Crossing the Southwest

So what has been (and I sure hope will remain) the longest single day drive of this trip was my trek from San Diego to Albuquerque via Tucson. As I wound down my time in San Diego, I knew Mark had an early plane flight on that upcoming Thursday morning, and I figured I would just leave his apartment at the same time he did, giving me a sufficiently early start for what would be a long drive. For whatever reason it was a kinda strange night and I got to sleep around 1am, got up at 4, we said our goodbyes, and I was driving by 5. I then drove east, hard, bidding a sad goodbye to the west coast and starting to think about the end of this journey. Driving east into the desert dawn, I squinted in the sunrise ahead and watched the colors grow.

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I then made it into Tucson around midday. Jessica had a date with the local Volvo dealership. As I may have hinted earlier, my car had been worrying me more and more. It's had a oil leak problem for awhile which had been getting worse, and arriving San Diego a steady engine rattle had cropped up - a sign that my worst fears were coming true and the piston rings were badly wearing down? I took it to a local mechanic who had come recommended, and he quickly gave me a doomsday evaluation. Nothing he could do for it other than rebuild the engine, he said, and told me that the best thing to keep it going in its current state was to cut open a tube to vent pressure from the crankcase, constantly monitor the oil level, and hope for enough life in the motor to get me back to Philadelphia. Great. I did as he recommended, but in the days after this, while I was still just puttering around San Diego, my brain kept working over the problem, and on my drive to Tucson, no oil was coming out of the opened tube, but it was still pouring out of the oil cap, where the leak has been all along. Was it possible, after all this, that the issue was simply the car needed a new oil cap - the easiest, cheapest, most obvious solution (which several of my friends had suggested before, and which I had scoffed at - who ever heard of changing a car's oil cap as a part of routine maintenance? Not me, my father, or the mechanics I'd spoken to along the way). When I got the car looked at by the Volvo-only mechanics, they confirmed this. After all that fretting, all I needed was a $10 part. An oil change and a tuneup was a good idea too. The rattling of the engine was caused by a breakdown of rubber bushings caused by (go figure) the oil leaking all over the engine bay. I'm sure my car and situation was the laughingstock of the mechanic crew for the day, if not the week. I know that this was a long explanation, but it's hard to confer what a ridiculous 'head-fake' this whole situation had been. The car is my home and transportation and has been for months now, and to go from thinking that it may die on me in the middle of the southwestern desert to realizing that it just needed the easiest fix possible was alot to handle... in a good way. Anyway, the Volvo dealership lounge provided me with a good nap site, I stuffed my pockets with the snacks and fruit provided, paid my very small bill, and was on my way with lifted spirits.

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My time in Arizona lasted a whopping ten hours, but I still got a feel for the immigration war that is taking place there - in person with the checkpoints on the interstate, on talk radio as I flipped through stations, and in the local newspaper headlines when I stopped in gas stations. While driving along interstate 8, which sweeps across the southern portion of the state, I drove through two border patrol checkpoints, where all traffic has to stop and be questioned by one agent while another walks a dog around your car that sniffs for drugs or hidden passengers. At one stop I was pulled aside and patted down and the dog was made to run a thorough sweep of my car - who knows why. It felt vaguely un-American, but I suppose law enforcement has to do some desperate things about the drugs and illegal immigrants rushing in from Mexico.

My drive continued to Albuquerque, where my friend/relative Eric Stillions lives. I didn't quite realize just how far I had to go to get there from Tucson - everything is bigger out West. As I drove into the evening, thunderstorms rolled overhead. Since I was in the desert, the line of sight was largely uninterrupted and I could constantly see lightning touching down in every direction. One particular thundercloud off in the distance straight in front of my car was amazing - it was toplit by the setting sun and filled with spikes of lightning like flashbulbs going off inside a circus tent. I drove into the night and arrived at his house at 2am - all in all, an ~850 mi., 22-hr. day, with an hour nap at the Volvo dealership. The following day was spent recovering from that terrible idea, seeing some of downtown Albuquerque, driving up to a great view of the city from a mountaintop, and hanging out at Eric's house.

"The game is rigged." Eric works in the film/TV industry, and snagged a few tokens from his time on the set of "The Wire", a very good show which I ironically had just been watching with Mark and Rebecca in San Diego. He decided to hang the pay phone prop on the wall of his living room, and we threw in the interrogation room switchbox for good measure.

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I continued on east from Albuquerque, driving down through Roswell, which contained a disappointing lack of aliens (or dumb alien-related tourist traps), to Carlsbad Caverns and then into west Texas. Whew, now there's an empty place. At least the landscape is green and somewhat pleasing to the eye, because you're looking at it for a looooong time. West Texas is where I honed my driving-with-my knees technique as a way to pass the time - when the road is perfectly straight, flat, and empty for hours, why not just cradle the base of the wheel with your knees and leave your hands free to... well, twiddle your thumbs? I don't know, it was something to do. I once went 30 minutes without laying a finger on the wheel while driving 70, I kid you not. It was actually pretty easy. Anyway, I had seen an old-timey mining ghost town in Death Valley, which was still around basically as a tourist attraction, but in west Texas I drove through modern-day ghost towns - houses, stores, gas stations, etc. that were all fairly recent and had been built around highway junctions only to be deserted sometime within the last few decades, the buildings left completely intact. It was a little sad. On my second day driving across the state, I made it to San Antonio and saw the Alamo. It was interesting to learn about Texas' path to statehood-certainly different from any other state. The Alamo church, seen below, was beautiful inside but photography was banned.