Continued from Cross-Country w/Kyle pt. 5: Nauseous on the Devil's Road to the Grand Canyon Sunset - by way of Monument Valley
The first time I woke up, it was to hear wolves howling to the moon, packs of them seemingly all around us, and I wasn’t frightened but excited, reveling in the great mid-night music. The natural way of things, songs of lament or maybe it was gladness, accepting the primal urges to scream with all your lungs. I stared at the moon through the mesh openings in the top of the wall, the wolves crying out, and I felt very happy.
The next time I woke up, it was early, just pre-dawn, and I had to go to the bathroom so I snuck outside and walked a little to prop myself on a tree and watched the steam rise in the cold, early-morning air. Finally, an hour later we both woke up and decided to get a move on. That must have been key for the pioneers, I thought. It’s so uncomfortable sleeping on the ground that it’s a lot easier to get out of bed in the morning.
We packed up the tent and got in the car. We drove to just past the hotel, to what seemed like the furthest East viewpoint and stared out one more time. We watched a group of visitors on horseback being led on a switchback trail down to the edge of a great plateau a few hundred feet below us but still a few hundred feet up from the base of the canyon. It was a beautiful final view but obviously wouldn’t top the sunset we had seen the night before and when we had enough, we headed to the gift shop and bought some magnets while I bought a bracelet for Becca. We drove out of the park, leaving through the South entrance, passing acres of open woodland with the occasional little supply huts or rangers’ offices on the roadside, restricted turnoffs. The South Road from the South Rim is US-180 and the second you leave the National Park you’re greeted by several overpriced motels, fast food places and gas stations. We stopped at the McDonald’s where Becca and I had stopped a few years before and bought egg McMuffins, then filled up the car. Kyle started off driving, the final day of the trip, through the Southwest and Death Valley, dead-ending in my little apartment on a cliff above the ocean.
We were tired. The road takes its toll, especially when you charge it as hard as we had, and I noticed it running me down a bit more than it ever had before. I was getting old, I thought, the legendary quarter-life crisis. At one point 180 split off east towards Flagstaff and we remained going straight on the smaller, more desolate 64. The western mountains were giving way to the Arizona desert with its scrub brush as we turned right at Williams, finding ourselves once again on I-40, as if nothing happened, like one of those old cartoons where a train launches off the tracks and does several spins and loops before miraculously landing back on the tracks a little further down, a little beat up but otherwise seemingly like it had never left.
We continued on 40, at Kingman AZ dipping down so as to come within an hour or so of Lake Havasu before hitting Needles and the California border. I had been online and found Aldo offering an insultingly low $50 thousand. After talking to Eric and his buddy, Dave who would be joining our company (Eric having flown to California for the big meeting on Monday), we decided to redraft it. Dave took the contract to a family friend who was a big lawyer at Universal, changed some of the language, and also changed our terms to a standard 4% of all monies brought to the project. As these things were happening, I was talking them over with Kyle, keeping him up to date on the process and he, in return, was telling me some great ideas he had for different movie scripts. I saw in the future a time when I would be able to produce one of my brother’s scripts and the prospect of that seemed like one of the greatest possibilities I had ever imagined.
By now the tank was getting low but I told Kyle to hold on until we crossed into California, passing the last Arizona exit, Topock where the gas was only $2.99 a gallon. As we pulled into Needles, in the dead, miserable desert, we found gas had climbed a whole dollar. I guessed that was what it took to justify living there. I walked in to buy water and 40 dollars worth of gas from the old man behind the counter, the one with the angry eyes and the old wrinkled body, who looked up briefly to shoot a look of subdued disdain. He held all us passersby with contempt and received his greatest pleasure from knowing his gas was close to the most expensive in the tri-State region. At the profits he was making, the man probably flew concubines in for the weekends for some desert loving. But at least we were back in California – we were almost home.
The 40 took us through the Mojave desert, through 29 Palms where one of my roommates was from. He was a naïve bible-thumper Marine with a lisp and the worst sense of humor and last I heard had married a controlling wench and settled down to a life of military and marital servitude. We were driving hot through Death Valley, en route to Barstow and the 15. The temperature had risen miserably, hovering around 109, making me sweaty and uncomfortable with prickly heat despite the air condition blasting which was draining the fuel fast. It was the end of the journey, one final miserable shot across the desert. Once before I had failed this part when Brenny and I found my Ford Probe breaking down along the 15 between Barstow and what looked like a miserable pile of rocks and dirt. We spent the night in a Howard Johnson’s on Indian Wells Road and woke up to find that we had stayed on the first real exit in Victorville. We would end up having to catch a bus to a train to Newport where my cousin picked us up and then the following morning sent us on a train to San Diego where we got a rental car to drive to our, only to return to Victorville to pick up the Probe with a new recycled transmission. Ever since that day, Victorville, and for that matter this stretch of desert, has been my true nemesis and most vile enemy.
At Barstow, we drove around looking for a Wendy’s so Kyle could use up his last graduation gift card. By now we were both cranky and tired and wanted to finish it. We couldn’t find a Wendy’s but we did find a gas station and decided to fill up again since we had almost run through our 40 dollars of gas in less than 2 hours with the AC and the constant ascending and descending roads. The Nissan Frontier does not have good pick-up and climbs poorly.
Kyle asked the gas station attendant where there was a Wendy’s and she said there would be one in Victorville, a few exits into the city. I shuddered. So we would meet again, you dastardly desert wasteland of a city. From Barstow, we got on the 15, now back in the land of familiar roads. I had driven to the Southern tip of the 15 – it dead-ended in San Diego a few miles away from where I spent college – and as far north on it as Idaho. Still, we had one final hurdle – Victorville.
The road descended and ascended but slightly and unnoticeably and if it weren’t for the occasional slight ear-popping, you wouldn’t even know you were going up. But the car was reacting accordingly, struggling getting up to speed, and I was swearing and yelling that the truck was going up, that we had pushed it too much, that I hated Death Valley and Victorville.
"Ryan," Kyle said, frustrated, "You’re just letting it win. Fight Victorville. Fight it." I fought it through clenched teeth, finally spotting a Wendy’s from the freeway and pulling off on one of the southern exits of the city. After backtracking a few streets and cussing at the Mexican drivers who seemed to drive as erratically as if we were in Tijuana, we got lunch to last us the rest of the ride. Then it was just one last hard drive through San Berdoo, Riverside, and Orange County, finally down to home and the ocean breeze.
Kyle said how much the desert now all looked the same, much like we had said about the East and the first two days of driving. These hills replaced the grass and trees with scrub brush and piles of rocks but it was still, boring hills same as back there except hotter and less civilized (although, in its defense, the sunsets over the desert are absolutely God-fearing marvelous). Kyle fell asleep, letting me concentrate on the drive, channeling all of my frustration and tiredness and discomfort into driving fast. At Corona I turned us onto the 91, the toll road Kyle and I had taken to Vegas the summer before, driving West as I passed the exit for the 55.
"Son of a bitch!" I yelled, waking Kyle up.
"What?"
"I just missed the fastest way home now I have to go out of my way and I’m just fucking tired and want to get there."
"I know. We’re almost there," he said to my tantrum, closing his eyes, back asleep.
Finally we were on the 5 heading South, past Disneyland where you could see the Matterhorn and the California Adventure Grizzly Bear Mountain, through Garden Grove and Santa Ana, finding ourselves in the familiar sprawl of Irvine. It was cooler here, hovering around 84, and I rolled down the windows, feeling the fresh California wind as we flew down, catching the tail-end of rush hour.
I got off on Alicia and drove Southwest towards the Pacific and my house. I turned up the hill at Pacific Island, climbing, and called Becca, hardly able to contain myself.
"Where are you?"
"Honey, get on the porch and look down." As we turned right onto my street, I saw her standing up there with the dogs and waved. I pulled the truck into the parking spot, got out, and ran up to her, giving her a big hug and a kiss. The dogs were excited, jumping around in circles as Kyle came in and gave her a hug too. She came down and helped us unpack the truck. I got the tarp off and brought in everything – it all made it without the slightest crack or water damage. As Becca packed up a bowl and passed it to us, Kyle and I inhaled, relaxing, at the end of the adventure, having a celebratory smoke. He and I went into the kitchen with the bottle of Gentleman Jack and poured the rest into two shotglasses – there was just enough. We cheersed to a great trip and drank the final swigs of the good whiskey.
Becca had bought beers and we poured some into to-go cups for a little walk. Kyle and I changed into our bathing suits and we all walked out to the hot tub, basking in what we had just accomplished. Kyle had done it, had made the trip through 11 states, every imaginable climate and natural condition, and 3260 miles. He had done the hard-driving nights, gotten lost and found, eaten legendary ribs in Memphis and witnessed one of the last performances of one of the true Blues legends. We swigged Gentleman Jack in a hotel in Santa Fe and drank homebrews in Telluride, shivered 2 miles above sea level while staring out over a horizon covered with snow and sweat in a valley below sea level where the temperature hovered around 110. We went off-roading in Navajo country amidst great cinematic landscapes and ate mushrooms for a sunset over the greatest symbol of the open and untamed west. Kyle ran it hard with the family’s token gypsy and taught the older brother a thing or two about patience and silence. And I think by the end he discovered the traveler’s true love-hate of the road. We smiled and splashed water into each other’s faces, Kyle Becca and I inventing what we decided would be a reality show entitled "In Your Face." The next day, we would head to a baseball game and get drunk in the warm California sun as we watched the Angels beat the Orioles with a Vlad Guerrero 2-run homer in the 9th. On Monday Kyle would be a driver to my meeting at the Chateau Marmont where our investor would agree to fund the movie, although Eric and Dave and I would be somewhat offended by the grubby appearance of all the producers. This night, however, we would be going nowhere.
As the sun was setting I hurried us all back inside so we could change into shorts and go for a little walk. The three of us stood on the trail in front of my apartment a couple hundred feet above the ocean and South Laguna, watching the sun dip behind Catalina island. I’ve traveled a lot and I’ve seen a lot and maybe that’s why I live where I live. I have to live here, where the views can compete with the paintings running around inside my head, rendered from everything I’ve seen and experienced, pictures some of which Kyle now shared. At that moment when we saw the sun finally drop its last shred, sparkling over the green-blue waters of the coasts, turning Catalina black and pronounced with shadow while the rest of the sky refracted every color of the rainbow swirling through all the smog and cloud and sea-mist that hung in the atmosphere, I felt like I was inside a larger-than life Imax video seeing something grander and more beautiful than almost anything I had seen or would ever see with two of the most important people in the world on either side of me. On my left stood my girlfriend, my love, my future. And to my right I no longer saw my little brother. I saw a man who I respected and loved and admired as a true soulmate, not related by blood but by that indescribable thing that some lucky siblings share which is much more powerful and binding, an unbeatable companion for whatever journeys life would find us on together. I smiled. He would do just fine for himself and, when need be, by himself, I thought. I put my arm on his shoulder as together we stared out to the horizon, to Japan maybe, or to whatever lie at that endless expanse of blue, looking to the future, looking to possibility.
- Ryan Ariano
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