ONWARDS WAYWARD BOATMEN
Cataract Canyon, Utah’s Canyonlands, late ’70s with Suzanne Jordan
At the end of June, one of our trips gets cut in half—some clients cancelling. We have a rotation system, taking turns at the bottom of the list – first to get cut if the roster shrinks. This time around, it’s me. I join the boyos for their pre-trip dinner in Moab, after which our beloved area manager, Suzanne, drives them off towards Mineral Bottom put-in (where I should be heading), and I return alone to the Melody Home, our rusty, beat-up trailer home-cum-boating office on the dust-blown outskirts of this sober Mormon town. Next morning, still a little bleary eyed, the sun not yet over the horizon enough to make things sizzle, Suzanne returns in a mad rush, gathering food, tossing it helter-skelter into her Toyota Land Cruiser.
Her car is old, cranky, and just off the blocks from an overhaul by long-bearded Stanley Bufford, her ex, also from Alabama. One of the Bufford Boys. They aint from ’round heea. Surrounded by wilting evening primrose and a lonely sand verbena long deprived of it’s beguiling desert perfume, the Toyota has been baking in the sun so long the metal has warped. Numerous oil leaks drip into the red dust below, creating a patchwork of ruby-colored sandpaper, the sweet-oil fragrance as pungent as a horse barn. It would not be out of place cast in Mad Max.
I’ve seen Suzanne like this before. Whatever it is she’s planning, there will be no stopping her. She grabs an army surplus rocket box sitting in the dirt and goatheads and tosses it effortlessly in the vehicle, jumps in, starts up the motor. I love the way she moves in her flowered skirt and plastic sandals: a focused whirligig. Groggily, I ask what’s up as I step barefooted outside, directly onto one of the goatheads with a yelp. While I hop and pull the devilish spiny grass seed out of my heel, she tells me, “Wayell. Those guides f’got a day’s worth of food an’ I got to drive it way out theah.” She waves her arm in a generally way-out-there direction. This means catching them on the super remote, rarely travelled White Rim Trail along the Green River, down there below Mineral Bottom put-in, in the midst of Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons, some of the most forbidding territory on earth. “They sayed they’d go slow and wait for me to caitch up.”
It’s an hour and a half drive to get to the put-in. In a moment of insane inspiration I offer to join her. Nothing better to do.
Suzanne is suited to this environment. Not necessarily her body—she’s a fair-skinned Alabaman with flaming red hair and countless freckles. It’s her spirit that fits. She wears Navajo-style print skirts and white frilly blouses and sacred silver and turquoise bracelets. She speaks with a heavy southern accent, which I adore, but which she finds embarrassing. She’s tough, resilient, superb and unlikely at all times, best under fire. Her tiny hands are strong and leathery. She, like the desert, surrounds you with heat and energy and offerings, and if you are able to see straight through the rippling air and ignore the mirages, she makes you stronger, better. I remember her as I first saw her, a legend among boating legends during the early days in California, me in my kayak down there low at water level surfing a wave on the doomed Stanislaus River, she bearing down upon me in her huge Huck Finn raft, red hair flying, teeth flashing in a great smile, arm muscles in firm control of oars doing her bidding, a flick of the wrist and deliberately just missing running me over, all the while laughing her infectious laugh.
We drive through town, veer off the highway onto the dirt and up into the desert wilderness towards Dead Horse Point, past temples and mesas and towers of ancient, multicolored, rock-hard sand. Sand which has risen from molten mantle to highest mountain, erosion settling things down to a nice, warm coastal beach, which eventually migrated to Utah for a bit of sun, taking its sweet time. We turn off the asphalt towards Mineral. The trail is one that was used by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – The Hole In The Wall Gang. We pass an old adobe cabin with two-foot thick walls, sitting cool and hidden amongst the cactus and dunes. The windows look out strategically over surrounding low points. Suzy drives down the switchbacks cut into vertical sandstone cliffs a thousand feet high, then down still more to the willow and tamarisk bordering the Green River at Mineral Bottom. Here we turn left, south, downriver, along the beginning of the four-wheel drive track called the White Rim Trail. This route follows the river, more or less, for over forty miles towards the confluence with the Colorado, then up along the Colorado arm and back to Moab. Sounds simple enough, but in this country, nothing is as simple as it seems. Another thing we have in common.
Switchbacking up cliffs, wading through deep sandy ravines, impassable gorges can come out of nowhere and separate you from the life-giving river. Or the rest of creation. Or perhaps your own inconsequential existence. Rattlesnakes and cactus needles and scorpions and fire ants. And heat—relentless heat, searing heat, tormenting heat. Red dust and quicksand. Isolation and impenetrable country tick, tick, tick into your soul like grains of sand through an hourglass. We groan downstream in second gear.
As we approach the final little hill before the meeting point, Suzy obliquely asks me if I might want to just continue on down the White Rim Trail after we’ve accomplished our little mission, instead of, say, turning back towards cold beer and air conditioning. Neither she nor I have actually done the trail, though we’ve glimpsed isolated bits of it from below as we floated by in our rafts. I ask her if she thinks her old beater will make it. Her disdain is womanly, defiant, thickly Southern. “Of caw-rse!”
The Gods are once again giving me a helpful clue. And once again, I miss it by miles.
“Ok. Let’s go for it.”
Halfway up the next rise, the Toyota stalls. Fate kindly offering its children another opportunity to bolt. We politely, unwisely refuse. Suzy turns the key to restart the car, carelessly saying “Oh, Jeffy, I just forgot to downshift.” It doesn’t restart. Dead as a doornail. She rolls it back down the too-short hill and pops the clutch. Nada. We look at each other, the silence immediate and close, and disembark. Like rats fleeing a sinking ship. I find myself running downstream in my cotton Chinese slippers—having imprudently left them on from this morning post goathead—and am instantly and acutely impressed by the flawless isolation. Topping the rise I scan downstream for the boats tied up at the pre-appointed spot. Dugald and the crew were going to take the passengers on a short hike to kill time while they waited for Suzy. I crest the hill just in time to see them pulling out of the thick tamarisk, lazily floating the current downstream and away.
We’re twenty miles from anything, dead in our tracks, and it’s getting hot. Not hot like when you have to stop playing baseball and get a Coke—hot like when you start to stagger and hallucinate and collapse, heart quivering uselessly, blood coagulating in your veins. I wave Suzanne’s colorful Pendleton blanket—a gift to her from her grandmother—high over my head like a bullfighter, yelling and whistling and trying to get the attention of the floating specks disappearing in the distance. I cannot say what inspired me to grab it. A motor sounds, a boat turns upstream. Good ol’ Dugald comes to the rescue with a couple of passengers to help push.
Dugald Sinclair Alistair Bremner the Third, “Doog,” is handsome, funny, a great kayaker and musician. Savvy and quick, with a self-deprecating, compact wit and charming Scottish smile. He can see what’s up before it leaves the ground. We give him the rocket box, they push the Toyota, the engine sputters to life.
While they’re readying their boat to continue downstream and catch the others, Suzanne asks me, “Ah you still game foah the White Rim, Jeffy?” She’s coquettish about it… smiling, coy and sly.
In a not-too-distant future, mountain bikes and four-wheelers will travel this road in an endless parade. Countless open canoes will ply the flatwater, only to be met by a motorboat at the confluence downstream just before the whitewater of Cataract Canyon, then hauled back to trendy outdoor sports Mecca Moab in two swift hours. In that future, you will have to struggle for silence and solitude. At the moment, however, negotiating this track is an extreme undertaking at the end of the fucking earth. I never saw one single human soul on it in three years of running this river.
Trying hard not to sound patronizing, I ask if she thinks the car can do it. Hands-on-hips indignation is her response, as any fool can see it was just a momentary glitch that is now overcome. Stupid me. OK, I’m all over it. Dugald is shaking his head, looking at me dubiously, one eyebrow raised. People do this a lot to me. I shrug my shoulders—my typical response. Dugald floats away, wordless, brow furrowed in a failed search for reason. Suzanne and I drive off, happy as clams.
Up and down, around and over, the hours rattle by. The indifferent landscape jolts by the open top. The heat ascends, and so do we, up over a thousand-foot ridge, pausing at the apex. I gaze down the steep descent, and my thoughts unwisely escape my lips.
“Okay. This is our turn-back point. If we go on, and somethin’ happens to the Cruiser, we aint gonna get back up this hill. It’s over twenty-five miles from here to the nearest traveled road—the one to Dead Horse Point…” My voice trails off. Suzy scowls and revs the engine in reply. We lurch down the slope, me gripping the overheated metal dash and doorframe in a pointless attempt to keep my neck from snapping.
Minutes later, at the next ravine, we fly over a lip into the sandy wash, and the engine dies once more. Only this time something smells funny. As my brain resettles in its case and begins to function, I get out and pop the hood, exposing the toxic smoking hulk of the battery. Stanley’s rusty, corroded clothes hanger wire tie-down has broken, leaving the battery sitting tilted on the hot engine. Two cells have melted, toxic electrolyte dripping into the thirsty sand. My spirit sinks along with it.
I salvage what I can of the wire and use it to retie what’s left of the battery to its proper seat, then refill the remaining cells with our half-gallon canteen and pray to the Gods. I wipe my brow, Suzy turns the key, and the engine starts—coughing and sputtering. Only now it won’t idle. Suzy has to keep gunning the engine to keep it alive. She can’t do the brake, the gas, and the clutch all at the same time, so I have a new job: I am to give it gas with my left foot—reaching from the passenger seat around and over the gear shaft—while Suzy works the other two pedals. I glance back, and decide confidently that there couldn’t possibly be any steeper slopes going forward than the one we’d have to try if we turned around. So now in total agreement—onwards.
It’s soon apparent that there’s no longer enough guts in our game beast to ascend even the smallest grades. Every time we get to the bottom of one, I disembark while Suzy constantly revs the engine, retrieve the two full jerry cans of fuel from the back, and hump up the hill on foot carrying them. Meanwhile Suzy reverses to get a running start and, lighter by 265 pounds or so, guns it to the summit. I meet her, puffing hard and wordless from hauling two full Jerry’s of fuel uphill, replace the two fifty-pound cans. Onwards. Occasionally, even this tactic fails, and the Cruiser stalls halfway up the hill. Undeterred, we concoct a team effort for restarting the engine. It goes thusly: after dropping the cans in the sand, I position myself in front of the vehicle where she can see me, and gesture to the right or left like a manic traffic cop while she removes her foot from the brake and lets the car roll downhill fast (and backwards, mind you), frantically hitting all three pedals with two feet like an Italian smashing grapes, at long last popping the clutch when some inner sense tells her she’s gained enough speed. This saves her the trouble of having to look over her shoulder while she’s doing all those other gyrations. She then comes barrelling up the hill as I leap out of the way, wipe off the dust, take up my burden of dinosaur juice, and lug them to the top, sweating hard.
We get to a longer, steeper hill—the biggest yet. I turn the door handle to initiate our little ritual, but Suzy, a bound and determined woman if there ever was one, guns the thing before I have a chance, and up we go. I hold on tight, trying not to take flight. The short wheelbase rattles our bones and threatens to tear our brains out of our skulls. Halfway up, it stalls. I step out to help direct the backing-up-popping-clutch-gymnastics, but Suzy is frustrated and mad and perhaps a bit dehydrated (like me), and she starts to roll back down the hill without waiting for me to set up. A rather large rock just off the side of the track stops her progress with a crunch. I return to her side, ambling slowly and looking down, kicking the dust at my feet, not saying a word. We’re in this together after all. I pop the hood, and find the battery has broken its binding once again. Down to two cells. I don’t even know if that’s enough to run an engine, much less start it. Not much choice, though, and I retie it, then we begin to figure out a way to move the rock so we can try and roll-start it again. Luckily, there’s a shovel in the back of the Cruiser. It must be fortune blessing us, because it was certainly not my fault. We take turns moving dirt under the searing afternoon sun for an hour, finally removing the offending rock. I beg Suzy to be patient and let me set up for the reverse. She complies, does the drill, and astoundingly the engine whimpers to life at the very bottom of the hill.
Decision time. Again. To keep the thing running now, with a third of a battery, the engine revving has to be constant and at much higher revs. The hill in front of us is clearly way too long and steep to get up, even without me and the jerrys. We know that Dugald’s river trip is back upstream, just opposite the huge hill that forms the barrier behind us at Fort Bottom. If we can just make it back to that point, even if we can’t make it up the hill, at least we only have a few miles of cross-country walking to get to the bank across from where they’re probably camped. There will be food and shelter. Treated water, decanted of mud. Single Malt scotch, compliments of Doog. We could then simply hop on the trip for the week, return with them back to Moab, pick up a good vehicle and battery, come back with help, and retrieve the Cruiser. No problemo.
“I cain’t leave the office unattended for a week, Jeffy. Nobody would know where I was ay-at.”
Suzy is area manager. She takes her job very seriously.
“But Suzy—we could die out here.”
Worth a try.
She decides that if the Toyota can’t make it up the hill, we’ll walk alright. All the way back to Mineral Bottom. And if nobody’s there to help, we’ll hump it the thousand feet to the top of the rim and out the eleven miles to Dead Horse Point Road in the hundred and twenty-five degree heat. She in her plastic “jelly” shoes, me in my cotton slippers. We’ll drink the muddy Green River if we have to (and we will, since the canteen’s just about dry).
“We can do without food for a few hours, cain’t we Jeffy?”
We’re goners.
We jounce and convulse back towards the big one. Afternoon melts into evening, and things cool down a bit. Probably only a hundred and ten or so now, thank God. We arrive at the base of The Hill. I get out, remove the jerry cans, start to walk. Suzy reverses to get a running start. My mind wanders for a moment, finally free of the rattling and whining engine, the mad bouncing and lurching. The cicadas scream at each other, seeking mates. The heat is heavy and molten, dragging me into the earth. My arms lengthen with the weight of the cans. Something out of place catches the farthest reaches of my consciousness, and, purely from some inner instinct, I dive off the side of the track just in time to avoid being smashed by the hurtling steel containing the insane dusty redhead as they skid sideways and careen into the cliff at the sharp switchback, BAM!, then recoil perfectly off it and around the bend, disappearing in a cloud of dust. I hear, rather than see, her progress, as the banging and crashing sounds fade, leaving only the sweltering desert and me. And the fuel cans. I continue my ascent from hell, toting my burden. Don’t ask my why I didn’t just leave them there. Malfunction is the theme after all. After a while, about three quarters of the way to the summit, I huff and puff up to the wreck. She’s stalled at a turnoff in the track. The next part looks steep, but it’s only two more bends to the top.
The track here is rather narrow. Exceptionally narrow, actually. Just wide enough for the outside edge of the wheels, I’d say. Bounded by a vertical cliff going up on the left, straight down hundreds of feet to jagged sandstone on the right. I can see a beckoning campfire far off in the distance along the meandering river, just about where our river trip should be, across from another Hole-In-The-Wall hideout. Steak night. We could be there in an hour or so, easy. I’m briefly tempted to kill Suzanne and leave her to the buzzards.
Suzy begins to empty the vehicle of every bit of weight. I shake my head, sitting on a rock, watching, resigned. Best not to get in the way just now. Leaving a pile of junk in the dirt, she starts the vehicle rolling with one foot outside the door like Fred Flintstone, leaps in, slams the door and silently disappears over a drop in the road, heading back downhill. I hear the engine cough to life, then fade away. I’m not sure whether it died again or she went over the edge or just got too far away to hear. There’s a few moments of silence, apropos, and then I hear her comin’ round the mountain. I barely manage to scurry out of the way like an insect on four legs, when Suzanne’s manic eyes appear above the steering wheel, glaring out of a red clay-dust mask. She looks like the trickster Hopi Mudhead Kachina God, who, upon reflection, I suppose happens to be moulding this story.
She rounds the curve leaning upwards into the steep part, gets halfway up, and stalls. I bolt towards her, praying that reason has returned and she’ll wait for me to help guide her back down on this dangerously narrow track all the while knowing full well she would do no such thing. True to her nature and the fulfilment of our fates, she begins to roll backward, gaining speed.
The right rear wheel goes over the brink. I scream,“Suzaaaaanne,” not in warning really—it’s clearly already too late, and she’s going to die right before my eyes trapped in a plummeting hulk of steel—but a primal scream straight out of her comrade’s burning soul. However, a miracle occurs or we’re telepathic or something because if she’d waited to turn her head around to see where she was headed she would’ve already catapulted off the edge, but my scream must have gone to some place deep and without looking or thinking she instantly jerks the wheel hard to the left while slamming on the brakes and the front right wheel goes over the brink and then everything stops dead, tottering.
The sound of dirt cascading—grains of sand through an hourglass.
I find myself on the driver’s-side running board, leaning back, providing just the slightest leverage, our eyes lock.
Panting, more from fear than my sprint—“You okay?”
“Yay-ess.”
I drop my voice to a whisper. “Suzy. Slowly scoot towards the door. I’ll open it. We’ll both jump off before it tips over. Okay?”
That’s not what she has in mind.
“Jeffy…open the doah so you can lean back fah-thah. That’ll give me an escape route if this don’t work.”
I open my mouth to ask her what she means by this, but it’s too late—she’s already let go of the brake and is absurdly bouncing up and down in her seat, leaning into me.
We inexplicably roll back onto the track, right-side wheels miraculously bouncing along with Suzy home to solid ground.
“NEVER EVER to do that again, please.”
Suzy smiles a smile that would make you forgive God for creating humanity. She looks so comical with her white teeth and eyes in that mask of red dust, wild red hair like Medusa gone haywire, and we’re so giddy to be alive that we both just cackle for a while. She then rolls it back down to the turnout overlooking the desert below and thankfully, finally gives it up. We drink the last of the canteen, I relinquish any thought of food or sleep, following my revered leader wherever she’ll go, and we trudge off in the fading light towards Mineral, about twelve miles upstream.
The desert night is full of mosquitoes—smart little fuckers hiding from the deadly sun and coming out only at night to feed on our coagulating blood. We slap and itch our way along, sometimes talking, sometimes silent. The new moon rises over the obsidian horizon and floats across an unfathomable sky pulsing with stars. Just before dawn, exhausted, we lie down to rest in the side of a sand bank, rolled up like puppies in Grandma’s blanket.
A hushed dawn wakes us. On we trudge, hoping to take advantage of the last minutes before the Great Oppressor peeks over the cliffs. We pass the fateful little hill where we left Dugald yesterday. Only a mile or so to Mineral now. We discuss our strategy. If we see a car coming down, we know we’re ok and we’ll just go meet them. If we see a car going up and out, I’ll run and try to flag it down, hoping they pause at the brink for one last look at paradise before returning to what some fools call civilization.
My feet hurt. I’m hungry and thirsty and I’m not real sure I can make it out if we don’t see anyone. I do not share this frailty.
We see a dust cloud, turn to face each other. Neither of us can tell whether it’s going down or up, so I take off in a dead run. Topping the last rise, I glance upwards but see nothing on the rim, still unable to tell if they’ve just gone up or were coming in. Rounding the last bend hiding the put-in, I see an old Suburban towing a canoe trailer. Saved. I slow, thanking my lucky stars, coming up behind a shaved-bald man flipping pancakes on a Coleman stove for a gaggle of Boy Scouts. The Scouts are facing me, but the master has his back to me. I stop inches from him, just behind his shoulder, politely awaiting acknowledgement…which does not arrive. The boys look from me to the Scoutmaster and back again. Still nothing. Something is not quite right. I clear my throat. No response. Finally I pronounce, “Excuse me, sir.” Nada. Before I can turn and take the latrine shovel sitting in the sand and hit him over the head, one of the boys says to him, “Sir, I think there’s a man who wants to talk to you.” Finally he turns, scowling, and spits. “What do YOU want?”
Thinking fast, I tell him, “My wife and I got stuck last night and we’ve walked all night long without food or water since midday yesterday and we’d just like to ask for a ride out to Moab so we can get some help, please.”
“Sorry, there’s no room.”
My eyes drop, surreptitiously searching for a weapon. The boys chorus, “Sir, we can squeeze together there’s plenty of room, please, sir.”
“We’ll see.”
I return to Suzy to tell her the good news and the bad news. I figure we could call it self-defense. She decides to turn on the charm. If that doesn’t work, then we can call it self-defense. She moves a ring from her middle finger to her left ring finger, as always one step ahead. We return to find the Scouts scurrying to pack the last of the food and kitchen gear, rushing to tie the canoes on as quickly as possible and beat it. Orders from the freakshow commandant, no doubt. One boy sneaks up to me and offers me two cold flapjacks, explaining, “Our Scoutmaster is kind of strict.” I think he’s kind of fucked up in the head, maybe lost his dick in Vietnam or something, but don’t say as much. I accept the pitiful offering, split it with Suzy. We bathe off some of the dust in the muddy river, eyeballing the frantic goings-on, half submersed in the thick but cool water, waiting for the moment. The Scoutmaster piles everyone in the Suburban and jumps into the driver’s seat as we emerge, dripping, me planning to reach into the open driver’s window and karate chop him in the throat. He exclaims, not nearly plausibly, “There’s no room, sorry!” and guns the engine. As he’s taking off, the kids roll down the rear window and frantically wave us in. As we dive in through the opening, I observe the murderous glare in the rear view mirror. Just try and pry us out, now, buster.
We make the dozen or so miles past the watchful adobe hideout back to pavement. The fiend stops, scowls at us in the rearview mirror, says, simply, menacingly “Get. Out.” The kids recognize this finality, stay silent, eyes wide. We, knowing the territory better than he thinks, ask him where he’s going if not Moab. He says he’s turning right to Dead Horse Point and doing the White Rim Trail from this side. We know better. Not only would it be impossible in the huge Suburban with a trailer full of canoes, but there’s an ancient Toyota blocking the road. We ask him if he couldn’t in that case possibly handle our snivelling presence just to the ranger station at Dead Horse. He growls, accelerates, drops us off at the station, proceeds until just out of sight, does a U-turn, and zooms back past us in a cloud of dust, heading for Moab. Minus two Godless interlopers. I imagine he lives in his mother’s basement.
Suzy and I once again glance at each other—not quite there, but still saved—and enter the ranger station to ask for a tow out. It is politely explained to us by the young rangers that they don’t do that no more. They towed out too may turkeys who then proceeded to sue the Park Service for repairs for rusty dents they claimed were the ranger’s fault. They don’t even offer us a cup of coffee. We return to the front steps to ponder our next move. An off-duty ranger, greying at the temples and leaning on the end of the map and flyer-decorated front counter (the traditional barrier between uniformed ranger and unclean public), has overheard our tale of woe. He ambles out the door and leans against the corner of the stone building, arms crossed, near enough to us but not too near, looking at his cowboy boots.
“Hear ya got a problem.” We turn and face him. Okay. I can do this. Become a cowboy.
“Yup.”
“I know the territory you’re talkin’ about.” He’s got a good, solid twang going. “Got a jeep down at my place.” Looking up at us for the first time, he points his chin in the direction of the ranger residences, not far off. The toothpick in the corner of his mouth never moves.
A wordless glance at Suzy, then, “Much obliged, sir.”
“Tell ’em to call Bill when ya get back.” He turns and walks away, gravel crunching under his boots.
Delighted at finally finding a civilized human being, we make decisions fast. We’ll hitch a ride to Moab, grab the brand-new battery out of the Arta step van, toss it in the bus, drive that back, caravan with the ranger to Mineral, leave the bus at the top of the dropoff. Then we’ll jump in with him and the battery, sit in back while he drives the four-wheel track downstream to the Toyota, replace the battery, follow him back to Mineral, let him go home, then drive the bus and Toyota back to Moab and the Melody Home. A case of his favorite beer should do the trick.
After an hour of hitching on a road that sees maybe twenty cars a day, a passing tourist bus picks us up. The driver is giving his spiel to the elderly passengers, naming the landmarks. I note that he is mixing up some of the place names, and rise to correct him. Suzy, knowing me all too well, nearly jerks my arm out of its socket pulling me back down into my seat. We’re dropped off in Moab, quickly gulp down some cold tortillas and beans, fill the bus with car tools and desert extrication tools and water and food, grab the battery, fill up with fuel, and we’re off. We neglect to change our shoes.
Back at Dead Horse Point, we rejoin Bill, throwing a case of cheap-ass boatman Pabst beer in his back seat, our offering to his humanity. At Mineral, we leave the locked bus, jump in with him, and head back to the murder scene. Engine humming, we smile and slump into our seats, gaze at the deep-blue sky, enjoying the motorized breeze. Capable hands piloting our magic carpet: nice new springs smoothing the ruts and lumps, unworn tires turning sand-bogs into pavement, torque evaporating ascents. Could this be another planet?
When we reach the Cruiser, we exchange the melted battery for the new one. Which turns out to also be dead as a doornail.
He looks at us, realizing too late that he’s joined us in the grips of an ugly curse beyond mortal understanding. He jump-starts the Toyota, Suzy roars off like déjà vu all over again back down the hill, up again, and the engine dies—again. I grip her arm before she can do the back-up thingo. All she has to do is take one look into my eyes and she knows that control of the situation has shifted. Mr. Ranger hooks a chain up to us and tows us over the hump. It’s all downhill from here. We thank him, he takes off, seeing a friend ranger mooring his raft near the dirt track about a mile away and wisely choosing escape. We coast down, past him and his buddy (I wonder who they’re talking about?), and towards the end of the journey at Mineral.
A couple of miles short, the Toyota, now a living-dead zombie-like creature, dies yet again. I speak quietly, menacingly at the dashboard, beyond exasperation. “What could it possibly be this time?”
“Well, it sort of felt like it does when it runs out of gay-as.”
“So, uh, you think maybe it’s run out of gas?” She shrugs. We check, fill it up with those freakin’ jerry cans. The starter motor growls, engine still sucking air in the line instead of the new fuel. Suzanne removes the air filter and pours a little teeny itsy-bitsy thimblefull of superheated gas into the carburetor, just to help it start up. She turns the key. The engine explodes into flames.
Suzy dashes out of the Cruiser and smothers the flames with Grandma’s blanket, exclaiming, “Oh! Oh my!” I watch with hands on hips. We are not looking at each other. The distributor wires are now melted, the blanket burnt. Accepting that something demented has us and won’t yet let us go, we sit back on the seats, pull out a warmish Pabst, chuckle about life and all that, and wait. Two hours later, the ranger pulls up and jerks to a halt beside us in the dust, staring.
We take the chain back out, and he tows us back to the bus, too fast. Suzy’s in front with Bill, chatting away, me in back. Just as it comes into sight, Suzy turns to me and says, “Jump out and take the bus up the switchbacks Jeffy. We’re going to keep up the momentum and tow the Toyota to the top.” Dutifully, I leap out over the side while we’re still rolling as they pick up speed for the ascent. Landing artfully, like a cat, my glance shifts and focuses onto the locked padlock on the bus door. At that precise moment, out of the meteoric dustbowl that is the departing jeep, a disembodied, silver-braceleted hand appears. A shiny object flies out of it in a perfect arc through the air and lands amongst the prickly pear cactus about fifty feet away.
Ever tried to pick your way through cactus wearing shorts and cotton slippers, never taking your eyes off of a life-affirming pinpoint on a far-off dune? With some expletives and surprisingly little blood loss, I find the keys, and meet Suzy and her chariot at the top.
Towing the Toyota back to Moab on an exceedingly short tow chain behind the bus, I only occasionally see the top of Suzanne’s flaming red hair as her head bounces up through the Toyota’s roll bars into the limited view of the rear window. I don’t stop, but I do snort a lot.
We ramble down Moab’s main street, through the single traffic light, out to the far side of town, turning at the ancient, giant cottonwood tree that gives life to our dusty industrial park. Suzanne chases me around the Melody Home, both of us hooting wildly. Apparently riding the brakes so she wouldn’t slam into the bus at mach ten, she had eaten red dust till it caked her an inch thick. I drove onwards, purposefully oblivious, humming to the cowboy tunes on the bus’ radio.