Chapter 5

When we made the turn west out of Needles it was like coming home. I'd gone to school in Needles, and had lived there for a bit after I graduated from high school. The woman I'd lived with now lived in Albuquerque, and had given me the only fainting fit in my life when she'd appeared in my office out of the blue in December of 2005, nearly 20 years after I'd last seen her. I don't usually believe in coincidences, but her reappearance had come near convincing me. No, that's not true. I don't believe in coincidences, period. But I do believe in providence, though that instance of its operation shocked the boots off me.

I'd never liked Needles, and to express that dislike had called it Needless when I was young. It was getting out of Needles that had always been the best part of the town – sort of like the song which talks about happiness being Lubbock in the rearview mirror. I was glad once again to put Needles behind me, and start the long climb up from the Colorado river.

We stayed on the freeway instead of taking the Searchlight cutoff. We'd taken the cutoff the very first time I'd brought Cecelia out to the desert, but this time I wanted to take the long steep slope up to South Pass. Unlike the South Pass in Wyoming, where the continental divide is so gentle that unless you know where it is you'll miss it, this one is very steep and very definite. The elevation at the top of the pass is only 2,603 feet, but Needles is just 500 feet or so above sea level, so that's over 2,000 feet of elevation gain in 20 miles or so, and most of it's the slope of the mountain itself.

As we climbed the slope to the pass I told the story of how I'd been on the school bus once – old 21, before we got a new bus which had the same number – and it had slowed and slowed and slowed until it actually stopped, and then rolled backwards for a few feet before the driver could get it moving forward again. I'd told the story about a billion times over the years, but Darlia and Cecelia don't seem to mind. I don't tell a lot of what my brother Memphis calls war stories, so the ones I do tell they tolerate, if they don't actually enjoy 'em.

We got over the pass without trouble – the Blazer's gearing is for power, and it's got that in spades, thanks to money I spent upgrading it after I bought it – and went down the western slope into what I'd named, when I was a kid, Teddy Bear Cholla Valley. I called it that because it's got a magnificent stand of teddy bear cholla in it. Cholla is a kind of cactus that grows like miniature trees, sometimes five feet high, with woody trunks and branches, and spines that would make a porcupine jealous. The spines aren't long, but they're vicious, and since the cactus grows in easily detachable joints that come off if you just brush against 'em, some people call it "jumping cactus." It doesn't jump, but when you get stuck with it, you hurt. I can't prove it, but I believe that the spines have tiny barbs on them, for pulling one out hurts even worse. Teddy bear cholla has such dense spines that it glows in the sun as though it's covered with fur. But don't try to hug one – you'll be picking stickers out of yourself for days.

We drove through the stand, Darlia looking out the window as she always does. Cecelia was watching the road, her eyes constantly moving, for she sees everything that's going on within a mile or two of her when she drives. I've never known her to miss a child who might dart out into traffic, or a vehicle approaching on a side road which doesn't look like it's going to stop in time. The only times I've seen her surprised has been when a driver right in front of her has done something so sudden that you have to believe he didn't know he was going to do it until he did.

The next exit after the Searchlight cutoff was Mountain Spring, where I'd caught the school bus way back in the olden days when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Cecelia pulled off there, and we headed north. We had 22 miles to go before reaching the desert place – the place where I'd grown up. The road led downward, past Goffs Butte, to the place I'll always consider my hometown – Goffs.

We didn't stop. Sometimes we do and sometimes we don't. It used to be we always stopped in Goffs to get a drink at the water tower, but they'd taken that down in 2003, and the faucet we'd always gotten our first drink of Goffs water out of was gone. It was like ripping a piece out of my heart, for that was where we'd gotten all our water when I was a kid, hauling it all the way back to Lanfair Valley in a tank truck my uncle Tony owned. Later on I'd driven the truck a lot, making the water run whenever the level grew low. I learned to drive, and to drive a stick, in that truck – three or four years before I was old enough to get a learner's permit.

Cecelia crossed the tracks, took the sharp left bend, and then turned right off of what had been US 66 until 1931. This was Lanfair Road, as the maps have it, or Goffs Road as I'd learned to call it when I lived out here. I could remember when they'd paved it, back in the 70s, but the blacktop had ended then, and still ends, just south of Hackberry Pass. I looked forward to that. To me the desert is best when it's hard to get to. That way the only people who are likely to make the effort to get there are those who actually love the desert, rather than those who just want to run out for a couple of days and dump their garbage everywhere and leave ATV tracks to permanently scar the place up.

We tooled along under the "high wires," as I'd called 'em when I was a kid, that took electricity from the river to LA. As we drove the land was rising toward the Hackberry Mountains, which were on the left of the road, and the Vontrigger Hills, on the right. The pass was between the two blocks of stone, and about a mile south of the pass we passed what had once been a clearing but was now getting overrun with cactus and brush. I'd known the family who'd lived there, and was five years behind their oldest son. They'd settled there in 1973, and left in 1977, and though by then I was out of school I can still remember how devastated that oldest boy had been when they left. He said that desert rats are born, not made, and clearly he was one. I've said the same thing many times since.

So was I, for that matter, though I'd left on my own in 1986, when I was 21 years old. I hadn't been back until 1996, when Cecelia and I had been married for a bit more than a year. I'd missed the desert terribly, but as she'd pointed out, with her greater ability to analyze, I hadn't been back until I had someone I could share it with.

And truly desert rats are born. Cecelia loved the place almost as soon as she saw it, and while she's settled in Albuquerque and neither of us plans to move, she looks forward to our August vacation nearly as much as I do.

Cecelia pulled off the road at the Hogeyboom, a set of windmills and cattle tanks just short of Hackberry Pass. This has become a tradition with us, especially since they tore down the Goffs water tower. There isn't a lot of shoulder to park on, but traffic is light and there was no realistic chance anyone would hit the Blazer; probably no one would come by until after we'd left. We didn't even bother to lock the Blazer, something we'd never dare in Albuquerque. Out in the desert there aren't many people, and they wouldn't steal the vehicle, and if they did everyone who lives there knows me and would let me know about it. Some of 'em were there when I arrived in 1965. They'd look out for me – that's just the way it is.