8:36 p.m. - 2009-01-01
10 west
Steam tendrils up through the cold, fingers the withered-caulk perimeter of the fiberglass shower stall and lays down flat when I crack the little in-shower window to peep the freeway. It's 30 yards behind the motel, maybe, out in the icy New Mexico pre-dawn. A Christmas-lit barge of a semi rumbles by and the bathroom counter's complementary one-cup coffee pot dribbles out its weak-but-hey-it's-complementary offering. Then I'm crossing the parking lot, tiny cup in hand, past the dirt-filled swimming pool to leave the key in the drop box attached to the office door. The office is dark. How many hours ago was it I was standing inside there, road-frazzled; taking comfort in that basmati-and-roach-powder smell that defines small-town motels across the American southwest? Four hours ago, I think, when I pressed my finger on the night-bell and summoned a mother-daughter pair of innkeepers from their TV-lit, office-adjacent chamber. Four hours since the mom, sari-clad (no pottu, though) pulled my key from that wall-mount key-box thingy while her daughter (a poster-child for first-generation immigrant assimilation with her brown beautiful teenage skin, her skull-print sneakers and black-lacquered fingernails) filled out my registration card. Four hours of sleep after 13 hours of driving, which may not seem like enough, but getting up before 5AM puts an easy 300 miles of desert highway under your belt before the family-sedan set has even cracked their sticky Denny's breakfast menus. And because your brain clock is still too sleepy to start worrying its little gears with the kind of being-trapped-in-a-car thoughts that define long-distance driving, it's like free time.
Anyway, the key is in the drop box and the defrost is kicking in and as the lights of another redneck town recede and the faintest traces of color dilute the nocturnal navy in my rear-view mirror I'm entertaining my favorite westbound driving conceit: that I'm outrunning the dawn. Or better yet that I'm hanging interjacent, with today's steady paling of yesterday's horizon behind me and with last night's dark mass suspended not only before the windshield of my pickup, but retreating synchronously against daylight's ever-encroaching presence. I roll this way for a good 40 minutes; heater blasting, freeway spooling steadily into a dark wall of potential. Poised, y'know? Timeless at 80 mph...a good feeling for the soggy-headed and the desperate. Then I'm losing ground; the aquamarine stain in the east has crept higher, transforming the gauzy ass-end of yesterday into the crisp transpicuous atmosphere of a desert morning. A desert landscape is softly revealed, laid out in preparation for the inevitable, inescapable, blaze of dawn.
After that it's just driving.
