Our Time Machine

We met a grey and bearded trucker in a rest stop just south of Arches National Park in Utah. He looked like a plump and jolly Santa Clause, dressed in jeans and a sunset-themed hawaiian shirt.

He never shared his name, but we sat and listened to his stories about life on the road, living on the highways, surviving on the move, and how to take it all in.

We live in a time machine, he told us. In The Bus, we understand. Out the windshield is the future. In our mirrors we see the past. Everything inside is the now. We roll through time, watching it flow from future to pass, and as the hills and mountains subside before us, and a vast expansive plane comes into view, we have a better understanding of what's to come. Them, we're back into the cliffs, with towering stone protrusions from the Earth casting uncertainty on the distant future. We just can't see it yet.

Our notion of time on Earth is broken into moments - and infinite stream of infinitely minute instances, and perceived individually and in sequence. It's like planes in the second dimension. All of them are there, and together they yield recognition of depth, but from a two-dimensional perspective, they're only instances, and come one after another with no connectivity.

And that's what we learned from the trucker, who took the time to reflect, out loud, on his appreciation for encounter "three would-be hippie kids (if this were the 60's) sitting a whittling sticks at a highway rest stop by the cliffs." He had just come out to talk to us and see what we were doing.

Since last I wrote we crossed the Rockies. From the sputtering crawl up to Independence Pass, we found the other side, and glided west, down and down from icy tundra to alpine woodlands, to foothill forests, and onward to the red and rocky deserts of Utah. 50 miles past the border into Utah, we picked a road to wander and look for a spot to camp and cook the chicken we'd bought some days before. Along the way we encountered another one of those hidden treasures, set in the Earth for drifters to find. The town: Cisco. Population: 0.

It was a small but spectacular glimpse into our apocalyptic future. Collapsed wood workshops and houses, refrigerator, truck transmissions, over grown prarie grass, and a healthy selection of about a dozen abandoned buses and RVs.

There was no one; not a single sign of life or human occupation for a long long time. We parked to explore. Old one-room houses were littered with rusty metal and relics of their heyday - books for them 50's, 60's, and 70's, eight-track tapes of Kenny Rodgers and Steve Earl, old and broken vintage appliances. RVs were left out - wood rotten and collapsing, preserving a livable interior left dusty by the countless years. We salvaged some treasures off this old and rocky dirt road.

No explanation comes to mind for the state of poor old Cisco. Plague? Radiation poisoning? Mass exodus? It's a modern ghost town that's sat for 30 years. I don't know why.

The next day, many miles down the desert road, we found Arches National Park, a red and sandy desert preserve sporting gigantic stone gateways - arches that rise and plummet to the Earth, like trail markers of divine and giant desert wanderers. From the Devil's Garden trail head, we set out straight into the desert, leaving the trail before it started to find our way. That's hiking, after all. Traveling trails warrants no special name, and aside from carrying a small and personal water supply and wearing some nice and pricey shoes, it differentiates little from common walking. The true sport and adventure implied in the word 'hiking' comes from thinking about every step - sidestepping cactuses and desert brush, maintaining orientation on the mountains far ahead as you round the dunes and boulders as they try and throw you off your way. We walked for hours in the sandy basin, climbing each stone mountain we encountered, and sitting at the top to absorb each spectacle we found.

Two days and an illegal parking citation at arches gaves us our fill of the rocks, and the full time walking in the sun left us yearning for some driving time. So, we moved a short ways down the line to Moab, a little desert town advertising adventure tours to European tourists, then on to the rest stop where we spent the night. The road lead through the great Canyonlands of Utah, an endless network of towering canyons carved by the intermingling Green and Colorado rivers. There's really no end to the spectacle of constant motion.
Yesterday we made it just a short ways south before running up on a blue and placid lakes, walled in by the desert cliffs and grown with Ash trees and lake-side scrub. It was too tantalizing to pass up, so we called it a day, and pulled aside to bath, wash some clothes, cook some hot dogs and veggie stew, and sit and wait for the night to arrive. Unfortunately, this is where photographic records end, at least until we get to Flagstaff, AZ and find someone to fix our camera.

At the lake, and at each patch of land we make our camp, we leave the same things behind: a fire pit surrounded by rocks, filled with ashy coal, some cut up bushes, burnt to keep warm, and some chicken bones strewn in the soil. Our marks are hardly distinguishable (minus the tire tracks), from those left by our founding generations for tens of thousands of years. It's all we need. We pick our camp, never paying to use the land, and sit to whittle, carve some rocks, make a little music, clean our home, and cook our food before the sky goes black and starry. During the day we're on the move, slowly creeping west, taking the turns and hidden roads that pique our interest along the way. That's how it is.

Now we're in Arizona, planning to spend some time with the Navajo in the northeast before heading for Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas.