Notes from an inept traveler

He fills the cooler with drinks and eats. Bacon, his favorite campsite treat, is tucked beneath a bag of ice next to a half-rack of cheap beer. He checks the car, remembering he had the oil changed a week ago, and the inept traveler gases up the little red Subaru called Alberta (sweet baby ain’t never let him down) and sets his sights on the desert solitude of Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge, in eastern Oregon, where pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, and mule deer roam.
Highway 66 winds up out of Ashland and then traverses over forests of pine and fir until it falls down and runs into U.S. 140, which cuts through prairies of hay disrupted by lakes and irrigation ditches and grazing cattle, overshadowed by mountains in every direction. Onward to Lakeview, a quiet village where people talk straight and look you in the eye. And from there, the path cuts north on U.S. 195, then another turn north and by this time, the greenery and water fully gives way to sage and the high desert. And about this time, the traveler is feeling like the last man on earth. Massive brown chunks of earth tower over the desert and one can’t help but reach for his camera to take pictures of these amazing monuments.
And then the traveler hears a pop and a clank and looks up to see smoke swirling in the rearview mirror and every horror story of breakdown floods his head. Quickly, the car—sweet Alberta—is stopped and a quick check under shows oil pouring out and collecting in a pool on the white and tan and brown desert rocks that line that lost highway.
The weary traveler—the change from amazed to weary took less than a minute—begins to contemplate life. He paces the length of the car and wonders what would happen if he fired it up. A foolish idea. He changes tactics and reaches for reliable cell phone. No service in this remote area. He stands out in the middle of the road. He checks how much water he brought. He looks up, then sees no shade trees anywhere, and thinks, ‘You, sun, are my enemy.’ He dreams of a tiny apartment with stained, worn brown carpet he calls home and he loves that apartment. He dreams of overcrowded cities. He listens to the wind whistle through the sage brush and damns the romance he saw in this beautiful desolation. He is anxious and jittery.
Then he thinks of those people in stories he’s read. Edward Abbey used to hike miles through deserts just for the fun of it. The men who escaped Siberian work camp in The Long Walk trudged thousands of miles south to freedom, much of it through the Gobi Desert. He feels like the character in the brilliant Tobias Wolff short story, “Desert Breakdown, 1968,” whose car broke down in the middle of the Arizona desert, except that character had a wife and child with him. And he thinks, ‘You, inept traveler, are a wuss, softened by a life of air conditioning, running water, and sewage systems.’ He says to himself, “You’re not tough.”
And he ponders the idea of filling a backpack with jugs of water and how long he should wait before he starts out when a white mini-van appears and the driver stops and offers a ride to the store in the town of Plush a few miles down the road.
“I was wondering who’d be broken down. All the oil I saw on the road,” the driver says.
“People break down all the time out here?” the traveler asks.
“Oh, yeah. Happens all the time,” says the thirty-something mother. “You’re lucky you’re not one of these who’ve hit cows the last couple weeks.” In the backseat, a baby is slumped, peacefully asleep in his carseat.
He is dropped off at the Plush store, where he calls a tow truck from Lakeview and waits, watching cable news with the store employee, who is quiet, like the traveler, yet nice enough. The inept traveler is silently embarrassed about his jitters. He was not near death; he only had an inconvenience that will cost him close to $300 in towing fees and an unhealthy blood pressure surge.
A few hours later in Lakeview, he is told it was only an oil pan plug that had fallen out, and the mechanic finds a plug, fills the car’s oil reserves, and after looking and listening to the engine, determines that it is sound.
The traveler ponders another attempt at the refuge, but he decides that the lost highway is cursed for the day, and he puts his tail between his legs and drives home, cursing the shop who last changed his oil before the trip.
It is dark as he drives home, a crescent moon lighting his way through the forests cut by Highway 66. Late in the night, he pulls up in front of his residence, unloads and trudges into the apartment, where he lights a fire under his cast iron skillet and cooks up a mess of bacon, pops a beer, and reads a brochure and flyer about the refuge. He again plans a trip, one day, to Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge.