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Interstate 15 and I have an ongoing history. Like any historical tale, some of it’s good, some of it’s bad, and some of it is neither good nor bad but rather is best summed up as: It is what it is. That is truly the only conclusion one can arrive at when emotion, bias, self-interest, and expectations are removed from the equation of a “good or bad” experience.
After removing the self from a situation that is being reexamined, all that’s left is an experience. Once detachment is obtained when analyzing a situation by removing emotion, self-interest, and an expected outcome, then whatever designation was being sought is no longer a moot point regarding a positive or negative label. An experience, when dissected through disassociation, simply leaves a set of facts or an order of events, allowing the term “it is what it is” or “it was what it was” to be applied. Neither of which indicates a good or bad judgment—just an event experienced. Granted, we humans are nearly incapable of emotional separation, especially in Trump’s America.
I have traveled I-15 by hitchhiking, by automobiles, by semitrucks, and by my favorite mode of travel: motorcycles. For some reason unbeknownst to me, the small stretch of I-15 passing through the northwest corner of Arizona for just under thirty miles holds the potential for mishap when I’m driving a vehicle with four or more wheels. I have had numerous cars, pickups, and semitrucks break down on that small stretch of highway. (On the other hand, when riding on that same short-but-winding passageway on a motorcycle, breaking down is the least of my concerns. In that curvy canyon, one false move on a motorbike could easily end by going over The Edge, resulting in a bad ending—aka death.)
It was around noon, on August 15, 2011, when the last two hundred miles remaining on my return trip to Las Vegas lay before me. I was speeding down I-15 and pondering my hair-trigger reaction that resulted in me quitting my high-paying oil field job. It wasn’t just the interaction with my dysfunctional coworker and the resulting bilaterally dispensed discipline by our employer that drove me onto Interstate 15. I was also fed up with the majority of the economic refugees who had flocked to the Bakken—to Boomtown USA. In a boomtown economy, the unemployable elsewhere become not only employable but are actively recruited.
A major impediment in a boomtown environment, wherein the unemployment rate basically becomes nonexistent, is that those who could not obtain employment elsewhere—for a multitude of reasons ranging from lack of skills to physical impairments to substance abuse to psychological issues to emotional damage to psychotic behaviors—get jobs for which they are not only unqualified for but are equally incapable of ever adequately performing.
In a boomtown economy, there is one constant: frenetic activity, not unsimilar to that of a busy beehive but lacking the hive’s unseen orderly process. If one were to look down on an oil field boomtown environment from a low-flying helicopter or airplane, I’d bet my last silver dollar that all the movement below would look like thousands upon thousands of misshaped Super Balls bouncing and ricocheting to and fro aimlessly, without any rhyme or reason, and faster than Ricochet Rabbit but without his intuition—but certainly containing his calamitous comedy. A visit to the Facebook page “Bakken Fail of the Day” will confirm my musings.
I had had enough of Boomtown USA and needed a break. I needed the open road to do what it does best for me—distract me from my issues by forcing me to focus on driving. As I was leaving Utah, heading south, and entering the northwestern corner of Arizona’s small stretch of I-15, I was free from the petroleum frustrations that had forced me onto the interstate. While driving my Dodge on that mild midday, I was envisioning being back on my motorbike. It won’t be long now, I thought, before I head out for the open road on an ocean-to-ocean ride. With about 110 miles to go before reaching Las Vegas, and with over seven hundred miles of I-15 behind me, I entered Arizona towing a partially loaded U-Haul behind my completely packed two-door Dodge Ram.
Passengers catching a quick nap on Arizona’s I-15 would be unaware of its designation as “Veterans Memorial Highway,” because it is only 29.43 miles long. Originally that stretch of modern I-15 was part of the old Arrowhead and Spanish Trail passageway. Thirteen and a half miles of Arizona’s share of I-15 passes through the Virgin River Gorge. From the north, the gorge starts at mile marker 22.5, just south of Purgatory Canyon, where it passes over the first of five bridges that span the Virgin River, and ends around mile marker 10, near Desert Springs, a mile or so from Beaver Dam and Littlefield. The gorge’s 13.5 miles are breathtakingly beautiful, rugged, isolated, curvy, and treacherous. They have one hell of an elevation drop and are just plain dangerous for the easily distracted. The roadway there is referred to as the Narrows, because of the sheer limestone cliffs that jet up on both sides of the road, rising as high as five hundred feet.
Motorcyclists, hell-bent on trying to find The Edge that Hunter S. Thompson so eloquently wrote about in Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, attack the gorge with reckless high-speed abandonment. We lean into the curves until our bikes’ exhaust pipes and our knees scrape against the asphalt, all in search of an elusive adrenaline rush . . . which the daily grind lacks.
Survivors who seek The Edge (that place where life and death hang in the balance, as Thompson explained) do not find it. Only the dead know where it is. And if they could tell us, they’d say, “It’s right back there,” as they point backward from the other side, never to return. The search for The Edge is heady stuff, and it’s not for the faint of heart. I’m now firmly in my sixties, and against my better judgment, I still possess the desire deep within (way below my fat belly) to ride off in search of The Edge. If I happen to find it, or if it finds me, rejoice, because I went out doing something that I absolutely love and which makes me feel whole, makes me feel right, makes me feel like I belong. Those feelings of belonging have come from only a few fleeting experiences, like motorcycling or performing for audiences or when I have sojourned in Key West, Florida, or Big Sur, California, and each—in its own unique way—is the best therapy available for the little boy within me. You’ll never see a motorcycle parked outside of a psychologist’s office or psychiatric hospital.
I’m not implying that bikers don’t have issues. We do! More than the general public does, which is why we ride, but if bikers had an appointment at either a psychologist’s office or a psychiatric hospital and we were riding our motorbike to the appointment, by the time we arrived our problems would be temporarily solved, and we’d just zip right on by . . . off to parts unknown for as long as life would allow us to be gone, before beckoning us back to society’s voluntary chain gang.
As I exited the gorge section of Arizona’s I-15, after navigating its curves and its rapid elevation drop, with just eighty-five miles remaining on my journey to Las Vegas, the rear differential of my pickup exploded or imploded. Either way, it made a hell of a noise. I limped the Ram over to the road’s shoulder and hugged it with the U-Haul trailer in tow . . . with one more mile to go before reaching exit 9.
I knew that at exit 8, two miles south of where the Dodge’s rear differential acted up, was Beaver Dam and Littlefield. Down there would be a gas station, a store, a bar, a restaurant; it’s where life exists and where civilization had taken root at the desert’s edge. It’s where I had stopped many times when I lived in Las Vegas—to buy lottery tickets, to get fuel for my motorbike and fluids for myself after running the gorge and not finding The Edge. Exit 9, at Desert Springs, the exit I was forced to take, was an unknown entity to me. I had never been down it before, but I could not risk having the Ram give up the ghost on the interstate by trying to make it farther than the next exit. I had to get the Dodge to the low way, right away, and onto the road less traveled (as it were).
As I exited onto an access road adjacent to exit 9, my anxiety subsided when I saw a structure that looked like a service garage. My spirits lifted more when I saw people in front of an old, dilapidated, faded building. I pulled into its parking lot with grinding, squelching, squealing, and all sorts of other unworldly noises emanating from the back of my pickup. I parked, slid out of the Ram’s seat, and said to the two guys standing in front of the building, “I need a mechanic.”
To which one of them replied, “Sure sounds like it.”
It was unequivocally clear (the crystal kind) that it was the Dodge’s noise and not my verbal communication that he was referencing. Usually I have a retort that slays smart-asses, and I had one readied, locked, and loaded right then and there, too, but in un-Hallesque fashion . . . I stifled myself and said, “It sure does. Can you help me?”
“Nope,” he said. “Can’t work on rear ends.”
Well, shit, I thought. Then I said, “That sucks. Is it okay if I leave the U-Haul trailer here after I arrange for a tow for the pickup for repairs?”
“Why would you want to do that?” he asked.
Again I sucked it up; I held my tongue. I was at a huge disadvantage. For all I knew “Dueling Banjos” was about to emanate from off in the distance in that enclave where I was stranded, all alone. I was steaming inside because of the terse talk and the Ram’s condition, and my cheeks (the gluteus maximus) were clenched when I leaned in and said, “Excuse me!” to the man doing all the talking.
“This guy can fix your pickup’s ass,” he said while smiling at me and pointing his thumb to his right in hitchhiker fashion, fingers curled in, palm facing out.
“This guy” turned out to be my saving grace that day. I could tell right away he was a hardworking, honest family man. He was always twisting his wedding band, “not because it’s uncomfortable,” he told me when I asked if his ring was too tight, but rather he was always touching it to remind himself of being a “blessed man.”
His wife located a rear differential for the Ram from a salvage yard back up the gorge, in St. George, Utah, a border town. The self-sufficient and fiercely independent couple would go get it the following morning and install it at their house, and I’d be back on the road before the next night’s dusk fell, with only one day of downtime. The tough-but-lovely couple drove me the twelve miles to Mesquite, Nevada—another border town—where I lodged at the CasaBlanca Resort and Casino. They would retrieve me in late-afternoon desert heat the following day, post repairs.
Before being dropped off at the casino, I was told that my repair bill would be $1,500. That included parts and labor, the round-trip drive time to Utah and back, the removal of the rear differential from the salvage vehicle, and installation—all-in it would be fifteen hundred bucks flat.
The night that I spent at the CasaBlanca Resort and Casino lightened my financial load the same amount as did the repair bill. That financial setback was sparked when I decided to kick Dr. Atkins and his diet to the curb and waltzed into CasaBlanca’s steakhouse. It had been a long lonely-lonely time since I last enjoyed my favorite steak: the sizzling-delicious, the mind-melting, the soul-shaking, the body-changing and heart-stopping bone-in rib eye. I ordered up a fabulous surf ’n’ turf dinner, kicking things off with steamed clams and an iceberg wedge salad, followed by a twenty-four-ounce bone-in extra marbled rib eye steak escorted to my table by a sixteen ounce lobster tail. Both were accompanied by a loaded baked potato, cheese-covered asparagus, a fantastic bottle of Napa Valley cabernet wine, a few generous pours of Scotch whisky and its Irish counterpart, and a flaming, decadent dessert prepared tableside—it was an extremely agreeable meal. After eating I spent a few hours sipping warm Grand Marnier, smoking cigars, playing video poker and craps and slots and blackjack. With room charges, taxes, and tips, the financial damage was also $1,500. But a good time was had by all.
I figured: What the hell. If I was forced to spend money on repairs to my vehicle, then I ought to spend an equal amount repairing me. With the Ram repaired, and me straightened out from the time spent at the CasaBlanca Resort and Casino, the couple picked me up, their equally independent and spirited teenage daughter in tow. Through conversation during the ride to Wells Fargo and then to my pickup, they expressed their gratitude to me for the work, and I to them for doing the work. They said that the money from repairing my pickup was right on time because their daughter had been saving up to open a food-service trailer. She was going to be serving snow cones, ice cream, cold beverages, hot dogs, and chips to the heated and parched desert travelers. The repair money accounted for the last dollars she needed. She had been lacking the licensing fee and some opening stock to get going. So I added a tip to the cause, hopped into the Dodge, and headed away into the desert’s fiery red and orangish sunset, grateful to be an American. Grateful to live in a land where a teenage girl, in a desolated desert location, could dream big and enter the entrepreneurial world at such a tender age.
I often think of that incident, of being momentarily waylaid on I-15, and of the encounter with that family that got me going again. What started off as a bad situation turned into a good experience. In the end I guess it was just another experience on a long, strange trip called life.
I hope that that family is doing okay, doing hunky-dory. That they are having a grand ol’ time out there in the desert, on the edge of civilization, where they have made their stand, living life on their terms, possessing freedom and offering goodwill and a good deal to a traveler who was momentarily waylaid on their exit. I hope that their life away from the hustle and bustle of modern life is fulfilling and that their wonderful teenage daughter got to realize all her American girlish dreams. I like to think that all of that happened for them.
I arrived in Las Vegas two hours after departing exit 9 on Arizona’s I-15, where my pickup had been repaired. Darkness was beginning to fall while the lights of Las Vegas were rising, signaling that the night crews were now running things—crews who, if you had the correct amount of cash, could get you anything your impure heart desired.
I had made it back to Las Vegas, and it was time to prepare to take a long and hard motorcycle trip to extinguish the intermittently lingering anguish still within me from my experiences within the Bakken boomtowns. I quickly unpacked the U-Haul at my storage unit, drove to a U-Haul return center, and dropped off the trailer; then I returned to my storage unit and immediately fired up my Harley-Davidson 2002 Softail Deuce and rode away to find short-term accommodations, because I’d be leaving soon—on my beautiful black-and-chrome Deuce—for Key West, Florida, and parts unknown.
But before I could go, I had to deal with the voices from my past which emanated from people who were still occupying space inside my head: “Think this through, John. Are you still running away when things get tough? What about your future? You’re not a spring chicken anymore. Stop acting crazy and find another job—act your age!”
I had heard all of that screeching inside of my head before I found a room that would serve as a base of operations while I prepared for my const-to-coast journey. When I awoke the next morning, I could not get out of bed. I just stared at the ceiling and wondered where my life was headed. I have always believed that if you are unsure of where you’re going, you are free to take any road to your destination. And while I was still unsure of what I wanted from life—I knew what I did not want. I had no desire whatsoever to return to my former way of living . . . running away when things got bad and from the mistakes I had made.
Before I could leave Las Vegas, I’d have to navigate the obstacles of self-doubt and the ghosts from Christmas past.
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Postscriptum: At exit 9 on Arizona’s I-15, you will now find a modern-day travel center and many new peripheral businesses. I hope one of the businesses is owned by an American woman, who as a teenaged girl fantasized about being an entrepreneur.
