Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
drifters: dreamers, losers, vagrants, crazy people-they all always go west in America. They
all have this hopeless idea that they will get to the coast and make a fortune as a movie star
or rock musician or gameshow contestant or something. And if things don't work out they
canalways become aserial murderer.It'sstrange that nooneevergoeseast, that younever
encounter anyone hitchhiking to New York in pursuit of some wild and crazy dream to be
a certified public accountant or make a killing in leveraged buyouts.
The weather worsened. Dust began to blow across the road. I was driving into the storm
that the weatherman had spoken of on television the morning before. Beyond Albuquerque
the skies darkened and a sleety rain began to dart about. Tumbleweeds bounced across the
desert and over the highway, and the car was knocked sharply sideways with each gust of
wind.
I had always thought that deserts were hot and dry the year around. I can tell you now that
they are not. I suppose because we always took our vacations between June and August it
implantedinmetheideathateverywhereinAmericaoutsidetheMidwestwashottheyear
around. Wherever you went in the summer in America it was murder. It was always ninety
degrees. If you closed the windows you baked, but if you left them open everything blew
everywhere-comicbooks,maps,loosearticlesofclothing.Ifyouworeshorts,aswealways
did, the bare skin on your legs became part of the seat, like cheese melted onto toast, and
when it was time to get up, there was a ripping sound and a screaming sensation of agony
as the two parted. If in your sun-baked delirium you carelessly leaned your arm against the
metal part of the door onto which the sun had been shining, the skin where it made contact
would shrivel and disappear, like a plastic bag in a flame. This would always leave you
speechless. It was a truly amazing, and curiously painless, spectacle to watch part of your
body just vanish. You didn't know whether to shriek at your mother as if you had been
gravely wounded or do it again, in a spirit of scientific inquiry. In the end, usually, you
would do nothing, but just sit listlessly, too hot to do anything else.
So I was surprised to find myself in wintry weather, in a landscape as cold as it was bleak.
The darting sleet thickened as the highway climbed up and into the Zuni Mountains. Bey-
ondGallupitturnedtosnow.Wetandheavy,itfellfromtheskylikescatteredfeathers,and
the afternoon became like night. Twenty miles beyond Gallup, I entered Arizona and the
fartherIdroveintothatstatethemoreevidentitbecame thatIwasenteringastormoflong
standing. The snow along the roadside became ankle-deep and then knee-deep. It was odd
to think that only a couple of hours before I had been strolling around Santa Fe in bright
sunshine and shirtsleeves. Now the radio was full of news of closed roads and atrocious
weather-snow in the mountains, torrential rain elsewhere. It was the worst spring storm in
decades, the weatherman said with ill-disguised glee. The Los Angeles Dodgers had been
