Amy & Roger's Epic Detour

“But what if something happens?” he asked. “I mean, normally I stick with a road and hope it gets better, but I don’t know if I can handle eight more hours of that. Do you know how to change a tire?” I shook my head. “Me neither. And despite what Barb says, I don’t want to have to rely on her brother-in-law in case we have car trouble in what literally seems to be the middle of nowhere.”

“But we’d have to go back two hours to get on the interstate anyway,” I pointed out. “And there are other people driving this road. It’s an American highway. It’s not like we’re in the outback or something.”

“No,” said Roger, starting the car. “But we are on the most depressed road in the country.”

“Loneliest,” I said. “There is a difference.”

He looked over at me. “We’re doing this?” he asked. And for the first time since the trip began, it felt like we were doing something. The two of us, making a choice, taking a leap, together.

I nodded. “We’re doing this.”

Roger gave me a small smile. “Well, then,” he said, pulling out of the gas station. “Let’s hit it.”

I glanced back and saw Barb standing in the doorway, watching us. On impulse, I waved to her, and she waved back, and I looked back at her small figure until we turned a corner and she was gone from view.

Barb had been telling the truth, and Fallon ended almost as quickly as it had begun. As we left, there were signs warning that there would be no more “gas or services” for a hundred miles, and to make sure we were prepared. I saw Roger frown as he read that, but he kept going, and we were back on Highway 50.

We drove. Time seemed to pass a little differently when there was nothing to mark how far you had come, or what you were heading to. I would look at my watch, thinking an hour had passed when it had been five minutes. Or I would catch the car’s clock and realized forty-five minutes had gone by in what I would have sworn was fifteen. Now that I knew what to expect from this road, it wasn’t so stressful. There were still moments when the sheer aloneness of it all would cause me to have a momentary panic. But then it would subside, and I would look out the window, take in the view, and feel myself calming down.

Maybe it was because I’d never really seen anything like it before. But even though it was scary and isolated, the scenery out the window was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was just stunning. I could see much more of the world than I was used to. It was like someone had opened the pages of a pop-up book, where the pop-up was our car, and everything else all around us was totally flat. It was sunny, but not squint-inducing, and Roger had since reclaimed his sunglasses. The sky was a bright, clear blue, and the few clouds that filled it seemed too picturesque to be real. There were mountains in front of us, way off at the horizon, and we never seemed to be getting any closer to them. But I didn’t mind. They just added to the picture—how I’d imagined the desert looking, even though I probably wouldn’t have been able to put it into words until now. And even the isolation was beginning to seem kind of cool—the shadow our car made was the only thing on the road. It was like the two of us were getting to see something nobody else was, and something that not many other people had seen.

After an hour, my butt beginning to hurt from sitting in the same position, I kicked off my flip-flops and placed one foot on the dashboard, then the other, looking over at Roger to see if he was bothered by this. But he didn’t seem to be. He just looked over at me and gave me a small smile before turning back to the road. He’d put on cruise control, and it looked a little strange to see both his legs bent at the same angle, feet flat on the car’s mat, like the car was driving itself into the endless horizon. I slid down a little farther in the seat and looked out the window.

We drove. Just outside a mini-town called Middlegate, we passed an enormous cottonwood tree that had hundreds—or thousands—of shoes dangling from it, casting shadows on the highway. Roger slowed down to look at it—which was easy to do, since there were no cars behind us. “You know, I’ve always wanted to do that,” he said, looking at the tree.

“Go for it,” I said, looking at the sheer oddness of the spectacle, all these sneakers and shoes and boots, joined by their laces and tossed over the branches. The car slowed even more, and I thought Roger was going to stop and do it. But then he shook his head. “It’s probably pretty wasteful,” he said. But I noticed him looking back at the tree in the rearview mirror as we sped up again.

About half an hour after the shoe tree, I made Roger pull over so that I could take a picture, and I realized that there was no way to ever capture the entire landscape. So I turned in a circle, taking a picture in every direction, knowing that was the only way I could come close to capturing what it looked like. I lowered my camera and stood still for a moment, just taking in the silence. Even though it probably should have been scary, standing by the side of a deserted desert highway, it wasn’t. It felt strangely peaceful.

There were no other cars on the road. Just the sound of the wind, and the motor idling, and through his open window, the faint clicking sounds of Roger making another mix. I closed my eyes and let the wind whip my hair around my face, letting out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding.

We’re on the road to nowhere. Come on inside.

—Talking Heads

When we reached Eureka, one of the little mini-towns, it started to get dark. We hadn’t stopped to eat dinner—partly because there didn’t seem to be anywhere to stop and get dinner, but mostly because Roger seemed to want to get across Highway 50 as quickly as possible. We loaded up on more snacks at another little gas station mart, and I added some granola bars and trail mix this time, feeling like we should have something that was closer to real food than, say, Fritos.

We headed back on the highway, the sunset beginning with a line of pink at the bottom of the horizon, and then slowly taking over the whole sky. The car’s shadow was lengthening far in front of us, and I leaned my head back and took in the sunset.

“Amy?” Roger asked. I looked over to see that he was playing with the various buttons and levers around the steering wheel. “I don’t know what happened—the lights came on automatically last night. Maybe I turned that off….”

He was right; it was dark enough now that the headlights should have come on. “Let me see,” I said, looking over to see, but soon realizing I wasn’t going to be able to get close enough with my seat belt on. I unbuckled it and leaned over to Roger’s side, fully aware of how close together we now were. “Um,” I said. I looked at the buttons on my side of the steering wheel but didn’t see the light controls anywhere. “I think they might be on your side,” I said.