The rush hour traffic of midday and the Sacramento skyline was falling away in my rear view mirror when my phone started trilling. Muffled under the bulk of the newly acquired atlas, it took me a second to identify the electronic xylophone plink under the din of Bon Jovi and heavy traffic. Groping around under the book I located the phone and saw a number it would take scrubbing with boric acid to erase from my memory banks. It was also precisely who I'd been expecting. No surprise that Wesley, with his recent found talent for hovering over me like an excited mother bear (I pitied the man's poor offspring), would be the first to notice my tactical retreat.
My thumb hovered in indecision over the accept button long enough that the call bounced over to voicemail. Before I had the chance to feel guilty, it was ringing again, Wesley having apparently disconnected and redialed in lieu of leaving a message. This process was repeated a third time as I negotiated traffic.
Wesley was not a guy who did well with being ignored.
It was a useful personality trait for a detective, but one that as a friend, had more than once tempted me to sock him in the mouth.
A longer silence followed the third round of ringing, then a beep, signaling that I had a new voicemail.
I waited expectantly, seconds ticking by into a minute, but the phone remained quiet.
Thank Christ. Apparently Wesley had worn himself out.
Exhaling an undeniably relieved breath, I tossed it back onto the passenger seat and re-devoted my attention to the road.
I would have to call him back, but the call could, would, have to wait. It wasn't a conversion I could have while driving.
I knew Wesley, knew how it would go down. I'd get about as far as "canceled my lease" and he'd lose his proverbial shit. In vesuvian fashion. It would then be only a matter of time before I started replying in kind.
I'd spent enough rookie years ticketing traffic violations to know that belligerent shouting matches and moving vehicles rarely end well for any of the involved parties.
-----
The world outside my window grew increasingly foreign beyond the artificial oasis of Reno. Already sparse scrub became sparser yet, the terrain rockier. It was the middle of the afternoon and the sun, having long since reached its zenith, was beginning its western descent.
I'd stopped for gas in Austin, population one-hundred-ninety-two. If the sandblasted sign at the edge of town was to be believed.
Not far outside of Reno, the blue and white roadside placards had started declaring Highway 50 "The Loneliest Road in America." In the quickly fading daylight outside the Chevron station, a cursory examination of my map explained the moniker. It had been nearly two hours since I'd passed through the previous town of Fallon and it would be an hour and another seventy odd miles before I reached the next.
Talk about being careful what you asked for.
A full tank of gas, a pack of jerky (the least dubious of the convenience store's dust blanketed offerings) and yet another cup of twice-baked joe and I departed into the dark interior.
From what I'd seen in passing, Austin, despite its size, sported at least one hotel. Someone with a modicum of sense probably would have called a halt for the night right then and there. I however, was wired. Maybe it was too much coffee. Or too little sleep. Whichever it was, nervous energy not so surprisingly won out over common sense.
Fifty miles later, as alertness began giving way to hyper awareness, I started suspecting the second of the two possible culprits.
It was a sensation I'd experienced on more than a few occasions between the caffeine fueled cram nights of my academy years and the subsequent decade of a.m. calls from the station. All of which had served to inform me of one important fact. I was never half as awake in those moments as I felt and I was sure as hell not on my A-game.
At Eureka, the next point of civilization, I made for the town's lone hotel like a Chinese street gang was on my ass.
A quick dance of ID and crumpled twenties with a mostly comatose clerk scored me a single queen on the second floor of the Lincoln Logs inspired structure.
What the room looked like, I wasn't sure. There could have been a family of coyotes playing Texas hold'em in the bathroom and a fire in the john, for all the notice I was taking. My sphere of interest had narrowed down to the existence of a waiting bed.
Glory fucking hallelujah.
The minute I'd ceased forward momentum, I was instantly exhausted.
I spent a hot second mulling over prospect of undressing, ruled the plan gauche and flopped down on the Mexican print spread, boots and all.
-----
A few hours later I came around to the sensation of my heart trying to make a break for it. Outside the hotel's windows, the skies were still night dark, but trapped in the moment I couldn't parse that. There were sirens in my ears. A staccato of lights was dancing across my field of vision and obscuring everything beyond it.
This was not my first rodeo. I some level, I knew my subconscious was having a go at me. The police light bars I was seeing were, in point of fact, a bedside clock that needed the time set, and the most sinister thing in the air was probably mildew. No melted rubber, no stink of burning motor oil.
Didn't matter.
The vindictive chunk of hindbrain that was calling the shots on my fight or flight mode was committed to the lie.
Knowing you're in the middle of irrationally dropping your basket is all well and good. Doing something about it while your own body is trying to smother you via a tex-mex bedspread is another matter.
After a retrospectively humiliating length of time, I managed to twist myself around enough that I wasn't inhaling poly-cotton blend and could start forcing myself to breathe through it.
Out. Hold. Inhale... Out. Hold. Inhale...
I'd had a new age-y academy instructor who'd insisted on teaching us calming breathing patterns for use in stressful situations. Then, like now, I'd doubted the merits of pausing to do a bit of circular breathing while a junkie was taking pop-shots at you. It did, however, work annoyingly well when one was having an early a.m. freak out.
It took me few tries to stick the rhythm, what with feeling like somebody'd dunked my lungs in cement, but once I did, my pulse started winding noticeably down.
-----
It was still dark out by the time I'd leveled off enough to get up and throw on the lights. A check of my watch told me that it was indecently early. I'd slept maybe four hours. Nowhere near a reasonable amount to be driving on. I'd been fighting the dreams and the resulting rounds of panic for a couple months though and I knew nothing short of elephant tranquilizer would knock me back out. I was always on edge after- over-energized and feeling like I could run a mile- which I had done, or nearly, on more than one occasion in response.
Something told me though that the residents of Eureka would not take to a man jogging in the wee hours of the morning as well those in Seattle had.
In a city, inexplicable behavior is the norm. In The Middle of Nowhere, Utah, it was liable to get me arrested on suspicion of using a controlled substance.
Short of heading back out, that left bad morning infomercials as a possible distraction technique. Or I could just grab some matches from the car and spend the next six hours burning off my leg hair one by one. Both sounded equally pleasant.
Grabbing my duffle from the patch of floor I'd dropped it on, I headed for the door.
-----
The World's Loneliest Road, I soon discovered, did not end with Nevada. A few miles from the border, near the turnoff for a town named Baker, a state highway sign spelled out its warning in thick, no bullshit typeface: NO SERVICE NEXT 100 MILES.
Behind the ominous plaque the bleached salt flats stretch out into nothingness in the dim of twilight like an endless earthen ocean.
But Utah, it turned out, was as varied as Nevada had been predictable. The desert I'd started coming to expect gradually shifted, rocky outcroppings and marshy flats punctuating the sweeping expanses of craggy earth.
Then came the mountains.
Rolling and sandy, spotted with ground cover and desiccated brush, they turned steeper and sharper the further east I went; pine trees stubbornly clinging to their slopes on patches of dirt no larger than doormats.
It was the buttes and mesas that really snagged me though. Enough to rip my attention away from the mindless passage of blacktop.
A first since I'd left Seattle.
It was stretching into late morning, a stone's throw outside a tiny valley town where I'd pit-stopped for gas, when I spotted the first of them in the distance. There were the flat topped juts of rock I'd seen in a thousand photographs and reproduced in paint on the walls of every steakhouse with a southwestern flare. They were as familiar to me as the Statue of Liberty or the Golden Gate Bridge, but up close they were arresting. Towering outcroppings of red clay rock protruding from the earth like broken teeth in the jawbone of some ancient giant.
I'd seen desert rock formations before, but the deserts of eastern Washington had nothing like this and I felt my curiosity peak.
Looking back at that moment, as I eased up on the gas for a better look at the passing walls of rock, it was probably the turning point. A linchpin for everything that was to come.
-----
It was Colorado that threw down the final straw, fanned that initial spark of interest I'd felt traversing the valleys of Utah, until it finally got the better of me.
The place was drowning under the weight of its own landmarks.
With every mile I went into the state, a new sign sprang up, announcing yet another park or overlook or scenic byway. The majority, starting with the uninformatively named National Monument, I'd never heard of, but their sheer volume was enough to start me considering a little sightseeing.
It was early evening and I was making another cautionary stop for gas (between Utah and Nevada, I'd managed to develop a healthy paranoia), when I spotted a familiar landscape amongst the wracks of local attraction flyers. My national parks trivia knowledge might have been on the scarce side, but even I'd spent enough Sunday mornings mildly hungover and watching travel show reruns on WETA, to recognize Mesa Verde. Or perhaps not so mildly hungover, as I hadn't honestly remembered the site was in Colorado.
"This is near here?" I asked, pulling a pamphlets from the display.
It wasn't. I saw that the same second the question had left my mouth. There was a vague sort of map of western Colorado printed on the pamphlet's backside that declared "here" to be somewhere called Grand Junction. The star marking the park was a ways farther south. A good ways. Almost at the border with New Mexico.
"What's that, honey?" the clerk asked, slow blinking at me in confusion.
I couldn't help quirking an incredulous eyebrow at that. Was I honestly being flirted with by a teenage girl in a Blake Shelton t-shirt?
Wrong damn tree, wrong damn forest, not even counting the two decades worth of age difference.
She'd zeroed in on the pamphlet while I mulling that over. She shook her head. "Oh, no. That's down south. Like, a couple hours?" Finished dumping the last of my acquisitions in a shopping bag, she pushed the green dinosaur emblazoned sack across the counter. "You have a nice night," she said, giving me an inexplicably doubtful (was there something on my face?) once-over. "And drive careful."
I beat a hasty exit to check my teeth for wayward jerky chunks.
Outside the sun was retreating behind a western mountain range and a bank of fat, dusky purple clouds. It looked like rain was in the forecast and not of the light drizzle variety. Distracted by that, I was moving to pull out my keys before I realized I was still holding the Mesa Verde brochure.
Unlocking the car, I slid in and unfolded the paper across my steering wheel.
There was the usual blurb of historical background, photos of cliff dwellings and smaller maps of walking paths. Not thrill a minute reading, but still, I was intrigued.
I flipped it over to the main map again, and then, on impulse, reached over and turned on my GPS, which had remained off thus far in my semi-aimless road trip. A little typing and the computer informed me that the park was adjacent to the town of Cortez- another vaguely familiar place name- and could be reached in three and a half hours. It was indeed near the New Mexico border. Not exactly 'on my way,' so far as I'd planned it.
On the other hand, I'd have to veer further south at some point if I planned to make for the Carolinas. And it wasn't like I was exactly running on a set schedule.
"What the hell," I said aloud.