Everything was good with the RV so i pulled it out of storage. Well, i tried to, but the thing is, I’ve never left that parking lot before, and it turns out that the giant sliding door you come in isn’t how you get out. It’s the other one on the other side of the building you can’t see from any of the places I’ve ever been. There should be arrows painted on the pavement.
You know how every vehicle takes some getting used to, when you get in it? [Especially ones with clutches.] Well i wasn’t exactly used to it after the 8 prior seconds of driving practice in four months, but i did manage to get out of the parking lot without hitting anything. In their office, they’d put up plexiglass cough screens but there were no masks in sight, at least not counting mine. I’d worn it for 7 hours, a little while longer wouldn’t hurt. I did swap it out for a fresh one when i went in to the tire place to get some exciting new mystery items I’ll tell you about later. [Spoiler: it’s tires]
Ok, it’s later now, i got tires. Michelin Agilis Crossclimate, specifically, the finest shoes for your bigass van. I got to learn about load ratings! They’re ratings for load [he said load]. But they’re not in pounds, they’re in [no, not kilograms] … in… Some other unit that converts into the two prior mentioned units. [He said “Units.”] I went with the bigger number, as I’ve watched enough Tim Allen to know that more heavy duty is more better [arrrg arrrg ugg]. [Feel free to translate that into the neolithic language of your choice.]
This is of particular interest to me because i beat the snot out of my tires, since the pavement is a vague suggestion. [Bitumen, for the portion of you picturing pavers]. Paving’s not seen as necessary, since every wash is drivable if you’ve got high enough clearance. A wash, see, is a violent flood channel full of rocks in vee shaped waves, as though speedboats had gone upstream their pebbly paths. Except of course when it isn’t… which is most of the time because desert. All washes which are drivable until they aren’t. So, I ordered the best possible tires to deal with the constant battering by rocks the size of alien heads as i barrel confidently across the great American southwest. [It’s all aliens here. ]
After the tires i went grocery shopping with 3/7ths of a shopping list, and a hand basket. And my mask. There were a few people wearing them, and i saw a few folks around in face shields. I got unrefrigerated processed meats, cheese, bagels and other cheese of the spreadable bageloid variety [ed: he means cream cheese], and also not-round bread of the sour-dough variety. And a spicy brown mustard, because yes. [I don’t have an editor.] And pesto.
In line in front of me was a greying patient-care-outfitted lady in line ahead of me had a hair brush and a 25 pack of beer and looked like she needed it. [The beer; her hair was lovely.] When she forgot it on the carousel i chased her outside and yelled to her to come back. [Can confirm: you can yell across the parking lot in an n95 just fine.] So, she came back with… her empty shopping cart and her hair brush, back to get her beer. [Also can confirm: the glass star trek doors work in both directions even if they only say “exit”] The carousel I’ve never seen, a disc cut from a half sheet of plywood on bearings, which was pre-covid [or the store has a really good painter in their props-aging department.]
And a sandwich, of the whore’s radish and roast beast variety, which I ate in the rv with the engine and ac running. Having completed my 24 hours to vegas mission, I sat and tried to figure out where to go. Because that part didn’t matter till it did, and I’d managed to mentally put it down until then. Like an unread book I picked it up from the shelf for the first time.
I knew the story started in Vegas and was definitely going somewhere cooler, since it was a hundo plus ten [that’s five score and ten [converted to C [exercise for the student to complete]]] degrees, Fahrenheit, (to clarify for you non-murricans and APMs [hereinafter: Americans Preferring Metric] who were surprised i was still alive.) In the shade. [just kidding [there is no shade.]]
Hot.
So, i went to a place called the Valley of Fire.
But it was ok because it was a dry fire.
And i had a partial hookup [no, that’s not dirty] so i had AC all through the 95 degree night [see above], and was able to cool down my fridge on AC [the current] as well, which takes a while even in cooler weather. They also had showers and a dump station [that’s dirty] and some imposing red rocks, and I climbed up into a tiny cave near the top of one, and sat, and sat, and sat.
And sat.
And then I drove a few hundred miles and collected some trilobites.
The sign suggested a rock hammer and chisel, so i brought my regular hammer and my 6 inch long pry-bar, and went to war with the tools I had. I’m pretty happy with my preparedness there, i but i did have to move the antifreeze bottle, the fuel filter, the silicone lube (huh huh), the fluid transfer pump, the roll of shop towels (unused), the windshield squeegee and the box of spare parts, not to be confused with the spare parts BAG (which is in the kitchen.) Mostly because stuff fell when I pulled the toolbox out, and also when it fell again a second, and for one item, a third time. Did i mention it was hot?
I found a spot in the shade and managed to find a few trilobites and other bites, after i got the hang of opening the shale seams. [Tappy tap tap in outward vectors from the middle of the long face of the slab, like you’re trying to open a book with a hammer.
Because you are.
A story anyway, equally leaved and sheaved, older than the mountains, unseen by conscious eyes.Till mine.
[Interlude]
[I said interlude]
Fossils are quite good storage media for lumpy-thing-shaped temporally-resistant records. Pretty slow retrieval time though. Always trade-offs in IT.
I broke some and I feel like an ass about that, but I think there’s like a whole former ocean floor of them, and i collected a handful of those pieces in my sil-nylon backpack [yes, per the rules, which suggested bringing a hammer]
Also i definitely leveled up my rock whacking skill, I heard the tune and everything. [+1 to Whacking Skill]
[Ed: *sighs*]
Whacking.
So yeah, I hacked the storage array of the trilobite lumpiness-record. It was a messy fight. People got hurt. [And by people i mean trilobites.] 31337.
It was also messy, as in covered-in-rock-dust-messy, and of course my Alanis fanclub n95 was back in the RV, a quarter mile away, so i held my breath when it seemed like i might be inhaling rock dust.
It smelled of a childhood memory, of a boy covered in dirt. Constantly.
He, who put a different soft dirt in each of my pants pockets, and later zip lock bags [thanks, mom] and biked on muddy trails, and slid down anything slideable. I remembered him.
Probably better i didn’t have the mask on.
Then i drove a few hundred miles through vast valleys and past a mountain whose Matterhornish peak seemed shaved and sandpapered, since sand’s cycle is to sand only sometimes, sometimes paper (never scissor.)
Said sandy peak sanded itself into billions of tiny sanders, each set free to carve curved caves of all circumferences by the hand of the howling wind. A matrix of sedement cyling itself anew. A sculpture carving itself over millions of years.
Throughout the day, short hikes only, in the heat, mostly hopping flop-shod over red rock outcrops. On a trail, rivulets of soft red sand had me try to recall my Attenborough… something about lizards. I passed petroglyphs hopping from foot to foot flipping at my flops to unlock some flotsam. Different shoes for me soon.
That trail led to Mouse’s Tank, meaning hole-in-the-rock-which-collects-water, which explains why Mouse came here to hide out, as in outside-the-law, because he was an outlaw Mouse and not a mouse-mouse. This day it was claimed by bees, and lots of them (minding their beeswax) and the tank looked more suited to them and dead mules. It looked like a dangerous scramble, too, and I calculated i had a 3/7ths chance of a compound fracture even if it had been freshly scrubbed by Mouse and his mule brush. Don’t bring a bathing suit.
Aa sun was setting I climbed the van up the long road into Great Basin National Park, which, contrasted with the valley is thousands of feet [metres] higher and dozens of degrees cooler [see above]. Then i started writing. I’ll ride down in the morning; i bet it’s better in the daylight.
Goodnight.
*I figure there’s not much overlap between radish growers and whores, because of the difference in working hours. [Ed: he knows how to spell horseradish, he’s trying to be clever.
[Insert footnote as desired]
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[The brackets are too small on my phone screen for me to count when my eyes are this tired, so just pretend all the brackets are perfect if they aren’t.]
H