THE TRIP (Part 4)

    Day eight dawned chilly and bright in Northern Arizona. There was a touch of frost on my car as I took Riley out for our usual pre-breakfast walk. Today we’d be driving north for the first time all trip and I was looking forward to seeing some new and surprisingly exciting places. The first of which was the Hoover Dam. And the surprising part was how unbelievably scared it made me.

    I am afraid of heights. This is not news. I am fine climbing mountains, but I am not fine when I get too close to a cliff edge. For me, it’s all about exposure. Having air between my feet and the far away ground scares the crap out of me. So much so that my hands even get clammy on a tiny county-fair Ferris wheel. But, in all my years, I’d never experienced what I did that morning at the Hoover Dam.

    Before you drive down to the dam there is an opportunity to get out of your car and walk across a bridge to view it from 1000 feet above the Colorado River. Jenn and I parked and started across. I was looking forward to it and even got excited when the dam came into view. Then, suddenly, my heart started racing and I felt like I was having an anxiety attack. The exposure through the open railing on the dam side was way too much for me. And I just wanted to climb over the jersey barrier, that separated the walkway from the highway, and take my chances with the semi-trucks buzzing by. Jenn was fine. Even standing up on the lower rung of the railing to get a better view. But all I wanted to get, was the hell out of there.

    The dam itself was amazing. Once we got off the bridge, and I had a chance to catch my breath, we both enjoyed the attention to detail and the art-deco styling of this 1935 mega-structure that spanned the border between Arizona and Nevada. A short while later we were flying through Las Vegas. Neither one of us had any interest in the fake glitz and glamour of sin city, so we drove through without so much as a pee break. Unfortunately, that decision would soon come back to bite us in the ass.

    A little ways outside of town, I realized that we needed to get gas. Jenn looked on Google and 40 miles ahead there was a gas station at a town called Indian Springs. Perfect! My gas gauge says I’ve got a range of 60 miles, so we’ll fill up with 20 miles to spare. However, when we got there, we saw that the only gas station in town was closed for repairs. Not enough gas to go forward, and not enough gas to go back. We were trapped! Thanks Google. You have all kinds of useless trivia at your disposal, but you can’t tell us something as super important as this?!

    We asked all around for a place to refuel. One local, at the Dollar Store, said “Sure, you can get gas across the street at the Air Force Base. As long as you have a military ID.” With neither of us owning one of those we kept searching, and this is where the divine intervention comes in. We walked into the post office and explained our situation to the postwoman there. And she said, “Oh, this happens all the time. Let me call Pastor Glenn at the Baptist Church, and he’ll help you out.”

    Minutes later, a kindly older gentleman named Tim pulled up with his sun baked pickup truck and said, “Follow me, I’ll get you some gas.” He took us to his trailer home and pulled out one of a handful of 5-gallon gas cans he had stored there and proceeded to pour it into our nearly empty tank.  When we offered to pay him, he gently declined. Saying we should make a donation to the church instead since it was their idea to help stranded motorists like ourselves. We left there feeling relieved and grateful to have found such kindness in such a desolate place. At the next town, we filled up and headed towards an even more desolate locale, Death Valley and the Badwater Basin.

    I had planned on driving through Death Valley National Park mostly just to say I’d been there. Expecting it to be merely a hot and barren desert, devoid of life. And it was those things, but what surprised me most, was also how stunningly beautiful it was. The prismatic cliffs of Artists Drive, the stark white salt flats of Badwater, the golden folded hills of Zabriskie Point, the random sandy dunes of Panamint Springs, and the brilliant colors of the sun setting over Rainbow Pass. It was, by far, the biggest and best surprise of the trip.

    Later, after a delicious authentic Mexican dinner and a harrowing twisty-turny highway drive in the dark, we pulled into Carson City for the night, utterly exhausted. 680 more miles down and two days left to go.

    The next morning, we awoke to snow flurries and alerts that some of the highways through the Sierra Nevadas had been closed due to problems with visibility and drifting. So, we altered our 560-mile route and decided to skip a trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park. Instead, we drove around Lake Tahoe and steamed northward towards Crater Lake. Northern California and Southern Oregon were breathtakingly gorgeous, and the contrasting colors of white snow, red cedar bark, and iridescent green moss dangling from the trees made me want to come back soon for a much longer visit.

    Crater Lake National Park was even more dazzling and provided us with an interesting contradiction to our experience just 24 hours earlier. Yesterday, we had sand and sun and heat of over 80 degrees. Today, we had cold and wet and snowbanks over 8 feet high. What a difference a day makes! So, we traded in our sandals and t-shirts for snow boots and parkas and went out to explore the frozen volcanic rim. It’s hard to believe that such a place exists. A crystal-clear lake in the middle of an ancient crater. But it does, and we were in complete awe of it.

    The next days 460-mile drive from Bend to Spokane was a bit of a blur. I know we toured some lava caves and crossed the Oregon Trail. I know we drove over the Columbia River and visited a park dedicated to Sacagawea. And I know I was mostly quiet until I inexplicably punched a gas pump that would not accept my credit card. I spent most of our last day together inside my own head. I knew my time with Jenn was coming to an end, as she was scheduled to board a plane that evening back to the east coast, and it made me terribly upset.

    I asked myself questions that even Google could not answer. Was I making the right choice? Would our relationship survive the distance between us? What would it be like to live in Spokane? Would Jenn come to visit? Was Sacagawea really a slave? Was I still a slave? And what about this new corona virus thing, how would that affect my life here?

    What I did know was that these past ten days with Jenn had been nothing short of a revelation. Before we left, I knew I loved her. But after all the amazing adventures we shared together, I knew now that I couldn’t live without her. And, as it is with most important events, it was not one singular moment, but a million little moments, that changed everything.

    Finding a monster pinecone on the frothy banks of Lake Tahoe. Drinking a mid-day beer in the heat of Death Valley. Hunting for Saguaro cactus in Arizona. Sliding beneath the stars and flashing red beacons of the wind turbines in New Mexico. Singing American Pie at the top of our lungs while driving in the dark through McLean, Texas. Spotting a same color car as our map highlighter in Oklahoma. Waking up with a bewildered “Where are we?” in a hotel room in Arkansas. Running with the buffalo in Memphis. Having a chocolate melt race in Virginia. Surviving Riley’s breath everywhere. And holding hands for 5000 miles, 19 states, 10 days and a thousand laughs.

Only for her to get on a plane and immediately fly back home. It didn’t seem fair.

    When we got to Spokane we went for a run, of course. And then Jenn took a quick shower before her red eye to Boston. I was a mess, and she did her best to console me. I wanted our joy ride to continue, but she had her kids to look after and I had work to start the next day. She was my navigator and my best friend, the Lewis to my Clark. And with one teary-eyed, five-mile, trip to the airport later, she was gone.

    Little did I know, a mistake that I’d unwittingly made just a week before would rock my brave and lonely new world.