Over the Mountains

I’d been hired for an after-dinner performance at a convention of Australian Shepherd dog enthusiasts in Carson City. Amazing dogs, nice people, long industrial style tables with paper tablecloths and plastic flatware, and your choice of beef or chicken for an entrée, both, as usual in these deals, cooked to the consistency of rawhide. Also on the show with me was a cowboy poet friend of mine named Skeeter, who lived close by and invited me to stay with him afterwards.

Everybody has a friend like Skeeter. Well, all right, maybe you don’t, but everybody I know does. He has the disagreeable habit of drinking too much, after which he’ll describe for you, in great detail, the darkest moments of his four failed marriages while picking his feet over the coffee table. I didn’t want to stay with Skeeter. I made the Australian Shepherd folks put me up at a local casino instead.

It turned out they had a budget that was a bit small and cramped, these dog people, and rather than a big, flashy casino—one of those comfortable ones—they put me in a small, cramped place at the edge of town with a small, cramped motel attached. It wasn’t the casino with the Beverly Hillbillies theme, but it almost was, and their ventilation system needed work.

Around one o’clock in the morning I woke up, coughing. Something weird had happened with the Casino’s fans and airducts, and all the cigarette smoke in the building, which should have been vented to the outside, was now being funneled directly through my room. And that was a bunch of cigarette smoke. It’s a Nevada state law that you can’t fill out a keno card or pull the lever on a slot machine without smoking a cigarette. Even if you’re on oxygen. I’ve never seen this law written down, but I know it exists, because I’ve seen the people who obey it, yanking those handles, hacking their lungs out, cigarettes dangling from lower lips, with their oxygen bottles on the floor beside them. This is a tiny and strange facet of Americana that is rarely noted.

I sat up in bed, gasping. I tried opening a window, but you’re not allowed to open a motel window in the State of Nevada. There’s a law against that, too. Gamblers who lose all their money might try to jump out those windows and commit suicide, even a single-story motel room like the one I was in, where it’s only a foot and a half down to the little gravel-and-cactus garden next to the sidewalk. I opened the door to let in some fresh air, and this immediately turned the room into a large, tobacco-smelling ice cube.

And now I was awake. Really awake.

The kind of awake I was is the kind of awake you get when you realize you’re not falling back to sleep. Perhaps ever again. You become alert, severely alert, and can suddenly solve complicated math problems, even the one with the guy on the train going thirty miles an hour and walking through the cars at four miles an hour in the opposite direction. You become nervous, and can’t sit still. In fact, you feel that if you don’t get up and start moving, your brain will short-circuit, and fizzle out.

It was then I arrived at the brilliant idea of getting dressed and driving home. Right now, right this minute.

What a nice surprise it would be for my wife, I thought, when I came rolling through the gate at eight or nine in the morning, instead of my projected late afternoon arrival time. She would be pleased and happy, proud of me for accomplishing such a feat, and I, smart and industrious, would be a hero for finding a way for us to spend more time together.

These are the moments, by the way, that provide me with more material than I can ever possibly use.

I used to know a guy named Roland, who drove a fertilizer truck in Bakersfield. He was an expert on night driving. He never did any night driving himself, but he drove that fertilizer truck every day and, apparently, that will make you tired, in fact wear you plumb out, and he knew what to do about it. His remedy was to drink a cup of coffee, and then, half an hour later, drink a glass of orange juice. This, Roland swore, would get you an hour and a half of being wide awake. An hour and a half exactly. And who am I to argue with an experienced truck driver? Yeah, a fertilizer truck driver, sure—but a truck driver all the same.

I dressed, gathered up my stuff and tossed it into the car. I drove to the nearest AM/PM, where I remembered to buy gas. I always fill my tank before leaving Nevada, because California gas costs more. Much more. I was proud of myself for remembering this—but, you’ll recall, I was alert and very smart right then. The math problems were fairly whipping through my brain. Inside the convenience store I found my cup of coffee and my orange juice, placed them on the counter in front of the register, and announced to the clerk, “I’m heading over the mountains!”

The clerk stared at me. “What’re you, crazy?”

I paid him no mind. He was a bit pudgy and sallow-looking, as are many graveyard-shift convenience store clerks, probably a video game enthusiast. He didn’t strike me as the type to be ambitious and a go-getter, about to be lauded as a hero by his wife. Tsk, tsk, I thought. And pshaw.

And now a few moments for practical matters:

When driving across the mountains at night on a two-lane highway, it is impossible to go faster than thirty-five miles an hour. This is a fact. Try it, you’ll see. Especially on Highway 88, the highway I chose. And I sense that several of you already have your hands up. Couldn’t I, you ask, have driven north twenty-five miles to Reno, and there caught Interstate 80, a four-lane freeway, and crossed the mountains via that route where speeds of sixty and seventy miles an hour are possible?

Of course not.

There are two reasons for this, both so basic that to even mention them seems a waste of time and effort. The first reason is that I wanted to go home, and home was south and west of where I was.

The second reason is that I am a man. If a man needs to go south and west, it is impossible for him to even consider driving north. In fact, if a man attempts to drive north when he wants to go ultimately south and west, his head will explode. This is a simple truth. Ask any wife. She will confirm it.

So I chose Highway 88, which climbs into the mountains just south of Carson City, heading in the proper direction, a winding, two-lane highway. A winding, narrow, two-lane highway.

Going in the proper direction.

Man, it was dark out there. My headlights were yellowish and anemic, and seemed to dwindle away into the blackness, and except for the ten or twelve deer I almost hit as they streaked past, I could hardly see anything. I drank the coffee. Thirty minutes later, as instructed, I drank the orange juice. It did not give me the hour and a half of sharp focus I’d been promised. I think I got twenty minutes out of it. I cranked down my window and let the cold air blow on me. I sang. Loudly. I dug around in the glove box for a CD to play, but the only one I could find was Zig Ziglar giving a motivational speech to an Amway Convention in Des Moines in 1977. Zig was a great speaker, but after the third or fourth time through he started to lose me. I did learn how to answer objections and lead my customer toward the close of the sale, should such a need arise.

The idea that I’d made a mistake came gradually to me. I had hoped for a moon to throw some light on the road, but no such luck. In a little while it began to rain. I hunched forward over the steering wheel, staring out past the whipping wiper blades. I was up in the trees now, trees, trees, trees, branches hanging over the road, swaying mournfully in the wind, waving me back, warning of unseen perils hiding in the darkness ahead, along with more deer. My fingers ached from their death grip on the wheel. It occurred to me that the tobacco smoke swirling through my motel room hadn’t been that bad, really, and maybe I could have toughed it out and eventually fallen back to sleep, and come away with only a couple of small tumors. I realized I could no longer remember the first line of Roger Miller’s “Dang Me.” I hummed it over and over again, thinking it would come back to me. It didn’t. This was almost as bothersome as the weather.

The wind rose up behind the rain, great roaring gusts that caused the car to shudder and skitter sideways on the road. The car I drove was a small one, chosen for speed and economy, but I wished now I had brought something a little heavier, something more substantial—a Hummer, perhaps, or a Sherman tank. The wind sent waves of water slapping against the windows, reminding me of movies I’d seen about storms at sea, which made me think of shipwrecks. That didn’t help. My shoulders knotted up and tried to draw together behind my ears. Though the wiper blades worked valiantly, visibility was washed down to fractions of a second, and my speed slowed to a breathtaking twelve miles an hour. Even that seemed reckless.

And in the midst of all this craziness, I suddenly, very badly, wanted to sleep.

My eyes began to ache, and burn, and feel brittle at the edges, begging to close just for a second, that’s all, a couple of seconds to rest. Just for a second, maybe two little seconds, it wouldn’t take long, there’s not much of a curve coming up, it’s pretty straight along here, or I bet it would be if I could see it, just keep a little to the right of the white line in the middle as soon as I can catch sight of it, hold steady and blink for a good long blink. Not closing my eyes, really, just doing some slow blinking.

Somewhere around four o’clock I pulled to the side of the road, got out and ran around the car three times. Then,...