Tomorrow, we’re off to Arizona. There’s hardly a soul to be seen, although we have occasionally bumped into a couple in their sixties, who told us they started travelling round the States in their motor-home six months ago and plan to carry on as long as their health holds up.
MESSAGE TO L.
KAYENTA (ARIZONA), MARCH 27, 2008
Today’s drive from Torrey to Kayenta was a real test of our nerves. Entirely our own fault. We should have stopped to fill up in the first town, Hanksville, but it was seven o’clock in the morning, the girls were asleep in the back seat, and so we decided to keep driving. We didn’t even feel suspicious when we saw two huge gas stations in a one-horse town like Hanksville, and we drove straight past them making jokes about American consumerism. Stupid. The gas stations were there for the simple reason that the two hundred and fifty miles to Kayenta are pure desert, possibly the most deserted desert in the whole of the West.
We left the UT-24 at Hanksville and took the UT-95. At first, we were fine. There were the usual roadside signs: DID YOU CHECK YOUR VEHICLE BEFORE SETTING OFF? HAVE YOU CHECKED YOUR TIRES? PLEASE DO NOT TRAVEL WITHOUT WATER. The girls were still sleeping, and Ángela and I said nothing. Outside, only desert.
Half an hour passed, and the road was still utterly deserted. An hour went by, and still nothing. For the first time, I looked at the petrol gauge.
“What a desolate place!” Ángela said softly.
Another half an hour. I examined the map Earle had given us and noticed that halfway along the route, the Colorado river widened out and, when it reached Glen Canyon, seemed to form a lake. I thought it likely that there would be a service area there, a restaurant-cum-gas-station, like the Crosby Bar at Pyramid Lake. On the map I found a dot that gave me hope: Fry Canyon Store. I again looked at the gauge. The tank was half-full or slightly less.
We drove on for another twenty minutes at sixty-five miles an hour. No-one. Five minutes later, a big truck came towards us from the opposite direction. The driver waved to us, and we waved back.
“I think we’ll probably start seeing more traffic now. We’re very close to Glen Canyon,” I told Ángela.
Another half an hour, and when we reached Glen Canyon, another disappointment. It was more like a deep ditch, and the road simply snaked around it. Ten minutes later, when we drove over the Colorado river, we saw two trucks transporting sand along an orange-coloured esplanade. At least it was a sign of life. Meanwhile, I kept a careful watch on the road ahead. According to the map, we were near Fry Canyon Store. The needle on the gauge was now below half.
“No services.” I had spotted the sign from some way off. There was no gas station at the Fry Canyon Store. It was a hut, with no windows.
Ángela and I started exchanging reproaches, raising our voices slightly. Why had we not filled up in Hanksville? Hadn’t we seen that the area on the map was a complete blank?
I studied the map again: a surface unmarked by dots or names and traversed only by a thick blue line, the Colorado river, and our road marked by Earle in black.
“When we drove through Hanksville, we weren’t worried about the journey at all,” I said to Ángela. “Our sole concern was not to wake Izaskun and Sara.”
“At least they don’t know what’s happening, that’s one good thing,” Ángela said softly. It was twenty past ten. The girls had been sleeping for nearly three and a half hours.
I had done some calculations in pencil. According to the map, there was a fairly large town, Mexican Hat, about fifty miles from Glen Canyon.
“We’ll get there easily, I think.” As soon as I said that ‘I think’, I realised it was surplus to requirements.
Another half an hour. The only difference was that the desert seemed slightly less harsh and, to use Daniel Sada’s image, it was gradually coming to resemble a stage set: the occasional tree, some scrubland.
“I don’t understand why there’s no traffic,” Ángela said. “If Mexican Hat is a town, where are the cars and trucks of the people who live there?”
I had no answer. And yet there were more and more trees on either side of the road, and it wasn’t hard to imagine that there must be an inhabited place somewhere near, with houses, a river, a church perhaps – and a gas station.
We had been driving for three hours when we saw the wood, a green fringe on the edge of the sandy desert, and shortly after that, a crossroads. We read the sign very carefully: to the left, following the UT-95, were Blanding and Monticello; to the right, following the UT-261-S, thirty-four miles away, was Mexican Hat.
The road narrowed as we entered the wood and the surface grew more uneven. If the UT-95 was a minor road, then the UT-261-S was a minor minor road.
“If it wasn’t for that sign, I would think this road was leading nowhere,” Ángela said. It did resemble those ‘corridors’ through forests made by logging trucks.
About six miles further on, the trees began to thin out.
“It looks like this is where the wood ends,” I said.
At that very moment, I saw a traffic sign: 30 m.p.h. The speed limit. Ángela braked, but looked rather sceptical. The road was absolutely straight.
“It must be because of the bad surface,” I said. “It’s full of cracks.”
Another hundred yards further on and another sign: 15 m.p.h. There were fewer trees now, and with the sun shining through the topmost branches, the whole atmosphere seemed somehow less gloomy. Ángela and I looked at each other, not knowing what to say. The road was in a pretty bad state, but not bad enough to require a 15 m.p.h. speed limit.
Suddenly, we saw a handwritten sign: SLOW, PLEASE!!!
We got out of the car to see what lay ahead. Nothing, nothing lay ahead. Only air. We were at an observation point, at the top of one of those rock faces so beloved of climbers. The UT-261-S proper stopped there, and continued two hundred yards below.
We went a few steps closer to examine the near-vertical stretch of road below us. The road that connected the upper part of the UT-261-S with the lower part had been dug out of the rock and was only about nine feet wide. I counted seven bends. Down below, like a dead insect, lay a car with its wheels in the air.
It’s often said that in difficult situations, in battles, for example, when you find yourself in danger, someone takes hold of you, as if you were possessed, and you lose your individuality. In my brief experience, that ‘someone’ who takes hold of us is an automaton. Seeing that we had no alternative but to continue, I took the wheel like an automaton and set off – like an automaton – along the unpaved road.
Halfway down, Izaskun and Sara woke up.
“What’s happening? Where are we?”
“Shut up!” we both yelled.
In the end, it wasn’t that difficult. Just four minutes and we had reached the bottom.
We got out of the car to look back at the wall of rock. You couldn’t even see the road. Sara took some photographs, and Izaskun applauded our Ford Sedan.
The automaton inside me vanished when we set off again, and my head filled with terrifying images: our car meeting another car coming up, with no room for both; a huge boulder in the middle of the road and us stuck there, unable to go forwards or backwards; the car skidding on a curve and plunging off the road … Imagining what could have happened, I lost my concentration, and Ángela took the wheel again.
We drove on through the desert on the UT-261-S, but it was much more “stagey” than the earlier parts. Not far ahead, we could see strange-shaped rocks. One of them looked like a figure in a poncho and a Mexican sombrero: Mexican Hat. Twenty minutes later, we reached a gas station.
A Navajo woman served us. Without even asking, she filled the tank right up.
“With what was in the reserve tank and a bit more, we had enough petrol for another thirty miles,” Ángela told me.
I’m writing to you from Kayenta, the centre of the Navajo reserve. Ángela and the girls have gone down to the hotel swimming pool. I wanted to buy a beer to celebrate
the happy ending to our journey and to cool off, but without even looking at me, the waitress refused point-blank. No alcoholic drinks are served on the Navajo reserve. And so here you find me, in front of my computer, sipping a soft drink.
MESSAGE TO L.
ET IN ARCADIA EGO: DEATH
An image: the Navajo guide is calmly driving the jeep down the sandy slopes, while we’re admiring the rock formations. Suddenly, on the other side of a dune, we see a small ravine: at the bottom of the ravine, a pool of crystal-clear water. On the edge of the pool, beneath a leafy willow tree, a dead mole.
MESSAGE TO L.
ET IN ARCADIA EGO: VIOLENCE
We didn’t know that, among the Navajo, it’s considered rude to give information unless asked, and during the first part of the trip, our guide provided us with hardly any facts at all apart from the various tourist names for the rock formations: Totem, Three Sisters and so on. After a silence, Ángela asked about the education system and if the Navajo could study in their own language. Our guide said only that this was possible in junior school. I spoke then about the protests held by the Hopis to stop their children being taken to white schools, and about the photograph of the Hopi chiefs imprisoned in Alcatraz. Our guide smiled broadly and, with an expressive gesture, described the relationship between the two tribes: “Navajo and Hopi enemies!” At one point during the trip, we noticed that our guide was looking very tense and kept glancing in the rear-view mirror. Shortly after that, we were overtaken by the Navajo Nation Police. I thought perhaps he was worried because he wasn’t supposed to let visitors travel in the passenger seat, where he had placed Sara.
MARCH 30
THE MONSTER
On the return journey, we drove back on Route 95, the same road we had taken on the outward leg of our trip, and we stopped at the gas station in Tonopah. After paying, I returned to the car and noticed that both Ángela and the girls kept peering anxiously at a car parked nearby. When I looked too, I saw the monster: a man with his face completely covered in tattoos. The white and tawny lines formed arabesques and other geometric shapes. He had high, very prominent cheekbones, a mane of reddish hair, pointed ears, and his upper lip was split like a cat’s. He resembled a wild animal.
However, it seems he was a friendly monster, because when he said something to the girl at the till, she laughed.
THE CAT MAN
I only had to mention what I had seen at the gas station in Tonopah for Dennis to identify the monster.
“Oh, the Cat Man!” he exclaimed. “He’s another world record holder, like Steve Fossett. Apparently, no other human being has made so many changes to his body. Silicone, tattoos, surgery, piercing, he did it all.”
An hour later, Dennis sent me various links about the Cat Man. He didn’t seem quite so impressive in the photographs, but they were still very shocking. He looked half-cat or half-tiger. According to his biography, he was a Native American, from the Huron tribe.
BACK IN RENO
We were very glad to be back in our house in College Drive after that three-thousand-mile journey. If, as Eric Havelock writes in his book The Muse Learns to Write, all life’s pleasures are related to rhythm, we were really pleased to return to the rhythm of our Reno routine. The raccoon was in his usual place next to the hut; in the morning, we could hear the blue jays chattering; at the university, Earle, Dennis and Mary Lore were the same as ever; at school, Izaskun and Sara had the same homework to do as before we set off. And yet our happiness was far from complete. The dark side of Reno life continued. Mary Lore reminded me of this when I dropped in at the centre to say hello. Yes, she and Mannix were fine, and so were the girls, but …
“They still haven’t caught the spider. And it’s nearly two months since he killed Brianna. He’s probably already preparing to commit another murder. It’s just really worrying.”
From the way in which she phrased this – “they still haven’t caught the spider” – I guessed that she and Dennis had been discussing the matter a lot over the vacation.
On the porch, I found over a week’s worth of Reno Gazette-Journals, which had been left to pile up during our absence. I glanced through them and again found articles about Brianna Denison. Et in Arcadia ego: violence and death.
APRIL 9
AN ARTICLE FROM THE RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
“A 35-year-old mother of four was jailed on child neglect charges. Officers said her children had been left home alone where they played with knives and tools.
“The woman was arrested on Thursday during her shift at Wal-Mart on suspicion of child neglect.
“Her children, aged 6, 7, 9 and 13, were placed into emergency foster care.
“Officers described the home as in “complete disarray” with rotting food and dirty clothes … The children were sleeping on box springs and took knives and razors to bed with them.”
FUNERAL OF A SOLDIER KILLED IN IRAQ
I was lying in bed in our house in College Drive. Once again I was sleeping badly. I would wake in the dark and hear footsteps, a window being smashed, a door handle turning, and I would sit bolt upright in bed, thinking: “Who’s there?” But there was no-one, nothing. The house was silent. So was the town. It was the same on that day, April 17, 2008: Ángela was sleeping; Izaskun and Sara were sleeping. All was well. Brianna Denison’s murderer had not attacked again. It was said that he might be in Seattle, where, it seems, there had been an identical case of a petite young woman being kidnapped and strangled.
I heard the Reno Gazette-Journal land on the porch and went out to pick it up, then took it into the kitchen to read. Before sitting down, I checked to see if the raccoon was waiting in the darkness, among the shadows. There he was in his favourite place, next to the hut. I found his presence soothing. It was a sign of normality.
The protagonist of the main news item was Army Sergeant Timothy Smith, who had been killed when his vehicle struck an improvised explosive device. His body had already been taken to his home town of South Lake Tahoe.
“Fallen soldier returns with honors,” the headline said.
A large photograph showed the details. In the background, the snow-covered peaks of the mountains. In the foreground, the coffin, the American flag fluttering in the breeze, a few soldiers standing to attention, and a white aeroplane in the middle of the airstrip. There were two more photographs: one showing an old school friend of his, Lisa Calderón, wiping the tears from her eyes, and one of Timothy Smith himself. “I’ll always remember his bright red hair,” Lisa Calderón said. She added: “He just lit up the room when he walked in.” And yet the photograph showed a rather sad, withdrawn young man.
Another name to add to the memorial in central Reno dedicated to Nevadans killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. His name would follow that of David J. Drakulich and the other soldiers whose names I had copied into my notebook: Raul Bravo, Anthony J. Schober, Alejandro Varela, Joshua R. Rodgers and Joshua S. Modgling.
There was a note at the end in small print giving details of the funeral service, which would be held at eleven o’clock the next day, Friday, April 18, at the Sierra Community Church in South Lake Tahoe.
I talked to Ángela about the funeral and, twenty-four hours later, after dropping the girls off at school, I set off for South Lake Tahoe, which was an hour away in a normal car, but an hour and a half in our second-hand Ford Sedan.
Car engines take a real hammering going up those mountain roads. The roads are very narrow and appear insignificant in comparison with the rocks and cliffs towering above, and seem even smaller, weaker and more fragile when you look up at the sky and remember that, on many winter days, the road is often buried beneath twelve or fifteen feet of snow. The fir trees are proof of the power of snow: many of the trunks have snapped in two as if they had been under bombardment; those higher up have the rusty look of plants scorched by frost.
In spring, though, the fallen snow seems almost friendly and covers the slopes where the local children, wearing anoraks and warm hats, s
tart learning to ski or snowboard. From a distance, when you see those small colourful dots moving about, they seem odd, out of keeping with the usually dark monotonous mountains; but they immediately become real when you wind down your car window and hear their shrieks of laughter.
As I drove past just such a group of children, it seemed to me that the scene could be made into a haiku, rather like the one by Masaoka Shiki: “In the old still pond, springing into sudden life, a green blade of grass.”
With a few judicious changes, the poem could read: “Children in the snow, their laughter restoring life to the sad mountains.” That was one possibility. Another would be to connect the sounds the children made with those of the vociferous blue jays. In that case, the poem would read: “Among snow and trees the loud chattering voices of birds and children.”
And yet, the road to Lake Tahoe offers other possible subjects to anyone driving along and hoping to write a poem. One of them, probably the main one, begins to reveal itself as soon as you notice the line that cuts across the mountains, halfway up, as if drawn with ruler and pencil, and which is the first transcontinental railway line built in America in the 1860s; a gigantic, monstrous enterprise, the building of which cost thousands of Chinese immigrant lives. It’s impossible to look at that line or drive past the tracks without thinking of that poem by Bertolt Brecht: “Who built Thebes of the seven gates? / In the books you will read the names of kings. / Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? / And Babylon, many times demolished, / Who raised it up so many times?”
The official accounts of how the railway was built speak at length about the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, the companies that financed and organised the work, making special mention of the ceremony held in Promontory, Utah, on 10 May, 1869, when the locomotive coming from the west and the locomotive coming from the east met head on, and when the so-called Golden Spike, the final one, was hammered in. On the other hand, they say nothing of the Chinese immigrant workers who tackled the most difficult section through the mountains, including building the Truckee tunnels. In the photograph taken of the Golden Spike ceremony, you see the two locomotives, a bottle of champagne, and plenty of top hats, Stetsons and caps, but not a single Chinese coolie hat.
Nevada Days Page 27
