The Last Adventurer

Even though I knew I was right about where we could camp, I could tell that Pink was uncomfortable about not having a designated special location that was our destination. But I also knew that once we found a spot to camp, Pink would feel better. As we drifted slowly south on the S-2, I kept my eyes peeled for the elusive backcountry road entrances while watching the mile markers. The roads weren’t elusive because they were hard to find. They were elusive because they appeared as sudden shadowy gaps in the brush that yawned open and closed in a matter of seconds, despite the fact that we were traveling at a very slow speed. In order to get Pink more involved, and to make her feel better about where we were camping, I kept asking her whether she wanted to turn off at the various openings. It was a bad idea at best. It didn’t make her more interested in our situation; instead she became more skeptical about where I was taking her; and convinced that I had no idea what I was doing.

Since I had been watching the miles pass, I also knew that we didn’t want to go much further south because we would soon be experiencing light pollution from the freeway. I also didn’t want to have to turn around and drive the same stretch of road again to find a spot. I decided that I would make an executive decision. I would turn out at the next entrance, head up whatever road it was, and park. By the time that thought had gone through my head, we had passed another opening. I wheeled the car about and pulled out at the entrance.

“Alright, how does this look?” I said, eyeing the opening. It looked like there was a slight hill that descended three or so feet before the road headed off into the desert.

“O-K.” Pink said, squinting out the window. I figured that such a statement gave me enough authority to proceed, so I dropped the car into a lower gear, and placed my foot on the gas, ready to ease down the hill. “STOP!” She shrieked suddenly.

My foot hit the brakes. We stopped a foot away from the hill.

“What’s going on?”

“Look!”

I looked. When we had pulled in, the “hill” had been in darkness. Our lights had pointed at an angle, so we hadn’t been able to see the first part of the road. I had seen the rest of the road, stretching out across the desert for miles, but I hadn’t exactly seen the “hill”. But, it had been perfectly reasonable to assume that it was there. It had been a bad assumption. At our current quick dead stop, our lights had illuminated the road’s contours. There was no hill in the first several feet. Instead, there was a simple three to four foot drop-off before the road started. If we had been going at death-defying speeds, we might have been able to sail off of the edge, and possibly make the landing below and keep going. But we weren’t going that fast. Instead, we had been going at a crawl. Our nose would have pitched over, and we would have either landed with an axel cracking, hood denting thud, or we would have been stuck between the top and the bottom like a see-saw. Either way, we would have been fine, but we would have had a very long wait, and a super-expensive tow back to civilization.

“Good catch!” I said enthusiastically. “That would have been totally bad.”

Pink muttered something that I didn’t quite catch, and I backed us out of our near-stupid trap, and we got back on the road. I could tell that she was even more skeptical about the situation now, so I knew that I really had to turn out at the next spot. Fortunately, another opening appeared almost immediately. I pulled out again. I couldn’t quite read the sign, but this road was completely flat, with no hidden traps.

“How’s this?” I asked. “It’s signed – can’t quite read it – ‘Ord… Canyon’?”

“Looks good.” Pink said. “Much better than before.”

We rumbled up the road, through copious amounts of desert vegetation. Ocotillos scratched and clawed at our windows as we followed the track further into the canyon. There was a fair amount of new growth in the center rut which, along with the long-dried out ATV tracks told me that not too many people had been up the road for a while. After about three miles, I pulled far enough off the main road so that any potential traffic would not hit us, and turned off the car. It was quiet. With the car off, the silence of the desert crept in; succulents rustling in the western breeze, and desert rodents peeping and squeaking at the late night intrusion.