstroked into the shallows. What time is it? I wondered lazily as I bobbed up and down. Oh right, Soc, I got this one—it’s now.
Late the next morning, fruit juice traveling from a cocktail glass up a straw and into my mouth made me grin—so did floating for an hour on a blow-up raft in the motel pool with the slick feel of sunscreen on my skin. Grinning and giddy. Vegas magic turning one man into an amoeba, undoing epochs of evolution.
Continuing my devolution, that night I found myself at a casino roulette table. I played number eleven—not the smartest move, considering the odds. A modest bet. By midnight and after more losing bets, I still felt a loyalty to good ol’ number eleven, so I persisted. It had to come up sometime. Down to my last chips, I heard a whisper: “Put it on sixteen.”
I wheeled around—no one nearby but the croupier. Surely this was a sign. I shifted my remaining stake to number sixteen. The wheel spun and finally stopped—on sixteen! I was about to cash in a sizable pile of chips when the voice spoke again: “Let it ride.” So I let it ride. The ball rolled, danced, hovered on the edge of sixteen—then skittered out onto a green zero.