The Dog Went Over the Mountain

by Peter Zheutlin

  Albie and I took a table on the outdoor patio of a cheap Mexican restaurant to soak up the atmosphere. There was a noisy group of six at the picnic table directly in my line of vision to the street. One man, well over three hundred pounds in my estimation, sat with his T-shirt hiked halfway up his back and the waistband of his shorts roughly halfway down his rear. Every couple of minutes he let out a bizarre growl. I could hardly wait for our food to arrive. Occasionally, when the din of the motorcycles subsided for a brief moment, it allowed the subtler sounds of squealing car tires and pickup trucks stripped of their mufflers to be heard.

  Some places cannot be adequately captured in photographs. No still image of the Grand Canyon, for example, can do justice to the scale and grandeur of the place. The Kalalau Valley on the Hawaiian island of Kauai has to be seen to be appreciated, as does Yosemite Valley, the magnificent work of photographer Ansel Adams notwithstanding. The reality of these places is vastly more impressive than any representation of them. Other places—oh, let’s see, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Texas, leaps to mind—are equally unimpressive in photographs and in reality.

  What then to make of Cadillac Ranch just off Interstate 40 on the outskirts of Amarillo? After a noisy meal of mediocre Mexican food Albie and I headed off to find out.

  In 1974, a group of hippies from San Francisco, an art collective calling themselves the Ant Farm, alighted in Amarillo and planted ten Cadillac car frames, nose first, into the Texas panhandle at a nearly 52-degree angle, an angle that purportedly corresponds to the angles of the sides of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The Ant Farm’s silent financial partner was an eccentric Amarillo billionaire, a gadfly with a troubled history named Stanley Marsh 3 (not Stanley Marsh III, but Stanley Marsh 3).

  This distinctively American Stonehenge has achieved iconic status and almost everyone passing through Amarillo makes a pilgrimage to see it. You’ve no doubt seen pictures of this unusual work of art and it is indeed impressive in pictures, mostly because cars are big things and seeing them “parked” this way, stuck in the ground nose first, is rather novel, unless you still have teenagers just learning to drive. Yet, this is one of those rare places where the real thing doesn’t do justice to the photographs.

  Sitting in an empty field in the middle of a vast plain and dwarfed by the huge Texas sky, Cadillac Ranch seems smaller and less imposing in real life than in pictures. But at least in real life, you can interact with the visual spectacle before you.

  The thing to do here is to pick up one of the dozens of cans of spray paint visitors have left behind and make your own mark on the Cadillacs, so densely covered in layers of paint over the decades that the tires look like round, psychedelic blobs.

  The day we were there was not the day to try that, however. The gale blowing from the north was so strong that when we faced into the wind Albie’s ears were, as in Stillwater, pinned inside out to the sides of his head. If you tried spraying the Cadillacs with the wind at your back and missed, the paint would likely have landed somewhere in Mexico. If you’d have sprayed paint into the wind it would have blown right back in your face. That didn’t stop people from trying, of course.

  Because weather was a major factor in our travel plans I was always checking the forecast for the places we planned to be a few days ahead of time, and the forecast as we left Amarillo was cause for concern. The day we expected to reach Grand Canyon a few days hence looked to be cold and snowy and we had been planning to camp there. It looked more favorable for the days following so I considered arriving later than planned. But that alternative ran headlong into a second concern. Though we were still a few days away from our expected transit of the Mojave Desert between Needles and Barstow, California, the long-range forecast for Needles was for temperatures to exceed one hundred degrees, and reach as high as one hundred nine degrees, for a week straight. When the air temperature is between ninety and a hundred degrees, the road surface can be between one hundred forty and one hundred fifty degrees, hot enough to buckle or turn gooey, and our car sits a mere twelve inches above the ground and would be close to that scorching heat.

  The last thing we needed was an overheated engine or a flat tire while crossing the desert. The pavement would be too hot for Albie’s paws and we might not be able to run the air conditioning if we broke down. So, I started to consider making that drive at night, or taking alternate routes that would mean reluctantly bypassing Grand Canyon, in my opinion the singularly most spectacular sight in America. I was loath to do that since I very much had my heart set on seeing it again after more than five decades and who knew if there’d ever be another chance? Poring over the maps, I considered a route through southern Colorado and Utah, but the choice of roads was limited, and travel would be painstakingly slow. That idea had two other strikes against it: it would again take us off Steinbeck’s route, which we were trying more or less to follow, and off the Joad’s route from Oklahoma to California. Our best bet was to take our chances with the weather at Grand Canyon and move faster than planned across New Mexico and into Arizona to beat the heat to the Mojave. We’d stay one night in Santa Fe instead of the two I had booked, drive in one day from Santa Fe all the way to Flagstaff, Arizona, our jumping off point for Grand Canyon, and get past Needles while the forecast there topped out at a mere ninety-nine degrees. One of the reasons we started this trip in mid-April was to avoid such extreme weather, but here we were facing the prospect of cold and snow at Grand Canyon and blistering heat in the Mojave.

  The wind that had whipped us in the face at Cadillac Ranch the evening before hadn’t abated the next morning as we left Amarillo, which explains why this part of the country, like Oklahoma, is also littered with massive wind farms, unimaginable in Steinbeck’s day. Some people find the giant turbines a blight on the landscape (and worry about their impact on migratory birds); others find them whimsical. When it comes to energy there is no free lunch. But, truth be told, central Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle are pretty desolate anyway. It’s not as if we’re desecrating a national treasure such as Yosemite Valley with these windmills, at least not here.

  Outside of Amarillo, as we did in the South, we passed a few churches with signboards carrying messages. But here they had a more practical angle: “Pray for Rain,” several proclaimed, something the Joads would surely have understood.

  About fifteen miles east of the New Mexico border the impossibly flat, seemingly endless plain ended abruptly and gave way to a more contoured landscape of dry arroyos and low-lying mesas and buttes, and the grass, such as it was, yielded to vast expanses of sagebrush. It was the most dramatic and sudden change in landscape of the trip thus far. It was as if we had suddenly been deposited in a new place, the way it feels when you fly somewhere.

  When traveling by plane we can’t see the subtle ways the landscape changes, the way the Blue Ridge Mountains, for example, gradually yield to the southern flats, or the way the wooded hills of southeastern Oklahoma imperceptibly become the more barren flatlands around Okemah. By car you can appreciate these changes, and the often peculiar names of the places you pass through, such as Deaf Smith County, the last county in Texas before reaching New Mexico. Erastus “Deaf” Smith was a partially deaf scout and soldier who served in the Texas Revolution in the 1830s and the first person to reach the Alamo after its fall. Lest you be overly impressed that I knew this because I am fantastically well-read, I didn’t. I looked it up.

  If you’ve seen the animated movie Cars, an homage to Route 66, you are familiar with the distinctive look of the vintage sports cars depicted in the film—long in hood, aerodynamically smooth and rounded and, typically, painted in bright colors with racing stripes in an accent color. As if on cue, just as we entered New Mexico and started looking for remnants of the old Route 66 we could drive, a dozen Dodge Vipers traveling together flew past us at high speed. It was if the animated cars in the film had sprung to life. There was some sort of rally or convention of Viper aficionados underway somewhere in the area; some of
the cars were from as far away as Florida. My favorite was one from Texas because the license plate simply said, “HOLD EM.” (Get it? “Texas” along the top of the plate and then “hold ’em.”)

  Cars, the film, also explored the ruin of the once vibrant towns along Route 66. One of those real-life towns is Tucumcari where Albie and I stopped for a walk. Route 66 still runs right through the town, it’s the main drag, but most traffic flies by on Interstate 40. As in Pampa, Texas, many of the empty lots were overgrown with weeds and the empty husks of old gas stations were slowly deteriorating in the desert sun. A few cheap motels, the Buckaroo and the Palomino, were still in business, just barely, it seemed.

  The main attraction here, as it is in all of the small towns along the old 66, is nostalgia for the Mother Road. Souvenir shops carry all manner of Route 66 ephemera: replica road signs, shot glasses, T-shirts, and license plate holders, all adorned with the iconic “Route 66” insignia.

  Albie posed for some pictures in front of a large mural painted on the side of a brick building in Tucumcari, a mural depicting the glamour of the road as it existed in the mid-twentieth century, cars passing cacti and road signs that said, TUCUMCARI TONIGHT and GET YOUR KICKS ON ROUTE 66. One of the motels in town had elaborate murals painted onto the façade that incorporated the doors to the motel rooms, murals depicting characters dancing the Lindy Hop or the jitterbug, characters that appeared to be straight out of The Great Gatsby with their classic cars and champagne glasses. These murals, which appeared in towns all along the old Route 66, became one of my favorite parts of our passage, iconic American folk art, worth the trip in and of themselves.

  We were bound this day for Santa Fe and the farther we got into New Mexico the more quintessentially Western the scenery became. Mesas off in the distance, tan expanses of grass dotted with sage, scrub pine, and tumbleweeds, nearly as light as air, blowing across and along the highway. Freight trains snaked along the tracks that paralleled the highway.

  What makes car travel for the easterner so novel, and a little discomfiting here in the vast empty spaces of the West, is that places of human habitation can be so distant from one another. Back East we mostly travel town to town to town, but it’s not unusual in these parts to go thirty, forty, or fifty miles between human settlements during which the road itself is virtually the only sign of human presence. Even Santa Fe is “apart,” about fifty miles off Interstate 40 on Highway 285, and until you reach the outskirts there’s not a single town to be seen.

  Once we exited the interstate onto 285 and were no longer traveling eighty miles an hour, I pulled over and put the top down. (At eighty the turbulence in the car, especially in the back seat where Albie was riding, can be too much.) As is typically the case here in the high desert, the sky was perfectly clear and the temperature a comfortable seventy degrees. At midday we cruised into the heart of downtown Santa Fe and parked.

  Downtown Santa Fe is touristy and upscale, filled with boutiques and shops selling Native American art and jewelry, but it’s a lovely place with a central square to walk about. The buildings are mostly traditional adobe pueblo style, which felt at once charming and a little contrived. Even the new, multilevel parking garage looked like it was designed by architects from Fred Flintstone’s hometown of Bedrock.

  But downtown was blessedly quiet; none of the motorcycles and hot rods that plagued us from Tupelo to Amarillo. As we sat at a sidewalk table at a Mexican restaurant all we could hear were the sounds of birds chirping and people conversing at a normal level. A gentle desert breeze riffled the leaves on the trees and all around us trees and flowers were in bloom. It was extraordinarily, impossibly pleasant. Santa Fe is also very dog-friendly; there wasn’t a store or coffee shop where Albie wasn’t welcome and everyone, it seemed, had put out a water bowl by their front entrance.

  Albie and I had been with one another nearly every minute of every day for more than two weeks now. We’d driven all the way from Massachusetts to Santa Fe, and all that time I thought we were on this trip together. That night, in Santa Fe, I realized I was mistaken. We were actually on separate trips . . . together.

  Our hotel was up in the foothills not far from downtown, with a direct view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, which run north-south along Santa Fe’s eastern flank. Just before bed I debated whether to take Albie outside to give him one more opportunity to relieve himself before settling down for the night—debated because I was beat and ready to sleep. But it had been a while, so we went for a short walk.

  Outside there was a barely perceptible, faint white glow behind the mountains across the valley to our east. The night sky was moonless, and I wondered if the glow was the moon about to rise. If so, it was bound to be a spectacular sight in the clear night sky. Gradually the glow grew brighter and brighter and expanded until a slim line of solid white appeared above the ridge line.

  Those moments when the moon rises and the sun sets, as they reach or breach the horizon, are the most awe-inspiring because you can see them move or, to be more precise, you can see the Earth’s rotation bring them into fuller view or make them disappear. Once above the horizon and transiting the sky the sense of movement slows to imperceptibility.

  The moonrise was utterly breathtaking in its silent beauty. It felt as if we were inside the works of an intricate watch, only the watch here was our solar system. Here we were, just Albie and me, watching the rotation of the Earth itself, a breathtaking moonrise, a miracle of the universe unfolding right before us.

  Except Albie was completely oblivious to this astronomical spectacle. As much as I wished he could share this exquisite, almost spiritual moment with me, he could neither appreciate the visual beauty of the moonrise nor grasp the basic cosmology required to understand the gradual appearance of a white sphere in the night sky and the workings of the solar system. Without that knowledge, what to me was a moment of sublime, transcendent beauty was for Albie a nonevent. As I watched in awe as the moon hung itself in the night sky, Albie turned and faced the other direction, utterly disinterested in the spectacle unfolding behind him. But maybe he was indulging some new intoxicating and unusual desert scent, wondering why I was staring at the sky instead of putting my nose to the ground as he was.

  As much as he had been a true and loving and uncomplaining travel companion, and as much as I will always treasure the memory of our adventure together, he simply wasn’t capable of sharing some of what made the trip such a joy for me. It’s not a fault, it’s a limitation, one dogs make up for in myriad ways. But we won’t, not now and not two years from now, look at each other and say, “Remember that night in Santa Fe? Wasn’t the moonrise amazing?”

  Albie had been happy wherever we’d been to pose for pictures—at Cadillac Ranch and in front of the Route 66 mural in Tucumcari, for example—but he had no way of knowing why I’d chosen those spots, or why ten Cadillac cars were sticking up out of the Texas plain. He didn’t realize how lucky we were to chance to stop in Okemah, Oklahoma, the day that we did, why Woody Guthrie mattered to me, why Elvis mattered to the people in Tupelo, or what distinguished Asheville from Nashville. He may have known we were no longer home, but he had no idea how far we’d traveled or why, or if we were ever going back. In short, there was a limit to what Albie and I could share. This didn’t make him an inadequate travel companion in any way. I loved being with him, but we were not, alas, having the same experience. I was, in some ways, traveling alone but not quite alone. Just as Albie was unable to share much of what I was experiencing, I was unable to share much of what he was experiencing and how he was experiencing it, and we couldn’t talk about it.

  The next day, we happened to wake up for our morning walk just as the sun was rising in nearly the exact spot where the moon had risen the night before. The moon still hung high in the deep blue sky to the west. Here we were, man and dog standing on planet Earth with the sun rising over the mountains to the east and the moon still in transit across the sky to the west. It felt as if we were bit players i
n a giant celestial time piece. As I got lost deeper and deeper in the profundity of my own thoughts and the cosmic grandeur of it all, I looked over at Albie. He was squatting over a carefully selected sagebrush.

  * President Trump had yet to make his remarkable and fanciful claim that windmills cause cancer.

  † Every town with some claim to fame, no matter how obscure, wants to make sure you know it. Bench, of course, was a hall of fame baseball player. Sparta, Tennessee, as noted, was the home of bluegrass musician Lester Flatt, and Okemah of folk singer Woody Guthrie. The town where we raised our kids never lets you forget it’s the hometown of Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman. Even the small town where we now live prides itself on being the home of the E. F. Hodgson Company, manufacturer of the first modular prefabricated home. Now there’s a claim to fame.

  TWELVE

  Grand Canyon Sweet*

  I wished we could have stayed another day in Santa Fe as we’d planned, because one day was hardly enough to explore this lovely town in the high desert surrounded by mountains. But the heat forecast for Needles and the Mojave was getting more extreme every day. Now the high temperatures were predicted to be one hundred and ten with no relief in sight. We had just three more days to beat the heat. And to think I had originally planned to make this trip in the summer!

  But for now, as we crossed New Mexico at the very end of April and the very beginning of May, the weather was exactly as I’d hoped, especially for Albie’s comfort: clear and in the sixties.

  As we approached Gallup we were driving through a landscape that had launched a thousand Westerns: flat, scrubby land dotted with sage bumping up against massive table-flat mesas of red rock. It was easy to imagine John Wayne or Clint Eastwood astride a horse, squinting into the sun here.