Engin and I stopped here on our solo trip and I said as I had said for the days weeks leading up to it, “Prepare yourself for a lot of downtrodden white people.” And there were the customary white people saddled up to slots with oxygen machines and cigarettes smoldering in the ashtrays beside them, bearded men in shirts reading e.g. “Donkey Kong Is My Spirit Animal,” every one with his hat on, women with big legs and bad hair and rambunctious children. Now I am here, a white person not particularly downtrodden but with big legs bad hair and rambunctious child although she isn’t really that rambunctious, not really, and at this moment she is peaceful in my lap, happy to be out of the car happy to be smiling at the hostess who is not white but brown and who chucks Honey’s cheek and touches her curly fuzz and Honey points at a bronco in a painting and says “daggy daggy daggy,” the only real word she can say. She sucks ketchup off the French fries and I analyze her food intake today and it is unbalanced and I wonder how I will go about balancing it. I exchange smiles with two very old people sharing an enormous sandwich, he with a trucker hat and suspenders, the picture of my beloved Burdock grandfather, but this man looks menacing to me as everyone looks menacing to me lately. We finish our meal, my fingers already swelling from salt, and I stand and pluck my pants from my butt and haul Honey through the smoky side to the bathroom and I pee and there’s no changing table so I change Honey’s diaper outside in the back seat of the baking car. Zerberts zerberts and more zerberts and baby laughs and so docile getting into the car seat I think I can do this and trot around to the driver’s side with just the slightest bit of pep in my step.
We leave State Lines and Honey looks happy. I have the windows down and the hot wind is whooshing around the car and the fuzz on her head is standing up and I crane to make eye contact with her in the rearview mirror and I smile and she smiles back. I like this stretch here the most because this is the real way there, all the obstacles of Davis Sac Reno behind you and the sparse hills rolling away from the road like a moonscape and you understand you’re really going somewhere special. But it doesn’t last long before the road becomes long and monotonous and the distance starts to feel threatening and somehow irrevocable, the only movement the occasional flocks of sheep impossibly far from shelter. When Engin saw this part for the first time he said “My god, it’s like the steppe.” When I was a child we did this pilgrimage every year, hours and hours and hours in the plane and then stepping bewildered into the fog of SFO, only to get in the car and drive into this otherworld where my grandparents waited on the deck with drinks for my parents and ice cream for me. But now for me it’s only the memory that beckons, the strength of all the associations that still cling to the land and the road leading to it.
Honey is quiet and the Buick is devouring miles, the ride so smooth you don’t feel the road beneath. We are swiftly out of radio opportunities and I have to pee again but Honey is fast asleep so I press the pedal and we are flying on the empty road at ninety miles an hour until I can’t stand it anymore and find a dirt place to pull over, a forest service fire road or a rancher’s road with a cattle gate stretched across. I leave the car on and spring around to the side and pee right next to the car so I can peer in the window and keep an eye on the sleeping Honey. And then it’s back on the road, now passing the tiny depleted burgs before the Paiute border. In the distance I see a little shack with a big black flag reading “Kafir” in Arabic, which was here when Engin and I came up last time. “Bu ne yaa,” he said when he saw it.
