As I finished packing up this morning, I found this pile of papers. It’s the drawing our host made when we stayed on her boat in Portland. I hung it on my fridge as a good luck charm and began the hardest drive day of the whole adventure.
My original goal had been Roswell, nine hours from home. But I realized that I could probably make it to Albuquerque which is a little closer to 12. If I did, I could either get in some hiking on Sunday, or potentially cut a whole night off the drive to Seattle. Either way, it meant doing 700 miles alone on fast highways through remote areas under desert heat in a car I’ve so far only driven to and from suburbs with.
Since the cars are still a secret, I can’t say a lot about the ride. And since today was a mile crunching day, there’s not much to tell about the drive, either… I did learn two things though: the Mystery Machine’s cruise control does not work, and the A/C really can’t keep up in the harsh New Mexico sun.
I missed having the other two around all day. For the friendship, but also there are two questions I miss being able to ask the caravan: “Is this road rougher than it looks or is my car falling apart?” and “Is that smell coming from my car or is it another oil rig?”
To stay entertained, I picked up both “volumes” of Peter Quill’s (Star-Lord) “Awesome Mix” from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. The movie studio actually recorded these out to real cassette tapes! Quill is a space-faring superhero and he is always listening to the mixtapes his late mother made for him as a child. For reasons that will become apparent after the reveal, these seemed like the right answer to “I have a tape deck, what should I do with it?”
Other than those tapes and my usual music tastes, I finally got around to finishing up Season 1 of OPB’s Bundyville podcast. This is fascinating for a handful of reasons: I found out about this show because Oregon Public Broadcasting was a client of mine for about two years. The 2016 Ammon Bundy occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was a transformational moment for OPB’s digital news arm and it came up in a lot of our conversations. But the podcast and our roadtrip’s Bundy experiences go further back.
Remember that time we drove to the Grand Canyon Parashant National Monument? Well, we got there from Mesquite and passed through Bunkerville, NV on our way into Gold Butte National Monument. Bunkerville is Cliven Bundy’s home and was the epicenter of the grazing rights stand-off in 2014. Some of the land in question extends toward (possibly into?) the edge of Gold Butte.
We drove right through where all that happened! So in retrospect, when we opted to not mess around with the likely-illegally-placed “No Trespassing” signs, we were, for once, making a smart choice.
Also on the podcast, I also learned that the schoolhouse and remains of the sparse community of Mt. Trumbull was largely settled by Bundy’s ancestors as they migrated southwest following persecution for their Mormon beliefs. It was a wild ride that OPB did a really great job with.
I’ve got a Washington Post podcast about the space race and early Apollo program queued up for tomorrow. We’ll see how that is! The rest of the drive went pretty smoothly and I made it to Albuquerque without any trouble. I think I’m coming down with an acute case of cautious optimism.
