Roadside Assistance

There’s a place on the drive out to my parents’ house where the road takes a sudden vertical turn. Town ends here. The houses are built in clusters right up to the base of the hill, then end suddenly and the chaparral takes over. There’s a three-way intersection with a stop sign, offering one last chance to go another way. There’s a fire hydrant, too; this is the last one, the end of the city water system. There’s a sign announcing the end of the 45mph speed limit, and another warning of lessened shooting laws. Climb the hill and there’s a view worth note. On a clear day, you can see downtown and the bay from thirty miles away and two thousand feet up. Some mornings, the whole world is buried in a blanket of fog, and the higher peaks of the county poke above the blanket like islands in the sea. At night, it’s a living system of electric lights.

I always liked to drink in the last sight of those lights in my rearview mirror when I came home late at night. It cheered me, a bit, to think about the people that those lights represented. Then the road would turn and descend into the next valley, and the lights would disappear from sight.

One night, as I dipped into that next valley, I encountered a thick fog at the low points of the drive. This was not uncommon. The road rose over hills and fell into valleys, and there would be fog at low points and not at the high. This carried on for a few miles, and, very near to home, I suddenly encountered a small SUV stopped in the lane. Clearly this was dangerous, especially with the fog, and I was able to slow in time to stop behind it. Its lights were on, and when I turned my radio down I could hear its horn blaring incessantly. I decided to try to pass it on the left, slowly to check it out. The front of the vehicle had collapsed inward, smashed in with some force, and the whole vehicle crumpled into half its normal length. There appeared to be no other vehicles around, and I had to stop to help. I pulled my truck passed the wreck and parked in the shoulder, then grabbed my flashlight and ran back.

A man appeared from a house on the hill above the road, and he came running down, yelling that his girlfriend was calling 911. We connected and ran to the wreck together. The horn still blared, as if laid upon. We reached the driver’s window and saw a woman, probably in her seventies, looking frantically about but unable to move. The man I was with—a few years older than me, with a short mohawk and no shirt—asked if she was okay.

“What did I hit?” she asked, dazed and frightened.

“Are you hurt?” he demanded to know. She didn’t respond coherently, and panicked even more. He tried to open the door, but it was locked. “Ma’am, I need you to unlock your door.”

“It’s not locked,” she insisted, though he and I could both clearly see that it was. “What happened?”

 The man got frustrated. “That goddamn horn is scaring her. Ma’am, are you pressing the horn?” She didn’t understand the question, even after he repeated it. “We need to kill the horn.”

He stepped around to the front, and I followed him. I admit I was a little unnerved myself, and I was glad to have him there because he was level-headed. He pried away some broken pieces of the hood while I held my flashlight for him, and behind the passenger side headlight he found and cut a pair of wires. The horn died instantly.

We walked back around to the door. “Ma’am, are you hurt?”

“I can’t move my legs.” Her legs were clearly pinned by the crumpled steel, but we couldn’t tell much about their condition from outside the car.

“I need you to unlock your door so we can get you out.”

She mumbled something, then, “What did I hit?”

“There was a truck,” the man said. “They were waving for you to stop but you didn’t.”

“I didn’t see anything,” she said defensively, a little more in control of her nerves now.

I hadn’t seen the truck either, so I asked, “Did they just bounce?”

The man looked over at me but didn’t answer, probably because it was a stupid question.

Headlights became visible to the east. “Make sure they stop!” the man barked at me. I took my flashlight and ran up the road waving it. The car slowed and stopped. I walked up to the driver’s side and explained the situation. The driver pulled off the road and got out to look around. Another car came, and I directed them carefully around the wreck; they didn’t stop.

Eventually, a firetruck showed up and the firemen took the man’s place at the woman’s window. I stayed my post on the road, waving off passing cars. Soon enough there were cops and an ambulance, but the firemen had not yet made any visible progress extracting her from the wreck, except that they’d placed a gurney beside the car. A highway patrolman relieved me from my traffic directing, and another cop wanted to hear what we had to say about the wreck. Pointing at my truck on the side of the road—with its multiple dents and broken body panels—the cop asked, “And that’s the other vehicle?”

I laughed. “No, that’s just my truck.”

“Then what’d she hit?”

My compadre explained what he’d seen. When he finished the story, he asked me if I had a cigarette. I did, and I smoked one with him. Another cop walked up to my truck with his flashlight to check it out. I called out that it was mine, and yes, I drove it here that way.

Eventually, the officer in charge instructed us to leave. He didn’t have to tell me twice, but I looked back at the woman to see if they’d made any progress. They hadn’t.

I wonder what happened to her.

Jimbo and the Fire

The side of town that I grew up on got hit pretty hard by wildfires in October, 2003. I was in high school at the time. I remember the thick smoke that covered the entire city for a few days and the ash that drifted down like snow. Many people could be seen in public wearing dust masks or bandanas over their mouths and noses. Others roughed it out and spent a few days coughing occasionally or avoided going out doors. The smoke didn’t bother me a terrible lot, being at the time a smoker of cigarettes (a little math reminds me that by this month I’d only been smoking for a short while).

I lived with my parents a little way into the hills, and brushfires in this time of year were common. This particular fire we could watch from our back deck if we looked a mile  to the north, and we could see plumes of smoke rising from another fire to the south. That was as close as those fires got to us.

My younger brother Nate had recently been hired by a friend of his named Jim. Jim was a plumber who lived in a small but densely-populated community a little ways into the mountains. In anticipation of fire season, he had instructed Nate to clear brush from around his home and between his house and his neighbors’ houses. Then, within a week, the wildfires came through and burned nearly every house on street, excepting Jim’s. He credited this to the great job that Nate did clearing the brush.

After the fires, Jim set out to help his neighbors clean up in every way he could. He got an idea, and drove his work truck from lot to lot to turn on the main water lines at the street so the people sifting through the remains of their homes could have water, both to clean and to drink. In order to do this, Jim would cut the line right after the main valve, splice in a reducer, a pressure regulator, an elbow, a couple feet of pipe and then a spigot for the people to connect a garden hose to. This proved to be a great service to the community.

The task was great, though, as many homes had burned (a quick google search tells me that 2,232 houses burned down in this fire). Jim set his two older sons to work up one street, he and his younger boy started up another, and he had recruited Nate, my dad, and I to aid in the effort. The work was humbling; we had a sort of reverence toward the people who’d just lost everything material in their lives, in many cases including the family pets. We would approach a home and make friendly contact with the people there to explain what we were going to do and how it would help them. I was young, and not good with words, so I let my dad do the talking. I remember at least one person tell us to leave.

We did this for a fair part of the morning, then skies darkened and there were reports of a coming storm. The authorities issued a flash flood warning. Though it wasn’t raining yet, people began to panic about mudslides. Most of these neighborhoods were carved into the sides of mountains, most of the vegetation that held the hills together had burned completely off, and most of the exposed earth was covered in two inches of loose soot and ash. If the rains came, anything salvageable in these homes would be buried and lost.

Jim came and pulled us off the plumbing project; now we were going to help the people by giving them sandbags. Someone (the local Home Depot, I think) donated a truckload of sand and dumped it at a park, along with empty sandbags, and Jim put us to work shoveling sand into the bags. This was simple work. One person would hold the bag open, the other would shovel sand into it, then it would be tied off and set into a pile by the road. Jim took his work truck and drove out to put them in place. A few other volunteers came by, perhaps eight of us in all, and we made happy work of it. Someone came along passing out sandwiches.

After shoveling for a couple hours, feeding hundreds of sand bags to Jim to deliver, we were interrupted by some kind of official, who looked at our pile of sandbags beside the road and declared it was enough. I like to remember this guy wearing a suit, though that part is probably false. He thanked us for our work, said that everything was under control, and that we could go home now.

We didn’t stop working, of course, because there was plenty of sand left and Jim would be expecting more sandbags when he came back. The official insisted, in a friendly manner, that our work was done, and still none of us stopped. Jim came back, eventually, and he and his boys hopped out of the work truck and began filling it full of sandbags, as they had done repeatedly for hours. The official walked over to them and said something like, “You guys are welcome to take some sandbags, but you should replace the ones you take.”

I think Jim pointed over at us and said, “Those guys are making more right now.” I don’t think that the official knew that we were friends of Jim, or that we were there because of him.

I remember the official explaining to Jim that we’d met our quota of five hundred sandbags and that we were done working. We knew that no one had counted how many sandbags we’d filled, that we were not stopping any time soon, and that no one had said anything about a quota. Apparently, the official wanted a stockpile of sandbags, ready to use when the rain started, instead of to preemptively place the sandbags in strategic places around the town as Jim was doing.

Jim replied that we needed tens of thousands more sandbags, and that we would work until we ran out of sand. The official didn’t like being disrespected, and began to get pushy. Jim pushed right back. Now, Jim was a large man—stocky and strong—a rough, working man, rather intimidating to strangers, and he was not afraid to get physical. The official was thin and pale, a little older, too. When Jim exhibited some force, he immediately locked himself in his car and called the police.

There was some discussion among the volunteers concerning how to proceed. I remember a stranger saying, “I think that one’s just a bureaucrat and the other guy actually knows what he’s doing.” We kept shoveling and Jim kept loading his truck.

Eventually, a cop showed up. By this time, the official had driven away and Jim was out placing the sandbags. The cop sat in his car and watched us. We would glance over at him occasionally. After a few minutes, he got out, walked over, picked up a shovel, and began filling sandbags with us. This pleased us a great deal, especially when he said nothing to Jim when the latter came back for another load.

But, a little while later, the official came back with a few cops, and they stopped Jim. They asked him a lot of questions, and in the end ordered him to discontinue the sandbag work. When he quit, so did we, though there were hours of daylight left and still a sizeable pile of sand.

We heard that McDonald’s was giving away food in the community center, so we headed up there. They had big boxes filled with cheeseburgers and were handing them out. Someone said that Outback Steakhouse had donated some, too, but it was gone by the time we got there.

Danielle

I accidentally took a train east instead of west today. When I realized my mistake, I hopped off at the next station. The particular station I found myself in is very small; it has no seating, no maps of the train line, and—save one girl who got off the same train I did—had no people. My plan was to wait for the next westbound train to come and ride back downtown. Trains should come every 15 minutes, I thought.

I had plans to meet someone downtown for dinner. I was sorry to keep him waiting, and texted him to say so. I looked around the station a little; most of the surrounding buildings were industrial structures of some kind. There was an abandoned apartment complex to one side and a neighborhood of less-than-inviting houses beside it. The wait began to feel long, and I stepped into the tracks to see farther down the line. No train.

I noticed the girl began to walk toward me. I noticed her because of the long, pleasant legs that carried her and the short denim shorts that showed them off. “Do you know the train schedule?” she called out, long before we were in conversational range.

I shook my head. “I think they come every fifteen minutes,” I replied.

“It’s been more than that already.” She was closer now. “Say, you got a lighter?” She pulled a bent cigarette from her pocket.

I laughed. “There’s a broken one on the track,” I said, pointing. She didn’t think it was funny, so I added, “No, sorry.” I debated telling her that I had recently quit, and that on a normal day I would still have a lighter—in spite of quitting—but none of it sounded true in my head, so I didn’t say it.

“Shit.” She studied my face a little. “You look like that guy…that gay blogger—what’s his name? Bon Iver? I think he’s gay.” I smiled. So did she. “No, I didn’t mean you look gay. You just look like him with the beard and glasses and all.”

“Really?” I asked, pretending to be interested. She grinned, revealing a row of yellow teeth. At least a couple of teeth were broken or rotten. I tried not to stare at them.

“I think…” I started talking before I had anything to say. “People tend to think I look like anyone with a beard.”

She laughed. “No, you really do. Watch, you’ll look him up and be like, ‘oh, Danielle was right.’ I’m Danielle, by the way.” She extended her hand.

I smiled and took it. It was pleasant to the touch. “Luke.”

“Nice to meet you, Luke.”

There was a pause, and a Mexican construction worker walked into the station.

“I’m gonna see if he has a lighter,” she said, and started walking away. I watched her a moment. She had an attractive body. She got her cigarette lit and came back, but we didn’t seem to have anything to say to each other. I drank in her secondhand smoke happily, as ex-smokers do.

Finally a train came. Apparently, they only come to this station every thirty minutes instead of fifteen. It was nearly empty, and when I sat, Danielle came and sat across from me, without saying anything. She sat cross legged and played with her shoelaces.

At some point, a homeless-looking black man-- the only other person in the train car—began calling out in our general direction. Danielle looked at me. “He ain't talking to me. Is he talking to you?”

I liked the way she’d worded that. “Nope, he’s not talking to me either.”

“You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked.

“Actually, I am,” I answered. “Well, east county, anyway.”

She got excited. “I grew up in Lemon Grove!”

I smiled. “Spring Valley,” though it was only partly true.

“Oh!” She paused a moment, and looked downward nervously. “Do you live with your wife there?” Then, before I could answer, “Are you married?”

Now, I’d like to pause the story to give a little background. I have several brothers. My brothers and I like each other well enough, I suppose, but we seem to have trouble communicating. What we have found that works best is communicating through obscure movie quotes, because we basically watched the same fifteen movies over and over again for the twenty years that we grew up together. It’s become a hilarious game to us, now that we’re adults, to try to speak to each other only in this manner. The reason that this fact is relevant at this point is because our movie-quoting-turned-real-life-conversation will often spill into our conversations with other people. Collateral damage, if you will.

So, when Danielle asked me, “Are you married?” I answered without hesitation, and without a single consideration for the implications of my response, “Occasionally.”

Some of you may recognize this. It’s a quote from Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park. I have not, in fact, ever been married, but I have been waiting for years for someone to ask me that question so that I may answer in this manner. In this case, however, I instantly regretted the word. When she looked confused, I mumbled, “Uh, not at the moment.”

She hesitated a second, but pressed on. “Can I get your phone number?”

I was still recovering from the embarrassment of the last exchange, but a series of ideas passed through my mind. How cool of a story would this be if we ended up together—that we met in a train station because we both took the wrong train? She certainly seemed to be a fun person, and she was pretty, too. I imagined kissing her, but could not get over her crooked, yellow teeth. I didn’t think that I could kiss that mouth.

Apparently my hesitation was too long for her. “If not, it’s cool. You don’t have to give it to me.”

I sunk a little, and shook my head. “Sorry. No.”

She nodded. “It’s cool. Thanks for being honest.” She stood up, and began to walk down to the other end of the train. I felt like I’d just clubbed a baby seal, and didn’t want her to go.

“Danielle,” I said, before she got too far. I read once that women appreciate it if you use their name when speaking to them. “Thanks for being forward.”

“Wait!” She exclaimed, “Wait, are you gay?” She suddenly became happily excited.

I should have said yes. I didn’t.

She was disappointed again. “Me and my goddamn vanity,” she muttered.

She sat at the other end of the train and got off at the next station.

Just one more thing for me to feel shitty about.

Oh, and I looked Bon Iver up. As far as I can tell, it's a band, not a blogger. I saw no indications of his sexuality, and he doesn't look like me, but he does have a beard.

Tijauna is a hell of a town.

I suppose that Tijuana’s famous for a certain amount of immorality. The drinking age is only eighteen; drugs and prostitutes are easy to find. Not a reputable place, by any means, but an easy good time for the young and foolish. We weren’t interested in any of that, honestly. We were just curious and feeling adventurous when we (my brother Matt and our friend Daniel and I) decided to spend an afternoon there once. I think we were teenagers at the time—older than eighteen but younger than twenty-one, if I recall correctly. We were perfect idiots, too; I should mention this to frame this story properly. I think we went because we thought we were cool and had a sort of curiosity—an attraction, if you will—to the wildness of the idea of Tijuana. We’d been to Mexico before. We’d been to Tecate, to Ensenada, and to Rosarito. Not the same thing, it turned out.

We took the trolley to the border because that’s part of the adventure. For some ineffable reason, trolleys are how San Diegans go to TJ. We then crossed a pedestrian bridge into Mexico. I remember being surprised at how little security there was for an international border. We were excited to be in Mexico, and found a block or two of touristy shops to look around. Almost immediately, a street vendor offered to sell us vicodin. We probably giggled like excited schoolgirls then politely declined. A taxi driver offered to drive us to TJ. We were cheap bastards, and we were already in TJ, damnit, so we declined his offer, too. We walked a block and found ourselves in Mexican suburbia. So we walked back to the touristy place, two blocks in the other direction and got hit by suburbia again. The cab driver watched us amusedly the whole time, and then offered again.

“Revolution Avenue,” he said in perfect American. “That’s where you want to go.”

We had never heard of it, but okay. Apparently, we were the only ones who’d never heard of it. It’s very famous. The driver dropped us off in the middle of the street and charged us eight dollars for the ride. We later learned that eight dollars was more than the ride was worth, but we didn’t know, and the cabbie knew that we didn’t know.

There was a party going on, as far as we could see up Revolution Avenue in both directions. The street was lined with bars, hotels, and strip clubs, and the American college kids overflowed into the streets. We didn’t have a plan, didn’t know what we wanted to do. We started walking aimlessly up the road. People who spoke various amounts of English kept trying to sell us things. After a few city blocks of not stopping anywhere, we decided to try to find some tacos. As white as we are, we considered ourselves taco connoisseurs, so with pride we passed many taco carts trying to find the perfect one. In reality, we were all looking for one that reminded us of the one we’d liked that one time in LA. We found a shop we liked, eventually (note the use of the word “shop” instead of “cart”) and sat there. They sold one kind of taco and cans of soda to go with.

When we sat down, the guy running the place looked at Matt and asked, “¿Cuantos tacos quieres?” Now, there are three words in this sentence. One of them is taco. One of them is a form of quiero, as in, “Yo quiero Taco Bell.” And the third is fairly self-explanatory. Also, we were there to buy tacos, so even if one didn’t understand the language, the nature of the question could be deduced fairly easily. But when the nice man asked Matt this simple question, he immediately forgot all the Spanish he’d learned in high school and a wave of panic washed over his face. He looked at us, his eyes pleading for help. I was surprised. I mean, my Spanish was shit, too, but “¿Cuantos tacos quieres?” isn’t really even Spanish.

Most of life is competition with our brothers; that day, I was winning. I translated, and tacos were had by all. Between the three of us, we ate fourteen tacos. The man charged us for eighteen, and my Spanish wasn’t good enough to ever find out why, so we paid it, and were back out into the street.

After some more pointless walking and shallow interactions with various street vendors, we encountered a man in his sixties who insisted on walking with us for a little ways. He kept telling us how great a certain club was and how beautiful the dancing girls there were. We weren’t interested in dancing girls (no, we weren’t gay… we had religious inhibitions…and I really can’t remember why we went to TJ in the first place), so nothing he could say was going to get us in this club. Eventually, he said, “My sister is dancing in there right now! You should come see my sister!”

I feel like I should pause here and let you consider the heavy implications of his statement so I don’t have to explain them. His sister (he’s sixty-ish, remember). Is dancing (naked, we presume). And he’s okay with it (promoting it and probably profiting off of it, in fact). At best, she’s in her fifties, we’re imagining, or if she is young…think of the family dynamic. Not that we were interested before, but our desire to walk through those doors actually registered at absolute zero.

We continued on. We reached the end of party town and continued on a little farther after that. We were still in a fairly busy place. Eventually, we were the only white people in the street. We saw a pickup truck drive by with a bed full of standing policemen. It seemed silly at the time. I suppose it reminded us of the Keystone Cops or something like it. We also noted their assault rifles with three foot long magazines (guns are illegal in Mexico, FYI, but the police carry some pretty heavy artillery).

There were a couple of brothers, Americans about our age, who worked to gain our attention from across the street, so we went over to them and gave a friendly hello. They seemed excited to find fellow English-speakers (we were honestly a five minute walk from an entire colony of American college students, but somehow these guys were still excited), and they were carrying puppies. Arm loads of puppies.

“I’m saving these puppies!” I remember him saying, adding that he’d traded his cell phone for them. He had puppies poking out from his inside his sweatshirt, in his pockets, and in his hood, and so did his brother. There must have been at least a dozen little white dogs riding on these kids. “Do you guys know how to get back to the border from here?”

We did not, unfortunately. We had lost our sense of direction a long time ago, but we pointed north anyway because we are explorers and America is north, damnit. The guys thanked us and headed that way.

We turned around and headed back toward Avenida Revolucion. Somewhere we found a churro stand and I asked the woman how much they cost. One dollar, she indicated. I could see that her churros were about the size of my littlest finger, so I was disappointed that a whole dollar would only get me two bites. But we were in Mexico, so I shelled out. “Three,” I requested. “Tres,” I probably held up three fingers because I assumed she wouldn’t understand. I expected her to reach in there and pull out single finger-sized pieces, but instead she produced three brown paper lunch bags and filled them completely with cinnamon deliciousness. I was ecstatic.

One of the shops we stopped in had a wool poncho with an Aztec design on it, and the shopkeeper asked me if I liked it, and I said that I did. “Eighty dollars,” she said. I was disappointed and started to walk away. “Wait!” she said. “Seventy-five dollars.” I kept walking. I’d never bargained for merchandise before, and I didn’t want to try. “Hold on, where are you going? We can make a deal for you!”

She was an imposing woman, and strong-willed, so I stopped.

“Now,” she continued. “What is the most amount of money you would pay for that?”

I shrugged. “Twenty bucks.”

She freaked out. “I’m trying to make a living! How do you expect me to feed my kids?” or something like that.

I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking, “Then don’t sell it to me. Seems pretty simple,” and started to walk away again.

“Okay!” she agreed. “Twenty bucks.” So I bought it, though I hadn’t really intended to. I didn’t feel good about the bargaining experience, though. Somehow she’d made me feel guilt or something worse. She also informed me that it’s not a poncho, it’s a gaban. I wore it around for the rest of the day, and for weeks after.

We talked about getting a beer but never did. I’d never had beer before and thought it would be fun. I can’t remember why it didn’t happen. The sun set, eventually, and we took a cab back to the border crossing. Oh, and there’s a gentlemanly conduct that most drivers in America adhere to (taking turns and staying in lanes and obeying traffic lights and keeping safe distances from fellow drivers) that Mexican cabbies haven’t been introduced to yet. Someone should get on that.

There’s a line to get into America, apparently, a line that takes hours to get through. We took turns holding our place in line and exploring the area around. A drunken American saw me in my gaban, called me “Father,” and asked me what time Christmas mass was. We also saw the puppy guy again, somewhere ahead of us in line, and he still had his puppies. I wonder if customs let him bring them across the border.

Of Sand, Pliers, and Mexican Jumping Cactus

 I once read a piece by a British oilman in Saudi Arabia who said, “Never travel through the desert with fewer than four people, because that’s how many it takes to get a car unstuck from the sand.” Yeah, that’s a paraphrase. No, I don’t remember his name. Yes, I did once get myself in trouble for not listening to him.

I don’t remember with any certainty, but I think it was New Years Eve, either 2008 or 2009. See, my brothers and I have been going to the same place in the desert for years, camping in the exact same spot every time. We don’t even have to specify where to meet anymore; we simply mention the desert and a day of the week, and then we all show up, none of us ever having doubted the rendezvous location. There are many washes there—big, sandy dry canyons carved out by the desert storms—that run perpendicular to the highway, and if one turns off the asphalt into one of these, he could find dozens of hidden places to pitch camp in the soft sand at the bottom.

Our spot is outside of a small desert town. It’s a one bar, one church, and one gas station type of town that the interstate runs through near the Mexican border. Follow the highway north for a couple miles and you see mountainous badlands to your right, and vegetated, flat desert to your left. The desert isn’t actually flat, because the washes have carved it out in so many places, but you can’t see those from the highway. Our spot is out there.

I packed my truck in the morning, went to work for the day, then drove out to catch up with the others when I got off at 10:00pm.  I got out there near midnight. I hadn’t been out there in a while, and had never tried to find the place in the dark. Eventually, I discovered that many, many turnoffs looked like the one I remembered, and that the more of these that I saw, the fuzzier my recollection of the real one became. I doubled back and picked one, then drove into the sand to head up the canyon.

I imagined that our spot wasn’t more than a mile off the highway, so I watched my tripometer closely. After nearly a mile and a half, I decided I was up the wrong wash, and needed to turn around. But this wash was narrow and rocky, and there was no place. So I pressed on, hoping to find a turnaround place. Eventually, I encountered a Y in the road, and I determined that if I started up one way, I could then back up the other like a U-turn in reverse. I did not want to stop the truck because of the sand, but I had to choose between this or pressing on for a better spot. I chose the U-turn. I got stuck.

Driving on sand is not difficult, but you should never stop in deep sand because you may have a hard time getting going again. My wheels spun without moving the truck; they flung sand and quickly dug themselves deep into it. I stopped trying when I realized what was happening, but it was too late.

I put the truck in neutral and tried to push it. Nope. I put rocks under the tires to gain traction. Nope. I tried calling my brother with the little cell reception I had. He answered but we couldn’t hear each other. I dictated my predicament into the phone just in case he could pick up enough detail to help.

I climbed to the top of the ridge to see if I could see a campfire, smoke, truck lights, or hear voices. Everything was black and silent. I looked at my tripometer and saw that I was about four miles off the highway. Not that far, I thought, and decided to hike back to it. But what to bring with me? One has to think of worst case scenarios in the wilderness. A knife. Water. A flashlight. A jacket. A snack. Pliers.

Why pliers? Because there’s a species of cactus in this part of the world that we call Mexican Jumping Cactus (a quick google search tells me it’s actually called Cholla Cactus, or Jumping Cholla). It’s cactus, right? Pokey and shit? But this is no Saguarro that those pansies in Arizona brag about. The plant is sort of…modular. Meaning that the branches grow in such a way that if you unhappily get caught by the barbed spines, they don’t just poke you; the spines dig deep into your skin and the entire motherfucking branch breaks off from the plant and sticks to your hypodermis. Then every single spine on this branch (when I say “branch,” picture a spherical module of spiny plant, not a long woody stick with leaves), decides to also dig into your skin so that you have dozens of them stabbing your leg. If you try to remove it, this spiny sphere of plant simply rolls a little to a new location on your leg, leaving the old spines still attached where they penetrated you and a whole bunch of new wounds, too.  Oh, and it’s poisonous. Not “kill you” poisonous, rather “burning and stinging pain, with moderate swelling” poisonous. And if you can successfully free yourself from this little passenger, you are left with a million barbed spines deep in your leg…. so, pliers-- I brought them.

The moon was bright enough to see a bit, which was good because my flashlight didn’t work. I calculated that if I walked four miles per hour, I could reach the highway in one hour, then reassess my location and try to find our campsite. If I had no hope of finding the site, I could always hitchhike back to the town.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that it would be quicker to walk in a straight line back to the highway instead of following the curvy wash that ran at who-knows-what-angle to the road. I climbed up the canyon wall and carried on in the best direction I could decipher. I could see the orange glow of the western horizon behind me and knew that the highway ran north-south somewhere east of me. If I walked away from glowing western horizon, I couldn’t help but cross the road.

I found the walk invigorating. I was alone in a peaceful silence and darkness, and I was stimulated by nature. I could hear coyotes. I thought of mountain lions, of course, but didn’t let myself dwell on it. I couldn’t shake the thought of rattlesnakes from my head, and every stupid stick on the ground looked like one, of course. And somehow, even with my eyes carefully glued to the ground before my feet out of fear of snakes, I still stepped right into it, just like I knew I would: a goddamned Mexican jumping cactus.

I felt it before I saw it. Two pieces grabbed onto me, one outside my jeans and one on the side of my shoe; both were firmly latched through the clothing and deep in my skin. When I finally stopped howling and hopping around like I’d stepped on a Lego, I sat down to free myself. I’d been hit before, so I knew what to do. I used my knife to pry them away from me while using the pliers to pull them straight out. I then used the pliers to get all the little pieces out. It’s painful, and it bleeds a bit because the barbs cause more damage on the way out. I had to pull the big pieces off, then take off my shoe before I could get the little pieces. And with my poor eyesight in the dark, finding each of the little ones was time consuming, but if I didn’t get every one, then each step could be a twisting blade in my leg. It must’ve taken a half hour. Eventually, I got resituated and kept moving.

So now I’m limping a little. And bleeding. And less sure of my direction. Somewhere along the way, my cell phone rang but I lost the call immediately. I’ve only been in the wilderness an hour and I’m already thinking about mortality. I thought a lot about what an idiot I am.

 I did eventually reach the road. And it turned out that my brother had heard what I told him over the phone, and my friend Daniel was driving up and down the highway waiting for me to pop out of the desert. I flagged him down and he picked me up, then we started driving to camp. Within a minute of driving, we were suddenly surrounded and run off the road by Border Patrol cruisers. They didn’t even give us a chance to cooperate and literally came alongside to force us to swerve into a sandbank.

Apparently, there are tall towers with many cameras on them that the BP uses to watch the roads. They saw a car pull over and pick up someone on the side of the road, and that’s some kind of red flag. We explained, and they checked our ID’s. They were complete dicks to us the whole time, and when they were leaving, we asked if they would help us get the car free from the sand. They said, “No, you’re fine,” and left us to dig ourselves out. And when we finished digging that car out, we drove back into the desert to dig my truck out, too.

Life on the San Diego River

Mark Twain is a god. Or a demigod, anyway, and if you haven’t read his Life on the Mississippi River (and I imagine that anyone who takes time to read internet blogs must love reading and therefore be a well-read person) you need to do so immediately (at least the first half), before you consider reading anything else. If you have, you may appreciate my allusion to it, combined with the humor in its comparison to our own mighty, mighty San Diego River (hint: this is a joke—it’s funny because our river isn’t mighty. And by “isn’t mighty,” I mean that at the point where it passes thirty yards from the front door of my apartment it must be a solid twelve feet wide, and hardly deep enough to get your ankles wet… also, it’s contained by a construction of concrete banks. I saw a duck in there once.) I’ve long imagined that I would call my autobiography Life on the San Diego River out of admiration for that titanic American writer and out of a juvenile need to make myself laugh. Alternately, I’ve considered calling it, The Last Generation of American Smokers, but this option is problematic. We may not be, in fact, the last generation of American smokers. Also, we quit smoking. Months ago.

I never wanted to be a blogger (this is me distancing myself from my own actions so that you are left without ammunition to judge me). I never liked blogs. I don’t tend to like the kind of person who must be writing most blogs. But I’ve recently encountered more than one good friend who enjoys the practice, and I think I’ll give it a go.

I’m not here to share my innermost feelings (actually, I have no innermost feelings. I’m a very shallow person, really). I’m not here to entertain you, necessarily. I’m not here to vent… necessarily. I am here to force myself to write down some of the stories that I am fond of telling. Some of them will be worth reading, if I can do them justice. I won’t lie to you, I promise. I won’t misrepresent any of the players, either. I won’t write morals onto the ends (I’m not fond of stories that have morals—I hardly like conclusions). I will attempt to be true to my own voice (if you know me, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine me rambling on; if you don’t know me, then picture a half-drunk bearded guy with a touch of ADD talking too fast and getting excited long before he gets to any punchlines).

If anything I say causes you to question my perspectives, reference this:

I’m college-educated male born in the mid-1980’s living in the dark depths of San Diego. I’m an atheist of sorts, and I’m a humanist rather than a patriot. I don’t believe in hurting people. I have good intentions, most of the time, but I lack ambition. I like good beer, good music, and good company.