Carver’s Dog

“9-1-1. State the nature of your emergency, please.”

“There’s been a horrible accident on I-15,” I reported calmly into the cell. “We’re traveling southbound on the I-15 just north of Barstow … we’re passing …. hold on, there’s an overcrossing ahead … it’s Coyote Lake Road overcrossing, the accident happened half-a-mile north of that location.”

Miss L did not stop the car to help the victims inside — and if they weren’t dead, they cashed in on some kind of special luck that afternoon — because when the boxy white Lincoln Navigator flew off the side of the road and into the Mojave Desert (landing on its right axis and tumbling at least three times that I could see), a choking and blinding sand and dust cloud was tossed into the sky. For a few moments we had the unwanted and nerve-wracking experience of driving through a sepia-toned fog with the bumper of the car ahead a distant memory.

We pulled off the road at a lone gas station — not a major pump bandit but a mom-and-pop operation with no corporate backing — to regain our composure. On the other side of the parking lot in this desert oasis of Joshua trees and jacaranda and rambling boulders and thicket and rattlesnakes and cactus was the hollow eyed skeleton of a once-thriving cafe. A squat white stone building. A long dead neon sign with the simple enticement: EAT - COFFEE SHOP.

Moments earlier, before the driver of the Lincoln Navigator flew all four tires into the sand after clipping the bumper of a vehicle in the number two lane, I had noted a waterpark at the side of the road, a watersports-themed activity park in the middle of the goddamn Mojave Desert. Look, I say to Miss L, there are no cars in the parking lot and the ferris wheel is idle. Whose genius marketing scheme was this?

Didn’t Huxley come to the Mojave Desert to die? Why? It’s a strange place. We passed a lonely lighthouse of a gas station in the Mojave, one hundred miles away from anything with a human pulse. Out front stood a giant sign blinking in loud red analog text: GAS  FOOD  BEER  LIQUOR  LOTTERY  TIRES  OPEN 24 HRS

This is the middle of nowhere, I remind you. Coyotes and critters and no cold beer or liquor for hours in either direction so they’re essentially looking at drunk drivers on the road to Vegas as their marketing demographic.

Right after coming upon the waterpark we saw a discreet roadside sign pointing the way to St. Antony’s Monastery.

“I suppose to serve in that monastery,” I said to Miss L, “one would have to be really committed to testing one’s faith, being a monk in a monastery out here with searing heat, scorpions, hot wind storms, air so thick it burns your throat … “

And that’s the last thing I said before the Linclon Navigator made its death plunge off the highway and into the scorching sand.

There’s always something on the road. We continued on to L.A.