“Do you mind driving the first part?” she asks, shuffling to the passenger side door. Her voice sounds like the gravel my car is parked on. I don’t argue. At 3am on day four of our impromptu jaunt through the American southwest I have already driven through four states, slept for a total of nine hours. What’s another two?
I keep telling myself that I just need to go big or go home; I am never, ever coming back to this state that is so far away, this state that is all sand and no water, and we’ve already driven twenty five hours and however many miles and we are going to go see the sun rise over the Grand Canyon and I am going to get us there, I can stay awake awhile longer.
Our hostel in Flagstaff is staffed entirely by foreigners, the kind from bad teen roadtrip movies, who sing drunken karaoke all night and have no idea where anything is when we ask questions like ‘how do we get to the grand canyon from here?”. Shann spends half an eternity looking at a map with the innkeeper from Australia, and almost as long talking about Grand Canyon hikes with the inkeeper from England. From these instructions, we are instructed to take a road that does not exist, and we are encouraged to hike to the bottom of the canyon. I wonder if they are trying to kill us.
Driving at night down through California was lousy; driving through Arizona, I realize just after we turn out of the parking lot, is terrifying and stupid. It isn’t stupid because I am mostly asleep, or because I have terrible night vision, or because I am a horrible driver (check, check, and check), or even because the darkness is like molasses or the fade to black at the end of a movie, obliterating all signs of life. It is terrifying and stupid because these roads belong to the elk, and they really enjoy foraging and nuzzling and doing other elk-y things in the middle of the highway, especially when it is dark out. If you hit an elk, one of two things will happen:
1. you will wreck your car
2. you will wreck your car and die
I am almost too tired to remember my only-somewhat rational fear of hitting one of these beasts. We bumble northward at a steady 40mph. I don’t admit to Shann that I can’t handle this right now– I almost cried when I thought I couldn’t find my car keys this morning (in my pocket). I hope she falls asleep fast, I hope we don’t die.
A year ago I drove through Montana, and the mountains and the trees and the sky made me feel like I was the only person in the world. Besides offending my best friend sitting in the passenger seat, I felt so lonely my ribs hurt and I drove like a crazy person to get the hell out of Montana. It felt like the rock cliffs and the plants and the gigantic forests would swallow me.
Arizona is different. The sky is long and flat. Even in the dark as you stare out your windows, seeing nothing, you know that there’s not much of anything out there to swallow you up; even the sand is lonely. It’s an empathetic lonely, an understandable gaze at the moon til i lose my senses kind of lonely, or at least this is what I tell myself, smug, having no knowledge of southwestern flora or fauna. You can get out of your car and play your acoustic guitar and cook a can of beanie weenies on the side of the road and be mostly fine, I suppose.
My friend, my traveling companion through this ordeal is sweet, easygoing, tall, and so deeply asleep she is drooling onto her hoodie. I want to let her sleep, but I need some kind of noise to wrap myself in while I drive, and I stick a Joanna Newsom cd in, at volume level 2 or 3, barely on, I just need to hear a voice.
I hate Joanna Newsom, the twingy harp and the voice that could be an eight year old on a bad trip, but we listened to it driving east through california the night before and something about it was really perfect when you’re bobbing through the darkness feeling lonely, like driftwood.
Three tracks in, my staid passenger rustles a little under her seatbelt, opens her eyes a little, and mumbles something about how she thought I hated Joanna Newsom, and the energy of two awake people fills the car and suddenly this isn’t so hard. Sadie, track four comes on, and we get carried away in the song, quietly singing along. It bobs and sways in tone and feeling, gets loud and quiet and prophetic again, we have no idea what we’re singing. Eventually we will return home and I will fall in love with this album and we will sing this track especially loudly when I put it on if we’re driving somewhere to the point that she will ask if I put on this album every time she gets into my car, but I don’t know this yet, because we’ve only been friends for six months and I don’t know her very well and sometimes I think about whether we’ll even know each other in a year from now, or if she’ll be another girl I tried to graft into friendship and fell out of touch with, and that is what I am pondering when a large animal charges into the two lane road.
After it happens I will pull over and cry and she will put her hand on my head and tentatively rub my back and tell me that everything is okay, we’re fine.
It was smaller than it seemed the moment it entered my high beams. At first it looked like a bear or a sasquatch, sprinting for the other side of the road. Maybe the sand was sandier on the other side. When it thumped under my car I realized how small it was, a possum or a rabbit. I had never hit an animal with a car before. I cried for myself and the shame of killing an animal with my big dumb car and I couldn’t stop thinking about elk, even though I clearly had not hit one.
I pulled back onto the road and kept driving, shaking the rest of the way there. The sky turned a dark purple, and I begrudgingly sped up. Signs for the south rim of the canyon appeared, and my friend continued to pat my shoulder and tell me that I was doing fine.
We parked and walked and found a place to sit on a rock face overlooking the gigantic hole in the ground that is the canyon, and we watched what was indeed a sunrise, huge and crisp and beautiful, like texas toast. I took photos as the sun warmed an old, dying flower the color of butter, cast a shadow with the chainlink fence that kept eager tourists from falling to their deaths. We mutually agreed upon the beauty of the moment, turned, went on a short hike a mile into the canyon and back again, drove back to the hostel without incident, slept for nine hours in our hostel bunkbeds in the hot night without interruption for the first time since arriving in Arizona, dreaming of our survival.
