I've got a bridge in Lake Havasu I'd like to sell you...

In Oklahoma, the grass and fallow fields began giving way to ground that was barer, with small shrubs scattered about. Also, it became hillier—and not gently rolling hills, but more abrupt changes in altitude, with microplateaus and nanocliffs.

Hungry for breakfast and having seen only dull golden grass contained by miles-distant bluffs for the past couple of hours, I searched for the location of the nearest food on the Garmin. It was 48 miles in front of me. Forty-eight miles later, where one state route crossed another, lay some kind of town amputation—as each piece of a singly cleaved earthworm often begins to grow into a new, whole worm, this collection of buildings seems to lack some of the basics of a whole, healthy town while possessing some extraneities. I didn’t see a town center, or any municipal buildings, but I did find a restaurant and what seemed to be a junkyard.

I entered the restaurant and was told “Hello” by an AARP-qualifying white guy in a mesh hat and flannel sitting at the table near the door next to a similarly dressed and aged man. After I sat down, a man who would win the part of Sitting Bull in any local theater production entered and greeted the two older white men, indicating that the enmity between the white man and the red has eased significantly. However, he did communicate with the waitress in Spanish, so my suspicions have not been completely alleviated, and I fear there may be a rebellion stirring.
Santa Fe is like one of those all-too-short, over-too-soon levels in a video game. It’s surreal. It’s bright and blue and Mexican and Amerdian (Amerindian) and surrounded by mountains so close that an errantly tossed tortilla might get caught on a peak.

As I drove down the blacktop, the afternoon sun was white hot in its aggression, transforming the tar lines on the asphalt into visual lightning bolts.

The diversity of the southwestern states was encouraging to see. Nowhere was this culture of inclusion, acceptance, and tolerance more apparent than in Albuquerque, which, if you can believe it, contained not only a Whataburger but also a Lotaburger, showing that there’s enough room for a rich, diverse citizenry, some prefering quantity of burger, some more highly prizing quality.

Another encouraging discovey I made was of a certain, apparently popular, type of Mexican music that sounded a lot like polka to me. It made me happy to know that such a tradition is still going strong in 2009.

The lack of any natural barriers out here really is amazing. The roads just go on forever - you could run a marathon blindfolded.

Others are deceptively marked, at least on the computer map I had. One of the “county roads” my Garmin recommended I take was pretty much just two tire tracks in the dirt separated from each other by grass. It ran along a rancher’s fence. My Camry, I assume, would be flattered by the Garmin’s faith in it, but some of the potholes looked like something only a flatbed truck or SUV could handle them, so I backtracked the way I’d come.

Driving into the mountains, approaching Yuma from the east at sunset, was beautiful—the sun setting behind the mountains left the sky above a brilliant rainbow of low-frequency visible wavelengths, all suddenly obscured by the monolithic, monochromatic, monodimensional, jagged-edged range that looked like someone had torn off a piece of black construction paper and pasted it to the base of the horizon. However, like one of those dual, mutually exclusively messaged illustrations, where it’s either a young girl or an old lady, depending on what you’re brain is categorizing the lines as, as I stared at this truly magnificent explosion of color and contrast, I realized that, approached from an inverse point-of-view, it was fear-inspiring, as it could also be conceptualized as resembling a beautiful color palate whose bottom portion had been torn off to reveal a black no-man’s-land beyond, from which the headlights of escaping cars dimly appeared and other cars foolishly entered, their brake lights disappearing into its gaping maw of voidity. Alternately, it looked as if termites had eaten through the bottom of the horizon on the set of The Truman Show, and true night slipped in for the first time. Additionally, it should be noted that one should not have been embarassed to admit that it struck one as if the end of the world had been blasted through, and now travel to and from whatever else was out there was possible by automobile.

Having headed north from Yuma and then turning east at London Bridge, I was driving through weather in the mid-seventies, headed for the snow falling up in Flagstaff.

Nearing Flagstaff, I passed a guy driving a car with New York plates, and I got the same kick-in-the-gut feeling of humility I get when I see some guy wearing shorts in weather so cold that I’ve yielded to pants. It’s the same feeling I’d get when I’d see a white guy from a non-English-speaking country getting by living in India—he’s not only white like me (the title of my autobiography, perhaps?), but he’s also getting by with a foreign language. I nodded at this man from New York and said, with grudging respect, “You win...You win.”

I also saw a car with Ontario plates...but those people are crazy.

Having pulled into a rest stop somewhere above 5,000 ft, I got out and took some pictures of the snow. Returning to the car, I passed a guy wearing a flannel shirt with a shirt underneath, pants, boots, and a hat. He said to me, “You get the award for being inappropriately dressed,” as he looked at me in my winter coat, tennis shoes, and shorts. So that was nice. It was still 33 degrees, though. Still, after the New York-plate incident, I was taking what I could get. (It was 70 when I’d l begun climbing that mountain an hour before, and it would be in the mid-sixties when I’d return to the base a few hours later. )