K8sl's Blog

WARNING!  There is complaining, kvetching, whining and bids for sympathy in this narrative.  ALSO:  it’s long.

Heaven On Earth…

I saw the name overhead, between 2 gate posts, leading down a long dirt road that disappeared into the mesa.  The gate was made of bicycle wheels, and there was no time to stop and examine how they had been put together. They were visually balanced in a pleasing arrangement which was very much at odds with my experience of New Mexico up to that point.  Someone had found their heaven on earth there, but after 36 hours in the vicinity, I knew mine was back in New Hampshire, as if there were ever any questions.

The trip began with my bloody-minded determination to fly out west to where my daughter’s  RV had been abandoned after losing the brakes on Wolf Creek Pass.

For weeks beforehand, I kept in touch with the garage, working on making sure they fixed everything, to make it safe to drive across country.  I tried to be personable without being a pest because I wanted to be real to them, not just a target.

It seemed like a good plan, if Mabel Joon, the RV would be roadworthy to not only bring it back East, but to come the Northern route, by way of my friends in Idaho.  That way, I could take pictures of all my beloved places in the Sawtooth Mountains, and around Yellowstone, the Badlands, and whatever else looked likely for painting projects.

There are many people in my community who would tell me that my first mistake was in being wary, that not being completely positive and cheerful brought on all that followed, but I am a greater believer in Karma and a lesser believer in magical thinking.

My old friend, I’ll call her Mary, who has been living in Gallup for a few years now told me that if I flew into Albuquerque, she would pick me up, let me stay at her house for a night and then drive me to Pagosa Springs, a generous offer, the distance being substantial by Eastern standards.  Two days before I was to get on the plane, she told me she didn’t want to do that after all.  She was tired, she said, she had reached her limit.  I told her I was sorry she hadn’t mentioned this before I bought a ticket, and to have a nice day.  The smart thing to do would have been to let it go, to use that ticket for some other destination and let the RV disappear into the maw of some junkyard in Colorado, and though I seriously considered that, I decided that I didn’t want to be so easily deflected by such a tiny issue as no transportation, so I reserved a rental car and a taxi to get me from Albuquerque to Gallup, from there to Durango, and then be ferried by taxi to Pagosa.  This required keeping moving with an eye on the clock,  defeating the purpose I had gone into the magnificent West for in the first place.   After I had found my own way to get to the RV and Mary was off the hook for driving me around, she was gracious enough to let me sleep the first night at her place, and made me feel welcome.  In the morning, she gave me a couple of gallons of water and some apples and a box of blueberries which I was pretty grateful for before the day was over.

We went out for breakfast the next day at a local diner.  Everywhere we went, people were selling jewelry, or pots or beaded things or woven things, and many of which were lovely.  She took me to the Saturday flea market where the variety of vendors went from guys who looked like something out of Breaking Bad selling stuff out of their pick-ups to  strutting men with their downcast wives and tired grandmothers nursing babies from breasts that hadn’t produced milk in decades.  The landscape was hot and spare and gravely magical, inviting a brush – but not a hammock.

Up until the time I got to Pagosa Springs everything went smoothly.

From the moment I put my hand on the keys to Mabel Joon, things began to feel wrong.  The steering felt loose and spongey, though “Bill” at Buckskin towing had told me that it was fine, they had checked it and all the linkages and connections and joints were fine.  OK, I tried to get used to that.  It had no power, the kind of no power you feel when an engine is dying, but again, just old.  I wasn’t doing well with the altitude, my head buzzed, I was having trouble breathing, my nose was bleeding, I wanted to get out of there and down at least a couple of thousand feet, so I pushed on.  I stopped in Chimney Rock for a sandwich where the proprietor informed me that the back/side door of the RV was flapping.  The engine was so noisy I had not heard it.  Still trying to be positive, I bungi-corded the door shut, [“Bill” was supposed to fix the door…] felt gratitude that all my stuff hadn’t gone flying out into the Yellow Jacket pass, and kept going.  I stopped just west of Farmington, NM to top up the gas, drove another few miles, not sure how many, my nervous system was pretty well screaming by then, when I noticed the occasional puff of blue smoke in my rear view mirror.  I had to keep opening the window to the 105 degree heat to yank the mirror back in to a position such as would  make it useful as a rear view mirror.  I had been pulling over on a regular basis to let streams of pissed off motorists behind me pass.  During one of those pull overs I found a pair of pliers, but remained unsuccessful at getting that bolt to tighten so the mirror would stay put, though it seemed loose enough while driving.

Somewhere between Farmington and Shiprock, well into the reservation, smoke was continuous blowing in clouds from the rear, and as the panel gauges did not work, it was hard to tell what was what.  When plumes of smoke billowed up from under the hood, I pulled over.  I’d had enough of the diesel fumes to last me for the rest of my life anyhow.  How in the hell had my daughter and her boyfriend driven this thing 4,000 miles?  Bill was supposed to have fixed the diesel fume problem.  Had he fixed anything?  The brakes worked, but for how long?  When Rosamund and Cayce abandoned the miserable object the gauges worked, and so did the radio.  Now? nothing doing.

At that point, I was in the desert, no particular landmarks, so when I told triple AAA more or less where I was, a bit east of Shiprock, 30-45 minutes west of Farmington, they assured me someone would be there soon, I also pointed out that I was in distress physically so would they step on it.

I took the time waiting to figure out what I could abandon and what I really was willing to haul along.  Rosamund and Cayce had gone through this same process, so there were a few things in the RV that I was hoping to salvage for them, a big book of Cayce’s baby pictures, Ingrid’s djembe, Rosamund’s first weaving project, and a really lovely one, though dark with diesel fumes and an aluminum wall plaque of the virgin de Guadalupe  that had come with Mabel Joon.  Earlier in this doomed trip I had spotted the Queen of Heaven, and asked that she keep me safe on this journey.  I’m not a Catholic, but I thought any help from any deity or mother of deity that I could get would be gratefully acknowledged, though – not by going to mass…… sorry.  Not until she deals w/the pedophile priests.

A lot of good stuff got left behind, that I’m sure someone will happily scavenge before I am able to get AAA to haul the piece of shit to a junkyard.

I called Visa to ask them to dispute the payment to the garage, and called the garage man “Bill” to complain, but of course, now that I had gotten the blight off his lot he wasn’t picking up.

An hour later, I called them back.  During this time, a man had come by and had tried various ways to get me separated from my vehicle, or to get inside it with me, and when an associate of his turned up to help him, I got on the phone again.  Running out of battery, but at least had some, and still had cel service.  It was about 100 degrees, no shade anywhere, no airconditioning because the RV was turned off and dead to this world anyhow.  Very little water left, extreme swelling in my body and extremities, thinking getting cloudy, no food and beginning to panic, I called AAA again.  They did not seem to know anything about my previous call, and then informed me that nobody was coming to get me or the RV the excuse being that they didn’t know where I was.  Well that makes 2 of us, I told them.  They suggested that I call 911.  I called the police, and they informed me that I was not any kind of priority and that they might come get me sometime, but no guarantees.  There was a fire in a building and they were all at that, I was told.  I’m not sure why the police were there and not the fire department, but I was in no position to argue, maybe they didn’t have a fire dept.

The town of Shiprock, in case you ever get stuck there doesn’t have any motels, hotels or rentals of any kind.  There is no taxi, no rent a cars, nothing but your thumb and the kindness of strangers is going to get you out of there, and after what the white man has done to the Navajo nation over the years, I would advise you to be suspicious of a friendly Navajo.  They are a highly introverted and self-protecting society for good reason, and being stranded there was no good idea.

The police seemed to hear me when I said I was an elderly woman alone, being chatted up by a stranger near a casino in a place without shade, water, food and displaying health problems.  I suggested that they might not want the publicity of a tourist death.  The man standing too close to me that I had been unable to persuade to go away vanished as soon as he realized I was talking to police, taking his friends with him.

Some time after that, the police officer I had talked to who told me there were no officers to come to where I was, turned up and took me into Shiprock to the police station.  I pretty much begged them to let me sit in their antechamber until the next day when Mary could be persuaded to come up from Gallup to get me.  They tried to get a relay together to send me back to Farmington where I could get a motel and a car rental, but that fell through because in the meantime they found an officer who was going to Gallup and would give me a ride.  He’d picked up a juvenile on some offense and was transporting him.  For reasons I could understand if I wanted to, he wasn’t going to turn around and drive the 5 miles back into Shiprock to pick me up for transport as well, so, grateful to have a safe place to spend the night, I lined 3 punitive chairs up and did my best to pass the time.  I sorted luggage.  I drank lots of water.  I played the accordion, and it was just loud enough to drown out the screaming and pounding on the other side of the wall where the drunk tank was.  I slept for little bits in between.  I painted the beautiful surrounding landscape from memory.  My body had shut down, intestines and bladder weren’t functioning, I wore a sweater and stayed wrapped in a blanket, but body was shaking and racked with cramps.  It occurred to me that I was probably in shock.  I was clammy and shivering in 85 degree heat.

There had been a brief idea of Mary trying to find someone to come get me, she has a cataract and is particularly nervous about driving at night on that road, which used to be route 666, and named The Devil’s Highway.  Many many DUI fatalities happen on that road, especially on a Saturday night.  I could hear from the other room that there was plenty of extreme behavior to go around.  It was good to know that the other people in the building had been taken off the road for the night.  At any rate, Mary didn’t come, and couldn’t find anyone who would except for the alcoholic son of a co-worker, and I said I’d pass.  The one thing I did know was that I was in a safe place, and gratitude was my main emotion.

Up until midnight or so, a steady stream of traffic came in trying to get help or relief for some profound misery that was easily way worse than heat exhaustion, adrenal stress, hunger, blood sugar crash and shock.  Pretty soon I would be out of there.  The snapshot of the lives of disappointed grandmothers, distressed mothers and children plummeting into uncertain futures was enough to convince me that there wasn’t room for the self-centered whining that I was tempted to treat myself to.  So far, I had merely lost a gamble with my own hubris, not a big deal, really.

Dawn broke peachy and hazy over the rez, and the drunk tank was emptied.  Though the detainees had been brought in through another door, they were let out through the front, and let me just say, I have seen drunks in my time, I have seen destitute street winos in Boston, I have seen people with money who have ruined their health and life with a martini diet, but never could I have imagined that liquor and/or drugs could cause such ravaged faces on such young men. This is what Mary deals with every day, she is on the DUI taskforce.  No wonder she is burnt out.  I was burnt out and I’d only been in the state for 36 hours.

Sometime a bit more than 12 hours after I arrived at the Shiprock police station Mary came up from Gallup to get me.  We went to the market to buy some food, the only restaurants being greaseburger emporia, and then she thought it would be a good idea to show me the sights.  Being in an air conditioned vehicle was a massive relief for the first 5 minutes, but as my teeth began chattering and the leg cramps setting in again, I tried to close down a couple of the vents that were pointed at me and wish desperately for a blanket.  Mary said she had to keep the car cold for her dog, who was not there, and got upset with me for closing vents, or not wanting it to be cold enough to keep lettuce fresh. We drove to Cortez.  We drove to Mesa Verde, where my friend drove around the switchbacks at a speed if not designed to induce vomiting, nearly had that effect.  She observed the scenery while driving with her nondominant hand, her right hand reaching for a bag of chips while I tried to calm down.  I didn’t know I had real vertigo until that ride, the altitude got my nose bleeding again, and heart doing something odd, breathing altered, I couldn’t wait to get down, I barely appreciated the idea that there had been people who lived up there in the cliffs.  What were they thinking?  No wonder they disappeared.

We didn’t get as far as the cave dwellings, because when offered the option to go on or to go back, I chose going back.

I had forgotten that in the West, a 3 hour drive is not what it is here.  For one thing, people drive 90 miles an hour, so more ground is covered, but it also goes by so fast it’s more like a light show than a tour.

Seven hours after she rescued me from Shiprock, we arrived back in Gallup.  The plan was to sleep, take a day to get organized and figure out what I was going to do.  I ran a bath, and opened the curtain about 4 inches to let in a bit of natural light.  While I was out of the bathroom for a second getting a toothbrush or something, Mary found me a towel.  At this point she began yelling at me for opening the curtain.  She was enraged.  I felt as though I had slipped into a lost chapter of Misery.  “I can’t have anybody changing anything in here! ”  she shouted.  ” I don’t touch anything in your house, and I can’t have anybody touching anything in mine! ”  At this point I developed almost instantaneously some severe lung congestion and accelerated heart rate.  I thought I might die.  A voice told me to get out, to get out as fast as possible, to just run.  I went into the bathroom and called Southwest airlines and made a reservation for the first flight out of Albuquerque, figuring I’d find a way to get to Albuquerque.  I thought maybe I could get a one way rental or a taxi or anything it was, after all, Gallup, a city on the reservation, not a remote outpost.  Not wanting any more confrontation with a crazy situation that felt way too much like my childhood with people going from one personality to the next in a heartbeat, I told Mary one truth which was that I was grateful for her help up to that point, but my health was crashing, I didn’t want to have it crash in Gallup, that it wouldn’t be fair to either of us, and so I had booked a ticket out.  The suddenness and extremity of nastiness in her voice had really shocked me.  I felt as though I must have been completely out of it to not see how much of a nuisance I was being to her, because there had been no outward sign of this hostility beyond her displeasure at my not sharing her opinion of how cold a car should be.

I was trying to reach a taxi service or rental car company when she came in and told me that she’d had a friend who’d tried to get out of Gallup on short notice once and that it had been impossible, but that if we left in the next 5 minutes, we could make it to Albuquerque and she would drive.  Though my stuff was on the floor to have been gone through and repacked, I got it all in the car in 3 minutes and we were out of there.  “It’s not like I’m trying to get rid of you, ” she said, but we both knew that was less than accurate.

The drive to Albuquerque was smooth and fast.  I used up the rest of the memory chip on photos through the window, marveled at the beauty of that world, and clung to my sense of relief at getting out of there.  Storms came down briefly, and a rainbow, magnificently carving the sky into present and future; we pulled into the hotel parking lot and said our goodbyes, again, I thanked her for helping me, and left the rest alone.  There are so many things better left un-confronted.

The flight home was easy, I had congenial people around me, got another from memory painting done,

enjoyed a lovely cheeseburger in the Baltimore airport and delighted in being at sea level again with only one more hour of severe swelling and congestion to look forward to before being able to sleep in my own bed.  As we approached Manchester, I looked down to see 3 heart shaped ponds one after the other.  It seemed like a sign.

I’m still going to sue AAA, though.

This entry was posted on July 4, 2012 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.